Historical Dialectology in the Digital Age

Rhona Alcorn is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh and CEO of Scots Language Dictionaries Ltd. She is also Deputy Director of the Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics. She was the first receipient of the Richard M. Hogg Prize, awarded annually by the International Society for the Linguistics of English since 2008. Joanna Kopaczyk is Lecturer in English Language & Linguistics at the University of Glasgow. She is a historical linguist with an interest in formulaic language, the history of Scots and historical multilingualism, which she approaches from pragmaphilological and corpus-driven perspectives. She previously worked at the University of Edinburgh, where she was one of the compilers of the From Inglis to Scots (FITS) corpus, and at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. Her recent co-edited volumes include Applications of Pattern-driven Methos in Corpus Linguistics (John Benjamins 2018) and Binomials in the History of English (Cambridge University Press 2017). Bettelou Los is Forbes Professor of English Language at the University of Edinburgh. She graduated from the University of Amsterdam in 1986 and has since held teaching and research positions at the University of Amsterdam, the Vrije Universiteit, the University of Nijmegen, Radboud University Nijmegen and other colleges of high education. She participates in the research program The Diachrony of Complex Predicates in West Germanic, and has published several papers on diachronic syntax. Previous publications include The Handbook of the History of English, Blackwell, as co-editor (2006), and The Rise of the To-Infinitive, Oxford University Press (2005). Benjamin Molineaux is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics, the University of Edinburgh. His interests are in synchronic and diachronic phonology and morphology, with special emphasis on stress systems. He has published on these topics as applied to the history of English, Scots and Mapudungun (a language of Chile and Argentina). As one of the compilers of the From Inglis To Scots (FITS) database he has applied corpus methods to mapping the earliest sound-to-spelling correspondences in the history of Scots (1380-500). He is currently using the same methods to explore the 400-year history of Mapudungun, as part of the Corpus of Historical Mapudungun. He holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford.

The present volume is a very valuable contribution to the field of English historical dialectology. It demonstrates that the door for the linguistic analysis of early and late medieval texts and their language has been opened anew. It shows that there is an opportunity for more nuanced questions and more precise insights through the options presented by digitised corpora and/or digital methods (as complements to traditional, analogue corpora and methods). The overarching question – namely how digital methods can be used to investigate diachronic variation and language change – is addressed at different linguistic levels. It is the interplay between spelling variation and pronunciation which comes to the fore, as it is at the heart of half of the contributions (chapters 4, 5, 6, 7, 8), but syntactic variation and change, as well as morphological and lexical variation, do also find their places. The individual chapters all present their data and analyses with clarity and conciseness...All in all, the volume is a very good collection of papers, and it will be a handy and useful resource for students and more experienced scholars interested in the state of the field and what one can do with digitised corpora and digital methods.

• Contents List of Figures and TablesNotes on EditorsNotes on ContributorsPrefaceAcknowledgements1 Historical Dialectology and the Angus McIntosh LegacyRhona Alcorn, Joanna Kopaczyk, Bettelou Los and Benjamin Molineaux Part 1 Creating and Mining Digital Resources2 A Parsed Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English Robert Truswell, Rhona Alcorn, James Donaldson and Joel Wallenberg3 Approaching Transition Scots from a Micro-perspective; The Dunfermline Corpus, 1573–1723Klaus Hofmann 4 Early Spelling Evidence for Scots L-vocalisation: A Corpus-based ApproachBenjamin Molineaux, Joanna Kopaczyk, Warren Maguire, Rhona Alcorn, Vasilis Karaiskos and Bettelou LosPart 2 Segmental Histories5 Old and Middle English Spellings for OE hw-, with Special Reference to the ‘qu-’ Type: In Celebration of LAEME, (e)LALME, LAOS and CoNEMargaret Laing and Roger Lass 6 The Development of Old English ǣ: The Middle English Spelling EvidenceGjertrud F. Stenbrenden 7 The Development of Old English eo/ēo and the Systematicity of Middle English SpellingMerja Stenroos 8 Examining the Evidence for Phonemic Affricates: Middle English /t͡ʃ/, /d͡ʒ/ or [t-ʃ], [d-ʒ]? Donka Minkova Part 3 Placing Features in Context9 The Predictability of {S} Abbreviation in Older Scots Manuscripts According to Stem-final Littera Daisy Smith 10 An East Anglian Poem in a London Manuscript? The Date and Dialect of The Court of Love in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.19Ad Putter 11 ‘He was a good hammer, was he’: Gender as Marker for South-Western Dialects of English. A Corpus-based Study from a Diachronic PerspectiveTrinidad Guzmán-González Index