Table Of Content

Contact, Variation, and Change in the History of English Studies in Language Companion Series (SLCS) This series has been established as a companion series to the periodical Studies in Language. For an overview of all books published in this series, please see http://benjamins.com/catalog/slcs Editors Werner Abraham Elly van Gelderen University of Vienna / Arizona State University University of Munich Editorial Board Bernard Comrie Christian Lehmann Max Planck Institute, Leipzig University of Erfurt and University of California, Santa Barbara Marianne Mithun William Croft University of California, Santa Barbara University of New Mexico Heiko Narrog Östen Dahl Tohuku University University of Stockholm Johanna L. Wood Gerrit J. Dimmendaal University of Aarhus University of Cologne Debra Ziegeler Ekkehard König University of Paris III Free University of Berlin Volume 159 Contact, Variation, and Change in the History of English Edited by Simone E. Pfenninger, Olga Timofeeva, Anne-Christine Gardner, Alpo Honkapohja, Marianne Hundt and Daniel Schreier Contact, Variation, and Change in the History of English Edited by Simone E. Pfenninger Olga Timofeeva Anne-Christine Gardner Alpo Honkapohja Marianne Hundt Daniel Schreier University Zurich John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of 8 the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Contact, Variation, and Change in the History of English / Edited by Simone E. Pfenninger, Olga Timofeeva, Anne-Christine Gardner, Alpo Honkapohja, Marianne Hundt and Daniel Schreier. p. cm. (Studies in Language Companion Series, issn 0165-7763 ; v. 159) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. English language--Variation--History. 2. Languages in contact--History. 3. Linguistic change--History. I. Pfenninger, Simone E. PE1074.7.C56 2014 427--dc23 2014013547 isbn 978 90 272 5924 0 (Hb ; alk. paper) isbn 978 90 272 6993 5 (Eb) © 2014 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa Table of content At the crossroads of language change, variation, and contact 1 Simone E. Pfenninger, Olga Timofeeva, Anne-Christine Gardner, Alpo Honkapohja, Marianne Hundt and Daniel Schreier part i. Language change Knitting and splitting information: Medial placement of linking adverbials in the history of English 11 Ursula Lenker The order of adverbials of time and place in Old English 39 Susanne Chrambach The demise of a preterite-present verb: Why was unnan lost? 61 Anna Wojtyś Gradience in an abrupt change: Stress shift in English disyllabic noun-verb pairs 83 Betty S. Phillips Vowels before /r/ in the history of English 95 Raymond Hickey part ii. Language variation “Pained the eye and stunned the ear”: Language ideology and the progressive passive in the nineteenth century 113 Lieselotte Anderwald Watching as-clauses in Late Modern English 137 Cristiano Broccias Colloquialization and “decolloquialization”: Phrasal verbs in formal contexts, 1650–1990 163 Paula Rodríguez Puente Letters of Artisans and the Labouring Poor (England, c. 1750–1835): Approaching linguistic diversity in Late Modern English 187 Mikko Laitinen & Anita Auer i Contact, Variation, and Change in the History of English New-dialect formation in medieval Ireland: A corpus-based study of Irish English pre-modal verbs 213 Marije van Hattum Tracing uses of will and would in Late Modern British and Irish English 239 Patricia Ronan part iii. Variation and change in contact situations The subjunctive mood in Philippine English: A diachronic analysis 259 Peter Collins, Ariane Macalinga Borlongan, Joo-Hyuk Lim & Xinyue Yao Revisiting a millennium of migrations: Contextualizing Dutch/Low-German influence on English dialect lexis 281 Emil Chamson 〈U〉 or 〈o〉: A dilemma of the Middle English scribal practice 305 Jerzy Wełna Index 325 At the crossroads of language change, variation, and contact Simone E. Pfenninger, Olga Timofeeva, Anne-Christine Gardner, Alpo Honkapohja, Marianne Hundt & Daniel Schreier University of Zurich 1. The present volume This collection of 14 selected, peer-reviewed papers is at the crossroads of three fields of inquiry that are of great importance in historical linguistics: language change, (socio)linguistic research on variation, and contact linguistics. The essays of this volume aim at facilitating exchange between these three fields, predominantly by means of approaching specific topics from at least two perspectives, juxtaposing the roles of language contact, variation, and/or change against the backdrop of a variety of theoretical frameworks. At the same time the volume aims to provide an insight into current research issues in these fields. Owing to a range of recently-developed methodological innovations, such as methods for quantifying linguistic variation (which 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 how language change acts upon this variation. Another strand of research in historical linguistics has started to systematically compare language use and contemporary usage guides and grammars, thereby adding a new dimension to language variation and socio-historical reasons for change. 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. This is important inasmuch as it has become increasingly clear in recent years that diachronic change cannot be fully understood without a close analysis of variation across written genres, language use in society as well as the external influence of language contact. 