Patterns of Change in 18th-Century English : A Sociolinguistic Approach.
- 1 online resource (325 pages)
- Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics Ser. ; v.8 .
Intro -- Patterns of Change in 18th-century English -- Editorial page -- Title page -- LCC data -- Table of contents -- Preface and acknowledgments -- Contributors -- Part I. Introduction and background -- Chapter 1. Approaching change in 18th-century English -- 1.1 Preamble -- 1.2 Past work: material and method -- 1.3 Trajectories of change between 1400 and 1680 -- 1.4 Aims and scope of this volume -- 1.5 Material, methods and syntheses -- Chapter 2. Society and culture in the long 18th century -- 2.1 Introduction -- 2.2 Political life -- 2.3 Demography and urbanization -- 2.4 Social stratification -- 2.5 Literacy -- 2.6 Cultural climate -- 2.7 Conclusion -- Range of writers in the CEECE -- Polite society and rhetoric -- Chapter 3. Grammar writing in the eighteenth century -- 3.1 Introduction -- 3.2 Grammar production -- 3.3 Towards vernacular education -- 3.3.1 A practical grammar, a commodity -- 3.3.2 Target audience -- 3.4 Morphology and syntax in eighteenth-century grammars -- 3.4.1 Divisions of grammar -- 3.4.2 Awareness of variation and change -- 3.4.3 Case studies -- 3.5 Postscript -- Acknowledgments -- Chapter 4. The Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension (CEECE) -- 4.1 The CEEC project and the CEEC family of corpora -- 4.2 Corpus compilation -- 4.3 Coverage (representativeness and balance) -- 4.3.1 Diachronic and quantitative coverage -- 4.3.2 Gender balance -- 4.3.3 Social ranks -- 4.3.4 Regional coverage -- 4.4 Coding -- 4.4.1 Letter quality -- 4.4.2 Relationship between writer and recipient (register) -- 4.5 Corpus formats and external databases -- 4.6 Copyright and publication -- Data retrieval -- Mikko Hakala -- Acknowledgments -- Chapter 5. Research methods: Periodization and statistical techniques -- 5.1 Quantifying change -- 5.1.1 Need for multiple methods -- 5.1.2 Periodizing processes of change. 5.2 Basic methods for estimating frequencies -- 5.3 Methods for studying changes lacking a variable -- 5.3.1 Introduction -- 5.3.2 Method 1: accumulation curves and permutation testing -- 5.3.3 Method 2: beanplots and the Wilcoxon rank-sum test -- 5.3.4 Addendum: multiple hypothesis testing -- Acknowledgments -- Part II. Studies -- Chapter 6. "Ungenteel" and "rude"?: On the use of thou in the eighteenth century -- 6.1 Introduction -- 6.2 A short history of the rise and fall of thou -- 6.2.1 The pre-eighteenth-century use of thou -- 6.2.2 Eighteenth-century grammars on the use of thou -- 6.3 Thou in eighteenth-century letters -- 6.4 Thou on closer view -- 6.4.1 The contextual use of thou -- 6.4.2 The most prolific "thouer": Ignatius Sancho in focus -- 6.5 The use of thou in CEECE -- 6.5.1 The influence of social and linguistic norms -- 6.5.2 A marker of status and intimacy - and of interpersonal identity? -- 6.6 Conclusions -- Acknowledgments -- Chapter 7. Going to completion: The diffusion of verbal ‑s -- 7.1 Introduction -- 7.2 Verbal ‑s before the long 18th century -- 7.2.1 Interconnected processes -- 7.2.2 Past corpus evidence -- 7.3 New results -- 7.3.1 Time course of change -- 7.3.2 Gender variation -- 7.3.3 Social status variation -- 7.4 Polarization of individuals -- 7.4.1 Conservative minority -- 7.4.2 Two case studies: Thomas Browne and John Clift -- 7.5 Normative grammar -- 7.6 Conclusions -- Appendix -- Chapter 8. Periphrastic do in eighteenth-century correspondence: Emphasis on no social variation -- 8.1 Introduction -- 8.2 From periphrastic do to do-support -- 8.2.1 Periphrastic do before the eighteenth century -- 8.2.2 do in the eighteenth century -- 8.2.3 Present-day English do-support -- 8.2.4 The construction studied -- 8.3 General development of do in CEECE -- 8.3.1 do and social variation -- 8.4 Frequent linguistic contexts. 