I.3.1 Theories and methodologies (Section 1)

The chapters in Section 1 of the handbook provide surveys of theoretical and methodological approaches adopted in studying the history of English, highlighting both traditional and more recent methods in the field. The contents are as follows: in Chapter 1, Suzanne Romaine examines variationist approaches, including historical sociolinguistics, historical dialectology, and historical genre analysis. Chapter 2, by Martin Hilpert and Stefan Th. Gries, addresses quantitative approaches with a specific focus on diachronic corpus linguistics. In Chapter 3, Gabriella Mazzon turns to historical pragmatics. Chapter 4, by Graeme Trousdale, deals with the application of construction grammar to historical questions. In Chapter 5, Elly van Gelderen discusses generative approaches from a historical-linguistic perspective, focusing on two recent approaches, the Principles and Parameters (P&P) model and the Minimalist Program. Finally, in Chapter 6, Robert D. Fulk, examines the role of philological methods in English historical linguistics.

In addition to discussing the theoretical positions that have informed research in English historical linguistics, the chapters in Section 1 provide information on the connections of the field with other disciplines, including history, social sciences, cognitive studies, and other related areas. The chapters also provide insight into the historiography of the field. The philological study of earlier stages of English, discussed in Chapter 6, lies at the roots of English historical linguistics; the field originally grew from the neighbouring fields of English philology and historical-comparative linguistics. The role of philological methods can be traced from the first views into the history of English offered by sixteenth-century studies of Old English to the most recent contributions. These advances make new textual material available for scholarship in the form of digital editions of manuscripts and provide extralinguistic information about the contextual aspects of historical texts and the communicative settings in which they were produced and used. Since the evidence for the early history of English depends critically on philological scholarship, philological methods retain an important status at the primary level of providing data in the field.

Philological studies originally derived from motivations such as religious exegesis and the study of early literature (see Chapter 6). Later approaches have been inspired by a specific interest in language, its formal and functional characteristics in earlier periods, and its development over time. As a sub-discipline of linguistics, English historical linguistics has obviously been influenced by trends and developments in contemporary linguistic science, and the approaches addressed in this section tend to have their non-historical counterparts, including Chomskyan generative theory (Chapter 5) and the more recent cognitive approaches, such as usage-based construction grammar (Chapter 4) and synchronic pragmatics (Chapter 3). Similarly, the historical variationist and sociolinguistic approaches (Chapter 1) were inspired by broad paradigm shifts and innovations in linguistics, demonstrating an increasing interest in the correlation of language-external factors with the forms and functions of language and with language change. The rise of the variationist approach, like other frameworks of English historical linguistics, has benefited greatly from the increasing availability of different kinds of historical corpora since the 1990s. The arrival of corpora and the subsequent growth in their size have also facilitated the use of quantitative approaches and increasingly refined statistical tools in the analysis of historical language data (Chapter 2). Simultaneously, the interest in the impact of language-external factors, including the communicative context, has given new impetus to qualitative analyses focusing on language use and meaning-making. This has resulted in the emergence of new fields of inquiry, such as historical pragmatics and historical discourse analysis (Chapter 3). The picture that emerges from the chapters in Section 1 shows a theoretically informed, broad field of empirical research where different theoretical perspectives contribute to our understanding about the history of the language in different ways; a single approach could hardly have yielded the body of knowledge obtained within the field to date.

The theoretical and methodological approaches adopted for studying the history of English also reflect the research questions that have driven and continue to drive research in the field. Both synchronic and diachronic interests have had an impact on the field from the very beginning. Some overarching themes or shifts in mainstream interests can be identified. For example, an urge to understand language change and its mechanisms has inspired research within various theoretical frameworks, focusing on the process of change from different perspectives, as can be seen in the chapters of Section 3 in this handbook. Thus, research in historical generative grammar reflects an interest in, for example, changes in word order and information structure, or evidence for recurring patterns of change which provide a window on the acquisition process (see Chapter 5). Construction grammar, which conceptualizes language in terms of conventionalized non-modular form–meaning pairings at different levels of granularity, considers both the form and function side of linguistic change, and can reveal several successive small-scale changes in form and function leading to a change on a more general or abstract level (see Chapter 4). Finally, variationist approaches like sociohistorical linguistics pay special attention to the role of language-external factors in language change, aiming at an account of how language change diffuses, i.e. an account of how particular functions, uses and kinds of variation develop within particular language varieties, speech communities, social networks, individuals, texts, and genres (see Chapter 1).

