English language studies in English departments uniquely combine linguistics and literature, cultural studies, sociology, history and pedagogy, and benefit from a valuable heritage in philological studies. This volume highlights the present state of English language studies in English departments in the US and EU. The volume is dedicated to Richard W. Bailey, and in celebrating the depth and breadth of his life's work, the authors and editors also celebrate the depth and breadth of English language studies in English departments. The work is divided into four sections, which, while not exhaustive, represent key areas in English language studies: American dialects; the history of English; English lexicography; and English language and education. Although sections 1 and 4 focus on dialects and school experience in the US, the principles and methods described are essential to linguistics more broadly. Each section is composed of an editor's introduction, three papers and one response to those papers. The work is intended to be useful for undergraduates and professional researchers, for English literature scholars who are less familiar with language studies, and for the general public; it generally fulfills that intention by pairing summaries and background material with critiques of various approaches, as well as new findings, presented in an accessible style.
Section 1 on American dialects includes three essays that work cohesively to deconstruct both popular and academic conceptions of American dialects, providing a solid reminder of the necessity of deconstructing assumptions. That the volume begins with Dennis Preston's work on perceptual dialectology, which examines both the presuppositions and the actual receptive processes of language users, is an engaging and unconventional decision. Preston's work analyses popular assumptions about regional variation, showing those assumptions to bear little resemblance to linguistic data on isoglosses. His work also analyses general language users’ actual perception of phonetic variation, and based on specific inconsistencies in those perceptions draws conclusions about speakers’ confidence in their respective idiolects and regional dialects. These studies remind us that untrained perceptions of linguistic diversity are themselves an object of study, and that teasing apart stereotypes of linguistic variation from actual linguistic variation can be a significant task. The chapter also plainly provides a methodological model for similar studies, as such studies are relatively uncommon.
In the subsequent chapter, Walt Wolfram examines attributes of African American English (AAE), providing a useful and nuanced analysis of variation within AAE, and simultaneously critiquing academic assumptions about AAE's internal uniformity. He cites an unreasoned dominance of tradition in AAE scholarship, and the creation of a ‘sociolinguistic folklore’ (p. 34) surrounding AAE that does not conform to empirical findings, all of which opens the door to a necessary conversation on the state of the field. In particular, he notes that reducing AAE to a list of grammatical elements, a common practice, ignores the complexity of the variety as an ‘integrated structural system’ (p. 38). Wolfram presents corpus data to support his points, and cites numerous valuable studies on the internal complexity of AAE and the history of AAE studies.
William Kretschmar begins chapter 3 with an engaging and playful, if slightly circuitous, tour of techne and episteme, before applying those terms to the history of dialect maps. Fittingly for a chapter that begins by deconstructing the various natures of ‘science’ (and which refers to ‘science’ in quotes), the work does not unfold in a conventional scientific manner. Kretschmar deftly shows respect for dialectologists of the past, while confirming the problematic role that intuition played in early dialect analyses and offering a new data-driven, computational alternative approach to establishing isoglosses, ‘self-organizing maps’. If Kretschmar's language raises the question of the possibility of true induction, his argument provides a good counterpoint to the intuitive processes that earlier dialectologists depended upon, and evokes Preston's work by showing that, like the general public, highly trained linguists including early dialectologists sometimes unwittingly use their data to confirm their own preconceptions.
Sonja Lanehart neatly summarises the first section and proposes a worthwhile methodology that clearly emerges from the realm of critical theory in English departments and combines very well with sociolinguistic methodology. She highlights ‘the importance of scholars disclosing and understanding the impact of their subjectivities on their research and its outcomes’ (p. 72), which refers not only to the sociolinguistic observer's paradox, but also to the necessity that researchers deconstruct their own analytical processes and the linguistic forces implicit in those processes. Lanehart analyses her own subjectivities in describing her native variety of AAE and her relationship with that variety throughout her life. She notes that English departments are well-suited to promoting an analysis of researcher subjectivities because they incorporate literary analysis, historical research and multidisciplinary research, ‘all of which serve to balance, supplement, and challenge the social scientific methodologies of linguistic inquiry’ (p. 72). She goes on: ‘It would be helpful to science, art, and the humanities if scholars would recognise that who we are is integrated with what we do (method), how we believe it should be done (methodology), and how we see or know it (epistemology)’ (p. 74). Lanehart's response to section 1 relates to the section's key, unifying emphasis on deconstructing linguistic and sociolinguistic assumptions at every level, and connects to the volume as a whole by showing how English departments are particularly suited to this task. Given that section 1 promotes the deconstruction of generalisations about groups of language users, and given that deconstruction is obviously a strength for these scholars, it would have been interesting to see in the introduction or the response (or indeed in any of the above chapters) a discussion of the necessary role of generalisation in theory construction, and the dynamic between the two poles of generalisation and deconstruction.
