The Old English translation of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History (the “Old English Bede”) has been studied for what it can tell us about translation practices and the state of learning in Anglo-Saxon England. However, although some Old English Bede manuscripts have been comparatively well-studied, very little attention has been paid to Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS. 279B. This article examines the different layers of scribal activity discernible in that manuscript, reviewing in turn the performances of the main scribe, the corrector, the scribe responsible for chapter initials, and a later writer who provided “scratched glosses” (glosses incised in vellum with a pointed instrument, rather than ink) to parts of the text. It demonstrates that in each layer of production, the scribes were hampered by a difficulty in accessing some aspects of the language of the text they were interacting with, and shows the different strategies employed to overcome these difficulties.
This paper argues against the sense of certainty which editions and paradigms of Old English may have given us, texts emended quite often with several editors in agreement based on grammars now almost always unanimous in general and in detail. The manuscripts in which the texts have come down to us contain many rare forms of words, and these, especially when unique, may invite emendation to eliminate what is not easily explained. Unusual verb forms may be evidence that the verbal system of Old English was in a state of flux towards the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, the age to which the manuscripts belong. Textual and grammatical certainty and scholarly unanimity have led to the elimination of verb forms that look unlikely and feel uncomfortable in a grammar-dominated subject.
The traditional view of the etymology of modern English road is that it shows a semantic development of the reflex of Old English rād, Middle English (southern) rōd, (northern) rād, recorded in senses including ‘action or an act of riding’ (related to Old English rīdan ‘to ride’). The etymology of road is not, however, so secure as is often assumed. In particular, the types rod and rode that are found from an early date in Older Scots in the meaning ‘path or way’ are very difficult to reconcile with the southern English word, either assuming the traditional etymology or (as I will show here) if alternative etymological hypotheses are also tested closely. It is here that the methodological implications of this example are found: all etymologies are ultimately hypotheses, but while some rest on a very secure evidential basis, others are much less certain; such examples must be treated with caution when used as evidence for sound change or as examples of pathways of semantic change, and it is crucial that such uncertainty is flagged clearly in the historical linguistic literature.*
This paper aims to cast light upon the making of Halliwell’s Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words (1847) focusing on some of the regional material contained in it. In particular, the paper examines the contribution of White Kennett’s unpublished Etymological Collections of English Words and Provincial Expressions, also known as MS Lansd. 1033, so as to measure the extent to which Halliwell relied on this hitherto unexplored source of regional lexis in the making of his dictionary. The analysis shows that Kennett’s manuscript furnished a significant amount of data to Halliwell’s work and that Halliwell treated them with care. At the same time, the analysis lays emphasis both on the linguistic legacy of Kennett’s work and the need for further research into one of the key sources of dialect words of the Late Modern English period prior to the publication of Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary.
This paper examines the development of infer and imply from their first uses in the fifteenth century to the present, using the EEBO and COHA corpora. Both words have more complex histories than the prescriptive rule regulating them would suggest, and their development illustrates the movement towards subjective and intersubjective meanings often seen in semantic change. Both words began with an ‘impersonal entail’ sense, which developed into a ‘personal suggest’ sense for imply, and possibly for some instances of infer. Two other paths to the proscribed ‘suggest’ sense of infer become noticeable in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. First, the ‘deduce’ sense of infer started to be used in contexts in which someone both presumably made an inference and reported that inference. Second, infer began to be used to soften possibly face-threatening statements. The rise of the prescriptive rule, however, likely effaced, rather than encouraged, this nascent distinction.
This paper aims to explore the ways in which context is necessary for the meaning construction and understanding of the cant lexis (“thieves’ slang”) in actual language use. Taking a historical pragmatic approach, I investigate the use of one cant term (cull) in eighteenth-century texts drawn from two electronic resources: The Old Bailey Proceedings Online and The Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). My historical discourse analysis of cull demonstrates that context plays a dynamic role in the meaning specification of the term and that different layers of context (linguistic, textual, socio-historical, and cultural) need to be considered in relation to each other for understanding how the meanings of cull are negotiated and appropriated in real language use.
This paper discusses the form and behavior of Old English uton in relation to the question of whether it is a verb or not. Its lack of participation in the reduction process affecting finite verbs followed by wē and gē is difficult to account for if uton were still a verb form synchronically. The same holds for its apparently completely fixed syntactic position and the failure of the negative particle ne to attach to it. Not treating it as a verb would mean that uton constructions are without a finite verb, and it would make a very small number of examples hard to analyze but, on balance, the evidence suggests that uton had probably grammaticalized to a point where speakers no longer treated it as a verb.
