Yoko Iyeiri, a professor at the University of Kyoto, is internationally recognized as a leading scholar in historical English corpus linguistics, particularly for her application of the form-to-function approach. Through extensive collaboration with Western colleagues, she has played a key role in bridging the gap between Japanese and Western linguistic research, as exemplified in her edited volume Iyeiri (Reference Iyeiri2005).

The book under review is a monograph that clearly demonstrates her methodology: the analysis departs from unquestionably formal units of language and proceeds to examine their functions within historical contexts. The focus includes syntactic and grammatical features, as well as semantics, pragmatics and the communicative and sociolinguistic roles of each form. The narrow formal lens is intensified by the fact that the corpus consists of just three text types by a single author, Benjamin Franklin (1706–90), and by the mechanical understanding of ‘form’ – a list of thirty-three seemingly random words arranged alphabetically. The three text types are (i) a collection of letters by Franklin addressed to his wife Deborah (1755–74); (ii) letters addressed to other recipients (1724–75); and (iii) Franklin’s renowned Autobiography, written between 1771 and 1790. Each of the selected word forms – from arrive to write – is interpreted in depth. The complexity and subtlety of the analysis stems from the simultaneous consideration of multiple linguistic levels: although syntax (e.g. verbal completion) is central, semantics and pragmatics (e.g. politeness aspects) are also thoroughly explored. Orthographic features are occasionally discussed as well. The corpus is drawn from The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, held at Yale University Library. The study is strictly empirical, with theoretical considerations only briefly addressed in endnotes. Iyeiri’s work is both synchronic and diachronic: while it presents a case study of eighteenth-century English, it ‘always contextualizes analytical findings diachronically’ (p. 1).

In the ‘Introduction’ (chapter 1, pp. 1–8), Iyeiri justifies her focus on a single author’s English, citing a broader trend toward specialization in corpus linguistics since the publication of the Helsinki Corpus in 1991. She defends the form-to-function approach as a ‘bottom-up methodology’ (p. 4), and candidly acknowledges that her selection of the thirty-three target forms was guided by ‘my own linguistic intuition, experience, and expertise’ (p. 5). A subsequent subsection outlines corpus-linguistic details (e.g. dates and numbers of the letters) and presents her working hypothesis: Franklin’s private letters are the least formal, the letters to other recipients somewhat more formal and the Autobiography the most formal. While this hypothesis may seem trivial, and the lack of biographical background is notable, the book’s strength lies not in synthesizing linguistic findings with broader socio-historical concepts, but in meticulous linguistic analysis. Consequently, the two analytical chapters are relatively extensive, whereas the final, synoptic chapter, ‘Discussion and conclusion’, is more concise.

Chapter 2 (pp. 9–117), titled ‘Form-to-function approach 1: Historical sociolinguistic perspectives’, explores ‘lexical items whose behaviours are in one way or another conditioned by sociolinguistic factors, such as genres and text types’ (p. 9). Iyeiri also often uses the term style, contrasting the ‘informal’, ‘private’ style of the letters – particularly those to Deborah – with the ‘elevated’, ‘abstract’ and ‘argumentative’ style of the Autobiography. While these stylistic categories are used somewhat loosely and without strong theoretical grounding, her analysis of seventeen lexical items in this chapter is consistently rigorous and informed by prior research. Concerning statistical significance, frequency figures are normalized to facilitate comparison across the three text types.

The seventeen lexical items dealt with in this chapter are: become, behalf, choose, come, fall, fear, forget, go, like, methinks, please, pray, remember, show, think, work and write. Before analysing these, Iyeiri diverges briefly from the form-to-function model to discuss negation in the Franklin corpus. She examines frequency data as well as syntactic issues (e.g. simple negation with not vs periphrastic negation with do not), lexical/phraseological patterns involving never, no, neither and the parenthetical uses of no doubt. This section draws on her earlier work (Iyeiri Reference Iyeiri, Tono and Ishihara2018). Throughout the chapter, her method remains consistent: precise statistics, typically in tabular form, accompanied by extensive textual quotations and interpretive commentary. Given the corpus’s relatively small size, some findings are presented as ‘tendencies’ (e.g. pp. 61, 70) or cautiously expressed using modal hedges such as seem, perhaps or possible (see pp. 28, 29, 31, 45, 56, 90). This argumentative modesty reflects the chapter’s sociolinguistic orientation, which limits room for alternative explanations. For example, do-negation, compared to classical not negation, is interpreted, following Tieken-Boon van Ostade (Reference Tieken-Boon van Ostade1990), as a ‘change from below’ and thus a less formal variant, found more frequently in the letters than in the Autobiography (p. 11). One might have asked whether the increased use of periphrastic do in the eighteenth century and in correlation with its role in questions and emphatic utterances also reflects growing word-order rigidity, beyond its sociolinguistic associations; or whether some of the findings were affected by Franklin’s seniority when he wrote his Autobiography.

