Volume II of the New Cambridge History of THE English LANGUAGE

The present volume follows on from Volume I, which focuses on the background to English and on early language contact and its effect on the development of English in the second half of the first millennium CE.Footnote ¹ Volume II is concerned with three key aspects of the historical development of English. These are documentation, sources of data and modelling – three interconnected areas which are each illustrated in detail by several chapters.

Given the background information of Volume I, the present volume attempts to tackle the manifold issues surrounding the textual record of historical English. In keeping with the other volumes and their chapters, the emphasis is on recent developments in scholarly research. The first part of the volume thus includes dedicated chapters on questions of orality and vernacularity in as much as these can be reconstructed from available texts. Part I also focuses on the increasing number of detailed and differentiated corpora of historical English which allow access to levels of detail and analysis not previously available to historical linguists. Again in accordance with a key approach of all volumes of the present new history, the significance of dialects for linguistic analysis is highlighted. This volume also contains chapters on three lighthouse works and authors, that is major landmarks in the history of English. The choice was a deliberate one as the works and authors can be taken as being of uncontroversial status in the history of English.

Recent historical scholarship has turned its attention to a much broader range of genres, registers and text types, and this is reflected in the many chapters which deal with sources not hitherto explored to the same extent. These embrace such text categories as courtroom documents, religious texts, newspapers and personal letters as well as documents produced by women, which have not enjoyed anything like the visibility of works by men throughout history. Against the backdrop of these discussions of sources and text types, there is a set of seven chapters which examine the textual record from the standpoint of linguistic theory and method, seeking to find confirmation or refutation of assumptions and hypotheses on the basis of this wealth of data.

The History of English: A Changing Field

Studying the history of English is different now compared with even two or three decades ago when the original version of The Cambridge History of the English Language appeared. The main reason lies in the range of developments that have taken place within the field itself. This is partly because new resources, particularly those using corpus linguistic methodology, have become available; these resources have enabled us to ask as well as answer additional research questions, yielding novel insights in the process. This holds for manuscript studies within the philological framework as well. But the diversification of the field is also due to the emergence or further development of a wide range of perspectives on language history, a number of which receive detailed treatment in this volume. Some of these approaches, such as generative models and Construction Grammar, concern theories of the way in which language is organised in speakers’ minds. Others have to do with the nature of the evidence examined: new categories of texts and language users have increasingly been sampled and investigated, and these endeavours have broadened our conception of what the English language was – and is. Yet others have put increasing focus on what types of insights can be gleaned at different levels of granularity: from a speaker’s unique idiolect via social constructs such as speech communities and networks to entire varieties of the language.

The effects of these developments on the field should of course not be exaggerated. Important theoretical advances have been made continually since the beginning of English historical linguistics, and important research is still carried out using methods that have been established in the field for many decades. But taken together, more recent advances have arguably shifted the focus of research somewhat in at least two ways. First, the fundamental issue of what changes English has undergone has grown in complexity as new types of evidence have become available; for instance, we now know more about past spoken English (see, for instance, Culpeper and Kytö Reference Culpeper and Kytö2010) and about language of socio-economically marginalised groups (see, for example, Auer, Gardner and Iten Reference Auer, Gardner and Iten2023). Secondly, scholars have been able to say more about how and why language change took place; these are questions which historical linguists have always wished to answer (see, for instance, Lass Reference Lass1997: 277–304), but which we can now approach from an increasingly broad range of angles.

Structure of the Present Volume

The first part of this volume considers the coverage and nature of the surviving textual record and its relation to past speech (parts of the so-called ‘bad data’ problem formulated by Labov Reference Labov1994: 11). The second part zooms in on three lighthouse works or authors and their language, namely the heroic poem Beowulf from the Old English period, Geoffrey Chaucer and his language from the late Middle English period, and William Shakespeare from the Early Modern English period. The third part of our volume then narrows the scope of each contribution by focusing on particular genres, authors, groups of speakers, works or facets of English usage. Finally, the fourth part presents seven different ways of understanding and modelling language change, with special reference to morphosyntax.

