In this book, Stroik and Putnam take on Turing's challenge. They argue that the narrow syntax – the lexicon, the Numeration, and the computational system – must reside, for reasons of conceptual necessity, within the performance systems.
EDITORS: Robert A. Cloutier, Anne Marie Hamilton-Brehm, William A. Kretzschmar, Jr. TITLE: Studies in the History of the English Language V SUBTITLE: Variation and Change in English Grammar and Lexicon: Contemporary Approaches SERIES TITLE: Topics in English Linguistics 68 PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton YEAR: 2010
C. Blake Shedd, English Language Center, Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey
INTRODUCTION The topics in this anthology range from an analysis of Old English spatial prepositions to the use of quotative ‘re’ in Internet communication. The immense span of time and topics offers a cursory glance at some of the main issues being researched by eminent scholars in the field of English linguistics. The articles are grouped under two headings: English Grammar and English Lexicon. The cohesion achieved in this volume is due to the commentary/response model that allows other authors featured in the anthology to comment on fellow scholars’ work and then allows the original author(s) to respond to the commentary. This format enables the reader to observe dialogue among experts in the field.
SUMMARY The first section, “English Grammar,” begins with Elizabeth Traugott’s “Dialogic Contexts as Motivations for Syntactic Change,” in which she analyzes the reason for syntactic change, focusing mainly on dialogicity (the number of points of view among speakers) as a motivation for certain changes. Beginning with a thorough explanation of how motivation is construed (external versus internal) and how previous scholarship has not dealt with the reasons for syntactic change, Traugott then briefly summarizes the extant research that deals with explaining such evolutions in use and argues that dialogicity should be considered when attempting to describe why certain syntactic changes occur, for example, how certain words undergo grammaticalization. ALL-clefts and WH-clefts are offered as examples of structures born out of a dialogic context. A number of examples are provided from early modern English to show how dialogicity works in these texts to produce ALL-pseudo-clefts and WH-pseudo-clefts. Traugott argues that more specific notions of why syntactic changes, like the ones she analyzes, occur and offers ideas of future research that could be done to determine how dialogicity is encoded. This article might be somewhat difficult for the non-specialist.
In the second article, “Whatever Happened to English Sluicing,” Joanna Nykiel provides a history of sluicing, a form of ellipsis involving interrogative clauses, in different stages of English. She provides examples of sluicing in English, German, and Old English to show how it works, and detailed data for OE and ME sluicing (with a distinction between two types: merger and sprouting), which she then elucidates with further examples and percentages; at first glance, this proves rather intimidating to the uninitiated. The analysis continues with data from Early Modern English and Late Modern English while evidence for the change in distribution of merger and sprouting is also explained (the two processes essentially switch places in terms of frequency as English develops). The article concludes by offering a solution that is situated in the relevant literature regarding deep structure, surface anaphors, and other syntactic features.
The third paper by Olga Thomason, “Notion of Direction and Old English Prepositional Phrases,” discusses the semantics of Old English prepositions in regards to directionality, proximity, and opposition. Beginning with a discussion of spatial prepositional semantics, Thomason introduces how OE prepositions function with the accusative and dative to show location and direction. Her initial examples raise the question of “why the preposition tō governs the dative instead of the expected accusative” (71), to which she responds with a discussion of the historical use of the dative and the word’s Indo-European cousins. The examples that follow elaborate on the differing semantics of ‘tō’ with certain cases in Old English. Thomason then takes up ‘wiþ’ to examine how it expresses directionality and how its meaning extends from showing direction/nearness to showing emotion (in the sense of being “against” someone or something). The argument is well exemplified and clearly shows how the semantics of OE prepositions overlap while also showing that some semantic fields that a preposition or case governs might be more prevalent than others.
