LINGUIST List 22.2544 Sat Jun 18 2011 Review: Discourse Analysis; Historical Ling: Hickey (2010) Editor for this issue: Monica Macaulay <monicalinguistlist.org> New! Visit LL's Multitree project for over 1000 trees dynamically generated from scholarly hypotheses about language relationships:             http://multitree.linguistlist.org/ This LINGUIST List issue is a review of a book published by one of our supporting publishers, commissioned by our book review editorial staff. We welcome discussion of this book review on the list, and particularly invite the author(s) or editor(s) of this book to join in. If you are interested in reviewing a book for LINGUIST, look for the most recent posting with the subject "Reviews: AVAILABLE FOR REVIEW", and follow the instructions at the top of the message. You can also contact the book review staff directly. Directory         1.     Robert Cote , Varieties of English in Writing Message 1: Varieties of English in Writing Date: 18-Jun-2011 From: Robert Cote <robert.cotehct.ac.ae> Subject: Varieties of English in Writing E-mail this message to a friend Discuss this message Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/21/21-4822.html EDITOR: Hickey, Raymond TITLE: Varieties of English in Writing SUBTITLE: The written word as linguistic evidence SERIES TITLE: Varieties of English Around the World G41 PUBLISHER: John Benjamins YEAR: 2010 Robert A. Cote, Sharjah Women's College, United Arab Emirates SUMMARY The editor, Raymond Hickey, begins the introductory chapter, ''Linguistic evaluation of earlier texts,'' by describing the early notions of the dichotomy of English along numerous parameters: urban versus rural, national or non-regional versus local, educated versus naive, etc., and how perceptions of self and other in terms of spoken language affected the written word in various eras. He points out that that the earlier in time a text was produced, the less reliable it is, stating that non-standard texts often contain ''data which were never intended to be a source of the language it contains and is often fragmentary and incomplete'' (p. 7). To counteract the effects of possibly unreliable data, Hickey uses numerous resources including cross-textual comparisons, a thorough set of classification criteria including degree of vernacularity and text-internal scope, the author's relationship (insider, intermediate or outsider) and degree of distance (intrinsic or extrinsic) to the language, approaches to the language and content of the text and the chronological perspective, defined as ''a distance between the time at which some piece is composed and that which it attempts to represent'' (pp. 8-10). This set of parameters lays the foundation for the analysis of the writings explored in all subsequent chapters. In Chapter 2, ''Non-standard language in earlier English,'' Claudia Claridge and Merja Kytö introduce the labeling of language as standard or non-standard based on the speaker's education, prestige and situational appropriateness (see Campbell, 1776). They continue by describing aspects of language that could be potential indicators of non-standard, among them regional restrictions, jargon, speaker's level of education, emotive or archaic uses, outdated terminology and/or use in unusual or inappropriate contexts (pp. 18-9). They provide interesting grammatical examples of 18th century non-standard forms including deviant subject-verb concord, double negation, incorrect article usage, irregular word segmentation and others (p. 28) from various corpus sources, including personal letters, court documents and literary works. Claridge and Kytö close with cautionary statements regarding the size, availability and reliability of corpora when doing such studies. Philip Durkin, in Chapter 3, ''Assessing non-standard writing in lexicography,'' focuses on the spelling nuances of two very different pieces of writing: John Clare's prose ''The Farmer and the Vicar'' and four of Lewis and Clark's exploration journal entries. In the former, examples of irregular spellings fall into two camps: those prevalent in other sources of the time or remaining from earlier periods of writing, and those that the authors labeled as nothing more than ''idiosyncratic but uninformative spellings by a naive writer'' (p. 50). Interestingly, the authors comment that nearly all of the marked spellings in the text are found on 21st century web pages. The American journal entries portray non-standard spellings as a result of the writer's educational level. In both cases, more analysis of the data is warranted and cross-referencing to other texts from the time could provide deeper explanations to the writers' spelling choices. In Chapter 4, ''Northern English in writing,'' Katie Wales presents a plethora of sources as evidence of the importance of Northern English (NE) writing due to its seminal role in ''the emergence of urban dialects as a consequence of the Industrial Revolution'' (p. 62). Wales identifies the challenges of data limitations and reliability as well as the effects of resilience and recesssiveness. The chapter focuses on the historical development of NE, offering numerous detailed examples before exploring NE phonology, syntax, lexis and discourse in a well-researched approach. In contrast to the previous chapter, chapter 5, ''Southern English in writing'' by Gunnel Melchers, explores Southern English writing, which he professes is not as well-defined as NE. He offers a brief overview of relevant spoken and written dialectal variations and their interrelatedness, a good portion of which will be of particular interest to phonologists. Melchers concludes with a short explanation of the importance of genre, motivation and awareness and their effects