Lynda Mugglestone begins section 2, on the history of the English language, with a personal perspective, the story of Michael Faraday and his self-attested linguistic development under the guidance of elocutionist Benjamin Smart in nineteenth-century London. As with Preston's opening to section 1, this section opener is pleasantly unconventional, and an excellent example of the field's potential for analysing and evaluating particular historical texts in the context of broader sociolinguistic trends. Within nineteenth-century London's complex phenomena of social class, Mugglestone fascinatingly juxtaposes Smart, who ‘capitalised on linguistic anxieties’ (p. 92) by teaching proper pronunciation to the upwardly mobile, with Faraday, who sincerely felt profound personal and intellectual benefits from his lessons with Smart. The narrative can be read as a nuanced presentation of the complications of prescriptivism, and its potential to both disenfranchise and enfranchise.
Anatoly Liberman writes chapter 6 in an engaging and humorous style that enhances accessibility to what is the volume's most technically dense chapter. Analysing the history of etymologies for wife, the work represents a defining subdiscipline of English language studies in English departments, as opposed to linguistics departments. As Liberman reveals his own compelling proposal for the roots of wife, the chapter masterfully unfolds like a detective story, a lovely metaphor for etymological research itself.
In chapter 7, Edgar Schneider succinctly summarises studies of English worldwide before reporting on sociolinguistic attributes of English in Singapore and Hong Kong (as in Schneider Reference Schneider2007), and in Japan. Although Schneider's excellent Reference Schneider2007 book is critical of an ENL/ESL/EFL model for English worldwide, he invokes it here to describe the differences between English in its social contexts in Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan. It would have been beneficial to see Schneider's own models of the developmental stages of postcolonial English varieties instead. The new contribution in this chapter is the case study on English phonetics and grammar among speakers from China. Phonetic and grammatical details are meticulously reported and discussed (reminiscent of Schneider's excellent Reference Schneider, Wolf, Peter and Polzenhagen2008 phonetic study), and observations on mixed American and British elements in students’ speech are particularly interesting. Given the references to Schneider (Reference Schneider2007), this chapter effectively serves as a springboard into that valuable book for students.
While section 2 is titled ‘History of the English language’, it covers a broader range of topics than section 1. Colleen Moore offers a keen response to the section by narrating a history of English language historical studies in English departments, showing the centrality of English historical studies in such departments in the nineteenth century, and convincingly arguing for the indispensable role of English language historical studies in those departments today. The chapter is worthwhile reading for anyone in an English department.
To begin section 3, on lexicography, Joan Houston Hall presents data on word-formation derived from the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), and in comparing that data with findings in other dictionaries shows the value of DARE as a research tool. Hall discusses intriguing examples of word formation and mines DARE to find words whose expanding usage, according to Hall, qualifies them for entry in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Jesse Sheidlower from the OED writes on creating quotation paragraphs for dictionaries in an extremely lucid, well-organised, informed and informative chapter 10. He relates a history of quotation paragraphs in general, and in the OED in particular, and neatly displays valuable data on the general increase in length of quotation paragraphs in the OED since its inception. He then untangles some decisions faced by editors compiling quotation paragraphs and evaluates published examples, including his own. In particular, he notes that due to the wealth of available information in full text databases, ‘copiousness is no longer a virtue. What readers need is refinement’ (p. 208). As Sheidlower states, discussions of quotation paragraphs and the methods behind their creation are limited in the research literature; this contribution is an excellent addition.
In chapter 11, Michael Montgomery explicates the history of regional dictionaries based on the model of the OED, and explores the historical, political and sociolinguistic reasons for the conspicuous absence of a dictionary of Irish English on historical principles. This is an interesting spotlight on the politics of dictionaries, which rounds out the section well. Montgomery's conclusion that Irish English may occupy a space in the English-speaking world both on the periphery looking in and on the inside looking out is provocative, and his detailed dissection of the unique sociolinguistic attributes of the variety is effective.
