Studies in the History of the English Language V: Variation and Change in English Grammar and Lexicon PDF
Preview Studies in the History of the English Language V: Variation and Change in English Grammar and Lexicon
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 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. ” 2010 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, 10785 Berlin/New York Cover image: Brian Stablyk/Photographer’s Choice RF/Getty Images Typesetting: RoyalStandard, Hong Kong Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ⬁ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com 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, 2 Introduction and syntactic motivations for change. The authors here expand the approach to include consideration of pragmatic and semantic motivations in qualitative and quantitative studies, complementing theoretical ap- proaches rather than competing with them. The evident benefits shown here encourage viewing the historical development of English with a multidisciplinary perspective. In the lead article for the first section, Elizabeth Traugott demonstrates the potential for new syntactic constructions to arise in dialogic contexts by examining diachronic changes in the use of all- and wh- pseudo-clefts. In a review of approaches to motivations for language change, Traugott explains that invited inferencing motivates speakers to exploit language- internal implicatures, which may become conventionalized. Traugott iden- tifies several linguistic expressions that function dialogically, such as the concessives although and however, which convey dissonance or incom- patibility between two eventualities. Tracing the history of all- and wh- pseudo-clefts, Traugott provides textual evidence that they were initially shaped in English by their use in argument refutation, progressing to non-dialogic contexts after about fifty years in the historical record. Based on the evolution of all- and wh- pseudo-clefts in dialogic contexts, Trau- gott argues for an interactional approach to the study of language change, and challenges scholars to reconsider oversimplified monologic perspectives and generalized notions of motivation in diachronic syntactic research. In her commentary on Traugott, Akiko Nagano suggests three constructions that would benefit from the interactional approach because they involve speaker evaluation of an utterance or its context, including conversion in retorts, superlative adjectives, and speech-act conditionals. Responding to Nagano’s discussion of conversions, Traugott agrees that some may have arisen in dialogic and dialogual contexts of the type Nagano suggests, and explains that because the histories of individual constructions di¤er, it is important to consider the full range of interactional contexts in which they arose and distinguish dialogic from dialogual contexts. Joanna Nykiel addresses the problem of syntactic, semantic, and prag- matic involvement in English sluicing by examining the evolution of this structure in the language’s history. Sluicing is defined as a surface anaphor with a full underlying structure that goes unpronounced, which Nykiel exemplifies in the title of her article, ‘‘Whatever happened to English sluic- ing.’’ This structure was initially associated with a full underlying repre- sentation, an analysis that has persisted in later work. Through her dia- chronic approach, Nykiel shows that sluicing is not such a purely syntactic operation. In fact, despite drastic changes in the syntax and
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