Historical linguists frequently find themselves working with primary texts of uncertain or dubious origin. Sometimes the author of a text is not known at all or the authorship has been contested on the basis of book-historical evidence; but, whatever the reason is, uncertainties about authorship can lead to problems if the linguistic characteristics of the text are ascribed to the supposed or conventionally accepted author. This exploratory paper evaluates the usefulness of a method of authorship attribution that is based on cluster analysis of part-of-speech frequencies. While far from perfect, the method is shown to be a useful addition to the methodological toolkit of the historical corpus linguist by allowing quick diagnostic analysis of similarities between texts.
The present paper discusses the ordering of main and adverbial subordinate clauses in the fifteenth-century Paston letters and tests whether there is continuity between Middle English and Present-day English discourse organizations. The adverbial clauses investigated in the following discussion are those introduced by if, though (although), when, because (be cause), and till (until). It is known that in contemporary English, conditional clauses tend to precede the main clause, whereas causal clauses are likely to follow the main clause. Moreover, temporal clauses like when-clauses and till-clauses present intermediate situations, according to Diessel (2001, 2005). This is largely applicable to Middle English, but there are some additional features worthy of note in the Paston letters. The ordering between main and subordinate clauses seems to be conditioned by: (1) information structure, (2) the length of subordinate clauses, and (3) the juxtaposition of two subordinating conjunctions.
This study analyzes complexity in Early Modern English proclamations from 1500 to 1707 in the Corpus of Early Modern English Statutes (1491–1707). The complexity features chosen for analysis are coordination and textual structure. The study shows that text structure and layout are important in signaling dependencies between sentences in legal writing.Coordination can link clauses and lexical items, and clausal coordination in the data is most frequent before 1550, while phrasal coordination is more numerous in the seventeenth century. The frequencies are affected by extralinguistic changes such as the beginning of printing of legal documents. Further, the genre of proclamations is systematic in the Early Modern period, and the various coordinating clauses have specific functions.
This paper offers a corpus-driven investigation into the formulaic nature of Early Modern English medical genres. The aim of this study is to answer three related questions: (1) to what extent various text categories in medical discourse share the same lexico-syntactic choices?; (2) what stable and fixed lexico-syntactic patterns repeat across various texts related to medicine?; and (3) is there a diachronic dimension to the employment of these repetitive strings? The study is based on the recently published electronic corpus of Early Modern English Medical Texts (EMEMT, 1500–1700, Taavitsainen et al. 2010) and uses the lexical bundle method (Biber et al. 1999) to extract 3-grams from the normalized version of the corpus. The diachronic distribution of 3-grams across medical texts shows an increase in the number of text categories which share lexical bundles. When it comes to specific 3-grams, the paper presents a diachronic overview of the most prominent semantic areas where overlaps of fixed strings occur among text categories, e.g. quantification, body parts, time and sequence, or ingredients. The study has also found important overlaps in purely functional contexts, e.g. in clarification, modality or efficacy expressions, and in structural frames, e.g. copula constructions and prepositional phrase fragments. With the help of an objective, frequency-driven corpus tool, the common lexico-syntactic core of early modern medical discourse could be established. At the same time, clusters of text categories sharing the same preferences could emerge.
The aim of the article is to investigate whether the Early Modern English (EModE) medical writers were aware of the role of titles in informing the reader about the content of the texts. The analysis attempts also to find out what strategies were employed to adapt the texts to the intended audience. The data come from the Early Modern English Medical Texts (EMEMT) corpus which includes texts that were published between 1500 and 1700. These texts were written by university-trained physicians and non-learned practitioners of medicine and seem to be the most representative source that provides an overview of medical practice that prevailed in Early Modern English, whether learned or non-learned.
This article explores the use of evidentials, or markers of source of information in witness depositions from England in the period 1680–1710. By comparing the results with those from a previous study on the Salem witch trials (Grund 2012), I point to significant similarities in the linguistic forms and deployment of markers signaling sensory evidence, inference, assumption, and quotatives (i.e. information based on what other people have said). I also demonstrate the importance of considering the socio-historical and situational context in the interpretation of the evidentials: the legal setting and concerns such as appearing reliable and credible or not providing potentially questionable evidence probably significantly influenced deponents’ choices of evidential strategies.