Chapter 3, ‘Form-to-function approach 2: Synchronic and diachronic perspectives’ (pp. 118–68), analyses sixteen lexical items without reference to sociolinguistic context, as the author found no significant stylistic differences across text types. Instead, these items are examined for ‘interesting linguistic behaviours … from synchronic and/or diachronic perspectives’ (p. 118). The items include thirteen verbs – arrive, avoid, dare, doubt, drink, forbear, forbid, grow, help, need, return, speak and suffer – and three words of other classes: exceedingly, scarce and street. The analysis is more descriptive than argumentative and covers a wide array of issues, including be- vs have-perfect (he is arrived vs he has arrived), sentence position of I doubt, variants of the past participle form of to drink (drank, drunk, drunken), complementation patterns and zero-marked adverbs (such as safe vs safely). Overall, Benjamin Franklin emerges as relatively conservative.

Chapter 4, ‘Discussion and conclusion’ (pp. 169–85), revisits key functional parameters from a slightly more theoretical perspective. The first subsection provides a survey on morphological and orthographic variation, as previously detailed for choose, forget, drink, write and some other verbs. One of the items of variation is the formation of the past participle with or without -en, as in drunken vs drunk. Iyeiri explains the variants in terms of formality differences among text types. The -en forms (written, forgotten vs forgot) are seen as ‘probably a change from above’ (pp. 170–1), associated with the more formal Autobiography. Based on further grammatical criteria (such as the auxiliary vs the lexical status of dare and need), Franklin’s English is described as ‘notably conservative’ and exhibiting a blend of British and American features. Additional subsections address the use of progressive forms, perfect auxiliaries (be vs have), double-object constructions (I show it him vs I show it to him), complementation types, adverbial marking and prepositional variation (in behalf of vs on behalf of). Pragmatic elements such as comment clauses (e.g. I fear) and politeness markers (please, archaic pray) are also considered.

The final subsection briefly (three pages) recaps Franklin’s English and the form-to-function approach (‘Concluding remarks’, pp. 186–9). Iyeiri emphasizes that her aim was to characterize Franklin’s language as a whole, not just individual features, and that the lexical-item approach is particularly well-suited to this goal. An appendix lists the individual recipients of Franklin’s letters (pp. 203–33), and the book concludes with an index of names and topics (pp. 234–40).

Overall, Iyeiri’s case study is a valuable and well-executed examination of numerous lexical items – primarily verbs – within a rigorously applied form-to-function framework. Her analytical consistency is commendable, though her functional interpretations remain cautious, often hedged by modal qualifiers. While the book refrains from engaging deeply with broader issues such as eighteenth-century rationalism, prescriptivism or tendencies toward grammatical simplification, it occasionally gestures towards theoretical themes, mainly in endnotes. The profile offered of Franklin himself is rather sparse; readers might have appreciated more background on his role in American history and linguistic influences, especially considering his extensive time in Britain (mentioned only briefly on p. 1).

That said, the book admirably fulfils its purpose to explore significant features of Benjamin Franklin’s language. The parameters applied – intimate, informal, interactive, private, spoken vs formal, elevated, argumentative, abstract, expository style – are consistently used to differentiate between letter types and the Autobiography. From a diachronic point of view, the letters are tentatively associated with ‘changes from below’, while the Autobiography reflects ‘changes from above’. The theoretical aspects of the analyses are partly underpinned in the endnotes, and the methodology is meticulous. I have found only six typographical errors: p. 1, l. 1: merger of words; p. 28, l. 6: dependent for depends; p. 171, l. 1 of second paragraph: is for are; p. 172, penultimate line of third paragraph: revists for revisits; p. 184, l. 8 of second paragraph: everday for everyday; p. 239, Taavitsainen: Irama for Irma.

For those interested in the form-to-function approach and the sociolinguistic perspectives on historical English, this study offers an excellent example of the multi-faceted nature of lexical analysis.