Neubauer’s research monograph, based on her PhD dissertation, is a thorough corpus-based investigation of morphological patterns and word-formation processes attested in English nouns in the Middle, Early Modern and Late Modern periods, with the data analysed from a cognitive perspective. The aim of the investigation was ‘to trace the typological development of the English nominal lexicon, understood as the vocabulary used by the language community’ (p. 3). Neubauer was interested in both the processes employed by speakers to extend their repertoire of nouns and the structure of the whole nominal lexicon. The working assumption of the book is that, since English developed from a synthetic to an analytic language, the trend towards analyticity should be observed in both inflectional and derivational morphology. Such an assumption stems directly from the cognitive approach adopted by the study: since ‘all linguistic behaviour is, in principle, governed by the same physiological, cognitive and sociocultural factors’, Neubauer expected ‘similar typological developments to surface in the lexical and grammatical domains’ (p. 219).
With this purpose in mind, Neubauer collected an impressive amount of corpus data, which is a basic prerequisite for a usage-based study of language. The investigation draws on the Penn corpora of historical English: the Penn–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English (PPCME2, Kroch & Taylor Reference Kroch and Taylor2000), the Penn–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (PPCEME, Kroch et al. Reference Kroch, Santorini and Delfs2004) and the Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English (PPCMBE2, Kroch et al. Reference Kroch, Santorini and Diertani2016), c. 4 million words in total. Neubauer manually filtered and lemmatised the nouns and extracted information about their first date of attestation from relevant dictionaries, which means that the data preparation stage must have been very time-consuming. As a result of this carefully designed data collection procedure, the final number of nominal tokens taken into account in the study amounts to 145,222.
The structure of the book is clear and logical. A concise introduction (pp. 1–7) stating the aim and giving necessary background information is followed by the first, theoretical part of the book, where basic concepts related to morphological typology and typological shifts in the English lexicon are presented (‘Morphological typology and the English lexicon’, pp. 11–39). The analysis begins in part 2, ‘Means to extend the nominal lexicon since 1150’ (pp. 43–149), which focuses on the processes employed to enlarge the nominal lexicon (i.e. borrowing, conversion, compounding as well as Germanic and Romance affixation) and morphological patterns attested in particular historical periods. (Here it should be noticed that Neubauer makes no attempt to divide Romance borrowings into words of Latin and French origin due to understandable methodological problems that such a division would involve.) In part 3, ‘Typological profile of the nominal data since 1150’ (pp. 153–90), the results are summarised from the typological perspective and the data are classified into cases representing particular typological subtypes (i.e. isolating, agglutinating and fusional techniques), using Dixon’s (Reference Dixon1997) clock as a visualisation of the typological cycle that English has undergone. Part 4, ‘Discussion and conclusion’ (pp. 193–224), is an attempt to link the developments in the nominal domain to other parts of the lexicon and to draw parallels between the changes in derivational and inflectional morphology, leading straight to the final conclusions.
The core strength of the study is the fact that it is data-driven and the effort which had to be invested in data collection and preprocessing is really impressive. Moreover, the quantitative results are backed up by statistics and based on clear and well-described research procedures. Neubauer decided to deal with an interesting and clearly under-researched topic, shedding considerable fresh light on the history of English derivational morphology. Because the study is not focused on any specific techniques of word formation, it manages to quantify the relative importance of each technique (including borrowing) in subsequent historical periods. The study leads to a few important findings. First of all, contrary to numerous claims found in the literature of the subject presented in the introductory chapters, the role of Romance affixation turned out to be surprisingly small when analysed together with other methods of lexicon extension. Next, the impact of conversion and its supposed surge as a result of borrowing of various formally identical Romance words belonging to different word classes was not confirmed, with the number of words derived by conversion in the study corpus rather negligible. Additionally, the study shows a strong parallel between the typological developments in derivational and inflectional typology. In the case of the latter, Szmrecsanyi (Reference Szmrecsanyi, Nevalainen and Traugott2012, Reference Szmrecsanyi and van Gelderen2016) uses two measures: the syntheticity index (i.e. all word tokens with a bound grammatical morpheme in a text by the token total) and the analyticity index (i.e. all free grammatical morphemes by the token total). Neubauer uses similarly calculated measures for the nominal lexicon: the syntheticity index based on the number of complex (synthetic) nouns and the analyticity index based on the number of monomorphemic (analytic) nouns (p. 179). The analysis reveals that a strong analytic trend towards the end of the Middle English period was followed by a reversal towards syntheticity, which is a direct result of the steady growth of compounding since the sixteenth century. Since Szmrecsanyi (Reference Szmrecsanyi, Nevalainen and Traugott2012, Reference Szmrecsanyi and van Gelderen2016) observes a similar pathway of change in inflectional morphology, Neubauer concludes that ‘the coding of grammatical information and the expression of lexical content have developed along parallel paths that appear to have formed a semicircle within the syntheticity-analyticity spectrum’ (p. 185).
