Late Modern English (LModE) looked, at the end of the twentieth century, like the poor cousin of earlier periods of English in terms of linguistic resources and studies. In particular, digitization of period texts got off to a slow start, compared with other periods, and the first LModE historical corpora appeared to be dogged by copyright problems. But since 2001, a triennial international conference devoted to Late Modern English has helped achieve what Pérez-Guerra et al. call the ‘decinderellisation of LModE linguistics’ (2007: 13), following Jones' famous observation in 1989 that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were ‘the Cinderella of English historical linguistic study’ (Jones Reference Jones1989: 279). Collections based on previous conferences are Dossena & Jones (Reference Dossena and Jones2003), Pérez-Guerra et al. (Reference Pérez-Guerra, González-Álvarez, Bueno-Alonso and Rama-Martínez2007), Tieken-Boon van Ostade & van der Wurff (Reference Tieken-Boon van Ostade and van der Wurff2007) and Beal et al. (Reference Beal, Fitzmaurice and Hodson2012). A sixth conference is due to be hosted by Uppsala University in 2017. The collection reviewed here presents fruits of the fifth such conference, held in Bergamo in 2013 on the theme that provides the title of the volume.
The burgeoning interest in LModE of the past few decades is related to two other trends that have influenced English historical linguistics. First, a growing focus on sociolinguistic and pragmatic aspects of language in diachrony, inspired inter alia by Romaine (Reference Romaine1982) and evidenced by the creation of new journals such as the Journal of Historical Pragmatics (founded 2000) and the recent Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics (founded 2015). Second, developing interest in synchronic variation in the past has led to the creation of more specialized historical corpora. So while studies of language change have been boosted by register-diversified diachronic corpora, fine-grained synchronic studies of particular historical subvarieties have required genre-specific and sociolect-specific corpora. The studies in this volume fall broadly into this second category; most are concerned not with language change but with the analysis of synchronic language material from a special domain. Several of the chapters focus on standardization and language attitudes.
The volume consists of ten chapters along with an introduction by the editor and an index. In her introduction, Dossena highlights the methodological coherence of the collection and the comparability of the data. The volume ‘is expected to provide a general and consistently valid methodological structure for the study of largely untapped language material from a variety of comparable sources’ (p. 6). Parts of the editor's Introduction read more like a book proposal sent to a publishing house than an introduction to a volume of collected papers. Nevertheless, the stated aim is by and large admirably pursued across the chapters. A further unifying thread is the ‘generally sociolinguistic perspective’ (p. 9) adopted by the authors.
The first chapter, by Laurel Brinton, titled ‘Studying real-time change in the adverbial subjunctive: The value of the Bank of Canadian English’, is the only chapter to address language change and one of only two to focus on a particular linguistic feature. Brinton uses the Bank of Canadian English, a 2.5m-word quotations database linked to the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, to investigate the evolution of the use of the subjunctive in if-clauses in Late Modern Canadian English. The findings point to a marked increase in subjunctive use in the first half of the nineteenth century followed by a marked decline in the second half, which continues all through the twentieth century. This trend parallels that found by other studies for British English, though usage rates remain rather higher in Canadian English. The results match those found via other corpora, validating use of this (non-balanced) corpus. The author concludes first that the early nineteenth-century increase may reflect prescriptivism, and second that the high late twentieth-century rate (compared with British English) bears evidence of some ‘colonial revival’ of the use of the subjunctive.
The second chapter, by Carol Percy, is ‘Political perspectives on linguistic innovation in independent America: Learning from the libraries of Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)’. It discusses the dictionaries and language reference works that Jefferson collected for his libraries between 1770 and his death in 1826, a period of incipient awareness of American English as a distinct variety. Jefferson's attitudes to language change are discussed, highlighting his openness to neologism, and his stand against establishing an academy of language analogous to that of the French. Jefferson's comments on language reveal the divergent opinions at that time on the nature and future of an ‘American English’.
In her chapter ‘Five hundred mistakes corrected: An early American English usage guide’, Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade describes an American usage guide of 1856, one of the earliest. Most of the usage points cited are familiar from British non-standard varieties, and the ‘corrections’ offered by the guide conform to standard British English, suggesting that both the socially prestigious varieties and the non-prestigious varieties were extremely similar in the two countries.
The next chapter, ‘Transatlantic perspectives on late nineteenth-century usage: Alford (1864) compared to White (1871)’, by Ulrich Busse, also focuses on usage guides. It compares a British 1864 guide with an American one of 1871. Again, the author finds that the usages they condone are extremely similar, though differences in style are apparent, the American being the more intransigent in its prescriptions. The comparison supports the view that American prescriptivists still sought in the late nineteenth century to maintain the British standard in America and reject the emergent new variety.
Javier Ruano Garcia et al., in their chapter ‘“Provincial in England, but in common use with us”: John R. Bartlett's Dictionary of Americanisms and the English Dialect Dictionary’, examine how Wright made use of Bartlett's dictionary in the compilation of his famous English Dialect Dictionary, following an agreement he had reached with the American Dialect Society. Producing his dictionary in the 1890s, Wright included material from three editions of Bartlett, those of 1848, 1859 and 1877. The study highlights the links between American and British Isles non-standard lexemes. In particular, it helps to show which regions of the United States and of the British Isles shared usage of particular lexemes, many of which were obsolete in the standard language of the time.
