New-Dialect Formation in Canada: Evidence from the English Modal Auxiliaries [Full text] (original) (raw)
Cambridge University Press, 2019
Praise by Peter Trudgill: "For this brilliantly researched book, Stefan Dollinger bravely ventured to parts of the archives other scholars had never reached. He emerged with the fascinating story of how the "Lennon & McCartney of Canadian English", Walter S. Avis and Charles J. Lovell, persuaded Canada - and then the world - to recognize Canadian English as the distinctive language variety that it truly is." Advance praise by Jack Chambers (University of Toronto): "Stefan Dollinger has undertaken heroic archival sleuthing to resuscitate the coalition of amateur logophiles and English professors that succeeded in bringing Canadian English into print and, more important, into our consciousness. Through him, this small, almost forgotten band of scholars come to life with their foibles, their labours and above all their dedication." Synopsis: "Two fatal heart attacks are among the many reasons why the names of Walter S. Avis and Charles J. Lovell, the Lennon-McCartney of Canadian English, have not become the Canadian household names they should perhaps be. This book tells their stories and those of the other Big Sixers from the 1940s to the 1990s, with a good helping of present-day hindsight. This book also writes into disciplinary history the few women researchers in early 20th-century Canada. The main goal of the book is more generally to enrich and correct the social and linguistic histories concerning some long-forgotten individuals. This exercise is thrilling and enlightening at the same time, presenting the relatively small field of Canadian English linguistics in a new, fully contextualized light, telling the stories of how Canadian English was "discovered" and eventually lifted from ridicule and disdain to — cautious, because Canadian — appreciation."