About twenty years ago, the nineteenth century was more or less uncharted territory in the history of the English language. Some text books focusing on the period appeared in the 1990s (Bailey Reference Bailey1996, Görlach Reference Görlach1999; see also Romaine Reference Romaine1998), followed by some in-depth studies on selected features or constructions (e.g. Smitterberg Reference Smitterberg2005). But, by and large, the nineteenth century is still a phase in the history of English which must be called under-researched. Thus, the present volume is a highly welcome contribution to a field which still requires more substantial empirical linguistic investigations.

The lack of linguistic curiosity about the nineteenth century probably stems from the fact that its language seems so ‘modern’ in comparison to the language of other, more distant centuries. Historical linguists have long thought that more ‘relevant’ findings can be made in periods which are more far off, like Old English or Middle English. Such a view, of course, neglects the possibility of short-term language change and, most importantly, it precludes a coherent picture of the continuous development of the English language. Here the nineteenth century forms a major link, connecting Early Modern English to Modern English. In addition, the nineteenth century is an attractive object of linguistic inquiry because it provides a far richer and much more varied textual basis, including more language users with specifiable sociolinguistic backgrounds and a respectable number of well-attested genres and registers.

The present volume contains ten specialised case studies which mainly focus on the nineteenth-century South Eastern standard language and which are, for the most part, connected with the research on the Corpus of Nineteenth-century English (CONCE). CONCE is a one-million-word corpus, compiled at the English Departments of Uppsala University and the University of Tampere. As a balanced multigenre collection of texts and text excerpts, it offers a novel tool for a principled corpus-based investigation of the language of the period. It consists of seven genres, spread out across three subperiods (1800–30, 1850–70 and 1870–1900). The genres include speech-related and written, formal and informal text types (Debates, Trials, Drama, Fiction, Letters, History, Science). In addition, the genre Letters, which covers about one-third of the whole corpus, is arranged according to the sex of the authors. Thus, it is no surprise that in this volume genre and gender stand out as important extralinguistic factors which influence the distribution and development of the features under analysis.

The ten contributions to this volume are separate corpus-based studies which focus mostly on specific morphosyntactic features of nineteenth-century English. They are arranged in alphabetical order but, as the editors point out in their introduction, they can also be grouped according to whether their results mostly reflect stability or change in the linguistic development. Thus, three studies mainly suggest a stable situation, five contributions imply change, whereas two papers cannot be categorised clearly according to this pattern.

Larisa Oldireva Gustafsson's contribution, ‘The passive in nineteenth-century scientific writing’, reflects stability in two respects. First, the general frequency of passive constructions in scientific writing is fairly stable across the period under investigation, despite significant differences among individual authors. Secondly, a comparison with present-day English shows that the typical verbs usually associated with passive constructions in scientific writing have not changed very much. These results suggest that the formation of the characteristic depersonalised style of scientific writing (as reflected by a high frequency of passive constructions) cannot be assigned to the nineteenth century but to an earlier period in the history of English.

Christine Johansson deals with ‘Relativizers in nineteenth-century English’, in particular with the distribution of that and wh-forms in scientific writings, trials and letters in the first and third subperiods of CONCE. She finds that, generally, wh-forms prevail in all genres and environments (occurring in 80 per cent of all relative clauses examined). A tentative explanation for this unexpected result may be the re-emergence of wh-relativisers towards the second half of the Early Modern period, a development which obviously persists during the nineteenth century. It seems that the rise of the relativiser that, which is predominant in Present-day English, was not yet quite manifest towards the end of the nineteenth century. That appears with a slightly higher frequency in letters written by women, but only at the beginning of the period.

Mark Kaunisto examines ‘Anaphoric reference in the nineteenth century: that/those + of constructions’, for example, constructions along the lines of Lawrence's situation was almost as difficult as that of his brother (p. 183). This is a rather special construction, which is (at least today) associated with formal written language. Kaunisto shows that it is already fairly established in the CONCE data, with the highest frequencies in formal discourse. The formality of the genre does not only seem to determine the incidence of the construction but also its ‘anaphoric distance’, that is the number of words found between the pronoun and its referent. The higher the frequency of the construction the greater the anaphoric distance found in the respective examples.

Five studies suggest a predominant situation of change in linguistic development. Change is found in Ingegerd Bäcklund's analysis of ‘Modifiers describing women and men in nineteenth-century English’. Bäcklund studies premodifiers and postmodifying (nongenitival) of-phrases which occur together with common nouns referring to females and males. While the modifiers to a certain extent reflect the different spheres of men and women in nineteenth-century English society (public vs domestic, with the associated attributes), they also show, mainly towards the end of the period, indications of the changing conceptions of their roles, for example, with regard to the intellectual capacities of women. Differences are also revealed in the use of modifiers by female and male writers. For example, male writers use more modifiers and tend to refer to women more often with negative terms.

