Weaving data strands together
Towards assembling Norwich’s historical urban vernacular
The important role of historical cities as centers of higher literacy and text production in the
standardization processes of written languages has been recognized some time ago by scholars working on different
languages. The current article, which is couched in the study of urban vernaculars in the field of historical
sociolinguistics, focuses on written language use in Norwich during the period 1422–1760. Within the context of the
city’s socio-economic history, the article investigates two linguistic variables, notably the third person present
tense forms and periphrastic DO, in the manuscript-based Corpus of Middle English Local Documents
(MELD) and An Electronic Text Edition of Depositions 1560–1760 (ETED) and compares them to findings
from other urban centers. Despite the restricted data set, the study shows that the supralocalization processes and
the speed of change differ from one linguistic feature to another in the different urban datasets. The Norwich data
confirms previous findings of other urban datasets that the supralocalization of the morphological feature precedes
that of the syntactic feature.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Background information
- 2.1Supralocalization processes and urbanization
- 2.2A brief socio-economic history of Norwich
- 3.Linguistic case studies
- 3.1Data sources
- 3.2Third person indicative present tense (singular and plural)
- 3.2.1Previous literature and method
- 3.2.2Results and discussion
- 3.3Periphrastic DO
- 3.3.1Previous literature and method
- 3.3.2Results and discussion
- 4.A first step towards assembling Norwich’s historical urban vernacular
- 5.Concluding remarks
-
Notes
-
References
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