The fourth essay by Sherrylyn Branchaw, “Survival of the Strongest: Strong Verb Inflection from Old to Modern English,” provides a detailed diachronic analysis of the mutability of English strong and weak verbs and explains why certain strong verbs have persisted from Old English to the present-day. She begins by narrowing the verbs she will consider by determining their frequency and eliminating the ones not frequent or fully attested in Old English. Looking at ablaut (internal vowel alteration of verbs to show a change in tense) series to determine which verbs were susceptible to becoming weak, Branchaw concludes that ablaut series with minimally distinguished vowels were more likely to become weak (as opposed to vowel series whose constituents are more distinct) and that other factors (like the presence of a velar in the root) affected the likelihood of a verb becoming weak. She then presents other OE strong verbs as part of ablaut series, examines how many verbs survived as strong, and posits why some did not; her analysis of the verb series is based on “root shape, token frequency, and vowel distinctness” (98). Essentially, a verb’s root shape (the consonants of the stem and not the vowel), the number of times the verb occurred in the OE corpus, and the distinctiveness of the ablaut pattern all play a role in determining whether the verbs survived as strong. She concludes with a discussion of why the changes might have occurred, especially as regards non-native speaker influence, i.e., Anglo-Normans, and linguistic processes like analogy.
In the fifth paper, “Subject Compounding and a Functional Change of the Derivational Suffix ing in the History of English,” Akiko Nagano examines Old English (OE) and Middle English (ME) noun formation in light of current theories regarding synthetic compound nouns in present-day English (PE). She argues against interpreting OE and ME as having a verb-object relationship (the view for synthetic compounds in PE) and argues for interpreting them as having a subject-verb relationship. Introducing the concept of subject compounding (SC) in PE, Nagano analyzes the restraints of noun compounding in PE in regards to the derivational suffix -ing and provides examples of possible SC in PE with -ing, thus showing that subject-verb relationships do occur in PE compounds with this suffix. She then gives examples of possible OE and ME -ing compounds and notes that the productivity of -ing SC has decreased in PE. Discussing nominalization in English, the author provides a detailed analysis of how -ing underwent a functional change from OE to PE while also showing a correlation between the change in frequency of SC in OE with the functional change of -ing. Her argument precisely and clearly explains why SC is no longer as productive a process as it was in earlier forms of English.
The sixth and last paper of this section by Don Chapman, “Bad Ideas in the History of English Usage,” catalogues one-off prescriptivist rules (essentially the hapax legomena of rules in English usage manuals) and explains their lack of currency. These prescriptivist rules are characterized by writers expressing disapproval about certain idiomatic expressions or diction; one example is an eighteenth century writer discouraging the use of “you” and “thou” in the same piece of writing (144). Chapman seeks to determine how some prescriptivist rules are canonized, i.e., accepted as part of a group of speakers’ idea about how language should be spoken. Chapman lists four reasons why a construction might attract the attention of usage manual writers: the construction is (1) rare and disappearing from the language, (2) not established, (3) topical, and (4) too frequent and entrenched. He also includes a list of principles (from Garner 2003) that, when true of a particular construction, make the prescriptivist rule likely to be repeated because it is judged useful to writers. The author then considers some of the one-off rules from usage manuals, analyzing them using some criteria from Garner’s list, which he also discusses in detail regarding some ideas like whether something is logical or redundant. Chapman’s selection of one-off prescriptivist rules and his analysis of them using Garner’s list bring to light why such rules disappear or lack general currency.
The second section, “English Lexicon,” begins with Anatoly Liberman’s “The State of English Etymology (A Few Personal Observations),” in which he examines the evolution of English etymology as a discipline. With characteristic deftness, Liberman describes erroneous etymological derivations and provides (when possible) their generally accepted origins and catalogues the earliest etymological dictionaries and their authors, commenting on how each author fared in his etymological quests. These accounts are detailed and reveal a thorough knowledge of early etymological history. For each period, he notes the most important publications while including their weaknesses and their strengths while also situating his own guiding principles in this type of research. For the latter part of his article, Liberman considers the etymology of the word ‘cocktail’ and examines numerous words that might share some relationship to it. This consideration is meant to highlight how “English etymology has been equated with English etymological lexicography” (171); consequently, Liberman examines how scholars have grappled with the etymology of cocktail and how lexicographers have digested that research. He then concludes with some ideas on how to produce a worthwhile etymological dictionary of English and with a saddening list of reasons why etymological research is not considered a worthwhile endeavor. Liberman has however shown that etymological research is not only worthwhile but at times taxing and rewarding (all the while continuing to contribute to linguistics).