The following chapter, by Marina Dossena, is titled “‘Across the ocean ferry”: Point of view, description and evaluation in nineteenth-century narrations of ocean crossings’. This contribution is in the tradition of ‘language history from below’. It is based on diaries and correspondence describing ocean crossings, with a focus both on what the writers choose to write about and the language they choose to express it. The many quotations from the texts are nice to read, though it is not clear that any conclusions can be drawn about either the genre or the period. Much of the chapter is taken up with a comparison between the diary of Thomas Crawford, travelling to Australia (1825) and a travelogue of Robert Louis Stevenson (1895), travelling to North America. There is a description of their use of pronominal personal reference and of reporting verbs. The author concludes that ‘[p]redictably, the linguistic variety conveyed by such choices is a function of the writer's education and writing competence’, although Crawford's experience of education is passed over. The comparison seems odd, especially given the apparent gap of around seventy years between the two voyages concerned. There are also quotations from the travelogue in Italian of De Amicis (1889), travelling to South America.
In the seventh chapter, on ‘Legitimising linguistic devices in A Cheering Voice from Upper Canada (1834)’, Francisco Alonso Almeida & Nila Vázquez explore the ‘legitimising devices’, especially the use of modality to express stance, in a 37-page tract published in 1834, written in the first person and designed to attract emigrants to Upper Canada. The authors adopt Marín-Arrese's (Reference Marín-Arrese, Tsangalidis and Facchinetti2009) distinction between effective and epistemic stance-taking and examine the frequencies of the various stance-taking devices found in the tract. The authors conclude that ‘epistemic modals, attitudinal expressions, communicative evidentials and cognitive matrices allow the writer to depict a sharp contrast between new Canadian and old European social practices’ (p. 149).
‘Nineteenth-century institutional (im)politeness: Responses of the Colonial Office to letters from William Parker, 1820 settler’, by Matylda Wlodarczyk, examines the linguistic behaviours used to manage face in letters written by the Colonial Office to refuse requests from W. Parker, a merchant from Cork who was involved in leading a group of settlers to the Cape Colony in 1820. The letters are first analysed qualitatively, using Held's (Reference Held1989) model of (im-)politeness expression. Of special interest are the letters that reveal the drafts and self-corrections made by their author to minimize or maximize self or other, in Held's terms, and thereby fine-tune face management in the context of conflict with the addressee. A quantitative analysis is then conducted using the semantic tagger USAS (UCREL Semantic Analysis System, Rayson Reference Rayson2009) to compare this small set of letters to Parker with a much larger set of letters sent by the Colonial Office. For two of the semantic tags, ‘negative’ and ‘thought/belief’, significant differences are found which reflect greater use of negation and of stance verbs in the Parker letters compared with the general letters.
The next chapter deals with Irish English. In ‘“[B]ut sure its only a penny after all”: Irish English discourse marker sure’, Carolina P. Amador Moreno and Kevin McCafferty discuss discourse-marking sure from the eighteenth to the twentieth century through two Irish English corpora: one of literary texts and one containing ‘a large body of letters mainly to and from Irish emigrants’ (p. 181). In the letters corpus, 3.5 per cent (47) of the occurrences of sure are found to be discourse markers; the size of the corpus being unknown, it is not possible to calculate the frequency. The authors discuss the different syntactic positions of sure and the different functions of the discourse marker in those positions.
The final chapter, by Trinidad Guzmán González, is titled ‘Assigned gender in a corpus of nineteenth-century correspondence among settlers in the American Great Plains’. This study is based on a collection of letters written over the period 1862–1912 among the members of a Great Plains family. The author investigates gender assignment in anaphoric pronoun usage. She finds that there are no uses of she for non-living things, despite the fact that many authors regard such usage, particularly for ships, tools and machinery, etc., as ‘an indicator of colloquial American English’ (p. 211). The only uses of gendered pronouns for non-living things occur, albeit not consistently, with nouns such as ‘night’, ‘nature’ and ‘country’ and seem to represent ‘an elevated style’. Unfortunately, the tables in this chapter have neither captions nor adequate labelling.
The focus in several of the chapters on a small quantity of text allows the authors to engage in fine-grained analysis of specific textual features. As one author puts it, ‘small-sized corpora . . . are more amenable to the thorough reading of materials’ (p. 202). Potential disadvantages are the inability to generalize beyond just the text(s) in question, and the problem of relating such findings to findings on other subgenres or varieties of Late Modern English.
The book is not divided into sections, and there is no obvious reason for the order in which the chapters are presented. Five of the chapters focus on Late Modern American or Canadian English, three deal with British or Irish English only, and two compare American and British usage guides. Several of the chapters are synchronic insofar as the authors focus on a particular text or set of texts produced at a specific time, while others span a sub-period of LModE. A number of the chapters focus on ‘language authorities’ of one kind or another: dictionaries, usage guides, professional writers, and so on, while others, in the ‘language history from below’ tradition, start from the writings of laypeople. The structure as explained in the Introduction seems to be close to this last rationale: four groups of chapters, one on methodology, four on codification, three on historical pragmatics and two on the interface between pragmatics and morphosyntax. Indication of this structure on the contents page might have been useful to the reader. Most of the chapters provide considerable sociocultural background for the texts and manuscripts discussed, as befits a volume in this series on historical sociolinguistics, and this careful attention to contextualization is very welcome.
The book will be of great interest to all those concerned with the gradual divergence between American and British English in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and with language attitudes and standard language ideology on either side of the Atlantic, in the nineteenth century. It will also be relevant to researchers interested in the history of language attitudes, and in issues of standard vs non-standard varieties in the Late Modern English period.
