Unlocking the History of English presents a selection of papers from the 21st International Conference of English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL), held in Leiden in June 2021. This edition of the biannual conference – delayed one year because of COVID – brought together a diverse group of scholars interested in the many areas of study that the history of the English language encompasses. The volume successfully attests to this breadth of scope.
The ten contributions in the book are organised in three major thematic areas in the field, part I ‘Pragmatics and prescriptivism’, part II ‘Political, legal and medical text types’ and part III ‘The language of late modern letters’. The first part, consisting of three papers, showcases the versatility of metalinguistic commentary in the study of language and its value as a methodological approach and as a motivation for the analysis of change(s) in usage. The second part presents three chapters which explore political, legal and medical English. This part not only challenges an oft-monolithic view of historical English, but also illustrates how looking into the past can shed light on the diversity of language today. The third part, with four contributions, brings attention to the epistolary tradition, which in itself provides insights into the more speech-based aspects of written English. The collective volume thus aims to serve as a key ‘to word hoards yet to be unlocked’ (p. 7); in other words, to discover the linguistic gems which the English language has treasured through history.
In the first chapter, ‘Researching understatement in the history of English’ (pp. 10–32), Claudia Claridge presents a pilot study on emphatic and restrictive understatements in the Middle and Modern English periods. She discusses three approaches for the investigation of this pragmatic device, two of which are put to use in this case study. The metalinguistic approach, on the one hand, consists of the search of key terms like understatement itself, which would yield different definitions and examples. The form-to-function approach, on the other hand, requires the search of specific structures which are frequently used in understatements, such as the pragmatic marker putting it mildly, negations of the not un-type, and quantity and degree expressions like a bit of a. The author concludes that this pragmatic device becomes more common after 1800 – by which time it is identified with the idea of Britishness – and she also reports differences across the two types of understatements considered. Emphatic understatements are attested in Middle English poetry and occur more frequently in stylistic and rhetorical works; restrictive understatements occur later in time and are most typically found in dialogic texts, including drama, fiction and debates. The chapter contributes substantially to the field of historical pragmatics, yet further research is still necessary – a need that Claridge herself acknowledges.
Next, Jessica Nowak and Stefan Hartmann explore the practice of capitalising nouns in ‘The rise and fall of sentence-internal capitalization in English’ (pp. 33–59). The study tackles this oft-disregarded phenomenon from quantitative and qualitative perspectives. In the first place, the authors adopt a corpus-based approach to illustrate the distribution of noun capitalisations in the period 1450–1920. Then, they analyse metalinguistic references in grammar writing to identify their potential impact on usage. Nowak and Hartmann view the rise of sentence-internal capitalisation as an Early Modern development dependent on text type and on semantics. While the authors expand on the latter aspect by analysing the animacy of the capitalised nouns, it remains unclear which text types would favour the use of majuscules and why. The authors also argue that noun capitalisation suddenly fell out of use in the eighteenth century and that grammarians did participate in its short-lived development, although their influence in the decline of the phenomenon is uncertain. The findings suggest that printers may have been behind this orthographic practice, first spreading it under the influence of German conventions at the time of the printing revolution and later by bringing it to a (nearly complete) halt to accelerate the type-setting process. Nonetheless, these preliminary conclusions also identify certain gaps that the authors intend to follow up in future research.
In ‘Gender, genre, and prescriptivism’ (pp. 60–84), James Hyett and Carol Percy examine the distribution of you was and you were in several eighteenth-century plays authored by women. This case study – formulated as a continuation of a parallel piece of research on male playwrights – sets the proscription of the structure you was in mid-eighteenth-century grammars as the starting point. Combining quantitative and qualitative analyses, Hyett and Percy identify a rise in the frequency of you was in female-authored texts after 1765, which coincides with the loss in frequency among male playwrights. The authors tackle the mismatch between female usage and grammatical precepts from different angles, including the playwrights’ own idiolects and their characters’, as well as the dramatic functions that you was may have conveyed in individual contexts. The close reading of the examples reveals that you was was mostly used in contexts of anger and offence with the purpose of lying, insulting or expressing a lack of control, hence featuring a range of meanings that can be framed within an indexical field. Interestingly, the validity of this indexical field – which integrates temporary stances, permanent qualities and character types – does not correlate with the gender of the playwright: it appears to operate in both female- and male-authored texts. In addition to the intriguing findings reported, the value of this contribution lies, in the authors’ words, in the ‘innovative way of conducting diachronic sociolinguistics’ (p. 81).
