Eighteenth-century English is often associated with normative grammar. But to what extent did prescriptivism impact ongoing processes of linguistic change? The authors of this volume examine a variety of linguistic changes in a corpus of personal correspondence, including the auxiliary do, verbal -s and the progressive aspect, and they conclude that direct normative influence on them must have been minimal. The studies are contextualized by discussions of the normative tradition and the correspondence corpus, and of eighteenth-century English society and culture. Basing their work on a variationist sociolinguistic approach, the authors introduce the models and methods they have used to trace the progress of linguistic changes in the “long” eighteenth century, 1680–1800. Aggregate findings are balanced by analysing individuals and their varying participation in these processes. The final chapter places these results in a wider context and considers them in relation to past sociolinguistic work. One of the major findings of the studies is that in most cases the overall pace of change was slow. Factors retarding change include speaker evaluation and repurposing outgoing features, in particular, for certain styles and registers.

This book provides a fresh perspective on language change in Late Modern English, and is illustrated with corpus-linguistic case studies.

The past few decades have witnessed an unprecedented surge of interest in the language of the Late Modern English period. Late Modern English: Novel Encounters covers a broad range of topics addressed by international experts in fields such as phonology, morphology, syntax, lexis, spelling and pragmatics; this makes the collection attractive to any scholar or student interested in the history of English. Each of the four thematic sections in the book represents a core area of Late Modern English studies. This division makes it easy for specialists to access the chapters that are of immediate relevance to their own work. An introductory chapter establishes connections between chapters within as well as between the four sections. The volume highlights recent advances in research methodology such as spelling normalization and other areas of corpus linguistics; several contributions also shed light on the interplay of internal and external factors in language change.

This book delves into Benjamin Franklin’s English, illustrating the variable nature of 18th-century American English and his stylistic manipulation of the potentiality of English. Utilizing corpus methodologies, it offers researchers in historical sociolinguistics unique insights. Benjamin Franklin is one of the Founding Fathers of the United States and while his achievements have been well established in the history of America, his linguistic activities have been explored only to a lesser extent. Iyeiri examines his letters and autobiography, which provide linguists with opportunities to study his language. The book is structured using the “form-to-function” framework. The first part focuses on different lexical items one by one, and can be read in the order readers want, whilst in the second part, Iyeiri stitches the arguments together, discussing various grammatical features across different lexical items. This book is a fantastic reference for students and scholars of historical linguistics, varieties of English, and World Englishes.

The first full study of intensifiers in Late Modern English, combining a range of different theoretical perspectives on courtroom discourse.

This original volume provides the first state-of-the-art overview of research on pronouns in the 21st century. With its dedicated sections on grammar, history, and change, language learning/acquisition, cognition and comprehension, power, politics, and identity, The Routledge Handbook of Pronouns shows that contemporary interest in pronouns and gender represents just the tip of the iceberg. Led by Laura Paterson, a transdisciplinary collection of experts discuss the global history of different pronoun systems, synthesize the literature, and contextualize the salient issues and current debates shaping research on pronouns across different spheres and via different theoretical-methodological traditions. The Handbook is designed to encourage readers to engage with a range of perspectives from within and beyond their immediate areas of interest, with the ultimate aim of shaping the future trajectory of interdisciplinary, multiingual research on pronouns. Using data from multiple languages and engaging deeply with the social, cultural, political, technological, and psychological factors that can influence pronoun use, this innovative book will be an indispensable resource to scholars and advanced students of theoretical and applied linguistics, education, and the social and behavioural sciences.

This collection features different perspectives on how digital tools are changing our understanding of language varieties, language contact, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and dialectology through the lens of different historical contexts. With a clear focus on English, chapters in the volume showcase a broad range of digital methods and approaches that can contribute to advancing the study of historical linguistics. Visualization tools and corpus-linguistic techniques are part of the methodologies included in the volume. The chapters present empirically based research and discuss theoretical aspects that emphasize how digitalization is changing our analysis of different domains of language, going from phonology to specific grammatical/morphosyntactic and lexical features, to discourse-related issues more broadly. This book will be of interest to scholars of the history of the English language, historical linguistics, corpus linguistics, and digital humanities.

This volume illustrates new trends in corpus linguistics and shows how corpus approaches can be used to investigate new datasets and emerging areas in linguistics and related fields. It addresses innovative research questions, for example how prosodic analyses can increase the accuracy of syntactic segmentation, how tolerant English language teachers are about language variation, or how natural language can be translated into corpus query language. The thematic scope encompasses four types of ‘boundary crossings’. These include the incorporation of innovative scientific methods, specifically new statistical techniques, acoustic analysis and stylistic investigations. Additionally, temporal boundaries are crossed through the use of new methods and corpora to study diachronic data. New methodologies are also explored through the analysis of prosody, variety-specific approaches, and teacher attitudes. Finally, corpus users can cross boundaries by employing a more user-friendly corpus query language.

As the legislative bodies of democratic nations, parliaments play a fundamental role in society. Consequently the linguistic practices observed in parliamentary discourse are of importance to everyone. This volume brings together leading researchers in areas of corpus linguistics, big data, parliamentary discourse, and historical linguistics in a truly interdisciplinary exploration at the vanguard of big data and corpus methods with the aim to investigate the intersection between linguistic and social change. Making use of both quantitative and qualitative methods, the studies included in this volume range from a focus on explicitly linguistic phenomena to topics that contribute to our understanding of language and society more generally. It breaks new ground in its critical reflection on the conceptual and methodological challenges of using large corpora of parliamentary discourse to study both the specialised language of parliamentary speech and the societies that the parliaments in question represent and govern.