It is an astonishing fact that the dynamo producing some of the most powerful scholarship on the history of the English language is not even in Indo-European territory. Under the inspired leadership of Professor Matti Rissanen, Helsinki has reached an unprecedented level of effort in this field, and, when Rissanen retired in 2001, Terttu Nevalainen became his successor as director of the Research Unit for Variation and Change in English. This volume celebrates her elevation to her new role and, at the same time, her fiftieth birthday.

VARIENG (as the unit is known) became “one of the National Centres of Excellence in Finland co-funded by the Academy of Finland and the University of Helsinki.” In April 2002, when this volume was ready for publication, “The current personnel consist[ed] of 18 scholars, 16 postgraduate students and 15 part-time research assistants. The Unit also has 15 collaborating scholars from other universities” (p. xvix). Funds have been promised through 2005, and we may hope the benefactors will continue supporting the astonishing productivity, sound planning, and fine scholarship of the group.

Interest in the history of English is not new in Finland, and the same series in which this volume appears was also the publisher of Mustanoja's Middle English syntax in 1960. While various corpora were produced in the United States and Britain for the analysis of variation by genre beginning in the 1960s, these were for recent or contemporary English, and they were seen as showing variability within a genre (e.g., scientific writing) or mode (e.g., spoken English). Lexicography and EFL/ESL materials were seen as the main beneficiaries, and, coming as they did when mere performance was scorned in favor of the ever-elusive competence, they were not seen as having much to offer general linguistics or even English studies. With very few exceptions (one in Scotland, one in the U. S.), there were no corpora designed for historical study, except insofar as a concordance to a major English author (e.g., Shakespeare) might be used to inquire more deeply into, say, the pronoun or auxiliary verb systems at the end of the 16th century.

All this changed when Rissanen and his team designed and produced the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts and the Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots. American scholars soon followed in building historical corpora, and a series of articles and monographs beginning with Biber & Finegan 1989 made this work better known in the United States. In Britain those affiliated with the Survey of English Usage at University College, London, watched these developments closely. The late Professor Sidney Greenbaum, successor to Randolph Quirk as director of the Survey, organized the ambitious International Corpus of English (ICE) with branches around the anglophone world (e.g., Australia, South Africa, Ireland), and, though these corpora were contemporary rather than historical, they were designed with an eye to the work going on in Helsinki. Now systematic plans are in place to select, enlarge, and provide linguistic tagging for these corpora (see Meurman-Solin 2001). Access to many of them is sometimes limited (though not to the two pioneering Helsinki corpora) because copyright restrictions may apply and prevent distribution even of short specimen texts, but several are available to all at low cost or for a modest subscription price.¹

Contributors to this volume present their work under the five headings that make up the subdivisions of the VARIENG group. It is not possible to mention all contributors here, and the editors give a thumbnail sketch of each cluster in their introductory material (3–8), to which readers of this review are referred.

Rissanen remains associated with the first group, “Internal Processes of Language Change,” and it is the subunit with the longest history of publication. In the four papers published here, grammaticalization (of wit and anent) reveals how once flourishing oppositions (e.g., Old English witan and cnawan) wither to stumps like to wit or unwittingly. Both papers raise larger questions about language change within the context of these particular examples. A similar process is displayed in the shifting meanings of bliss and happiness, with OE bliss being displaced by happy, and happy, formerly a word applied to the corporate joys of eternity, shifting to feelings of individuals in the here and now. The final paper, somewhat inconclusively, treats the issue of the extent to which borrowed words “fill gaps” in the existing lexicon.

Nevalainen still has charge of the second subunit, “Historical Sociolinguistics,” a position she has occupied since 1993, and most new corpora under development within it are organized to produce the most revealing results for questions of gender, status, community, time, style, and mode. Helena Raumolin-Brunberg begins this section of five papers with this question: “Could there be anything more exciting than to trace the path of a linguistic innovation while it diffuses into varying linguistic and non-linguistic contexts?” (101). The implicit answer is “No, nothing could.” Drawing on prior scholarship, she examines the idea of “stable variation” and asks whether or not the conditioning factors for such variation remain the same over time. While very guarded in her conclusion, she states that “linguistic variation does not remain entirely stable for very many generations of speakers” (113).

Data-reporting essays in this section look at the “personal letters” data sets and related materials: verb types (by semantic function), thou/you pronoun alternation, and relation of practice to precept in Robert Lowth's unpublished letters (particularly the choice between auxiliary be/have with verbs like come, got, gone, arrive). The final essay argues that, for modal verbs at least, the “sampler” corpus (0.45 million words) is as good as the comprehensive one (2.7 million words), thus suggesting that the burdens of copyright may not weigh so heavily on results as might be feared, at least for very frequent events.

The subunit “Dialectology and Regional Variation” has two parts, and two of the three papers in the corresponding section are by the heads of each part: one on temporal subordinators (e.g., while, until) in Scots, and one on the verbal inflection –s in Devonshire. The third reports gender differences in the use of relativizer what in the interviews conducted in the 1950s by the late W. Nelson Francis in northern Norfolk for the Survey of English Dialects, supplemented by further recordings made in 1988–1991.

The four essays in “Text Conventions and Genre Evolution” begin with one describing the “Corpus of early English medical writing” (from 1375 to 1750), a collection that is already influencing our understanding of the role of scientific writing in the evolution of Middle English, the prior view having been shaped by an overemphasis on literary-theological texts. Irma Taavitsainen, the head of this independent unit within VARIENG, and her colleagues describe a broad array of investigations involving “thought-styles” in scientific writing. The remaining papers in the section are not corpus-based; they illuminate “conventions” in two medieval texts (a herbal and a romance) and one modern short story.

“Pragmatic Variability” is a subunit concerned with “social, cognitive, and cultural variation and variability in present-day discourse” (7, 321). Databases of 1994 news coverage of the sinking of the ferry M/S Estonia and of journalism devoted to national holidays (especially the U.S. Fourth of July) illustrate the ways in which language choice, broadly conceived, gives insight into ideology. The volume concludes with an illustration of uncritical “recycling” of news from secondary sources (e.g., prior news reports, releases from interest groups); the transmogrification of speculations and estimates into “facts” is especially troubling and pervasive.

This excellent volume concludes with a brief index.