The Oxford Handbook of the History of English

doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199922765.001.0001

The Oxford Handbook of the History of English

Edited by:
Terttu Nevalainen
Terttu NevalainenVARIENG, University of HelsinkiClose

and
Elizabeth Closs Traugott
Elizabeth Closs TraugottLinguistics and English, Emerita, Stanford UniversityClose

Abstract

This handbook takes stock of recent advances in the history of English, the most studied language in the field of diachronic linguistics. Not only does ample and invaluable data exist due to English’s status as a global language, but the availability of large electronic corpora has also allowed historical linguists to analyze more of this data than ever before, and to rethink standard assumptions about language history and the methods and approaches to its study. In 68 chapters from specialists whose fields range from statistical modeling to acoustic phonetics, this handbook presents the field in an innovative way, setting a new standard of cross-theoretical collaboration, and rethinking the evidence of language change in English over the centuries. It considers issues of the development of Englishes, including creole and pidgin varieties. It presents various approaches from language contact and typology and rethinks the categorization of language, including interfaces with information structure. The book highlights the recent and ongoing developments of Englishes in Africa, Asia, and Australia, and celebrates the vitality of language change over time, in various contexts, cultures, and societies, and through many different processes.

Keywords: history, English, typology, historical linguistics, language contact, dialects, phonology, code-switching

Bibliographic Information

Publisher:: Oxford University Press

Print Publication Date:: Nov 2012

ISBN:: 9780199922765

Published online:: Nov 2012

DOI:: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199922765.001.0001

Editors

Terttu Nevalainen, editor
Terttu Nevalainen is professor of English philology and Academy Professor at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her research interests are historical sociolinguistics, variation studies, and corpus linguistics. She is one of the designers and compilers of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts and the Corpus of Early English Correspondence. Her publications include more than 100 scholarly articles, An Introduction to Early Modern English (2006; EUP/OUP) and Historical Sociolinguistics (with H. Raumolin-Brunberg, 2003; Pearson), and she has coedited volumes on historical sociolinguistics, linguistic variation, and letter writing. She is the English editor of Neuphilologische Mitteilungen and the editor in chief of the e-series Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English and of the Oxford Studies in the History of English. terttu.nevalainen@helsinki.fi

Elizabeth Closs Traugott, editor
Elizabeth Closs Traugott is professor emerita of linguistics and English at Stanford University, California. She has done research in English historical syntax, semantics, pragmatics, lexicalization, and linguistics and literature. She has contributed to the Cambridge History of English, vol. 1 (R. Hogg, ed., 1992) and the Blackwell Handbook of the History of English (A. van Kemenade and B. Los, eds., 2006). Her books include Grammaticalization (with P. Hopper, 2nd edn., 2003), Regularity in Semantic Change (with R. Dasher, 2002), and Gradience, Gradualness and Grammaticalization (co-edited with G. Trousdale, Benjamins 2010). Her latest book is Constructionalization and Constructional Changes (with G. Trousdale, OUP, in press). She is coeditor with B. Kortmann of the series Topics in English Linguistics (De Gruyter Mouton). traugott@stanford.edu

