Sociocultural Dimensions Of Lexis And Text In The History Of English

The chapters collected in this volume examine how the sociohistorical and cultural context may influence structural features of lexis and text types. Each paper pays particular attention to social ‘labels’ and attitudes (conservative, religious, ideological, endearing, or other), thereby focusing on their dynamic and historical dimension. Changes in these are analyzed in order to explain morphological, lexical, and textual changes that would otherwise be hard to account for. Together, they provide a varied window on the effect of historical versions of a dynamic society on lexis and text. Examining lexical and textual change in history from a sociocultural perspective teaches us a great deal – not just about the past, but it also makes us think about similar phenomena in the present, enhancing our knowledge about how universally human some of these phenomena are. This volume will be of great interest to (English) historical linguists, sociolinguists, and scholars of sociohistorical and cultural studies.

Locating the subjunctive at the interface of mood and modality, this book presents a systematic description of the use of the English subjunctive in main clauses, noun clauses, relative clauses, and adverbial clauses. It explores the factors which governed its competition with other verbal expressions in texts ranging from the 9th to the beginning of the 18th century. Employing close reading alongside analysis of corpus data and the use of descriptive statistics, it offers new insights into the research landscape of English subjunctive use and into the fields of historical English linguistics and corpus linguistics.

The papers in this volume cover a wide range of interrelated syntactic phenomena, from the history of core arguments, to complements and non-finite clauses, elements in the clause periphery, as well as elements with potential scope over complete sentences and even larger discourse chunks. In one way or another, however, they all testify to an increasing awareness that even some of the most central phenomena of syntax – and the way they develop over time – are best understood by taking into account their communicative functions and the way they are processed and represented by speakers’ cognitive apparatus. In doing so, they show that historical syntax, and historical linguistics in general, is witnessing a convergence between formerly distinct linguistic frameworks and traditions. With this fusion of traditions, the trend is undeniably towards a richer and more broadly informed understanding of syntactic change and the history of English. This volume will be of great interest to scholars of (English) historical syntax and historical linguistics within the cognitive-linguistic as well as the generative tradition.

This is the first extensive study of Old English to utilise the insights and methodologies of sociolinguistics. Building on previous philological and historical work, it takes into account the sociology and social dialectology of Old English and offers a description of its speech communities informed by the theory of social networks and communities of practice. Specifically, this book uses data from historical narratives and legal documents and examines the interplay of linguistic innovation, variation, and change with such sociolinguistic parameters as region, scribal office, gender, and social status. Special attention is given to the processes of supralocalisation and their correlation with periods of political centralisation in the history of Anglo-Saxon England.

This volume explores the complex relations of texts and their contextualising elements, drawing particularly on the notions of paratext, metadiscourse and framing. It aims at developing a more comprehensive historical understanding of these phenomena, covering a wide time span, from Old English to the 20th century, in a range of historical genres and contexts of text production, mediation and consumption. However, more fundamentally, it also seeks to expand our conception of text and the communicative ‘spaces’ surrounding them, and probe the explanatory potential of the concepts under investigation. Though essentially rooted in historical linguistics and philology, the twelve contributions of this volume are also open to insights from other disciplines (such as medieval manuscript studies and bibliography, but also information studies, marketing studies, and even digital electronics), and thus tackle opportunities and challenges in researching the dynamics of text and framing phenomena in a historical perspective.

The Routledge Handbook of English Language and Digital Humanities serves as a reference point for key developments related to the ways in which the digital turn has shaped the study of the English language and of how the resulting methodological approaches have permeated other disciplines. It draws on modern linguistics and discourse analysis for its analytical methods and applies these approaches to the exploration and theorisation of issues within the humanities. Divided into three sections, this handbook covers: sources and corpora; analytical approaches; English language at the interface with other areas of research in the digital humanities. In covering these areas, more traditional approaches and methodologies in the humanities are recast and research challenges are re-framed through the lens of the digital. The essays in this volume highlight the opportunities for new questions to be asked and long-standing questions to be reconsidered when drawing on the digital in humanities research. This is a ground-breaking collection of essays offering incisive and essential reading for anyone with an interest in the English language and digital humanities.

Drawing on detailed case studies across a range of languages, including English, German, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Czech, Russian, Lithuanian and Greek, this book examines the different factors that determine the outcome of the interaction between borrowing and word formation. Historically, borrowing has largely been studied from etymological and lexicographical perspectives and word formation has been included in morphology. However, this book focuses on their mutual influence and interaction. Bringing together a range of contributors, each chapter illustrates how borrowing and word formation are in competition as alternative naming processes, while also showing how they can influence each other. The case studies are framed by an introduction that describes the general background and a conclusion that summarises the main findings.

This volume brings together research on panel studies with the aim of providing a coherent empirical and theoretical knowledge-base for examining the impact of maturation and lifespan-specific effects on linguistic malleability in the post-adolescent speaker. Building on the work of Wagner and Buchstaller (2018), the present collection offers a critical examination of the theoretical implications of panel research across a range of geographic regions and time periods. The volume seeks to offer a way forward in the debates circling about the phenomenon of later-life language change, drawing on contributions from a variety of linguistic disciplines to examine critical topics such as the effect of linguistic architecture, the roles of mobility and identity construction, and the impact of frequency effects. Taken together, this edited collection both informs and pushes forward key questions on the nature of lifespan change, making this key reading for students and researchers in cognitive linguistics, historical linguistics, dialectology, and variationist sociolinguistics.