English Historical Linguistics 2010: Selected Papers from the Sixteenth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL 16), Pécs, 23-27 August 2010

395 Pages·2012·3.767 MB·English

by  Irén Hegedűs, Alexandra Fodor

ENGLISH HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS 2010
CURRENT ISSUES IN LINGUISTIC THEORY
AMSTERDAM STUDIES IN THE THEORY AND HISTORY
OF LINGUISTIC SCIENCE – Series IV
General Editor
E.F.K. KOERNER
Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Typologie
und Universalienforschung, Berlin
[email protected]
Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (CILT) is a theory-oriented series which welcomes
contributions from scholars who have significant proposals to make towards the advancement
of our understanding of language, its structure, functioning and development. CILT has
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science. It offers an outlet for meaningful contributions to the current linguistic debate, and
furnishes the diversity of opinion which a healthy discipline must have.
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Sheila Embleton (Toronto)
Elly van Gelderen (Tempe, Ariz.)
John E. Joseph (Edinburgh)
Manfred Krifka (Berlin)
Martin Maiden (Oxford)
Martha Ratliff (Detroit, Mich.)
E. Wyn Roberts (Vancouver, B.C.)
Joseph C. Salmons (Madison, Wis.)
Klaas Willems (Ghent)
Volume 325
Irén Hegedűs and Alexandra Fodor (eds.)
English Historical Linguistics 2010. Selected Papers from the Sixteenth International
Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL 16), Pécs, 23–27 August 2010
ENGLISH HISTORICAL
LINGUISTICS 2010
SELECTED PAPERS FROM THE SIXTEENTH
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
ON ENGLISH HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS
(ICEHL 16), PÉCS, 23–27 AUGUST 2010
Edited by
IRÉN HEGEDŰS
University of Pécs
ALEXANDRA FODOR
Eötvös Loránd University / University of Helsinki
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
International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (16th : 2010 : University of Pécs)
English historical linguistics 2010 : selected papers from the sixteenth International
Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL 16), Pécs, 23-27 August
2010 / edited by Irén Hegedűs, Alexandra Fodor.
p. cm. (Amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic science. Series IV,
Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, issn 0304-0763 ; v. 325)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. English language--Grammar, Historical--Congresses. 2. English language--History--
Congresses. I. Hegedűs, Irén. II. Fodor, Alexandra. III. Series.
PE1075.I57 2012
427--dc23 2012027607
isbn 978 90 272 4843 5 (Hb ; alk. paper)
isbn 978 90 272 7319 2 (Eb)
© 2012 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
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John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands
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Table of contents
Foreword & Acknowledgements vii
Introduction
Coins, clothes and corpora: Ways and means to refine
investigations into the history of English 1
Irén Hegedűs & Alexandra Fodor
part i. Approaches to dialects and regional variation
Norse influence on English in the light of general contact linguistics 15
Angelika Lutz
The Germanic roots of the Old English sound system 43
Hans Frede Nielsen
Monetary policy and Old English dialects 73
Fran Colman
The order and schedule of nominal plural formation transfer in three
Southern dialects of Early Middle English 95
Ryuichi Hotta
The temporal and regional contexts of the numeral ‘two’ in Middle English 115
Jerzy Wełna
part ii. Syntactic variation in focus
Grammaticalisation, contact and corpora: On the development
of adverbial connectives in English 131
Matti Rissanen
Discourse organization and the rise of final then in the history of English 153
Alexander Haselow
The origins of how come and what…for 177
Claudia Claridge
“Providing/provided that”: Grammaticalization or loan translation? 197
Rafał Molencki
Prefer: The odd verb out 215
Thomas Egan
i English Historical Linguistics 2010
part iii. Grammatical changes in nominal and pronominal constructions
The 400 million word corpus of Historical American English (1810–2009) 231
Mark Davies
Gender change from Old to Middle English 263
Florian Dolberg
“Please tilt me-ward by return of post”: On the vicissitude
of a marginal pronominal construction in the history of English 289
Reijirou Shibasaki
part i. The integration of loanwords in Middle English
Multilingualism in the vocabulary of dress and textiles
in late medieval Britain: Some issues for historical lexicology 313
Mark Chambers & Louise Sylvester
“No man entreth in or out”: How are typologically unsuitable
loanverbs integrated into English? 327
Judith Huber
part . Investigating communicative intentions in historical discourse
Beyond questions and answers: Strategic use of multiple identities
in the historical courtroom 349
Krisda Chaemsaithong
The demise of gog and cock and their phraseologies in dramatic discourse:
A study into historical pragmatics of tabooistic distortions 369
Sylwester Łodej
Index 383
Foreword & Acknowledgements
The 16th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL 16) was
held in Pécs, Hungary, in 2010. That year was special both for the city and for its uni-
versity because Pécs had been selected as European Capital of Culture by the C ouncil
of Ministers of the European Union, and to celebrate this, the University of Pécs hosted
outstanding international conferences that brought together representatives of a great
number of research fields. Beyond the generous financial support provided by the
university; the moral and logistic support from Professor Ferenc Fischer, Dean of the
Faculty of Humanities, deserves to be gratefully acknowledged.
The year 2010 was also remarkable for the history of English historical linguistics
because it marked the 30th anniversary of ICEHL conferences: the series of these
conferences was initiated in Durham in 1980.1 It was a pleasure to see in Pécs so many