A major turning point in the methodological and theoretical development of the field was the arrival of electronic corpora, allowing automated extraction of data from large amounts of text (see Chapter 8 in Section 2). Diachronic corpora spanning several centuries facilitate systematic analysis of long-term diachronic changes and allow quantitative analyses, aiming at generalizations, patterns, and mappings, often with the help of fine-grained statistical analyses (see Chapter 2). More recently, the corpus-based study of recent change has become a thriving field (for examples, see Chapter 8). Structured corpora have also facilitated the study of language history from the perspective of genres, and inspired domain-specific analyses of linguistic and textual features (see Chapter 16 in Section 3).

In some approaches, the analytical procedure is entirely based on the manual extraction of data from the texts. For such studies, corpora can nevertheless provide research material in a conveniently accessible format. An example of this approach in the present handbook is seen in a case study of ambisyllabicity in the history of English (see Chapter 25 in Section 4). There is, of course, research beyond corpora as well, seen in a number of important and thriving subfields of English historical linguistics that do not essentially rely on corpus linguistic methods. These include, for example, various analytical approaches that require direct access to original handwritten documents and their physical features, illustrated in the handbook by a case study of the visual pragmatics of Middle English manuscripts (Chapter 28 in Section 4).

I.3.2 Evidence: material and data (Section 2)

The availability and status of the linguistic evidence that has been preserved for us from past centuries have always been crucial to research in historical linguistics. The further one goes back in history, the fewer – and less varied – the extant sources tend to be. Linguistic evidence is available to us only in written form before the invention of audio-recording devices in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Words, sentences or full texts are preserved in such forms as coins, manuscripts, or early printed books. Both written and spoken language can serve as loci for change, and recently it is spoken face-to-face interaction and colloquial contexts that have started to attract scholars’ attention. In this respect, the fact that we only have written evidence from past periods poses a major challenge to historical linguists (see Chapter 9). English had a millennium of written records behind it before audio-recordings became possible, and developing methods that will help to deal with this and other data problems is one of the foci of current work in the field. Access to computerized texts has facilitated data collection in ways that would have made English linguists gasp only a little more than fifty years ago; for instance, it is possible to search electronic texts for words and phrases which the data retrieval programme can list in contexts (so-called concordances) that have been conveniently sorted out for further analyses. Such sources of material have also given rise to new challenges that have given impetus to interdisciplinary collaboration between historical linguists and corpus and computational linguists; an example of such collaboration is work on software intended to help to deal with spelling variation in early texts.

The topics of the chapters in this section of the handbook have been chosen to give glimpses into the many-faceted data sources that English historical linguists nowadays have at their disposal, and to highlight both traditional and modern approaches to data collection and other aspects of methodology. While Chapter 7, by Simon Horobin, focuses on manuscripts and, to some extent, early printed books, electronic resources are in focus in Chapter 8, by María José López-Couso. In Chapter 9, Christian Mair turns to historical sound recordings, and Chapter 10, by Nuria Yáñez-Bouza, deals with the evidence yielded by historical grammars. In Chapter 11, Erik Smitterberg discusses the constraints that are inherent in the use of historical material, and the ways of arriving at definitions of linguistic variables which are necessary for valid data collection.

In terms of chronology, the chapters in this section cover the entire history of English, especially Chapters 7 and 8 on manuscripts, early printed books, and electronic resources. For historical reasons, Chapter 9 on historical sound recordings has a starting point in the 1870s, with a pioneering stretch of half a century leading to the advent of radio and sound films in the 1920s when advances in technology improved the quality of recordings to such an extent that research on the data became possible. Chapter 10 places some emphasis on the Late Modern English period, after Early Modern English grammar writing had become emancipated from Latin traditions. In Chapter 11 on data collection, most examples are drawn from the Early and Late Modern English periods.

Understandably, there have been shifts in the interest felt for different aspects of English historical linguistics, as in any academic field. From the times of philologically dominated approaches (see Chapter 6 in Section 1), research on the history of English is now open to various degrees of philological and/or linguistic engagement depending on the aims of a study. Regarding linguistic periods, research on Old and Middle English dominated up until the 1980s, while over the past few decades, interest in the early and late modern periods has exploded. The increasing availability of data in electronic form from these periods, notably the late modern period, has undoubtedly contributed to the boom. Indeed, corpus linguistic approaches are currently perhaps the most conspicuous trend in English linguistics, with significant efforts invested in making new data sources available and in enhancing the techniques of how to make the best use of them (see Chapter 8). Following this trend, manuscript studies have been energized by recent demands on editors to produce text editions, preferably in electronic form, which are faithful to original manuscripts and thus permit linguistic research based on reliable renderings of early texts.

