The Oxford Handbook of the History of English

BRILL eBooks, 2002

The corpus-based analysis of modern English tends to focus on language which has been written or spoken at a particular point in time, and a corpus is conventionally set up as synchronic entity. A synchronic study is often entirely appropriate, but language is a changing phenomenon, and linguists are also interested in that dimension: curious to trace an earlier language feature through to the present, or a current feature back to its source, and in studying recent changes in language use. Within this context, I shall discuss new developments in three areas of research activity: firstly, the setting up of a means of tracing morphological, lexical and semantic changes in Modern English text across time; secondly, the use of the web as a linguistic resource; and thirdly, the coordination of methodologies and resources in modern and historical corpus linguistics.

International Journal of English Studies, 2005

This paper examines modifications in the phonotactic system of English, as attested in changes that affected the tactic behaviour of individual consonants. This is exemplified by the loss of initial clusters in English (#CC- > #C-), which resulted in a merger of the cluster with a single consonant and effectively changed the syllable structure to CV-; this affected initial clusters such as */kn-1, */wl-1 or */hr-/. A corpus-based study traces these changes and dates them to various periods of the historical evolution of English. The findings suggest that multiple causations can be put forward to explain phonotactic change in English, including continuation of changes inherited from Germanic (and completed in Middle English), putative contact influence with Norman French, as well as local, independent innovation. Moreover, the trajectory of loss is traced also, which indicates that phonotactic change proceeds in similar fashion to other linguistic innovations (namely in an S-curve trajectory).

2011

Is historical linguistics different in principle from other linguistic research? This book addresses problems encountered in gathering and analysing data from early English, including the incomplete nature of the evidence and the dangers of misinterpretation or over-interpretation. Even so, gaps in the data can sometimes be filled. The volume brings together a team of leading English historical linguists who have encountered such issues first-hand, to discuss and suggest solutions to a range of problems in the phonology, syntax, dialectology and onomastics of older English. The topics extend widely over the history of English, chronologically and linguistically, and include Anglo-Saxon naming practices, the phonology of the alliterative line, computational measurement of dialect similarity, dialect levelling and enregisterment in late Modern English, stress-timing in English phonology and the syntax of Old and early Modern English. The book will be of particular interest to researchers and students in English historical linguistics.

ICAME Journal, 2014

The volume English corpus linguistics: Variation in time, space and genre is a well-balanced collection of eleven papers selected from the 32nd ICAME conference, held in honour of Stig Johansson and in Oslo in 2011. All the studies included in this book approach variation in English using corpus linguistics methodology. The contributions are divided into three sections, depending on whether their authors view variation from the perspective of time, space or genre (the last of these dimensions seems to cover register and text type alike). To begin with, Kristin Bech and Gisle Andersen provide the reader with a useful introduction commenting on the recent trends in corpus linguistics, and overviewing the contents of the book. Additionally, each paper is preceded by an abstract providing a summary of the key findings as well as the corpora and methodology used by particular authors.

The use of corpora that are divided into temporally ordered stages is becoming increasingly wide-spread in historical corpus linguistics. This development is partly due to the fact that more and more resources of this kind are being developed. Since the assessment of frequency changes over multiple periods of time is a relatively recent practice, there are few agreed-upon standards of how such trends should be statistically interpreted. This article addresses the need for a basic analytical toolbox that is specifically tailored to the interpretation of frequency changes in multistage diachronic corpora. We present a number of suggestions for the analysis of data that analysts commonly face in historical studies, but also in the study of language acquisition.

Anglia - Zeitschrift für englische Philologie, 2010

International Journal of English Studies, 2005

In historical language scholarship, it has been usual to assume that The transmission of language from generation to generation is itself a linguistic, rather than a social, process, and that the focus should be on uniform language states. Here it is argued that transmission is necessarily social and that the history of a language is necessarily a history of variation. Firts, it is shown that the history of British Received Pronunciation is not one of direct descent from a single uniform ancestral variety. It is then demonstrated that pre-vocalic [h] and [hw] in English have a long history as variables and that loss of [h] in these combinations is not a recent event. Finally, it is suggested that closely similar variants of certain variables, such as [w] for (wh), have most probably recurred independently at various points in history and that we therefore need to review the methods used for dating sound changes.

International Journal of Corpus Linguistics

The study of language through time has long been an area where the corpus approach to the analysis of language has been an important method. The possibility of using other methods, such as elicitation, introspection or psycholinguistic experiments to investigate language in the past is, effectively, eliminated by a simple fact-there is no direct access possible to speakers of language beyond those generations that are living. Our only access to them is through the traces of language they left-recordings, for language spoken in the past 160 years or so or, more commonly, written records. That access is deeply skewed. For some languages, such as English, data is available which would, in principle, allow researchers to study the language in some depth through changing varieties over a long stretch of time. Language spoken in the past which had no written form or where written records have been lost in whole or part are, in effect, lost to us. Research on those languages and varieties is, essentially, impossible. Yet the skew extends beyond simple existence or non-existence of records for some (nominal) standard form of a language. What was chosen to be written in the past, which texts it was deemed important to preserve, the varieties of the speakers with power who had access to the ability to have their language recorded, inter alia, are all factors which skew what we may be able to study when looking at language in the past. So even where we find that much exists, as is the case with English, more is lost. In this thinning-out of the totality of language in the past to the reality of what sources are available now, we also know that some things that we may consider to be constants impact on records, irrespective of language-the survival of texts is linked to cultural value, representations of speech are less commonly found than writing, and literacy levels are likely to greatly influence the types of texts produced. To pick up on that last point, consider a society in which literacy levels are low-the production of many literacy events will be limited accordingly. So, the production of letters to friends, the production of shopping lists and other aide-memoires, the keeping of diaries and even the production of written graffiti are all examples of forms of literacy which

Historical Linguistics studies language change over time. If a group of languages derives from changes to a common ancestor language (proto-language) then they are said to be related. Whenever there exists a lack of written records for an ancestor language, a relevant question in Historical Linguistics is to determine whether two languages are related. The gold standard for finding these relationships is the Comparative Method. Despite the success of the Comparative Method in finding language relationships, it suffers from at least two limitations. First, the Comparative Method involves the manual comparison of various features from a group of languages. Second, the Comparative Method doesn't provide a numerical measure of evidence for how much the database under consideration corroborates an hypothesis. Given the above limitations, the field of Computational Historical Linguistics is presented as a complement to the Comparative Method. This field has experienced a recent expansion with the adaptation of methods from biological phylogenetics. Nevertheless, there is debate whether the evolutionary models used in phylogenetics also incorporate valid linguistical assumptions. In this thesis, I propose a new (probability) model for the evolution of the phonology of languages. A relevant innovation of this model is that it captures the regularity of sound changes. I also describe the software that I created in order to assist in incorporating into the model a linguist's expert knowledge. I show that the knowledge obtained in this way agrees with qualitative statements known to linguists. Finally, I present a new algorithm used to compute the probability of linguistic hypotheses regarding language relationships and the occurence of regular sound changes. The main problem that this algorithm overcomes is that it efficiently explores the possible regular sound changes, mutations in languages that simultaneously affect several words. In order to overcome this challange, I present a new variant of Nested Sequential Monte Carlo that is used to explore the large space of language relationships and regular sound changes. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first algorithm that can perform joint inference on regular sound changes and evolutionary trees. I show that this algorithm is a special case of Sequential Importance Resampling.