Despite such impressive results, some aspects of the study may leave a reader somewhat unsatisfied. One of them is the interpretation of the changed rate of borrowing in the context of the whole investigation. In general, the role of borrowing in the typological shift analysed in the study seems enormous and it is unfortunate that its sociolinguistic conditioning has been explored only partially. For the purposes of the study, borrowing was classified as an isolating technique, and the only other technique of this subtype represented in the data is conversion, which appears with negligible frequencies in all the periods. Thus, the trends towards or away from analyticity are largely dependent on the rate of borrowing, which was naturally different in each subperiod depending on the sociolinguistic situation of English. It is somewhat unexpected that, while the surge of borrowing in Middle English is analysed in detail from the sociolinguistic perspective in the context of the Norman conquest and its aftermath, the increasingly low rate of borrowing in the more recent centuries is not sufficiently supported by an equally deep sociolinguistic explanation. The reverse trend towards syntheticity in the nominal lexicon observed especially in the twentieth century must have been a side effect of the low availability of borrowing as a word formation technique, and this low availability must have had sociolinguistic reasons. Nowadays English is the standard donor language for the borrowing process in many languages, but there is no language that functions as an obvious source of borrowings for English itself. Thus, when there is a need for a new lexical item, compounding becomes the default technique, with affixation being less frequently used, perhaps because of its higher semantic limitation. One may wonder why Neubauer gives no explanation for the reverse trend towards syntheticity apart from a parallel development in inflectional morphology (pp. 99, 220), even though the results call for a more in-depth sociolinguistic and functional analysis.
Another issue which may be viewed as potentially problematic is the treatment of compounds. As Neubauer claims, ‘in the present study, 20.5% of approximately 2,700 compounds could not be found in either the headwork entries or the dictionary attestations’ (p. 109), which means that the decision to classify a given word combination as a compound was to a certain degree subjective. This, unfortunately, means that the important result of the study pertaining to the relative importance of compounding in the Late Modern English data may at least partially be a side effect of the methodological assumption of what a compound is. Additionally, Neubauer consciously gave up on a systematic investigation of adjective + noun compounds if they were spelt separately (p. 60), which means that the low results for compounding are largely skewed for the earlier periods, i.e. before spelling standardisation. This decision is of course understandable, given the huge effort it would require to search for such combinations in the corpora, but including a few most frequent combinations which already surfaced in the data spelt as a unit could extend the database in a potentially beneficial way.
It should also be noted that Neubauer, motivated by practical reasons, decided to treat spelling as a guide to pronunciation (which was a necessary component for her calculation of the fusion index) – as she states, ‘Instead of embarking on the hopeless task of ascertaining the pronunciation of some 12,000 types for each century since 1150, I relied on spelling to keep the work manageable’ (p. 171) – but there is no detailed account of this potentially complicated procedure. It seems reasonable to follow such a method for Middle English (though spelling variation which had no impact on pronunciation must have been problematic), but much less so for Early and Late Modern English, where spelling fails to reflect many phonological developments. The solution by Neubauer is by no means perfect, but with such a large amount of data to analyse, it is naturally difficult to come up with a viable alternative. Given the limitations of this procedure, though, it is impossible to assume its complete reliability.