Of the types of language use studied, genres conveying degrees of ‘spoken’ or ‘colloquial’ language of the past have become an object of vibrant study. As discussed in Chapter 9, with reference to Hermann Paul's (Reference Paul1880) views, the sources we have from past stages of language use tend to be ‘written, edited, standardized, and monologic’ while what historical linguists would like to consult are ‘spoken, spontaneous, vernacular and interactive/dialogic’ texts. As a consequence, over the past two or three decades, there has been a notable rise in interest for the use of texts approximating informal, conversational, or vernacular usage, conveyed in sources such as private letters, drama comedy, quoted speech in fiction, and direct speech cited in witness depositions. Interestingly, a genre at the opposite end of the stylistic continuum has also started to attract researchers’ attention, i.e. the study of early grammars (see Chapter 10). This revival of interest has been fortified along with access to online resources such as Early English Books Online, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, and the Eighteenth-Century English Grammars database, and has allowed scholars to discover the potential of early grammar writing as a source of evidence for the study of the history of English. It should also be pointed out that other written texts representative of various genres (e.g. science, history writing, law, religious treatises) have continued to interest researchers. These texts are essential components in most historical corpora, providing material for empirical investigations of language variation and change.

As asserted above, the use of large-scale electronic resources has profoundly influenced the work done in English historical linguistics. Corpus-linguistic approaches have been most successful in the study of morphosyntactic phenomena (see Chapter 8), while the corpus-based study of, for instance, phonological features is still in its beginnings. Electronic dictionaries such as the Oxford English Dictionary Online (OED), the Middle English Dictionary (MED), and the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED) have meant a great boost for the study of word meanings and semantic fields (see Chapter 23 in Section 4). Electronic linguistic atlases have also been subject to rapid advances, allowing interactive use whereby scholars are now able to e.g. draw dialect maps for the medieval period. A recent development is the introduction of the first English historical mega-corpora, which provide access to hundreds of millions of words and are particularly useful, for example, for studying low-frequency phenomena (see Chapter 8). While the use of corpus-linguistic techniques mostly saves time in data collection, automated searches can also be constrained by their being based on strings of characters or coded entities; the spelling variation mentioned above can also hamper the use of search programs on material that has not been annotated by normalizing the word forms or by adding grammatical or semantic tagging (see Chapter 11 and Chapter 27 in Section 4).

Although research on early audio-recordings is still in its infancy, there have already been encouraging results in the use of early audio data in, for instance, the study of changes in British RP in the latter part of the twentieth century and in the study of early New Zealand English (see Chapter 9). Regarding early regional or transplanted varieties of English, the survey of the electronic sources included in Chapter 8 highlights corpora of early Scottish and Irish English, and corpora representative of historical periods of such international varieties as American English, Canadian English, and Australian and New Zealand English.

Despite the advances in automated data collection, the ultimate challenges of linguistic research still remain. The question of how to define a linguistic variable and how to verify the validity and reliability of one's research design still requires careful consideration. Some of the central issues involved are considered in Chapter 11, where examples are given of ways of proceeding. The question of whether quantitative or qualitative approaches or – as is increasingly the case – a combination of both these approaches would serve the researcher best also needs consideration (see Chapter 8). Regarding the amount of data, even small amounts of data can be of value for qualitative approaches.

I.4.1 Perspectives on processes of change (Section 3)

Change is a constant feature of all living languages, and one of the key interests of English historical-linguistic research. The nine chapters included in Section 3 of the handbook focus on this topic. Together the chapters provide a concentrated, yet multifaceted view of changes that have taken place in the history of English and the processes by which they have come about. At the same time, the chapters provide an overview of research exploring change in English. Four chapters examine change at different levels of language. Chapter 12, by Raymond Hickey, focuses on phonological change in English. In Chapter 13, Christian Kay and Kathryn Allan discuss lexical change. Morphosyntactic change is the focus of Chapter 14, by Olga Fischer, while Chapter 15, by Susan M. Fitzmaurice, examines the sphere of semantic and pragmatic change. Approaches focusing on language variation are foregrounded in two chapters: Chapter 16, by Irma Taavitsainen, deals with genre dynamics in the history of English; and Chapter 17, by Minna Nevala, discusses sociolinguistic and sociopragmatic change. Standardization is the focus of Chapter 18, by Joan C. Beal. Finally, the last two chapters explore contact-related processes of change. In Chapter 19, Peter Trudgill examines the impact of contact in the earlier history of English, while Chapter 20, by Marianne Hundt, investigates the role of contact in the global spread of English.