on how present-day researchers perceive and interpret written representations of accents and dialects from the past (p. 95). J. Derrick McClure, in Chapter 6, ''The distinctiveness of Scots: Perceptions and reality,'' deviates slightly from the previous chapters as he introduces the possibility of a bilingual situation in Scotland in which the spoken language of Edinburgh was at the opposite end of a continuum from the spoken English of London. However, their written forms were nearly one and the same, rooted in London English due to political and educational reasons and the invention of the printing press, resulting in somewhat of a diglossic state of affairs (see Ferguson, 1959; Haeri, 2000). McClure explores the regional pride of the Scots as a barrier against Anglicisation, which weakened gradually over time. The chapter contains difficult to read transcripts from plays, literature and poetry that portray the unique speech of Scotsmen, which is described as more melodious than London English, common and vulgar yet ''an integral part of the nation's cultural identity as perceived by itself and others'' (p. 119). In Chapter 7, Irish English in early modern drama: The birth of a linguistic stereotype,'' Raymond Hickey takes us through an analysis of more than 200 years of Irish English (IE) as it was perceived by authors and audiences via the portrayal of Irish characters in comedic and satirical stage plays. He cautions that the authenticity of the interpretation of spoken IE depends on the writer's proximity to IE as either a native or non-native speaker. Hickey presents numerous phonetic analyses of the linguistic features of various ''stage'' characters and summarizes his findings in well-organized tables. However, he only includes the original text for half of the examples he bases his data on, leaving the reader somewhat longing for more. Having more than just a novice level of IPA is crucial for this chapter. Chapter 8, ''[H]ushed and lulled full chimes for pushed and pulled: Writing Ulster English'' by Kevin McCafferty, focuses on the emergence and development of Ulster English (UlstEng) through an examination of various texts with the goal of utilizing ''a corpus of texts from Ireland that will permit comparative diachronic study of UlstEng and other Irish varieties'' (p. 141). McCafferty introduces the reader to the five categories of text type, defined by Schneider (2002), based on their proximity to speech: recorded, recalled, imagined, observed and invented which are utilized to classify data from travelers, surveyors and commentators found in personal letters and literary texts. The author cautions that the data presented has some major limitations including ''small number of linguistic features ... small data bases ... small quantities of data ... limited to particular periods, places and/or writers'' (pp. 145-6). The author also offers a look at the writings of William Carleton and Patrick MacGill not only to document vernacular features of their respective times, but also to explore the roles they may play in present-day usage (p. 149). Lisa Cohen Minnick, in Chapter 9, ''Dialect literature and English in the USA: Standardization and national linguistic identity,'' brings the book back to the Americas with an analysis of the portrayal of race, gender and socio-economic status in 19th century texts. She begins with lengthy but interesting political background on the language policies and planning that promoted the development and spread of American colonial English. The chapter is notable for its sociolinguistic focus, in particular early U.S. language attitudes, their role in constructing and promoting national identity, and the linguistic perceptions of self and other, including the speech of African-Americans and frontiersmen of the Old Southwest. Towards the end of the chapter, Minnick offers some analysis and her interpretation of Twain's depiction of white speakers' English versus African-American English, the perceptions of language standards and local dialects and the roles each plays in social organization. Chapter 10, ''Written sources for Canadian English: Phonetic reconstruction and the low-back vowel merger,'' by Stefan Dollinger, concentrates ''on the historical development of the low-back vowel merger'' (p. 197) in Canada through both literary and non-literary text types. He alerts the reader to be cautious of the filter removal effect, in which an author's own dialectal background influences the way s/he records the marked aspects of their own language. In other words, a native speaker of a language is the best author due to familiarity, but at the same time, s/he may not notice dialect differences because of this closeness (see Ives, 1971). Dollinger presents the reader with several linguistic maps and tables of spelling variants, which represent vowel shifts. In Chapter 11, ''Earlier Caribbean English and Creole in writing,'' Bettina Migge and Susanne Mühleisen depart from the main focus of the book with an analysis of Caribbean Creoles, in particular those of Dutch origin. Information is presented in somewhat of a disorganized manner, with references to different geographical areas, including outside the Caribbean, and Creoles based on languages other than English. There is a valuable section that maps Schneider's (2002) five categories of text to data from the period, and the authors also caution the reader of the challenges that may be encountered when encoding language materials. These include the distances between spoken and written language, target language competence of the writer, variation in orthography and lack of transcription skills (p. 229-30). The authors also provide a list of sources that examine the grammatical areas that