The Old English translation of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History (the “Old English Bede”) has been studied for what it can tell us about translation practices and the state of learning in Anglo-Saxon England. However, although some Old English Bede manuscripts have been comparatively well-studied, very little attention has been paid to Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS. 279B. This article examines the different layers of scribal activity discernible in that manuscript, reviewing in turn the performances of the main scribe, the corrector, the scribe responsible for chapter initials, and a later writer who provided “scratched glosses” (glosses incised in vellum with a pointed instrument, rather than ink) to parts of the text. It demonstrates that in each layer of production, the scribes were hampered by a difficulty in accessing some aspects of the language of the text they were interacting with, and shows the different strategies employed to overcome these difficulties.
This paper argues against the sense of certainty which editions and paradigms of Old English may have given us, texts emended quite often with several editors in agreement based on grammars now almost always unanimous in general and in detail. The manuscripts in which the texts have come down to us contain many rare forms of words, and these, especially when unique, may invite emendation to eliminate what is not easily explained. Unusual verb forms may be evidence that the verbal system of Old English was in a state of flux towards the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, the age to which the manuscripts belong. Textual and grammatical certainty and scholarly unanimity have led to the elimination of verb forms that look unlikely and feel uncomfortable in a grammar-dominated subject.
The traditional view of the etymology of modern English road is that it shows a semantic development of the reflex of Old English rād, Middle English (southern) rōd, (northern) rād, recorded in senses including ‘action or an act of riding’ (related to Old English rīdan ‘to ride’). The etymology of road is not, however, so secure as is often assumed. In particular, the types rod and rode that are found from an early date in Older Scots in the meaning ‘path or way’ are very difficult to reconcile with the southern English word, either assuming the traditional etymology or (as I will show here) if alternative etymological hypotheses are also tested closely. It is here that the methodological implications of this example are found: all etymologies are ultimately hypotheses, but while some rest on a very secure evidential basis, others are much less certain; such examples must be treated with caution when used as evidence for sound change or as examples of pathways of semantic change, and it is crucial that such uncertainty is flagged clearly in the historical linguistic literature.*
This paper aims to cast light upon the making of Halliwell’s Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words (1847) focusing on some of the regional material contained in it. In particular, the paper examines the contribution of White Kennett’s unpublished Etymological Collections of English Words and Provincial Expressions, also known as MS Lansd. 1033, so as to measure the extent to which Halliwell relied on this hitherto unexplored source of regional lexis in the making of his dictionary. The analysis shows that Kennett’s manuscript furnished a significant amount of data to Halliwell’s work and that Halliwell treated them with care. At the same time, the analysis lays emphasis both on the linguistic legacy of Kennett’s work and the need for further research into one of the key sources of dialect words of the Late Modern English period prior to the publication of Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary.
This paper examines the development of infer and imply from their first uses in the fifteenth century to the present, using the EEBO and COHA corpora. Both words have more complex histories than the prescriptive rule regulating them would suggest, and their development illustrates the movement towards subjective and intersubjective meanings often seen in semantic change. Both words began with an ‘impersonal entail’ sense, which developed into a ‘personal suggest’ sense for imply, and possibly for some instances of infer. Two other paths to the proscribed ‘suggest’ sense of infer become noticeable in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. First, the ‘deduce’ sense of infer started to be used in contexts in which someone both presumably made an inference and reported that inference. Second, infer began to be used to soften possibly face-threatening statements. The rise of the prescriptive rule, however, likely effaced, rather than encouraged, this nascent distinction.
This paper aims to explore the ways in which context is necessary for the meaning construction and understanding of the cant lexis (“thieves’ slang”) in actual language use. Taking a historical pragmatic approach, I investigate the use of one cant term (cull) in eighteenth-century texts drawn from two electronic resources: The Old Bailey Proceedings Online and The Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). My historical discourse analysis of cull demonstrates that context plays a dynamic role in the meaning specification of the term and that different layers of context (linguistic, textual, socio-historical, and cultural) need to be considered in relation to each other for understanding how the meanings of cull are negotiated and appropriated in real language use.
This paper discusses the form and behavior of Old English uton in relation to the question of whether it is a verb or not. Its lack of participation in the reduction process affecting finite verbs followed by wē and gē is difficult to account for if uton were still a verb form synchronically. The same holds for its apparently completely fixed syntactic position and the failure of the negative particle ne to attach to it. Not treating it as a verb would mean that uton constructions are without a finite verb, and it would make a very small number of examples hard to analyze but, on balance, the evidence suggests that uton had probably grammaticalized to a point where speakers no longer treated it as a verb.