8.4.1 Subject type -- 8.4.2 Type of main verb -- 8.4.3 Adverbials with do -- 8.4.4 Cross-tabulating subject type and main verb -- 8.5 Towards do-support -- 8.6 Conclusion -- Chapter 9. Indefinite pronouns with singular human reference: Recessive and ongoing -- 9.1 Introduction -- 9.2 Diachronic overview -- 9.3 Social embedding -- 9.3.1 Gender -- 9.3.2 Age and social status -- 9.3.3 Region -- 9.4 Discussion on the new evidence from correspondence -- 9.5 Conclusions -- Appendix -- Chapter 10. Ongoing change: The diffusion of the third-person neuter possessive its -- 10.1 Introduction -- 10.2 The third-person neuter possessive singular paradigm -- 10.3 Earlier sociolinguistic research -- 10.4 Results -- 10.4.1 Time course of change -- 10.4.2 Age -- 10.4.3 Social status variation -- 10.4.4 Gender variation -- 10.4.5 Regional variation -- 10.4.6 Conservative/progressive individuals? -- 10.5 Normative grammars -- 10.6 Conclusion -- Appendix -- Chapter 11. Incipient and intimate: The progressive aspect -- 11.1 Introduction -- 11.2 The progressive in Late Modern English -- 11.3 Diachronic developments in CEECE -- 11.4 Gender -- 11.5 Social rank -- 11.6 Register -- 11.7 Outliers -- 11.8 Conclusion -- Chapter 12. Change or variation? Productivity of the suffixes ‑ness and ‑ity -- 12.1 Introduction -- 12.2 Theoretical background -- 12.3 Previous research -- 12.4 Research questions -- 12.5 Results -- 12.5.1 Overall trends -- 12.5.2 Social categories -- 12.5.3 Case studies -- 12.5.4 Normative grammar -- 12.6 Conclusion -- Part III. Changes in retrospect -- Chapter 13. Zooming out: Overall frequencies and Google books -- 13.1 Normalised frequencies of the phenomena studied -- 13.2 Google books: A shortcut to studying language variability? -- Chapter 14. Conservative and progressive individuals -- 14.1 Definition of outlier -- 14.2 Analysis -- 14.3 Conclusion. Chapter 15. Changes in different stages -- 15.1 Introduction -- 15.2 From incipient to mid-range and beyond -- 15.2.1 Time courses of change -- 15.2.2 Sociolinguistic patterns -- 15.2.3 Issues of change in productivity -- 15.3 From nearing completion to completed -- 15.3.1 Time courses of change -- 15.3.2 Sociolinguistic patterning of recessive variants -- 15.3.3 Changing indexicalities -- Chapter 16. A wider sociolinguistic perspective -- 16.1 Rate and phase of change -- 16.2 Social patterns -- 16.2.1 Gender -- 16.2.2 Social status -- 16.2.3 Region -- 16.2.4 Real and apparent time -- 16.3 Social evaluation and register -- 16.4 The problem of continuation -- 16.5 Historical backprojection? -- References -- Appendix: Editions in the Corpora of Early English Correspondence -- Index.
Eighteenth-century English is often associated with normative grammar. But to what extent did prescriptivism impact ongoing processes of linguistic change? Basing their work on a variationist sociolinguistic approach, the authors introduce models and methods used to trace the progress of linguistic changes in the "long" 18th century, 1680-1800.