have been investigated in Caribbean historical documents written in Creole whose focus was ''identifying the linguistic properties of earlier varieties, their etymological origin and their diachronic development'' (p. 231). After extensive description of Dutch-based Creoles, it is surprising to read a sample analysis based on Jamaican Creole. Overall, this chapter leaves the reader somewhat confused. Daniel Schreier and Laura Wright, in Chapter 12, ''Earliest St Helenian English in writing: Evidence from the St Helena Consultations (1682-1723)'' introduce the reader to the unique English of St. Helena Island. This is one of the best chapters in terms of organization, starting with a historical background, then extensive courtroom testimonies circa 1800 -- a rare corpus of great value to forensic linguists, and concluding with sociolinguistic interpretations. In a concise manner, the authors show St. Helena English (StHE) to be the result of years of multidialectal and multilingual contact in which English was the dominant lingua franca, but more than a dozen other languages played important roles to the extent that StHE contained features typical of pidgins and creoles, some of which continue today. In Chapter 13, ''An abundant harvest to the philologer? Jeremiah Goldswain, Thomas Stone and nineteenth-century South African English,'' Lucia Siebers explores 1820's South African settlers' English vernacular from two sources, Thomas Shone's journal and Jeremiah Goldswain's Chronicle, the latter first studied in detail more than 50 years ago (see Casson, 1955). The chapter describes the history of the language, including its rapid homogenization from more than 30 regional and social British dialects in one generation (see Lanham, 1978) caused by a homogenous population and ''accommodation towards the speech of the few but influential middle-class speakers'' (p. 291). Though the texts are described as being written by semi-literates, their value should not be under-estimated. The author cites Garcia-Bermejo Giner & Montgomery (1997) who identified valuable attributes of writings from under-educated authors, including providing ''important data for the study of non-standard input'' and ''insights into some of the phonological and grammatical structures ... to study regional and social variation'' (p. 264). Siebers also alerts the reader to beware of editors normalizing original documents in order to standardize them, a practice which can damage the data's authenticity. Schneider's (2002) work is referred to once again in this chapter before the two sources are revealed. Siebers then explains phonological features such as H-dropping and H-insertion and grammatical ones like the uses of done, was and were. The chapter closes with the note that none of the 1820's non-standard features examined exist today. Chapter 14, ''A peculiar language: Linguistic evidence for early Australian English,'' by Kate Burridge, presents a plethora of samples of Australian English (AusE) as described by Charles Adam Corbyn, who kept a verbatim record of street and court dialogues in 1850's Sydney. The chapter explains the development of AusE from its beginnings as the language of Great Britain's exiled criminal population into what Hickey (2003) labels a supra-regional variety, accomplished via a three-stage transformation process (see Trudgill, 2004). Burridge also mentions that AusE is the first variety for which voice recordings are available (see Felicity Cox's Ancestors Project http://clas.mq.edu.au/felicity/index.htm). The majority of the chapter offers extensive samples of the different dialects present in Sydney at the time: Irish, Scottish, London English and unknown sources for which various non-standard linguistic features are listed, including phonology, grammar, discourse and lexicon. Burridge further offers examples of marked speech based on the age group of the speakers, and all of the original texts from which the samples were taken are provided in an appendix. The author advises that Corbyn's records may have exaggerated markedness for comedic purposes, used marked features that may have been receding or already disappeared from use and seems to completely disregard the occurrence of G-dropping, R-dropping and TH-fronting, all of which were prevalent at that time in the speech of Irish speakers elsewhere in the world at that time. In the book's final chapter, ''Describing and complaining: Written evidence of early New Zealand English pronunciation,'' Elizabeth Gordon examines New Zealand English (NZEngl) by presenting two data sets: one collected by a self-trained phonetician from Scotland, identified as a non-judgmental describer, and the other from British school inspectors, labeled as complainers, who were annoyed with the ''colonial twang'' that they heard. The material is quite different from other chapters in several ways. There are numerous samples of the speech of school age youth, divided by gender, that occurred in the classroom (prescriptive) or playground (descriptive) as well as teacher speech, which deviated from the expected British standard. Gordon also mentions some methodological challenges that cause some of the data to appear contradictory. In all cases, however, there was evidence of consonant changes, vowel shifts and reduction, as well as H-dropping. One noteworthy fact is that Gordon (1998) was able to compare all of the written records with voice recordings from the 1940's of the first generation children born in New Zealand, which clearly supported the written data. EVALUATION Hickey's introduction sets the foundation for the book as an attempt ''to consider the records for varieties of English which lie outside the mainstream of what was later to become