Studies in the History of the English Language V: Variation and Change in English Grammar and Lexicon: Contemporary Approaches

338 Pages·2010·3.93 MB·English

by  Robert A. Cloutier (ed.), Anne Marie Hamilton-Brehm (ed.), William A. Kretzschmar Jr. (ed.)

Studies in the History of the English Language V
Topics in English Linguistics
68
Editors
Elizabeth Closs Traugott
Bernd Kortmann
De Gruyter Mouton
Studies in the History
of the English Language V
Variation and Change in English Grammar
and Lexicon: Contemporary Approaches
Edited by
Robert A.Cloutier
Anne Marie Hamilton-Brehm
William A.Kretzschmar, Jr.
De Gruyter Mouton
ISBN 978-3-11-022032-2
e-ISBN 978-3-11-022033-9
ISSN 1434-3452
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Studies in the history of the English language V : variation and change
in English grammar and lexicon : contemporary approaches / edited
by Robert A. Cloutier, Anne Marie Hamilton-Brehm, William A. Kretz-
schmar.
p. cm. ⫺ (Topics in English linguistics ; 68)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-3-11-022032-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. English language ⫺ History. 2. English language ⫺ Grammar,
Historical. I. Cloutier, Robert A., 1979⫺ II. Hamilton-Brehm,
Anne Marie, 1970⫺ III. Kretzschmar, William A. IV. Title: Stud-
ies in the history of the English language 5. V. Title: Studies in the
history of the English language five. VI. Title: Variation and change
in English grammar and lexicon : contemporary approaches.
PE1075.S885 2010
420.9⫺dc22
2010020072
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The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
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Table of Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
English Grammar
Dialogic Contexts as Motivations for Syntactic Change . . . . . . . . . 11
Elizabeth Traugott
Commentary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Akiko Nagano
Response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Elizabeth Closs Traugott
Whatever Happened to English Sluicing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Joanna Nykiel
Commentary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
Elizabeth Closs Traugott
Response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
Joanna Nykiel
Notion of Direction and Old English Prepositional Phrases. . . . . . . 67
Olga Thomason
Commentary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
Joanna Nykiel
Response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
Olga Thomason
Survival of the Strongest: Strong Verb Inflection from Old to
Modern English . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
Sherrylyn Branchaw
Commentary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
Markku Filppula and Juhani Klemola
Response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
Sherrylyn Branchaw
Subject Compounding and a Functional Change of the Derivational
Su‰x -ing in the History of English . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
Akiko Nagano
vi Table of Contents
Commentary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
Olga Thomason
Response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
Akiko Nagano
Bad Ideas in the History of English Usage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
Don Chapman
Commentary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
Stefanie Kuzmack
Response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
Don Chapman
English Lexicon
The State of English Etymology (A Few Personal Observations) . . . 161
Anatoly Liberman
Commentary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
Ann-Marie Svensson
Response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186
Anatoly Liberman
From Germanic ‘fence’ to ‘urban settlement’: On the Semantic
Development of English town. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187
Ann-Marie Svensson and Ju¨rgen Hering
Commentary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
Don Chapman
Response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
Ann-Marie Svensson
Celtic Influence on English: A Re-Evaluation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
Markku Filppula and Juhani Klemola
Commentary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226
Elisabeth Tacho
Response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
Markku Filppula and Juhani Klemola
When arıv# en Came to England: Tracing Lexical Re-Structuring by
Borrowing in Middle and Early Modern English. A Case Study . . . 231
Elizabeth Tacho
Table of Contents vii
Commentary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257
Emily Runde
Response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261
Elisabeth Tacho
Reexamining Orthographic Practice in the Auchinleck Manuscript
Through Study of Complete Scribal Corpora . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265
Emily Runde
Commentary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 288
Sherrylyn Branchaw
Response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291
Emily Runde
How Medium Shapes Language Development: The Emergence of
Quotative Re Online . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293
Stefanie Kuzmack
Commentary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311
Anatoly Liberman
Response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314
Stefanie Kuzmack
Author Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317
Subject Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 322
Introduction
The conversation these days about the history of the English language
(HEL) has changed from what it used to be. The historical linguistics
(viz. internal history) and cultural studies (viz. external history) that have
marked traditional research on HEL are alive and well, but they have
been improved now by methods from corpus linguistics and sociolinguis-
tics. This collection shows how historical studies of English are increas-
ingly engaged with these contemporary trends in linguistics, and the vol-
ume demonstrates how empirical and other methods can bring classical
philology fully into the sphere of contemporary linguistics without aban-
doning its traditional concerns. This volume has two sections, the first on
grammar and syntax and the following section on word-based studies. Of
course grammar and lexicon cannot be entirely segregated. Both sections
highlight the contributions that strong empirical research can make to our
knowledge of the development of English grammar, especially as realized
in lexical development. And both sections pay serious attention to the fre-
quencies and discourse characteristics with which particular words have
been used at di¤erent times. Each essay will be followed immediately by
commentary from another of the authors in the cluster of papers, and
then the author will have the opportunity for a response to the commen-
tary. In this way the collection will show the kind of discussion currently
obtaining in the field, and more specifically in the section of the field in
which the pairs of authors find themselves. The essays in this volume thus
portray current research in HEL in the sort of conversations that in fact
actually characterize the field today. As Anatoly Liberman, known for
his classic work on historical etymology, writes in a commentary in this
volume on Kuzmack’s essay about development of the word re on the
Internet in the last two decades, regarding such new additions to the house
we have known as HEL,‘‘Welcome to the housewarming party.’’
English Grammar
The first section challenges researchers to examine and re-examine histori-
cal developments in English syntax from new perspectives and multiple
methods, including quantitative studies. Traditional analyses of historical
developments in English have focused on phonological, morphological,