As the chapters included in the first part of the present volume demonstrate, the surviving textual record containing specimens of early English from the past millennium is relatively scanty in its beginnings but expands in variety and volume especially from the 1500s onwards. The earliest specimens are of a documentary nature: non-literary and fragmentary materials carved, scratched or cast on bone, stone, metal or other surfaces, written on sheets of pergament or paper, or inserted as glosses into Latin texts (J. Smith, Chapter 1 this volume). The manuscript records proper containing specimens of both non-literary and literary early English works go back to the end of the eighth and the beginning of the ninth century, and increase in number over the centuries. We know relatively little about the technical side of manuscript production in the Middle Ages, but it is clear that the majority of medieval manuscripts are not authors’ original writings but later copies – or copies of earlier copies – by scribes, mostly produced in monasteries or other ecclesiastical contexts (Wallis, Chapter 5 this volume). Research on the complexities of this textual transmission and after-lives of early texts is an exciting area of the philological tradition, and so is the art of editing whereby early texts have been rendered accessible in print form to contemporary audiences. Such editorial efforts go back to as early as the fifteenth century, only to be revolutionised in our time by the rise of digital editing (Peikola, Chapter 6 this volume). It was also only towards the end of the fifteenth century that commercial book-making (see Noonan, Chapter 7 this volume) emerged in urban areas. Early imprints and subsequent printed books, in their original form or digitised for processing on computers, form the basis for a substantial amount of work on the history of English today.

The varied and even haphazard nature of records containing early English has been a source of frustration to generations of linguists, especially those interested in the systematic study of the influence of sociolinguistic factors on language change across the centuries (Nevalainen and Säily, Reference Nevalainen, Säily, Wright and Hickeyforthcoming). This state of affairs and the lack of direct access to past spoken language underlie the above-mentioned ‘bad data’ issue, referred to and elaborated on from various perspectives in a number of the chapters in the present volume (see Moore, Chapter 2; Włodarczyk, Chapter 3; Wallis, Chapter 5; Walker, Chapter 20; Hickey, Chapter 23; Auer and Hickey, Chapter 24; Bergs, Chapter 31).

An even broader issue is the question of the role played by orality in the history of English (see Włodarczyk, Chapter 3 this volume). To overcome the data problem, the research methodologies developed in historical pragmatics (Jucker, Reference Jucker, Wright and Hickeyforthcoming) have highlighted the justification for making use of written texts that relay features of spoken language as objects of study in their own right (Jacobs and Jucker Reference Jacobs, Jucker and Jucker1995; Culpeper and Kytö Reference Culpeper and Kytö2010; Hickey Reference Hickey2010; Pahta and Jucker Reference Pahta and Jucker2011; Schneider Reference Schneider, Chambers and Schilling2013). In several chapters in the present volume the authors provide case studies, which illustrate how written language can be usefully investigated with the aim of drawing conclusions on early spoken English across different genres and styles. Even though it has been shown that such documents should not be taken as verbatim records of speech events without further investigation, they can be usefully explored in linguistic studies carried out within, for instance, a historical pragmatic or sociolinguistic framework (in this volume see Moore, Chapter 2; Peikola, Chapter 6; Kytö and Smitterberg, Chapter 8; Walker, Chapter 20; see also Blake Reference Blake1995). A case in point is the area of historical dialectology, where literary dialects and dialect literature have provided evidence of language use that can be explored profitably to throw light on the nature and even the social implications of dialect variation in the past (Ruano-García, Chapter 13 this volume; see also Maguire, Reference Maguire and Hickeyforthcoming). A key requirement for connecting speech and writing is a thorough understanding of English orthography and its historical development (see Tichý and Čermák, Chapter 4 this volume).

Related to the ‘bad data’ issue is the validity and reliability of the historical data used for linguistic investigations. Starting from linguistic evidence drawn from manuscripts, there is an increasing interest in the material aspects of the text and its production process (in this volume see Wallis, Chapter 5; Peikola, Chapter 6). This is very much in response to ‘the material turn in philology’ (Drout and Kleinman Reference Drout and Kleinman2010; Kytö and Peikola Reference Kytö and Peikola2014: 1–8; see also J. Smith, Chapter 1 this volume). The manuscript context is of the utmost importance here; for instance, what was the text’s purpose and target audience, and what do its layout and other paratextual features tell us about its communicative functions? Moreover, early texts such as trials and depositions may exist in multiple forms as manuscripts, contemporaneous printed texts and later printed text editions that are now accessible in electronic corpora (Walker, Chapter 20 this volume). Before they are included in a corpus, such texts need careful consideration, and end users should be made aware of the status of the texts as sources of linguistic evidence and the extent to which they represent vernacular speech from a particular community of a certain period.

While historical language corpora and databases have indeed enabled new insights into the history of English (see Kytö and Smitterberg, Chapter 8 this volume and resources described in the third part of the present volume), there are also other indispensable electronic sources, among them historical thesauri, serving English historical linguists. By taking sense as its primary structuring principle, a historical thesaurus enables insights into the evolution of the lexicon and history of ideas as well as into changes in sociocultural and political phenomena. Thus the Historical Thesaurus of English and its related projects, among them A Thesaurus of Old English, are powerful tools, especially when combined with the use of traditional dictionaries such as the Oxford English Dictionary and the Dictionary of Old English, which both exist in electronic form (for details, see Alexander and Dallachy, Chapter 9 this volume). The importance of historical dictionaries becomes clear when we consider the make-up of English lexis and its development across the centuries (see Allan, Reference Allan, Wright and Hickeyforthcoming). Two chapters in the present volume address this issue: Chapter 10 (by Durkin) from the perspective of borrowing and Chapter 11 (by Green) from the perspective of slang. While the history of individual words has continued to intrigue researchers, there has also been an increasing interest in words combining to form larger phraseological units. Access to historical corpora has greatly fuelled research in this area (see Knappe, Chapter 12 this volume).