Next, the general significance of the findings presented in the study must be to a certain degree limited by the fact that register and text type were not consistently taken into account, which was naturally dictated by purely pragmatic reasons. In such small corpora, adding another variable to the analysis would be problematic, especially since not all registers are well-attested in all the corpora. Nevertheless, a few observations based on register (pp. 69, 223) suggest that a more systematic approach could reveal some interesting trends. Given this methodological decision, the conclusions about the minimal role of Romance affixation appear to be overstated. Since high register and specialised texts are bound to show more lexical elements of French and Latin origin, the results may differ according to text type. Neubauer assumes that ‘a register-specific examination may conclude that the findings of the present work are more pronounced in certain text types than others’ (p. 223), not taking into consideration the possibility that certain trends could actually be different in specific genres. Only a more detailed genre-oriented follow-up study could clarify this issue.
Another factor which suggests that the conclusions could be formulated with greater precision is the fact that, while basing the analysis on the entire corpora, Neubauer appears to assume that all the users of English from a given century knew the whole (nominal) lexicon attested in the corpus (i.e. all the nouns attested in a given century are treated as models for word-formation processes), which could only be true for the most educated part of the English society. Naturally, this is the nature of the data at our disposal, but it is unrealistic to assume that the study reflects the usage of language by the entire community of English speakers in particular subperiods. It is more plausible that, at least in the case of the Middle and Early Modern English period, the investigation models the linguistic behaviour of a small portion of the society, since before the Late Modern English period the level of literacy in England was low.
It must be noted that the analysis required meticulous work but, at the same time, from the point of view of such an ambitious and large-scale investigation, the database seems to be relatively small, which Neubauer openly admits (p. 74) and sometimes uses as an explanation when a given result is unexpected (p. 89). The conclusions are extrapolated from nouns to the whole lexicon, and therefore the analysis of verbs, adverbs and adjectives could theoretically reshape some of the findings. As explained above, register is not taken into account in the analysis and the treatment of spelling as a proxy for pronunciation cannot be considered a fully reliable solution. Thus, it is noteworthy that the final conclusions and certain statements are not formulated with more nuance. For instance, when Neubauer concludes that ‘the overall outcome of the investigation is most encouraging and should, in fact, inspire us to rethink the history of English, as proposed by Kortmann (Reference Kortmann, Nevalainen and Traugott2012)’ (p. 223), a careful reader may assume it would be reasonable to conduct a few follow-up studies to provide additional background for these statements. Neubauer writes: ‘I take the findings obtained for the nominal data to be representative of the typological makeup of the lexical data in their entirety until further research proves otherwise’ (p. 197), but she admits herself that nouns are the most frequently borrowed word class (p. 213). Since the trends towards and away from syntheticity and analyticity were to a large extent shaped by the changed rates of borrowing, a different dynamics of the borrowing process attested for other parts of speech could have some (perhaps even considerable) impact on the data, and the same may be said about the potential influence of register on the results.
Conducting a corpus-based investigation and challenging some observations made by researchers in the pre-corpus era is of course a very satisfying endeavour. Neubauer is confident about the contribution her study makes and proudly announces that ‘prior to this investigation, we could only rely on received wisdom’ (p. 198) and ‘so far, typological evaluations of English syntax and semantics have been based solely on anecdotal evidence’ (p. 204); it is true that the quantitative dimension of her research is unparalleled. Nonetheless, some of her methodological decisions imposed logical limitations on her study and the final conclusions would be more persuasive if they incorporated relevant caveats. These reservations notwithstanding, it must be stated that the study provides a fresh perspective on the development of English lexical morphology, it is based on robust and carefully processed data, and its findings are highly relevant, interesting and stimulating. Yet, because of its natural limitations, the analysis does not provide answers to all the questions concerning the development of English derivational morphology. Instead, it is a new (and promising) direction of research and an example of a very successful application of corpus methods and the cognitive approach to the study of English historical morphology. In order to confirm the main findings and pinpoint the specific sub-developments in particular areas of the lexicon, we need equally well-disciplined studies of other parts of speech and different registers, as well as further investigations drawing on larger databases, possibly extended to Old English as well. Let us hope that Neubauer, and perhaps other researcher inspired and encouraged by her study, will continue this line of research, providing the community of English historical linguistics with further interesting and corpus-based results that will allow us to have a clear and full picture of the diachronic development of all aspects of English derivational morphology.