In the first chapter of the second part of the volume, titled ‘A manipulative technique in a congressional debate: A case study from 1789’ (pp. 86–100), Juhani Rudanko and Paul Rickman present a pragmatic analysis on James Jackson’s (1789) speech opposing the amendment of the constitution. Rather than expressing his opposition at face value, the politician employs the fallacy of ad socordiam; the chapter is thus concerned with the analysis of this deceiving tactic on Jackson’s part. The authors argue that the speaker’s intention is crucial in manipulative discourse, and thus put forward a theoretical framework in which the conceptualisations of first- and second-order intentions, along with overt and covert intentions, shed light on the case study at hand. Jackson’s manipulative discourse is also considered from a sociohistorical perspective, leading Rudanko and Rickman to conclude that the tactic is not only recurrent in politics, but also, and especially, in those political debates which address major ideological divides, such as the one under scrutiny. Nevertheless, this reader feels that the chosen example may not have been as illustrative of fallacious discourse as intended, since it had no effect on legislation – the Bill of Rights was eventually ratified – and it would have been relevant as well to consider political manipulation from a more quantitative perspective, which would explore how permeable these tactics truly were.
Next, Paula Rodríguez-Puente investigates nominalisations in British judicial decisions in order to answer the question in the title of her chapter: ‘Is legal discourse really “outside the ravages of time?”’ (pp. 101–28). Based on previous research on passives, the author challenges the assumption that legal English is fixed in time and focuses on the examination of nominalisations, as they are often used because of their depersonalised and informational features. Adopting a corpus-based approach, Rodríguez-Puente first considers the feature as a whole and finds that it does characterise legal English, despite not being exclusive of it. The diachronic study then reveals that nominalisations grow steadily over time and rapidly rise from the nineteenth century onwards, a development which Rodríguez-Puente relates to the decline of passive structures. The author also presents a sophisticated morphological analysis of the types and tokens attested in the corpora under study, ultimately concluding that not all suffixes participated in the historical development to the same extent. Overall, it is observed that Romance suffixes are more pervasive, notwithstanding the relevance of some native morphemes. The author efficiently answers the research question leading this investigation: legal English does change over time, even if it does so at a gradual pace and more reluctantly than other registers.
Elisabetta Lonati follows with the chapter titled ‘Duties, offices, and conduct: The lexis of moral sense and practical ethics in late eighteenth-century medical writing’ (pp. 129–52). Drawing on a combination of discourse-based approaches, historical lexicography and lexicology, the author explores the works of the physicians John Gregory and Thomas Percival with a view to analysing the lexical construction of medical morality in Late Modern Britain. Lonati carries out a qualitative investigation on the nouns duty, office and conduct and traces usage and change over the period 1770–1803. The author demonstrates that Gregory’s and Percival’s usage differs at a functional level: Gregory seems to work towards the expansion of the semantic load of the items, refining their meaning and giving way to certain fixed expressions; Percival participates in the creation of new and more specific expressions, thus adding complexity to his medical discourse. This diversity is expected to a certain extent, as the sources were published twenty years apart and the physicians – the author argues – are interested in different aspects of medical ethics. While the results reported in this chapter are insightful, this reader feels that the study could be enhanced with an analysis of the potential correlation between the physicians’ dissimilar interests and lexical usage, as well as with a more overt discussion of the ways in which they conform with a community of practice.
In the first chapter of the third part of the volume, ‘Changing styles of letter-writing?’ (pp. 154–79), Tanja Säily, Turo Vartiainen, Harri Siirtola and Terttu Nevalainen investigate the trends towards colloquialisation in English letters during the period 1410–1800, in a POS-tagged corpus. Bearing in mind previous research, the authors analyse the use of nouns as indicators of informational registers, and personal pronouns and lexical verbs as indicators of involved registers. The case study is inherently sociolinguistic in that the variables of gender and social class lie at the core of the colloquialisation of letter-writing practices. Overall, the results confirm that nouns decrease slightly in frequency while pronouns and lexical verbs increase. This pattern is found in male and female writers and across higher and middle classes in the eighteenth century, but upper-class women have historically been more inclined to produce involved letters than other social groups, especially when the recipient belongs to their close social circle. These findings, the authors interpret, account for two simultaneous developments: first, the style of the epistolary genre colloquialises over time, possibly due to the spread of literacy in the period covered by the corpus; and, secondly, a more formal style arises and expands across eighteenth-century social strata, fostered by the notions of politeness and linguistic correctness of the time.
