New Approaches to English Historical Linguistics – serie

This book traces the development of the ideal of sincerity from its origins in Anglo-Saxon monasteries to its eventual currency in fifteenth-century familiar letters. Beginning by positioning sincerity as an ideology at the intersection of historical pragmatics and the history of emotions, the author demonstrates how changes in the relationship between outward expression and inward emotions changed English language and literature. While the early chapters reveal that the notion of sincerity was a Christian intervention previously absent from Germanic culture, the latter part of the book provides more focused studies of contrition and love. In doing so, the author argues that under the rubric of courtesy these idealized emotions influenced English in terms of its everyday pragmatics and literary style. This fascinating volume will be of broad interest to scholars of medieval language, literature and culture.

This book systematically discusses the link between bilingual language production and its manifestation in historical documents, drawing together two branches of linguistics which have much in common but are traditionally dealt with separately. By combining the study of historical mixed texts with the principles of modern code-switching and bilingualism research, the author argues that the cognitive processes underpinning the human capacity to produce mixed utterances have remained unchanged throughout history, even as the languages themselves are constantly changing. This book will be of interest to scholars of historical linguistics, syntactic theory (particularly generative grammar), language variation and change.

This edited book examines the multilingual culture of medieval England, exploring its impact on the development of English and its textual manifestations from a multi-disciplinary perspective. The book offers overviews of the state of the art of research and case studies on this subject in (sub)disciplines of linguistics including historical linguistics, onomastics, lexicology and lexicography, sociolinguistics, code-switching and language contact, and also includes contributions from literary and socio-cultural studies, material culture, and palaeography. The authors focus on the variety of languages in use in medieval Britain, including English, Old Norse, Norn, Dutch, Welsh, French, and Latin, making the argument that understanding the impact of medieval multilingualism on the development of English requires multidisiplinarity and the bringing together of different frameworks in linguistics and cultural studies toachieve more nuanced answers. This book will be of interest to academics and students of historical linguistics and medieval textual culture.

This edited book examines the multilingual culture of medieval England, exploring its impact on the development of English and its textual manifestations from a multi-disciplinary perspective. The book offers overviews of the state of the art of research and case studies on this subject in (sub)disciplines of linguistics including historical linguistics, onomastics, lexicology and lexicography, sociolinguistics, code-switching and language contact, and also includes contributions from literary and socio-cultural studies, material culture, and palaeography. The authors focus on the variety of languages in use in medieval Britain, including English, Old Norse, Norn, Dutch, Welsh, French, and Latin, making the argument that understanding the impact of medieval multilingualism on the development of English requires multidisiplinarity and the bringing together of different frameworks in linguistics and cultural studies toachieve more nuanced answers. This book will be of interest to academics and students of historical linguistics and medieval textual culture.

This book examines grammatical changes that took place in the medieval language contact situation between English and French from 1066 until 1500. It investigates structural copying phenomena and their connection with the lexicon, finding that copying of lexical verbs with a predicate-argument structure accelerated wider grammatical changes, and shows why the traditional notion of borrowing should be replaced with the more adequate concept of copying. The authors start by taking a fresh look at the relationship between Old French and Middle English in light of recent developments in the fi eld of linguistics, arguing that what has traditionally been seen as a diglossic situation (i.e., as contact between the dominating speakers of French and the native speakers of English) should instead be analysed through the framework of bilingualism. The two contact scenarios under scrutiny are the ones between Old French and Middle English and Middle English and the contact variety of Anglo-French. On the basis of their case studies they develop a holistic model of contact-induced change that integrates the bilingual individual as well as the speech community and its sociolinguistic background. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of language history and change, language contact and acquisition, sociolinguistics, multilingualism, and psycholinguistics.

This book challenges the long-held theory that the English pronouns they, their, them are loanwords from Old Norse, arguing instead that the pronouns ultimately derive from the Old English demonstratives þā – þāra – þām. Based on the most comprehensive quantitative and qualitative analysis yet published of third-person plural personal pronoun usage in early English, the study presents evidence of morphosyntactic and phonological continuity from Old to Middle English, particularly in the northern and (south)western dialects. It concludes that contact with Old Norse primarily reinforced existing native developments rather than introducing entirely new forms, thus highlighting the complex interplay of internal linguistic evolution and language contact that combined to shape they, their, them. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Historical Linguistics, Language Variation and Change, Language Contact, as well as readers interested in the history of the English language.

This book uses a corpus of manuscript letters from Bess of Hardwick to investigate how linguistic features characteristic of spoken communication function within early modern epistolary prose. Using these letters as a primary data source with reference to other epistolary materials from the early modern period (1500-1750), the author examines them in a  unique and systematic way. The book is the first of its kind to combine a replicable scribal profiling technique, used to identify holograph and scribal handwriting within the letters, with innovative analyses of the language they contain. Furthermore, by adopting a discourse-analytic approach to the language and making reference to the socio-historical context of language use, the book provides an alternative perspective to the one often presented in traditional historical accounts of English. This volume will appeal to students and scholars of early modern English and historical linguistics.