Graham Shorrocks, The Rev. William Hutton's A Bran New Wark: The Westmorland Dialect in the Late Early-Modern Period. (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Rev. William Hutton's A Bran New Wark: the Westmorland Dialect in the Late Early-Modern Period
Sederi Yearbook of the Spanish and Portuguese Society For English Renaissance Studies, 2004
Earlier work on the dialects of Early-Modern English has shown the dialects of English of the sixteenth-to-eighteenth centuries to be perhaps the most neglected and poorly researched of all in the history of the language. Under such circumstances, it is important to identify and then analyse both manuscripts and printed documents that contain examples of dialectal forms and constructions from that period. Although republished by the English Dialect Society, the Rev. William Hutton's A Bran New Wark has remained an essentially-neglected source, not least-one imagines-because of its rarity, spelling conventions, and stylistically-mixed character, all of which render it difficult to interpret. In the present study, I discuss and illustrate these difficulties, and offer an analysis of part of the text at all linguistic levels, from the discourse-analytical and stylistic through the orthographicalphonological to the grammatical and lexical. It is shown that, despite certain difficulties, Hutton's text gives us a considerable amount of linguistic information at all levels, and that it is especially valuable by virtue of its being one of a group of early studies devoted to the dialects of SouthEast Cumbria/pre-1974 South Westmorland and the extreme North of Lancashire. Further, given that Hutton had had close contact with this dialect for many years before he published the piece in 1785, that society was still relatively static at the time, and that his stylistic, religious-pedagogic, and antiquarian agendas were conservative, it is not unreasonable to imagine that this text offers us some insights into the Westmorland and North-Lancashire dialects of the early-eighteenth and even late-seventeenth centuries.
For years, it has been traditionally contended that George Meriton’s A Yorkshire Dialogue (1683) represents the first dialectally valuable historical document for the linguistic evaluation of Yorkshire speech. Not only has it been commonly regarded as the forerunner of Yorkshire dialect poetry, but also as the foremost written record where Yorkshire regionalisms may be attested in the Early Modern period. Nevertheless, in 1673 Stephen Bulkby issued at York an anonymous dialect broadside entitled “A Yorkshire Dialogue Between an Awd Wife, a Lass, and a Butcher.” Linguistically ignored as it has been, this specimen is of particular interest for the domain of historical dialectology: on the one hand, it illuminates the linguistic history of the county at the time and supports the linguistic data yielded by Meriton’s piece; on the other, it marks the beginnings of Yorkshire dialect literature. This paper seeks to examine selected features of north-east Yorkshire phonology as evidenced by non-standard spellings in this late seventeenth-century broadsheet. Furthermore, it endeavours to offer a diachronic framework so as to bridge the gap between Rolle’s speech and Marshall’s eighteenth-century provincialisms.
The Enregisterment of the Yorkshire Dialect in 18th-century Literary Texts : A Corpus-Based Study
2019
Over the last decades, there has been an increasing interest in studying dialects and registers as markers of social identity. This study has been possible due to Asif Agha's notion of enregisterment (2003), which refers to the link between language, society and culture. Nonetheless, scholars have been mainly focused on contemporary American or British English in general terms. Thus, little has been discussed about nonstandard varieties in historical contexts. Consequently, this paper seeks to examine a linguistic corpus of the Yorkshire dialect represented in two 18 th-century literary works-Joseph Reed's The Register Office (1761) and Rev. John Watson's "Two letters written in the Halifax Dialect" (1759)-that are now included in The Salamanca Corpus (SC). I have carried out a linguistic evaluation of the most salient phonological and lexical features identified in the corpus, which have been supported by the evidence recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and the English Dialect Dictionary (EDD). By comparing the results obtained from the analysis of Reed's and Watson's works, we can find an important number of shared features that are represented as characteristic of the Yorkshire dialect. Therefore, we can conclude that there was an enregistered repertoire of Yorkshire dialect in the 18 th century which circulated and showed the speakers' ideologies about Yorkshire people and their language.