In ‘No criticism or remarks & pray burn it as fast as you read it’ (pp. 180–97), Tino Oudesluijs examines the linguistic changes introduced in several copied letters in order to shed further light on the practice of copying and drafting letters. The analysis relies on two case studies based on the digital edition of The Mary Hamilton Papers (c.1740–c.1750). First, the author explores three letters originally written by Mary to her mother and later copied for a different addressee; second, Oudesluijs examines a letter addressed to Mary Hamilton, which was later copied by her for her fiancé. The results show that there were linguistic changes on the two occasions, with some differences; for instance, Mary made numerous edits in the first scenario and at different linguistic levels – morphology, syntax, lexis, spelling – whereas the edits in the second scenario were fewer in number and were only concerned with spelling. Among the most systematic changes observed are the use of -’d for ‑ed and the abbreviation ye for the. The author argues that these findings are meaningful inasmuch as their context is considered, since the use of the reduced forms is distinctive of informal and private language in eighteenth-century English. It is suggested that Mary Hamilton’s editorial changes were an attempt at register adequacy, as the intended audience of the copies belonged to her close social circle. Oudesluijs thus concludes that, beyond the letter-writers themselves, the purpose of the copy, the time of creation and the expected addressee may all play roles towards the selection of certain linguistic forms over others.
Next, in ‘Filled-in petition forms and hand-drafted petitions to the Foundling Hospital’ (pp. 198–224), Nuria Calvo-Cortés presents a case study which compares the two types of petition in terms of style and spelling and which also evaluates the possible influence of letter-writing manuals on these texts. The author sets the context of the hospital and the petitioners and explains how petitions fit into letter-writing and its spelling conventions in eighteenth-century England. Through a primarily qualitative study, Calvo-Cortés analyses 132 petitions, the majority of which – she argues – were not written by the petitioners themselves, probably due to illiteracy. In terms of style, the findings reveal that filled-in and handwritten petitions show more similarities than differences, as in the presence of the address, the introductory phrase and the concluding sentence. As expected, however, there is greater stylistic variation in hand-drafted petitions than in the forms. In terms of spelling, the results show that the two types of text present features typical of epistolary spelling as opposed to the overall standardised spelling of eighteenth-century print, with more evidence of deviation in handwritten petitions. After contrasting the petitions with two letter-writing manuals, Calvo-Cortés concludes that manuals are likely to have influenced petition writing practices, but it remains unclear whether the influence came directly from the source or from elsewhere.
In the final chapter of the volume, ‘Quhen I am begun to write I really knou not what to say’ (pp. 225–49), Sarah van Eyndhoven explores the Scots spelling <quh-> in eighteenth-century correspondence, paying close attention to frequency trends and to the sociolinguistic distribution of this spelling form. The author looks into <quh-> from an orthographic perspective and addresses its concurrence in letters as a locus for vernacular features. The data, drawn primarily from the writings of three authors, reveal that <quh-> had not entirely disappeared in eighteenth-century correspondence. The results indicate that its distribution was limited to people related to different Scottish institutions which had remained independent after the Union of 1707 and which ‘may have brought them into contact with Older or archaic Scots features’ (pp. 234–5). On these grounds, the author suggests that the occurrences of <quh-> may simply be examples of abbreviations, which the data from one of the informants corroborate. This ultimately implies that the feature was not intended as an index of social or political identity – especially as it was used by authors with different ideological backgrounds – but, rather, as a shorthand for the Anglicised variant <wh->, which the writers may have come to adopt in their own professions. As the author acknowledges, further analysis of other individuals’ practices is needed to confirm and expand the findings reported in this case study.
Overall, the editors have put together a cohesive and unified volume that mostly centres on discovering the ‘word hoard’ of history of English. Unlocking the History of English delves into the study of linguistics at different levels of analysis, including orthography (Nowak & Hartmann, Oudesluijs, Calvo-Cortés, van Eyndhoven), morphology and syntax (Hyett & Percy, Rodríguez-Puente, Säily, Vartiainen, Siirtola & Nevalainen), lexis (Lonati) and pragmatics (Claridge, Rudanko & Richman), at times with some inevitable degree of overlap. The analyses presented in the volume are also approached from a myriad of perspectives and methodologies, some of which entail substantial innovations to the field. Altogether, the chapters individually and the volume as a whole testify that English historical linguistics is very much thriving in the present day.