2 Simone E. Pfenninger et al. 2. Structure of the volume The volume is structured into three parts, each addressing topics that con- cern more than one of the areas mentioned above (language contact, variation and change), so there is an inevitable dynamic element of cross-disciplinarity. The three parts progress from domain-specific to domain-general processes of language change and variation. The contributors of Part I, namely Lenker, Chrambach, Wojtyś, Phillips, and Hickey, cast light upon a number of ques- tions and issues concerning language change as it is driven from dependently motivated principles; i.e. these authors explain diachronic changes by looking at form as well as meaning from the point of view of the language, viewing language as a process (rather than a product). In Part II, Anderwald, Broccias, Rodrídguez-Puente, and Laitinen and Auer offer fresh perspectives on text-type variation and linguistic variation in different socioeconomic and historical contexts, while van Hattum and Ronan discuss features of Irish English that are the result of long periods of contact. One of the main insights in Part III is that no change can be expected to be immune from global influences. This takes center stage in the offerings by Collins et al., Chamson and Wełna, who seek external explanations according to which phenomena are not investigated exclusively with reference to and within the domain to which they belong; rather, they take into account the way a language behaves when in contact with and influenced by other languages. 2.1 Part I (“Language change”) The volume opens with five chapters that zoom in on the complex interdepen- dencies between synchrony and diachrony, variation and change, giving special attention to morpho-syntactic change as well as changes related to information- structural choices, phonology, and prosody in the history of English. In the first paper, Ursula Lenker traces the development of the relatively recent phenomenon of medial instead of initial placement of connectors such as however or therefore from Middle to Present-Day English. Focusing on medially placed adverbials and their discourse functions in Late Modern and Present-Day English, she comes to the conclusion that there exists a principal distinction between two medial positions: (1) “post-initial” positions that place attention on the preceding elements (a frame-setting adverbial or a subject) and (2) “post-verb” positions that sepa- rate topic from comment/focus material and thus place attention on this material. Even though these two discourse functions are only beginning to be discussed in literature, usage guides and dictionaries do comment on the stylistic effects of the medial positions of adverbials. At the crossroads of language change, variation, and contact 3 The aim of Susanne Chrambach, then, is to investigate the order of Old English adverbials of time and place in what she calls “clusters of adverbials”, that is, “adverbials occurring immediately adjacent to each other in a clause” (43). A survey of literature on Present-Day English clusters shows that the scholarly consensus on the order of the adverbials of time and place is that there is a clear preference for place adverbials to precede time adverbials (place-before-time order). Chrambach’s own study, based on an analysis of the York-Toronto-H elsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose, demonstrates that the reverse order, time-before- place, characterizes Old English clusters of adverbials. The preference for this order is observed from OE2 to OE4 subperiods of Old English, across translations from Latin and original texts, regardless of individual authors and genres. Among the factors that influence the order of the adverbials, clause p attern, complexity, weight, obligatoriness, realization form, position of the cluster, kind of lexical verb, etc. are considered, and the extent of their influence is tested in a multifactorial analysis with the help of a binary logistic regression. Anna Wojtyś focuses on the fate of the preterite-present verb unnan ‘to grant’ in Old and Middle English, giving special attention to the language internal and external factors that might have influenced its decay and death in the late fourteenth century. Statistics show that the use of unnan in the Old English period was mostly limited to legal contexts, in particular, to writs, wills, and charters in which land or other property was “granted” or “bequeathed” to people or monasteries. Even though these documents continued to be copied in the Middle E nglish period, new ones were typically composed in either Latin or French. While the legal sense of the verb fell into disuse, in its second most frequent context – religious writings (in such phrases as “God grant/ give/ allow”) – unnan had powerful competitors: gifan and sellan ‘to give’ in Old English, and graunten ‘to grant’ in Middle English. Wojtyś concludes that the loss of unnan was primarily conditioned by the socio- linguistic change that affected the practices of writing charters after the Norman Conquest. Betty S. Phillips looks into the on-going analogical change in stress from ear- lier disyllabic backstressed nouns and verbs to forestressed nouns and backstressed verbs. Given Sereno & Jongman’s (1995) evidence of gradient stress in bisyllabic words which can function as either nouns or verbs, Phillips investigates whether the development of diatones in English (CONvict n, conVICT v. < conVICT n. or v.) and the further shift of some diatones to initial stress (e.g. REsearch n. or v.) might display a similar gradient component. Data from current U.S. and B ritish pronunciations (Wells 2008) and their noun/verb frequency ratios as derived from the Corpus of Contemporary American English reveal such an effect, but only for the shift of diatones to initial stress. Words which had undergone the diatonic stress shift were found to be influenced by their combined noun + verb frequency.