Like most languages, English is in a position to claim a wide range of landmark works and authors. The present volume highlights three of them, selected to represent the three main periods traditionally distinguished in the history of English: Old, Middle and Modern English.Footnote ² The heroic poem Beowulf stands out in the Old English canon of texts, the manuscript apparently originating from the early eleventh century but displaying conservative linguistic features characteristic of earlier language use, offering glimpses of the prehistory of English (Fulk, Chapter 14 this volume). Moving along the diachronic trajectory, Geoffrey Chaucer’s works take us to the late fourteenth century, when French and Latin had been ousted as the languages of the written record and English restored as the language of vernacular writing. To take an example, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, with its protagonists representing people from various walks of life, illustrates linguistic conventions of social interaction and dialectal usage in medieval England (Horobin, Chapter 15 this volume). Our third lighthouse author, William Shakespeare, takes us to the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period dominated by the reign of Elizabeth I and, to a lesser extent, by that of her successor James I. While Shakespeare has been considered one of the giants in world literature, his language has been surprisingly little researched in empirical terms. Chapter 16 (Culpeper and Murphy) in the present volume approaches Shakespeare’s linguistic repertoire by looking into areas such as phonology, grammar, lexis and semantics, pragmatics and conversation analysis, and shows how recent digital techniques can be profited from in such investigations.

That corpus linguistic techniques have substantially increased access to textual resources across the history of English is evidenced by the results presented in the ten chapters in the third part of the volume, all devoted to various categories of language use. Starting from more specialised areas – history writing, religious texts, medical and scientific writing as well as early newspapers – these chapters highlight developments in public writing addressed to wide or specialised scholarly audiences (see Claridge, Chapter 18; Kohnen and Kohnen, Chapter 19; Hiltunen and Taavitsainen, Chapter 21; and Bös and Brownlees, Chapter 22, respectively). History writing, religious texts, and scientific and medical writing all display major developments within their respective genres, spanning a thousand years of writing in English, in one form or another. History writing and religious writing gained their identity in modern terms largely from the early modern period onwards, the latter reaching a peak with the publication of the King James Bible in 1611 (Crystal Reference Crystal2010). Medical writing proved a productive register, constantly displaying new genres and subgenres, and seeing the first experimental reports emerge in the seventeenth century along with the establishment of learned societies. In contrast, the first print newspaper proper, the London Gazette, appeared only in 1665, making this genre a newcomer in the long history of text types and one that quickly gained considerable importance.

Yet a further important genre in the field of public writing intended for either wide or specialised audiences – early grammatical treatises – deserves mention in this context (Seiler and Studer-Joho, Chapter 17 this volume). Grammatical writing in England emerged in the seventh century, the language of analysis being Latin, the essential tool in medieval education. Interest in teaching Latin triggered curiosity about the structure of the vernacular, and the grammatical treatises written in Middle English for teaching Latin provide valuable linguistic data on aspects of Middle English in the form of metalinguistic comments and examples of usage.

As a counterpart to the chapters devoted to public writing, five chapters in the volume evolve around the spoken medium and its instantiations in early writing or audio recordings. One of these chapters focuses on speech-related records from the courtroom context, which often purport to comprise verbatim records of witnesses’ testimony and other speakers’ utterances (Walker, Chapter 20 this volume) but which preserve oral features with varying degrees of fidelity. The status of these sources as material for linguistic investigations thus requires careful consideration. However, after the invention of the phonograph in the late 1880s, it became possible to record speech in audio form, providing an additional source of generally reliable documentation. Early audio recordings, now a hundred years old, are the target of linguistic analyses in one of the chapters in this volume (Hickey, Chapter 23). Such audio material, when accompanied by as much socio-demographic data as can be recovered about speakers, enables new insights into the phonetic profile of varieties of English at a hitherto inaccessible time depth.