Change can also be observed in Peter Grund and Terry Walker's examination of ‘The subjunctive in adverbial clauses in nineteenth-century English’. Grund and Walker compare the frequencies of subjunctive verb forms with indicative verb forms and constructions containing modal auxiliaries in similar syntactic environments. The results suggest that the decline of the subjunctive, which can already be noted in Early Modern English, is accelerated during the nineteenth century, especially towards the end of the period and in less formal genres. Quite surprisingly, the preferred alternative to the subjunctive is the indicative, not the constructions containing modals. Their frequency decreases even more towards the end of the century. Another interesting detail is that the subjunctive form were seems to be rather unaffected by the change, while the subjunctive form be and the subjunctive forms of other verbs show a sharp decrease.

Merja Kytö and Suzanne Romaine investigate ‘Adjective comparison in nineteenth-century English’, focusing on the competing inflected and periphrastic forms (happier vs more happy). Their study reveals a steady growth of inflected forms throughout the period. But stylistic and gender-related factors come into play here as well, for example, the need for emphasis and clarity on the part of the author or the tendency of women to address both female and male addressees with terms involving dearest in letters, whereas men tend to use such terms only with women. Towards the end of the period it seems that the syntactic positions and functions of comparative forms approach those of present-day English. Once again, a development which can be noted in the Early Modern period can be linked to the present-day situation.

The last two contributions which fall under the heading of change aim at rather special and infrequent morphosyntactic features and thus go beyond the data provided by CONCE. Christian Mair investigates ‘Nonfinite complement clauses in the nineteenth century: The case of remember’. Using the quotation database of the OED on CD-ROM, he traces changes in the proportion of gerundial and infinitival complements of the verb. He shows that it was during the nineteenth century that infinitive complements decreased and gerund complements (both with common case and genitive/possessive subject) were firmly established. Here one can say that the nineteenth century laid the foundations for present-day English usage.

Juhani Rudanko looks at ‘The in -ing construction in British English, 1800–2000’, that is, constructions where the pattern in -ing functions as a complement of a matrix clause (The Titans delight in upsetting the odds, p. 229). He compares the data of CONCE with the examples found in LOB and two subcorpora from the Bank of English corpus. Two differences between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries emerge here. While matrix verbs belonging to the semantic class ‘engage in’ are found in both centuries, the twentieth century adds a substantial share of a new semantic class (‘be contained in’), verbs of emotion and the verb believe. In addition, with the new semantic class of matrix verbs the recovery of the implied subject depends much more on the context.

As was mentioned before, two contributions do not fall under the pattern ‘stability versus change’. Tony Fairman's investigation of ‘Words in English Record Office documents of the early 1800s’ is basically a synchronic analysis of letters and other documents which he selected from the corpus of Record Office documents. Comparing letters written by less educated and those by more learned and well-to-do people, he finds significant differences in word choice (native vs Latinate words) and spelling, with the first group of people showing spelling difficulties and a smaller proportion of Latinate words.

Erik Smitterberg looks at ‘Partitive constructions in nineteenth-century English’, that is, constructions including a partitive noun, the preposition of and a prepositional complement (for example, a bit of advice), in the CONCE data. Smitterberg notes both stability and change: on the one hand, the general frequency of the construction does not change in the period. On the other hand, he finds a significant degree of variation across the genres. Genres focused on the presentation of information show the highest frequencies. Verb concord with partitive constructions is another point of variation.

All the contributions in this volume display a very high standard of corpus-based empirical analysis, including statistical tests and meticulous presentation of frequencies and proportions of the features under investigation. I could not detect misprints or inconsistencies in the text or in the tables. Maybe, one could have wished for a slightly more detailed subject index. For example, there is no entry for ‘infinitive’, ‘participle’ or ‘-ing construction’, although these items appear in the text.

This volume is an important and highly welcome contribution to the investigation of nineteenth-century English and to the corpus-based diachronic study of linguistic variation in general. It goes without saying that it provides further evidence for the fact that the nineteenth century is a very attractive period in the history of English which merits the particular attention of historical linguists. Several contributions show that it is above all its linking function between Early Modern English and Present-day English which makes the nineteenth century essential for obtaining a comprehensive picture of the development of several morphosyntactic features.

A possible disadvantage of the present collection may be that it contains only snapshots of individual, sometimes fairly marginal, morphosyntactic features. The editors correctly point out that the studies should be expanded and complemented by further research, for example, by covering the nonstandard dialects of English and the evolving extra-territorial varieties. But another, even more welcome, expansion would be a more coherent and systematic corpus-based overview of the language of nineteenth-century England. Given the balanced multigenre structure of CONCE, such a project could easily be carried out.