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Front Matter
Introduction: Rethinking and extending approaches to the history of the English language Terttu Nevalainen and Elizabeth Closs Traugott
Rethinking Evidence
- Evidence
  - Evidence for the history of English: IntroductionSusan Fitzmaurice and Jeremy Smith
  - Evidence from sources prior to 1500Carole Hough
  - Coins as evidencePhilip A. Shaw
  - Editing early English textsSimon Horobin
  - Evidence from sources after 1500Joan C. Beal
  - Examples of Evidence from Phonology
    - Middle English phonology in the digital age: What written corpora can tell us about sound changeNikolaus Ritt
    - Evidence for sound change from Scottish corporaWendy Anderson
    - GOAT vowel variants in the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (DECTE)Karen P. Corrigan
    - Analyzing the ONZE data as evidence for sound changeJennifer Hay
  - Using dictionaries and thesauruses as evidenceJulie Coleman
  - Evidence from surveys and atlases in the history of the English languageWilliam A. Kretzschmar and Merja Stenroos
  - Evidence from historical corpora up to the twentieth centuryMerja Kytö and Päivi Pahta
  - Variability-based neighbor clustering: A bottom-up approach to periodization in historical linguisticsStefan Th. Gries and Martin Hilpert
  - Data retrieval in a diachronic context: The case of the historical English courtroomDawn Archer
- Observing recent change through electronic corpora
  - Some methodological issues related to corpus-based investigations of recent syntactic changes in EnglishMark Davies
  - “Small is beautiful”: On the value of standard reference corpora for observing recent grammatical changeMarianne Hundt and Geoffrey Leech
  - Exploring variation and change in New Englishes: Looking into the International Corpus of English (ICE) and beyondJoybrato Mukherjee and Marco Schilk
  - Change in the English infinitival perfect constructionJill Bowie and Bas Aarts
  - Revisiting the reduplicative copula with corpus-based evidenceAnne Curzan
  - Exploring aspects of the Great Complement Shift, with evidence from the TIME Corpus and COCAJuhani Rudanko
  - Diachronic collostructional analysis meets the noun phrase: Studying many a noun in COHAMartin Hilpert
  - From opportunistic to systematic use of the Web as corpus: Do-support with got (to) in contemporary American EnglishChristian Mair
Issues in Culture and Society
- Mass communication and technologies
  - Technologies of communicationThomas Kohnen and Christian Mair
  - Oral practices in the history of EnglishUrsula Schaefer
  - Forms of early mass communication: The religious domainTanja Rütten
  - From manuscript to printing: Transformations of genres in the history of EnglishClaudia Claridge
  - The competing demands of popularization vs. economy: Written language in the age of mass literacyDouglas Biber and Bethany Gray
  - The impact of electronically-mediated communication on language standards and styleNaomi S. Baron
  - Old news: Rethinking language change through Australian broadcast speechJenny Price
  - The commodification of language: English as a global commodityDeborah Cameron
- Sociocultural processes
  - Sociocultural processes and the history of EnglishJonathan Culpeper and Minna Nevala
  - DemocratizationMichael Farrelly and Elena Seoane
  - Changing attitudes and political correctnessGeoffrey Hughes
  - Social roles, identities, and networksMinna Palander-Collin
  - Changes in politeness culturesAndreas H. Jucker
  - The history of English seen as the history of ideas: Cultural change reflected in different translations of the New TestamentAnna Wierzbicka
  - Attitudes, prescriptivism, and standardizationCarol Percy
  - Perceptions of dialects: Changing attitudes and ideologiesChris Montgomery
  - English in Ireland: A complex case studyTony Crowley
Approaches from Contact and Typology
- Language contact
  - Assessing the role of contact in the history of EnglishRaymond Hickey
  - Early English and the Celtic hypothesisRaymond Hickey
  - Language contact in the Scandinavian periodAngelika Lutz
  - Language contact and linguistic attitudes in the Later Middle AgesTim William Machan
  - Code-switching in English of the Middle AgesPÄivi Pahta
  - Ethnic dialects in North American EnglishCharles Boberg
  - Contact in the African area: A Southern African perspectiveAna Deumert and Rajend Mesthrie
  - Contact in the Asian arenaLisa Lim and Umberto Ansaldo
  - Contact-induced change in English worldwideEdgar W. Schneider
  - Second language varieties of EnglishDevyani Sharma
  - Pidgins and creoles in the history of EnglishDonald Winford
- Typology and typological change
  - Typology and typological change in English historical linguisticsBernd Kortmann
  - The drift of English toward invariable word order from a typological and Germanic perspectiveJohn A. Hawkins
  - Typological hierarchies and frequency drifts in the history of EnglishMikko Laitinen
  - Lexical typology and typological changes in the English lexiconAlexander Haselow
  - Analyticity and syntheticity in the history of EnglishBenedikt Szmrecsanyi
  - Grammaticalization in nonstandard varieties of English and English-based pidgins and creolesAgnes Schneider
  - Toward an automated classification of EnglishesSøren Wichmann and Matthias Urban
Rethinking Categories and Modules
- Cycles and continua
  - Cycles and continua: On unidirectionality and gradualness in language changeRicardo Bermúdez-Otero and Graeme Trousdale
  - Quantitative evidence for a feature-based account of grammaticalization in English: Jespersen's CyclePhillip Wallage
  - The syntax-lexicon continuumCristiano Broccias
  - Toward a unified theory of chain shiftingAaron J. Dinkin
  - (Non)-rhoticity: Lessons from New Zealand EnglishJennifer Hay and Alhana Clendon
  - Lenition in EnglishPatrick Honeybone
  - Continua and clines in the development of New EnglishesDevyani Sharma and Caroline R. Wiltshire
- Interfaces with information structure
  - The interaction between syntax, information structure, and prosody in word order changeRoland Hinterhölzl and Ans van Kemenade
  - Rethinking the loss of verb secondAns van Kemenade
  - Rethinking the OV/VO alternation in Old English: The effect of complexity, grammatical weight, and information statusAnn Taylor and Susan Pintzuk
  - The impact of focusing and defocusing on word order: Changes at the periphery in Old English and Old High GermanSvetlana Petrova
  - The loss of local anchoring: From adverbial local anchors to permissive subjectsBettelou Los and Gea Dreschler
  - Stress clash and word order changes in the left periphery in Old English and Middle EnglishAugustin Speyer
  - Clefts as resolution strategies after the loss of a multifunctional first positionBettelou Los and Erwin Komen
End Matter

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The Oxford Handbook of the History of English

Edited by:
Terttu Nevalainen
Terttu NevalainenVARIENG, University of HelsinkiClose

and
Elizabeth Closs Traugott
Elizabeth Closs TraugottLinguistics and English, Emerita, Stanford UniversityClose

Abstract

Bibliographic Information

Editors

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Contents

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The Oxford Handbook of the History of English

Edited by: Terttu Nevalainen Terttu NevalainenVARIENG, University of HelsinkiClose and Elizabeth Closs Traugott Elizabeth Closs TraugottLinguistics and English, Emerita, Stanford UniversityClose

Abstract

Bibliographic Information

Editors

Share Link

Contents

Edited by:
Terttu Nevalainen
Terttu NevalainenVARIENG, University of HelsinkiClose

and
Elizabeth Closs Traugott
Elizabeth Closs TraugottLinguistics and English, Emerita, Stanford UniversityClose