standard British English and to consider to what extent such records ... are useful in determining the development and form of these varieties'' (p. 1). This is accomplished throughout via in-depth analyses by various authors on lexical, orthographical and phonological levels of authentic written English texts including fiction, plays, personal letters, journal entries and court documents. The samples were produced between the early-16th and early-20th centuries in both Great Britain and her former colonies with the goal of determining the level of standardization found in each. In most cases, the reader is provided clear and well-researched explanations of the markedness of a particular text with respect to its conformity to the acceptable standards of writing for the time period in which it was created as indicated by various reputable resources, such as the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560-1760 (CED), the English Dialect Dictionary (EDD) or the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in the earlier years and observation journals, literary journals and even audio recordings for the later time periods in Australia and New Zealand. The fifteen chapters are divided into three broad geographical categories that could have been separated into distinct sections: The United Kingdom (2-8), The Americas (9-11) and Australia-New Zealand (14, 15). Additionally, two chapters cover very specific locations, St. Helena Island (12) and South Africa (13). Because of this, the text is most suited to an academic audience interested primarily in the spoken linguistic history of these locations, especially Great Britain, as portrayed in writing. Some chapters (Gordon; Minnick) are quite suitable for the non-academic reader, while others (Claridge & Kytö; McClure) require the reader to be familiar with the styles of English being presented in order for the content to be fully accessible. In McClure's chapter on Scots, translations into 21st century English would have been helpful, for many of the sample texts were impossible to make sense of in their original forms. In many chapters (Wales; Hickey; Burridge; Gordon), a working knowledge of phonetics and IPA is necessary for the reader to get the most from the text, while Schreier & Wright's chapter requires some familiarity with English syntax. Migge and Mühleisen's chapter, though informative, seems out of place with the rest of the book because of its concentration on Dutch-Creoles as opposed to English ones. In summary, Hickey's collection of articles offers many rare samples of authentic writing based on numerous varieties of spoken English from various historical sources, resulting in informative and appealing reading on an area of historic English speech-based writing that is well-worth exploring by today's linguists. REFERENCES Campbell, Hugh. 1776. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. London. Casson, Leslie F. 1955. 'The Dialect of Jeremiah Goldswain, Albany Settler'. (UCT Lecture Series No. 7). Cape Town: University of Cape Town. Ferguson, Charles A. 1959. 'Diglossia'. Word 15, 325-340. Gordon, Elizabeth. 1998. 'The Origins of New Zealand Speech: The limits of recovering historical information from written records', English World Wide 19, pp. 61-85. Garcia-Bermejo Giner, Maria F. & Michael Montgomery 1997. 'British regional English in the nineteenth century: the evidence from emigrant letters' in: Alan Thomas (ed.), Issues and Methods in Dialectology. Bangor. University of North Wales Press, pp. 167-83. Haeri, Niloofar. 2000. 'Form and ideology: Arabic sociolinguistics and beyond'. Annual Review of Anthropology, 29, 61-87. Hickey, Raymond 2003. 'How do dialects get the features they have? On the process of new dialect formation', in Raymond Hickey (ed.), Motives for language change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 213-239. Ives, Sumner. 1971. 'A theory of literary dialect' in: Juanita V. Williamson & Virginia M. Burke (eds.). A Various Language: Perspectives on American Dialects, 145-177. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston [revised version of 1950 article]. Lanham, Len 1978. 'An outline history of the languages of southern Africa', in: Len Lanham & Carol Prinsloo (eds.), Language and Communication Studies in South Africa. Cape Town: Oxford University Press, pp. 13-28. Schneider, Edgar 2002. 'Investigating variation and change in written documents' in: J.K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill & Natalie Schilling-Estes (eds.), The handbook of language variation and change. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp. 67-96. Trudgill, Peter 2004. 'New-Dialect Formation: The Inevitability of Colonial Englishes'. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ABOUT THE REVIEWER Robert Cote received his master's degree in TESOL from Florida International University and is currently writing his dissertation in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching at the University of Arizona. He has taught in public high schools and community colleges in the US, served as Director of EFL at Saint Louis University in Madrid, Spain, and is currently the Chair of English at the Higher Colleges of Technology in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. His interests include heritage language learning, Generation 1.5 students and their use of language to negotiate identity, peer collaboration, IEP writing, CALL and ESL/EFL Teacher Training. Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue Page Updated: 18-Jun-2011       About LINGUIST    |   Contact Us       While the LINGUIST List makes every effort to ensure the linguistic relevance of sites listed on its pages, it cannot vouch for their contents.