Historical linguists frequently find themselves working with primary texts of uncertain or dubious origin. Sometimes the author of a text is not known at all or the authorship has been contested on the basis of book-historical evidence; but, whatever the reason is, uncertainties about authorship can lead to problems if the linguistic characteristics of the text are ascribed to the supposed or conventionally accepted author. This exploratory paper evaluates the usefulness of a method of authorship attribution that is based on cluster analysis of part-of-speech frequencies. While far from perfect, the method is shown to be a useful addition to the methodological toolkit of the historical corpus linguist by allowing quick diagnostic analysis of similarities between texts.
The present paper discusses the ordering of main and adverbial subordinate clauses in the fifteenth-century Paston letters and tests whether there is continuity between Middle English and Present-day English discourse organizations. The adverbial clauses investigated in the following discussion are those introduced by if, though (although), when, because (be cause), and till (until). It is known that in contemporary English, conditional clauses tend to precede the main clause, whereas causal clauses are likely to follow the main clause. Moreover, temporal clauses like when-clauses and till-clauses present intermediate situations, according to Diessel (2001, 2005). This is largely applicable to Middle English, but there are some additional features worthy of note in the Paston letters. The ordering between main and subordinate clauses seems to be conditioned by: (1) information structure, (2) the length of subordinate clauses, and (3) the juxtaposition of two subordinating conjunctions.
This study analyzes complexity in Early Modern English proclamations from 1500 to 1707 in the Corpus of Early Modern English Statutes (1491–1707). The complexity features chosen for analysis are coordination and textual structure. The study shows that text structure and layout are important in signaling dependencies between sentences in legal writing.Coordination can link clauses and lexical items, and clausal coordination in the data is most frequent before 1550, while phrasal coordination is more numerous in the seventeenth century. The frequencies are affected by extralinguistic changes such as the beginning of printing of legal documents. Further, the genre of proclamations is systematic in the Early Modern period, and the various coordinating clauses have specific functions.
This paper offers a corpus-driven investigation into the formulaic nature of Early Modern English medical genres. The aim of this study is to answer three related questions: (1) to what extent various text categories in medical discourse share the same lexico-syntactic choices?; (2) what stable and fixed lexico-syntactic patterns repeat across various texts related to medicine?; and (3) is there a diachronic dimension to the employment of these repetitive strings? The study is based on the recently published electronic corpus of Early Modern English Medical Texts (EMEMT, 1500–1700, Taavitsainen et al. 2010) and uses the lexical bundle method (Biber et al. 1999) to extract 3-grams from the normalized version of the corpus. The diachronic distribution of 3-grams across medical texts shows an increase in the number of text categories which share lexical bundles. When it comes to specific 3-grams, the paper presents a diachronic overview of the most prominent semantic areas where overlaps of fixed strings occur among text categories, e.g. quantification, body parts, time and sequence, or ingredients. The study has also found important overlaps in purely functional contexts, e.g. in clarification, modality or efficacy expressions, and in structural frames, e.g. copula constructions and prepositional phrase fragments. With the help of an objective, frequency-driven corpus tool, the common lexico-syntactic core of early modern medical discourse could be established. At the same time, clusters of text categories sharing the same preferences could emerge.
The aim of the article is to investigate whether the Early Modern English (EModE) medical writers were aware of the role of titles in informing the reader about the content of the texts. The analysis attempts also to find out what strategies were employed to adapt the texts to the intended audience. The data come from the Early Modern English Medical Texts (EMEMT) corpus which includes texts that were published between 1500 and 1700. These texts were written by university-trained physicians and non-learned practitioners of medicine and seem to be the most representative source that provides an overview of medical practice that prevailed in Early Modern English, whether learned or non-learned.
This article explores the use of evidentials, or markers of source of information in witness depositions from England in the period 1680–1710. By comparing the results with those from a previous study on the Salem witch trials (Grund 2012), I point to significant similarities in the linguistic forms and deployment of markers signaling sensory evidence, inference, assumption, and quotatives (i.e. information based on what other people have said). I also demonstrate the importance of considering the socio-historical and situational context in the interpretation of the evidentials: the legal setting and concerns such as appearing reliable and credible or not providing potentially questionable evidence probably significantly influenced deponents’ choices of evidential strategies.