Full Description
The papers in this volume aim at facilitating exchange between three fields of inquiry that are of great importance in historical linguistics: language change, (socio)linguistic research on variation, and contact linguistics. Drawing on a range of recently-developed methodological innovations, such as methods for quantifying the linguistic variation (that is a prerequisite for language change) or new corpus-based methods for investigating text-type variation, the contributors are able to trace linguistic change in different periods and contact situations, demonstrate how variation occurs, and in how far language change results out of this variation. Thus, the chapters go beyond core issues of language variation and change, focusing on the boundary between word and grammar, discourse and ideology in the history of the English language.
Contents
1. Preface; 2. At the crossroads of language change, variation, and contact (by Pfenninger, Simone E.); 3. PART I: Language change; 4. Knitting and splitting information: Medial placement of linking adverbials in the history of English (by Lenker, Ursula); 5. The order of adverbials of time and place in Old English (by Chrambach, Susanne); 6. The demise of a preterite-present verb: Why was unnan lost? (by Wojtys, Anna); 7. Gradience in an abrupt change: Stress shift in English disyllabic noun-verb pairs (by Phillips, Betty S.); 8. Vowels before /r/ in the history of English (by Hickey, Raymond); 9. PART II: Language variation; 10. "Pained the eye and stunned the ear": Language ideology and the progressive passive in the nineteenth century (by Anderwald, Lieselotte); 11. Watching as-clauses in Late Modern English (by Broccias, Cristiano); 12. Colloquialization and "decolloquialization": Phrasal verbs in formal contexts, 1650-1990 (by Rodriguez-Puente, Paula); 13. Letters of Artisans and the Labouring Poor (England, c. 1750-1835): Approaching linguistic diversity in Late Modern English (by Laitinen, Mikko); 14. New-dialect formation in medieval Ireland: A corpus-based study of Irish English pre-modal verbs (by Hattum, Marije van); 15. Tracing uses of will and would in Late Modern British and Irish English (by Ronan, Patricia); 16. PART III: Variation and change in contact situations; 17. The subjunctive mood in Philippine English: A diachronic analysis (by Collins, Peter); 18. Revisiting a millennium of migrations: Contextualizing Dutch/Low-German influence on English dialect lexis (by Chamson, Emil); 19. or : A dilemma of the Middle English scribal practice (by Welna, Jerzy); 20. Index