Marsha L. Dutton responds to section 3 with a reflective summary of a variety of online dictionaries, including wiki projects. She extends Sheidlower's claim that refinement trumps copiousness in light of contemporary technology by arguing that accuracy and reliability can also suffer in technologically advanced internet dictionaries.
Geneva Smitherman and Minnie Quartey-Annan begin the final section with a practical compilation and review of studies that have analysed approaches to African American Language (AAL) in pedagogical settings, with a particular eye to the influence linguists have had on pedagogical policy. Key themes in the chapter are conflict in the African American community, particularly language attitudes of the black middle class, and the notion that AAL can allow students and teachers to embrace bilingualism/bidialectism and biculturism. A closing statement calls on linguists to actively contribute to policy decisions.
The closing declaration of the previous chapter leads well into Dennis Baron's chapter 14, which describes one area in which linguistic science has been unable to penetrate pedagogical practice: pedagogy remains prescriptivist, while linguistics is decidedly descriptivist. After a persuasive and eloquent opening, and some provocative anecdotes from personal experience, Baron describes the Ann Arbor Black English case, a strong complement to Smitherman and Quartey-Annan's summary of the case, and presents practical summaries of Lau v. Nichols, the Oakland Ebonics case, and Proposition 227. Baron cites his experience training teachers for more than thirty years, and some of his assertions regarding schools and teachers are presumably drawn from that experience. For other assertions, additional citations would aid both the student reader and the linguist who is less well versed in pedagogical trends. Baron asserts, for example, that during the Ebonics fervor, even college-educated Americans who had taken linguistics courses believed that Ebonics was nothing more than ‘lazy English’ (p. 285); references for following up that assertion would be useful. Baron argues that in the twentieth century, ‘immigrant children always quickly took to English, becoming fluent enough . . . Unfortunately, the English they mastered wasn't always the academic register’ (p. 289), and shortly thereafter argues that ‘students enrolled in ESL classes run the risk of coming away with . . . inflexible textbook English rather than a fluent, idiomatic style’ (p. 293). Both outcomes are possibilities, as well as various other outcomes on a spectrum between the two, but Baron's piece contains numerous examples of such generalisations without references to sources for evidence, and thus reads at times more as a political statement for a popular audience than an analysis of linguistic science's penetration, or lack thereof, into pedagogy.
Amy J. Devitt's chapter could easily have served as a strong introduction to the volume, but functions equally well as the volume's final full chapter, a useful summary and an indication of where students and non-linguist English scholars can go next. Reflective, in the manner that Lanehart recommends in her response to section 1, and incisive, Devitt explores the real and vital link between English language study and pedagogical practice, with a well-presented historical context and a healthy analysis and evaluation of the current potential of the two fields. Crucially, she acknowledges that the process approach dominant in pedagogical circles since the 1980s resulted in a ‘perhaps necessary but unfortunate turn away from language-based study and teaching of writing’ (p. 301). This adroit and nuanced reading of a polarizing subject is extremely helpful. She further asserts, diplomatically, that in both English departments and pedagogical studies, the current emphasis on historical analysis and critical theory have allowed for a more complex understanding of writing that is now ‘ripe for the reintroduction of form’ (p. 302). Finally, she extends Baron's and Smitherman and Quartey-Annan's emphasis on variation in contemporary English as a basis for studying language to an emphasis on long-term historical fluctuation in standards, in order to highlight the instability of those standards and to insightfully advocate the teaching of current standards and variations as contextualised points in a process of long-term change.
Susanmarie Harrington closes the volume by replying to section 4. While her piece most specifically addresses recent American policy developments (the No Child Left Behind Act in particular), and is therefore intimately connected to a specific time and place, the issues she describes recur in education policy across generations in many countries.
Though the volume's introduction underlines the importance of digital corpora as a research area unique to modern language departments, the book's chapters don't delve much into corpus linguistics specifically, a minor shortcoming. Nonetheless, those of us working in English language studies in English departments can heartily recommend this volume to colleagues less familiar with linguistics. It is a representative cross-section of English language studies and a clear demonstration of the types of problems and questions faced by researchers of the English language. Students too will benefit from the introductory material and the methodological examples, which hold promise for stimulating future research.
