Review of: Auer, Anita, Daniel Schreier and Richard J. Watts, Letter writing and language change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015 (original) (raw)
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2001
Part I: Introduction: The Time Periods of English. Language Change. Sources of Information on Language Change. Linguistic Preliminaries. The Sounds of English, and Symbols Used to Describe Them: Consonants. Vowels. Structure of The Book. Part II: The Pre-History of English: Timeline of Events 1. The Indo-European Period. The Indo-Europeans and Linguistic Relatedness: The Beginnings. The Development of Historical Linguistics. Genetic Relatedness. Linguistic Developments. The Indo-European Language Family: Family Tree Relationships. The Indo-European Family. Indo-Iranian. Indic. Iranian. Armenian. Albanian. Balto-Slavonic. Slavonic. Baltic. Hellenic. Italic. Celtic. Brythonic. Goidelic. Germanic. East Germanic. North Germanic. West Germanic. Low Germanic. High Germanic. Yiddish. From Indo-European to Germanic: Prosody. The Consonant System: Sound Shifts. Grimm's Law. Verner's Law. The Second Consonant Shift. Possible Explanations For The High German (Second) Sound Shift. The V...
Eighteenth-century English letters: In search of the vernacular
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Questo studio presenta un modello di ricerca per lo studio degli stili di scrittura vernacolari nell'inglese del diciottesimo secolo. Focalizzando l'attenzione sulle lettere prodotte spontaneamente, è possibile studiare gli stili più informali di un soggetto. Tali lettere, tuttavia, non sono facilmente reperibili: nel Settecento, infatti, scrivere lettere era considerata un'arte, con regole che dettavano esattamente che cosa poteva essere considerato una buona lettera. L'articolo enuncia un gruppo di criteri sulla base dei quali una lettera può essere considerata valida per l'analisi socio-linguistica; l'approccio proposto parte dal concetto che l'autore opera nel contesto di una rete sociale: sulla base di ciò, ci si può concentrare su vari temi importanti in sociolinguistica, da analisi di micro-e macro-livello a studi di sociopragmatica. Viene presentato un repertorio di carteggi del Settecento attualmente disponibile al pubblico attraverso internet, con i criteri proposti per nuove iniziative analoghe; si ritiene infatti che nella pubblicazione di corrispondenza si dovrebbe dare attenzione alle esigenze degli studiosi di sociolinguistica storica, oltre che di un pubblico di lettori più tradizionale.
Writing the history of English - In need of a new perspective
Contexts of English in Use: Past and Present, 2007
New scholarly insights, both in the social and the natural sciences, take some time before they spread through the international scholarly community, and it takes much longer before they are reflected in the textbooks of the respective discipline. The history of English is no exception here, and many of the established textbooks have far too long ignored new developments in historical linguistics in general and in English historical linguistics in particular. This may be partly due to the intended audience of such books, which are in general undergraduates of English with little or no training in general and historical linguistics.
The Oxford Handbook of the History of English
2012
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 informat...
Journal of English Linguistics, 2001
The third of the four chronological volumes in the six-volume Cambridge History of the English Language (CHEL) covers roughly three centuries of linguistic history, from the introduction of printing in England by William Caxton to the American Declaration of Independence. This is the first period in the history of English for which both manuscript and printed records exist, it is the first period of intense scholarly interest in the state of the language, and it is also the first period for which we have abundant contemporary testimony regarding linguistic issues. CHEL III includes a general editor's "Preface" by Richard Hogg (xi-xv); an "Introduction" by the volume's editor, Roger Lass (1-9); and chapters on "Orthography and Punctuation" by Vivian Salmon (13-55), "Phonology and Morphology" by Roger Lass (56-186), "Syntax" by Matti Rissanen (187-331), "Early Modern English Lexis and Semantics" by Terttu Nevalainen (332-458), "Regional and Social Variation" by Manfred Görlach (459-538), "Literary Language" by Sylvia Adamson (539-653), a glossary of linguistic terms (654-69), individual bibliographies for each chapter, and an extensive index. As in the previous CHEL volumes, most chapters can stand alone as separate monographs. The individual contributions are unified chronologically but not theoretically; the only shared theoretical approach is the sensible attempt to avoid paradigm-specific formalisms. "Orthography and Punctuation" by Vivian Salmon is an informative and well-structured survey of the cultural circumstances, debates, and choices that changed English orthography from the medieval, rather chaotic, and localized scribal practices to essentially the modern set of conventions. It was during Early Modern English that multiple new punctuation marks were introduced and that most of the rules in force today were devised and enriched. The chapter separates the influence of printers and printed books from the impact of the learned orthoepic discourse in the formation of spelling patterns, with Mulcaster's 1582 Elementarie as the major divide between the premodern and the modern state of affairs. The eight decades from 1582 to the 1660 Restoration emerge as the most significant forma