Syllabus: Middle English Dialects
From roughly 1100-1500 C.E., five major dialects of Middle English were spoken in England: Northern, West Midland, East Midland, Southern, and Southeastern or Kentish. In this course we examine phonological, grammatical, syntactic, and lexical properties of these Middle English dialects. Our purpose is both linguistic and literary. With an awareness of dialectical differences, we are better prepared to read and interpret Middle English texts. Dialect may reveal information about the probable origins of a text and its cultural or political affiliations. An author of a literary text may use dialect in order to characterize the speaker within a tale or the tale's narrator. Dialect also plays a role in how we read and, therefore, hear the rhetorical turns and acoustic features in prose, poetry, and drama from the Middle English period.
The East Anglian Dialect of English in the World
Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, 2021
In the 17th century, the English region of East Anglia contained many of the major population centres of the British Isles, not least Norwich, England’s second city at that time. One might therefore predict that East Anglian dialects of English would have played a major role in determining the nature of the new colonial Englishes which were first beginning to emerge during this period. This paper considers some of the phonological and grammatical features of East Anglian English which can be argued to have been influential in this way.
Dialect and Vernacular Features in Late Modern English Correspondence: Beginnings of a Quest
Brno studies in English, 2010
In this contribution I intend to discuss some important methodological issues concerning the study of so-called ‘non-standard’ features in Late Modern English (LModE) documents; for instance, among such issues, we can include the place of perceptual dialectology, as labels like prescriptivism and normativity cannot be fully understood without taking into consideration the speakers’ selfconsciousness deriving from the (covert) prestige of certain varieties in relation to others. In addition to addressing some terminological points, I will stress the importance of studying authentic manuscripts, as it is only when we access original texts and manuscripts that we can go beyond the layers of interpretation added by later editors, and perhaps discover new perspectives from details that had been overlooked. The contribution will deal with a range of texts encoded by people of varying education levels, in order to highlight the different methodological problems under discussion; special at...
Yorkshire English two hundred years ago
Journal of english linguistics, 2001
and is currently researching language attitudes and cultural change. Michael Montgomery is a Professor Emeritus of English at the University of South Carolina, where he taught from 1981 to 1999. He has recently completed a comprehensive dictionary of southern Appalachian English and is engaged in a long-term study of trans-Atlantic linguistic connections, especially to determine the influence of Ulster emigrants on American English. Analyses of linguistic corpora have revealed that natural language is to a very large extent based on (semi-)preconstructed phrases. Drawing on corpus-based approaches to the description of such lexico-grammatical patterns in language use, the present study puts into perspective the question of why one and the same lexical item occurs in different patterns. The question of pattern selection (i.e., the analysis of factors that lead the language user to prefer a specific pattern in a given context) deserves further consideration. The present corpus-based case study is intended to illuminate this aspect of authentic language behavior.
The analysis of regional dialects in the Early Modern period has commonly been disregarded in favour of an ample scholarly interest in the 'authorised' version of English which came to be eventually established as a standard. The history of regional 'Englishes' at this time still remains to a very great extent in oblivion, owing mainly to an apparent dearth of direct textual evidence which might provide trustworthy data. Research in this field has been for the most part focused on phonological, orthographical and morphological traits by virtue of the rather more abundant information that dialect testimonies yield about them. Regional lexical diversity has, on the contrary, deserved no special attention as uncertainty arises with regard to what was provincially restricted and what was not. This paper endeavours to offer additional data to the gloomy lexical setting of Early Modern regional English. It is our aim to give a descriptive account of the dialect words collated by Bishop White Kennett's glossary to Parochial Antiquities (1695). This underutilised specimen does actually widen the information furnished by other well known canonical word-lists and provides concrete geographical data that might contribute to bridging the gaps still existing in the history of lexical provincialisms at the time.