The book is a collection of articles intended to explore potential paths for research in historical sociolinguistics focusing on three aspects: methodological innovations, new textual resources, and theoretical advancements. The volume opens with an introductory chapter by the editors, which acknowledges the pioneering work of Terttu Nevalainen, to whom the book is dedicated. The introduction gives an overview of the topics developed throughout the chapters and their debt with notions developed by Nevalainen, in particular the need to account for layered simultaneity in the study of the past, that is, taking into account the micro-level agency of individuals within the community and the macro-level of diffusion across communities.
While the studies are organized into three sections, each one devoted to one of the main themes in the volume, the individual contributions tend to be concerned with more than one issue as new methodologies or new kinds of data facilitate new questions that in turn contribute to the development of sociolinguistic theory. The language families represented in the eleven studies are rather limited, with various papers focused on just English, Dutch, and Finnish.
The first section contains four articles that feature methodological innovations such as the application of state-of-the-art statistical and visual tools that are relevant to historical sociolinguistics, the incorporation of methods from related disciplines, or the combination of data and sociolinguistic metadata. For instance, Tanja Säily, Arja Nurmi, Minna Palander-Collin, & Anita Auer combine textual data, linguistic metadata, and visual methods in their article to explore variation and change in part-of-speech frequencies in a sociohistorical English corpus. Likewise, two papers analyze big data in its historical and social contexts; Susan Fitzmaurice, Justyna A. Robinson, Marc Alexander, Iona C. Hine, Seth Mehl, & Fraser Dallachy investigate conceptual change in Early Modern England, while Helen Baker, Vaclav Brezina, & Tony McEnery look at collocational changes regarding the word Ireland in British parliamentary debates.
The next section presents how new data strive to reconstruct past language usage. The papers in this section feature new materials, such as Finnish rural newsletters in the chapter by Taru Norlund & Ritva Pallaskaio, and Dutch first-person writing in Andreas Krogull, Gijsbert Rutten, & Marijke J. van der Wal's chapter. Other papers reveal new trends, such as the study by Samuli Kaislaniemi, Mel Evans, Teo Juvonen and Anni Sairio on spelling uses in the Corpus of Early English Correspondence.
Finally, the third section aims to advance theoretical issues in historical sociolinguistics. Martin Hilpert discusses new combinations of theoretical approaches, such as construction grammar and historical sociolinguistics. Bridget L. Jankowski & Sali A. Tagliamonte study an English Canadian dialect in the process of recession, bringing new insights as to how social variation corresponds with different stages of change. Lieselotte Anderwald explores the role of metalinguistic discourse in the development of vernacular universals; more precisely, she studies the stigmatization of uses that used to be neutral in earlier English. Finally, Mikko Laitinen, Jonas Lundberg, Magnus Levin, & Alexander Lakaw use a completely new type of data, namely tweets, to test the social network model.
In summary, the volume, which includes a subject index, provides us with a valuable window into the current research trends in the field.
