Unlocking the History of English
Pragmatics, prescriptivism and text types
Selected papers from the 21st ICEHL
This volume brings together contributions selected from papers delivered at the 21st International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL, Leiden 2021). The chapters deal with aspects of language use throughout the history of English, including efforts to prescribe and regulate language in texts that share specific forms, functions and audiences. They feature both quantitative and qualitative analyses of changing language use, often in relation to trends of language advice in such metalinguistic works as grammars, spelling books and usage guides. The authors showcase work on pragmatics and prescriptivism (understatement between Middle and Late Modern English, capitalization of common nouns from Early to Late Modern English and the use of stigmatized grammatical variants in eighteenth-century plays), specific text types (case studies of political, legal and medical English) and the language of late modern letters (diachronic stylistic changes, letter-copying practices, the role of letter-writing manuals and changing spelling practices). This volume will be of interest to those working on pragmatics, prescriptivism and sociolinguistics of English, historical linguistics, language change, computational historical linguistics and related sub-disciplines.
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 364] 2024. viii, 253 pp.
Publishing status: Available
© John Benjamins
Table of Contents
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Foreword | pp. vii–viii
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Introduction: Unlocking the history of EnglishLuisella Caon, Moragh Gordon and Thijs Porck | pp. 1–7
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Part I. Pragmatics and prescriptivism
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Researching understatement in the history of EnglishClaudia Claridge | pp. 10–32
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The rise and fall of sentence-internal capitalization in English: A corpus-based approachJessica Nowak and Stefan Hartmann | pp. 33–59
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Gender, genre, and prescriptivism: Eighteenth-century female playwrights’ use of you was and you wereJames Hyett and Carol Percy | pp. 60–84
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Part II. Political, legal and medical text types
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A manipulative technique in a congressional debate: A case study from 1789Juhani Rudanko and Paul Rickman | pp. 86–100
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Is legal discourse really “outside the ravages of time”? A diachronic analysis of nominalizations in British judicial decisionsPaula Rodríguez-Puente | pp. 101–128
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Duties, offices, and conduct: The lexis of moral sense and practical ethics in late eighteenth-century medical writingElisabetta Lonati | pp. 129–152
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Part III. The language of late modern letters
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Changing styles of letter-writing? Evidence from 400 years of early English letters in a POS-tagged corpusTanja Säily, Turo Vartiainen, Harri Siirtola and Terttu Nevalainen | pp. 154–179
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“No criticism or remarks & pray burn it as fast as you read it”: Exploring copying practices in Mary Hamilton’s private correspondenceTino Oudesluijs | pp. 180–197
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Filled-in petition forms and hand-drafted petitions to the Foundling Hospital: A comparison and the influence of letter-writing manualsNuria Calvo Cortés | pp. 198–224
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“Quhen I am begun to write I really knou not what to say”: Inter- and intra-writer variation in the use of <quh‑> in Early Modern ScotsSarah van Eyndhoven | pp. 225–249
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Index | pp. 251–253
Subjects
Main BIC Subject
CFF: Historical & comparative linguistics
Main BISAC Subject
LAN009010: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / Historical & Comparative