senior specialists who have been regular participants at previous ICEHL meetings.
There were about 130 papers presented at the 16th ICEHL. The present volume
contains 17 papers of the 37 submitted for possible publication (papers presented
in workshop sessions are to be published elsewhere). Several papers that were not
selected for publication here due to thematic coherence will be published either
in another volume or individually in journals. For the sake of interested parties,
information about the publication of papers will be provided by the Pécs website of
ICEHL 16 (http://www.icehl-16.pte.hu).
The editors wish to thank the following experts for their participation in the
arduous process of paper selection: Elke Gehweiler, Elly van Gelderen, Ana I. González
Cruz, Richard Ingham, Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, Barbara Kryk-Kastovsky, Ursula L enker,
Bettelou Los, Angelika Lutz, Gabriella Mazzon, John Newman, Merja Stenroos,
Stefan Thim, and several other colleagues who would prefer to remain anonymous.
Their suggestions, corrections have helped not only the editors’ tasks but were also
appreciated by the contributors to the present volume.
We would also like to express our special gratitude to Ursula Lenker, who – as one
of the organisers of the previous ICEHL meeting (München, 2008) and co-editor of
. See the Preface to the proceedings of the Second International Conference on English
Historical Linguistics held at Odense University 13–15 April, 1981, published as Current Topics
in English Historical Linguistics edited by Michael Davenport, Erik Hansen & Hans Frede
Nielsen. Odense: Odense University Press, 1983.
iii English Historical Linguistics 2010
the first volume of the proceedings2 – has given us valuable advice and practical help
both during the Pécs meeting and in the editing of the present volume. Special thanks
go to our colleague, József Andor (Department of English Linguistics, University of
Pécs) for all the work he had put into organizing the ICEHL conference, and also for
actively participating in the initial phase of editing the present volume. We regret that,
due to the multitude of tasks he had to deal with at the time, he could not continue this
project as co-editor.
The editors’ Introduction was improved by a variety of comments and co rrections
provided by two anonymous readers, as well as by the feedback received from the
contributors of this volume, and – last but not least – from our colleagues, József
Andor and Gábor Győri. We wish to express our sincere thanks to all of them.
The preparation of this volume owes a lot to the editor of the CILT series,
E.F.K. Koerner. We are most grateful for his kind guidance, helpful suggestions and the
meticulous care with which he handled the task of overseeing the editing process.
The editors want to thank Anke de Looper at John Benjamins Publishing Co. for
the discussions we had either in person in Pécs or the assistance she gave us via e-mail
messages concerning the preparation of the material for the typesetting process.
We hope and wish that the thirty-year tradition of ICEHL volumes will continue
and these meetings remain an attractive forum for specialists in English historical
l inguistics to exchange the results of their research with interested colleagues.
Pécs, May 2012
The Editors
. English Historical Linguistics 2008. Selected Papers from the Fifteenth International Confer-
ence on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL 15), Munich, 24–30 August 2008, Volume I: The
History of English Verbal and Nominal Constructions, ed. by Ursula Lenker, Judith Huber &
Robert Mailhammer. [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 314.] Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Introduction
Coins, clothes and corpora: Ways and means to refine
investigations into the history of English
Irén Hegedűs & Alexandra Fodor
University of Pécs & Eötvös Loránd University / University of Helsinki
. Dialect formation and regional variation in the history of English:
Refining theory
The study of variation and dialects has been a fast growing area in English linguistics.
Synchronic and diachronic approaches to the subject are necessarily different due to
their distinct methods and tools. With written evidence covering twelve hundred years
of language variation and change, the history of the English language “can become an
important tool from which modern linguistic science can learn more of the nature
of language change and language variation and with which it can test the theories
which it proposes to relate the two” (Toon 1992: 451). This, however, should not be
seen as a one-way street: historical linguistic investigations can and do increasingly
integrate the results of synchronic variation studies, or other areas of synchronic lin-
guistics. In this volume there are several papers written in this vein, e.g. Angelika Lutz
applies the principles of contact linguistics in the evaluation of Old Norse influence
on Old English, Louise Sylvester and Mark Chambers examine code-switching in the
medieval context, Judith Huber gains insights from applied and cognitive linguistics
in examining the integration and usage patterns of loan verbs in English, and Krisda
Chaemsaithong provides a frame analysis for discursive interaction in an 18th-century
trial. How mutually beneficial the synchronic and diachronic approaches can be for
each other is demonstrated by the paper of Ryuichi Hotta, who proposes a refined view
of lexical diffusion in the course of investigating nominal plural formation transfer in
Early Middle English dialects and arrives at a reinterpreation of the northern dialect
developments.
The first part of the present volume includes papers that discuss various aspects
of linguistic description, and, taken together, they span the history of English from
the emergence of Old English to Early Modern English. A relative chronologi-
cal ordering of prehistoric phonological changes relevant to English was provided
by C ampbell (1959: 109), but there are plenty of reasons to challenge his scenario