Dialect and Vernacular Features in Late Modern English Correspondence: Beginnings of a Quest (original) (raw)
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This volume includes a selection of fifteen papers delivered at the Second International Conference on Late Modern English. The chapters focus on significant linguistic aspects of the Late Modern English period, not only on grammatical issues such as the development of pragmatic markers, for-to infinitive constructions, verbal subcategorisation, progressive aspect, sentential complements, double comparative forms or auxiliary/negator cliticisation but also on pronunciation, dialectal variation and other practical aspects such as corpus compilation, which are approached from different perspectives (descriptive, cognitive, syntactic, corpus-driven).
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The term Old English is used to describe the language of the AngloSaxons in England from about, say, 500 to 1100 A.D. Old English is the direct ancestor of Modern English; our vocabulary may be larger and show the influence of Latin, French and so on but our most frequently used words and our basic grammatical structures are still very much the same as in Old English. Old English has been studied from about 1550 on. In considering the habits of Old English scholars, I want to let them be heard in their own words as far as possible and though it is, of course, my purposes in shaping this paper which permit them to contribute, I have tried to be fair, to select passages which, though striking, are also consistent with the general attitudes of an individual scholar or those of a period of scholarship.
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English Language and Linguistics, 2012
This issue of English Language and Linguistics contains a selection of papers from the fourth conference on Late Modern English, held at the University of Sheffield in May 2010. Twenty-one years previously, when Charles Jones referred to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the ‘Cinderellas of English historical linguistic study’ (1989: 279), such a conference, let alone the fourth in a series of such conferences, would have seemed highly unlikely. Jones was alluding to the comparative neglect of the more recent past in historical studies of English. Up to this point, linguistic scholars had tended to regard the Late Modern period as unworthy of their attention. Morton W. Bloomfield & Leonard Newmark reflect this view in their assertion that ‘after the period of the Great Vowel Shift was over, the changes that were to take place in English phonology were few indeed’ (1963: 293). They also argue that any changes in the language that had occurred between the eighteenth and the m...
Anglia - Zeitschrift für Englische Philologie, 2016
The emergence of the form dialect in early modern English is often mentioned in histories of the language, but important as it is, the evidence for it has never been analyzed as a whole, and its treatment in the revised OED entry for dialect leaves room for modifications. This article presents and re-evaluates the evidence for dialect in sixteenth-century English sources. It demonstrates that there were two homonyms with this form, one a shortening of English dialectics and one a borrowing from post-classical Latin dialectus, from its Greek etymon διάλεκτος, and, less often, from French dialecte. After treating dialect 'dialectics' briefly, it explores the known attestations of dialect 'kind of language', showing the range of senses in which this word could be used, and the ways in which it can be shown to have spread from one user of English to another, beginning with one clearly defined expatriate learned circle in the 1560s, entering more general learned use in the 1570s and 1580s, and becoming a fully naturalized literary English word in the 1590s. The paper therefore offers a detailed case-study of the naturalization of a learned word in early modern English and also contributes to the history of the conceptualization of language variation in sixteenth-century England.