In the eighth essay, “From Germanic ‘fence’ to ‘urban settlement’: On the Semantic Development of English town,” Ann-Marie Svensson and Jürgen Hering engage in a diachronic analysis of semantic change of the English word ‘town’. Beginning with a cursory etymological look at the lexeme in question, the authors compare how the word evolved in the other Germanic languages and quickly arrive at Old English and describe how the word evolved, especially as regards its use in place names (a helpful figure shows the etymon’s evolution on page 189). Looking at ninety Middle English texts, the authors examine how the word developed from meaning “fence” to “fenced-in settlement” to “village.” This progression is then compared to other lexemes that had a shared semantic property regarding inhabitation by people like ‘borough’, ‘city’, and ‘village’; numerous quotations from Middle English sources catalogue the differences in how each of these terms was used to refer to various inhabitations of varying sizes and of various importance. This article provides ample evidence of how ‘town’ developed alongside its etymological cousins to take the place it has today in modern English.
In Markku Filppula and Juhani Klemola’s article, “Celtic Influence on English: A Re-Evaluation,” the ninth essay, the controversial issue of how English might have been influenced by Celtic speakers is presented anew in light of a continually developing understanding of language contact theory. Filppula and Klemola begin by giving a short review of scholarship on the Celtic question, i.e., what influence did Celtic have on English? Their analysis is based on four areas: “archaeological, demographic and historical, contact-linguistic, and areal-typological” (208). With each area the prevailing or previously held scholastic opinions are presented (generally against Celtic having influenced English), and then newer scholarship is discussed which either dismisses or brings into question the rather adamant, long-standing view that the Anglo-Saxons were not influenced by the native Britons. After listing many of the linguistic features of English that are shared with Celtic but not with Germanic, the authors analyze the case of periphrastic ‘do,’ e.g., I do like to sing. Filppula and Klemola consider one of the main arguments to explain periphrastic ‘do’, namely that it stems from a native English causative construction, but they find this hypothesis lacking due to mitigating linguistic evidence that documents early attestations of the form in certain areas of England. After presenting the Celtic argument for the syntactic construction by examining dialectal evidence, especially the lack of the construction in Scots and northern varieties of English, they argue that this evidence along with a modern sociolinguistic understanding of language change is sufficient either to call into question or to discount earlier arguments against Celtic influence on earlier stages of English.
In the tenth paper, “When arīven Came to England: Tracing Lexical Re-Structuring by Borrowing in Middle and Early Modern English. A Case Study,” Elizabeth Tacho first provides a brief theoretical framework for her study, including genre theory and semantic change, lists which corpora and other materials she uses, and begins the article proper with a brief history of arīven’s arrival in English and its competition with the native word lēnden, whose meaning was undergoing semantic broadening thus facilitating the borrowing of the Anglo-Norman arīven. She illustrates the narrow and wide meanings of arīven and provides helpful diagrams of its semantic change. Quantitative analyses done with the Helsinki Corpus and the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse detail the earliest instances of arīven and its distribution among different genres. Most important seems to be that this loanword is more frequent in translations from Latinate, Anglo-Norman, and French sources and the written-text genre (as opposed to genres which make use of dialogic or oral language). Tacho examines specific Middle English texts and the distribution of arīven and lēnden therein, noting that an author’s usage of one term over the other might be based on individual style, context, genre, or place in society.