An increasingly important area of research in English historical linguistics has been private writing, that is personal letters and other ego documents such as diaries, autobiographies and travelogues. Much of this material is speech-like in that it offers glimpses of everyday language use from informal domestic contexts or from sources of vernacular speech representative of varieties of English not otherwise available in contemporary sources (Auer and Hickey, Chapter 24 this volume). When produced by representatives of the less-well-off echelons of society – in the form of, for instance, pauper petitions – both private and official spheres of writing are involved. Other important sources of vernacular speech-like production comprise letters by emigrants writing from early colonies (Auer and Hickey, Chapter 24 this volume). The material aspects of letter-writing and its conventions and community context have also emerged as an area of significant interest in English historical linguistics (Kaislaniemi and Sairio, Chapter 25 this volume). The nature of social network ties, weak or strong, has proved a powerful tool for accounting for long-term linguistic change involving the adoption and diffusion of innovations across social structures (Conde-Silvestre Reference Conde-Silvestre, Hernández-Campoy and Conde-Silvestre2012: 336, referred to in Kaislaniemi and Sairio, Chapter 25 this volume).

Among several relevant social factors, the role played by women in language change has also been receiving increased attention. The final chapter in the third part of the volume probes deep into the history of records and language produced by women and addresses the challenges that research on such material can present (Percy, Chapter 26 this volume). It also serves as a valuable counterweight to the historical record, in which men’s voices account for the lion’s share of the material (as evidenced, for instance, by the lighthouse chapters in Part II).

Part IV consists of chapters aimed at systematising the linguistic data that language historians can glean from the historical record. Some of these contributions concern theoretical claims as to how language is organised in the human mind, and although they consider linguistic knowledge from different perspectives, there are clear connections between the individual chapters. Allen (Chapter 28 this volume) discusses the application of generative frameworks to language history, where the input that children receive when acquiring a first language is considered a potential trigger of changes to the formal properties of their internalised grammars. Proposed changes of this type can then be tested by comparing the predicted output with the historical record; as Allen notes, this type of comparison differs from synchronic generative treatments, where native-speaker judgements on the grammaticality of structures play a key role. Allen’s account focuses on Minimalism, which, like Construction Grammar (Hilpert, Chapter 32 this volume), attributes an important role to lexis. In Construction Grammar, speakers’ linguistic knowledge is seen as being structured into a network of form–meaning pairs, which constitute the nodes in that network. Both individual words and syntactic structures are considered constructions in this framework, and language change thus concerns the development of these two levels in relation to each other and to the overall organisation of language.

As with generative approaches, the acquisition of language by children is viewed as a key locus of change in psycholinguistic accounts (Hundt, Pfenninger and Mollin, Chapter 33 this volume). However, psycholinguists often consider second-language acquisition and bilingualism in adults as important factors. Like generative accounts, psycholinguistic studies need to adapt to a historical setting, where corpus-based evidence substitutes for experimental approaches. While this is comparatively easy in the study of, for instance, frequency and priming, less certainty is typically attainable with regard to factors such as salience. Closely related to psycholinguistics are cognitive approaches (Bergs, Chapter 31 this volume); for instance, frequency and analogy are central aspects of both frameworks, and the need to adapt the methodology to data from historical texts arises here as well. The Cognitive Commitment, which says that cognitive linguistic results should be compatible with our knowledge of the human mind, informs cognitive linguistics, and some research in the field examines to what extent cognitive factors appear to be the same for past and present language users.

Cognitive factors, such as analogy resulting in cognitive efficiency, are in turn one of the three types of functional explanation for language change discussed by Cuyckens (Chapter 29 this volume) when demonstrating the connection between linguistic structure and the use speakers make of language. The other two types of explanation are based on communication and processing, whose interplay can shed light on, among other things, sound changes such as assimilation: assimilation aids production (part of processing) but should not hamper effective communication. Unlike generative paradigms, functional approaches thus explain linguistic structure mainly through external factors. Cuyckens devotes one section of his contribution to functional factors involved in grammaticalisation, which is also the topic of Smith’s contribution to this volume (Chapter 30). Grammaticalisation is compatible with several other frameworks in focusing on the process by which (more) grammatical material is created from lexical – or less grammatical – material. Central to Smith’s account is the concept of ostensive-inferential communication, whereby a speaker’s linguistic behaviour invites the addressee to infer what the speaker is attempting to communicate. This conception of linguistic communication as necessarily approximate may lead to metaphorical extension as well as reanalysis. Like Chapter 30, Chapter 27, by Bohmann and Sommerer, is relevant to several of the frameworks presented in Part IV: the centrality of the concept of frequency in many research paradigms makes it necessary to treat linguistic data quantitatively. Bohmann and Sommerer’s account of the application of quantitative methods to the history of English starts by considering the bivariate statistics that dominated the field for a considerable time. They then proceed to multivariate statistical treatments as well as measures of productivity, collostructional analyses, exploratory approaches such as cluster analysis and multidimensional analysis (pioneered by Biber Reference Biber1988 and extended to historical linguistics in, for instance, Biber and Finegan Reference Biber, Finegan, Nevalainen and Kahlas-Tarkka1997), and finally to treatments that draw on machine learning and simulations.