Special issue: selected papers from the fourth International Conference on Late Modern English (original) (raw)
Related papers
On a Short Vowel Shift in Early Modern English
Schendl, Herbert and Nikolaus Ritt. 2002. “Of vowel shifts, great, small, long and short”. Language Sciences. 24. 409-421., 2002
This paper argues that the development of Early Modern English short vowels can be accounted for in terms of a chain shift which essentially lowered and centralised them. The shift, which we propose to call Short Vowel Shift, is as coherent and systematic as the comparably well established Great Vowel Shift. At the same time it is argued that both shifts represent historiographic constructs, or stories, whose plausibility depends not only on their truth value but at least as much on their fruitfulness and on the consiliences they produce. # Language Sciences 24 (2002) 409-421 www.elsevier.com/locate/langsci 0388-0001/01/$ -see front matter # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. P I I : S 0 3 8 8 -0 0 0 1 ( 0 1 ) 0 0 0 4 1 -9
English Language and Linguistics
Since Charles Jones referred to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the ‘Cinderellas of English historical linguistic study’ (1989: 279), there has been a great deal of progress in research on this period, but, as Beal (2012: 22) points out, much of this has been in the fields of syntax, morphology, lexis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics and the normative tradition. Beal argues that the availability of corpora of Late Modern English texts has greatly facilitated research in these areas, but, since creating phonological corpora for periods antedating the invention of sound recording is a challenging proposition, the historical phonology of Late Modern English has benefited much less from the corpus revolution. To redress this imbalance, the editors of this issue, with technical support from the Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield, created the Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database (ECEP), which is freely available at www.dhi.ac.uk/projects/ecep/
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...
A Historical Phonology of English
2013
A HISTORICAL PHONOLOGY OF ENGLISH 3.2 The Indo-European family of languages 3.3 The Germanic branch of Indo-European 3.4 Some pre-Old English segmental and prosodic changes 3.4.1 Grimm's Law, or the First Germanic Consonant Shift 3.4.2 Some IE vowel changes in Germanic 3.4.3 Early prosodic changes: stress and syllable weight in Germanic 3.4.4 Lengthening of fi nal vowels in stressed monosyllables 3.4.5 West Germanic (Consonant) Gemination (WGG)
On the recent history of low vowels in English
English Language and Linguistics
The development of low vowels in the history of English is one which shows continuous movement, usually upwards along earlier back and later front trajectories. In addition, low vowels have been subject to lengthening processes which have compensated for the loss of earlier instances of long low vowels. Shifts along a horizontal axis, from low front to low back, can also be discerned throughout the history of English. The present study begins by examining the situation in late eighteenth-century English, using the Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database and the works of various prescriptivist writers, to determine the outset for later developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It also scrutinises realisations of low vowels in these varieties in order to offer a possible chronology for the overall development of low vowels in the past two centuries.