The eleventh paper by Emily Runde, “Reexamining Orthographic Practice in the Auchinleck Manuscript Through Study of Complete Scribal Corpora,” is a detailed analysis of scribal variation and the implications of a holistic approach to studying an individual scribe’s entire corpus. Having examined multiple copies of the Auchinleck manuscript that were copied by two scribes, Runde first looks at whether the scribes’ writing reflects a conscious choice of certain spellings in their copying by looking at the absence or presence of initial /h/, which was routinely retained in Anglo-Saxon words but which exhibited instability in loan words, especially from Anglo-Norman or French. Two tables detail how Scribe 1 and 2 record /h/ in initial position in words of French origin and in “it” and “have.” To situate the scribes diachronically, Runde then discusses spellings associated with the earlier and the latter part of the fourteenth century, concluding that even though the scribes’ practices reflect the earlier spellings of 14th-century London-area English, this should be seen as merely an association and not preclude consideration that the scribes’ writings reflect a transition between older and newer forms. Focusing on “hand” and “land” in Sir Tristrem and Horn Childe & Maiden Rimnild, Runde looks at how scribal practice in Middle English manuscripts might give insight into writers’ dialects. Her analysis reveals that, due to the maintenance of certain northern features, both manuscripts warrant being associated with either the north or a northern scribe. This detailed, thorough orthographic study thus provides evidence suggestive of manuscript provenance or perhaps of scribes’ origins or dialects.
Stefanie Kuzmack, in the last and twelfth paper of the volume, “How Medium Shapes Language Development: The Emergence of Quotative Re Online,” analyzes how this quotative particle has evolved and how it functions in current usage on the Internet today. After first distinguishing quotative ‘re’ from prepositional ‘re,’ Kuzmack briefly introduces how quotative ‘re’ functions syntactically, especially in contrast to other English quotative particles. The origin and initial usage of ‘re’ follows as well as the first instances of the particle from Internet newsgroups, highlighting its use in e-mail subject lines and in written chatroom discussions, in which a new function has arisen, namely, ''block quote re.'' She then discusses how quotative ‘re’ functions as a complement of noun phrases as opposed to one of clauses; her conclusion is that speakers use ‘re’ with noun phrases because they are referring to a speaker’s actual words and not to his or her identity, for which one would use quotative ‘like’ and verb complementation. Regarding speech, quotative ‘re’ is equally capable of referring to direct or indirect speech, but it is generally not able to refer to other people’s thoughts, which are seen as being outside the knowledge of the speaker. The history and evolution of quotative ‘re,’ according to Kuzmack, is grounded in the media where it is found, most recently the Internet, where ‘re’ can easily refer back to earlier statements.
EVALUATION Overall, this volume provides a wealth of information for the general scholar of English as well as the specialist in syntax or semantics.
Some of the articles, especially the articles heavily devoted to syntactic theory, might be difficult for the beginning student of linguistics. While not detracting from the value of the book as a whole, small errors, mostly typographic, distract the careful reader (e.g., in Runde’s paper, ʒ ‘yogh’ is seemingly represented as ɜ (passim) and on p. 163, the ᾰ {breve} should be ἀ {smooth breathing mark}, while the η ‘eta’ should be a π ‘pi’) . Given the quality of scholarship and the nature of the work (historical linguistics), the errors do a disservice to the authors.
The editors aimed to provide a coherent view of how historical linguistics has appropriated methodology used in corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics, and they admirably achieved their goal by including articles of high quality that demonstrate how scholars are maintaining abreast of current theories and practices in their respective fields. The critiques to the articles by fellow scholars and then the rebuttal by the original author(s) is a highlight of this book and should be included in other similar volumes to encourage such debate. While some articles are somewhat narrowly focused (one article focuses solely on one word), others offer a larger perspective on the topic being discussed (one article focuses on a class of words).
REFERENCE Garner, Bryan A. 2003. Garner’s Modern American Usage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
Blake Shedd is a full-time instructor in the English Language Center at Koç
University, Istanbul, Turkey. In 2010 he received a Master of Arts in
Modern Languages with a specialization in Teaching English as a Second
Language from the University of Mississippi; previously he completed a
Master of Arts in German in 2008. His research interests include English
and German language teaching, historical linguistics, poetry, the history
of the English language, and Old English.