The chapters address key issues in language change from various perspectives. Sources of language change receive attention throughout, including both internal factors, active from within the language, and external factors, operating from outside. Internal motivations, i.e. language-systemic causes of change, are seen at work, for example, in phonological and morphosyntactic changes (Chapters 12 and 14). External motivation, such as sociocultural change, is highlighted, for example, in genre dynamics, as cultural expectations concerning the construction of texts in individual genres change over time (see Chapter 16). Sociocultural change, creating new concepts and new cultural practices and making others redundant, also has an important role in the two broad and related strands of lexical change: innovation, when a language acquires new words or existing words acquire new senses; and obsolescence, when existing words drop out of use or lose senses (see Chapter 13). External motivation originating from contact is another important source of lexical change, although the lexicon is by no means the only level of language bearing witness to contact-induced change (see Chapters 19 and 20). However, in many cases multiple causation or a mixture of motivations can be recognized. For example, changes involving standardization are externally motivated, but specific features within the standard repertoire may originally have evolved as a result of system-internal factors (see Chapter 18). Thus, while it is important to understand the role of different motivations for change and their impact on the directions and results of change, the chapters also underline the importance of considering both internal and external factors in individual cases of change, while pointing out that linguistic reality is too complex to be captured by a simple binary division of change types into internal and external ones. As Fischer notes, it is important for the historical linguist, ‘who wants to describe as well as understand the beginning and the endpoint of the change, to analyse the data as much as possible with a mind open to all frameworks relevant for linguistic processing’ (Chapter 14, p. 241).

The principles and mechanisms of language change on different levels of language receive detailed scrutiny in the handbook, and are illustrated with examples of individual linguistic features that have been affected by the relevant changes. Some mechanisms mainly operate on one level; for example, metaphorization or metonymization are mechanisms of semantic and pragmatic change (see Chapter 15). Other mechanisms can affect linguistic items on several levels, and are discussed from different perspectives in different chapters of the handbook. For example, grammaticalization, whereby lexical elements lose their concrete meanings and adopt grammatical functions, is examined in the handbook from the perspectives of phonological, morphosyntactic, and semantic and pragmatic change (see Chapters 12, 14, and 15). Some processes of change consist of several micro-steps involving various mechanisms. Such sequences of micro-changes are illustrated in Section 4 of the handbook in a case study tracing steps in subjectification, a pragmatic-semantic process by which meanings become increasingly based on the speaker's perspective (see Chapter 22).

The study of the role of social factors in mechanisms of language change is discussed in the handbook from various angles. These include, for example, sociolinguistic approaches, concerned with the impact of social categories like gender, class, age, or education, or the influence of social networks on the diffusion or propagation of language change (see Chapter 17). In addition, the handbook considers sociopragmatic, interactional processes, examining the dependence of linguistic phenomena on issues such as communicative situations and speaker–hearer interaction, including social hierarchies and roles, and identity work (see Chapters 15 and 17). The important role of language ideologies and attitudes in language change is also highlighted in the handbook, particularly in the processes of standardization, including the notions of prestige, normativity, and prescriptivism (see Chapters 10 and 18).

Finally, several chapters of the handbook discuss research on processes of language contact and contact-induced change. Contact-related changes are examined in two chapters, spanning the whole history of the English language and providing a broad coverage of temporal and regional varieties of English with two foci: the period from the prehistory through the earliest dialectal varieties of Old English to the Middle Ages (Chapter 19); and the spread of English beyond the British Isles since the early modern period, which has resulted in a large number of post-colonial varieties of English, the so-called outer-circle Englishes (Chapter 20). In his discussion of the earlier period, Peter Trudgill adopts a sociolinguistically informed point of view, examining those language-contact events involving English which have had structural consequences for mother-tongue English as a whole. In Chapter 20, which concerns language contact in post-colonial contexts of the modern period, the focus of attention is on the impact of processes like koinéization, nativization, and the relationship of language and dialect contact.

The concentration on language change in this section of the handbook is not intended to imply that stability in language would be uninteresting, although it has received less attention in research to date. Recent research shows that the dynamics of diachronic variation may range from relative stability to substantial reorganization, which requires a fine level of observational granularity. For example, the diachronic analysis of medieval and Early Modern English scientific and medical writing shows that some genres retain relatively stable and conventionalized genre features for centuries, while others undergo rapid changes in their linguistic characteristics (see Chapter 16).

I.4.2 Highlighting the research process (Section 4)

The chapters in Section 4 of the handbook are closely linked with those in the previous sections, especially Section 3; they are intended to be illustrative accounts of hands-on research on important and recent research foci in English historical linguistics. Thus, while Chapter 12 in Section 3 highlights phonological change in English, Chapter 25, by Donka Minkova and Kie Ross Zuraw, in Section 4 throws light on the use of allophonic and distributional tests for the study of ambisyllabicity in early English. Similarly, while Chapter 13 in Section 3 focuses on processes of lexical change, Chapter 23 by Philip Durkin in Section 4 demonstrates the ways in which dictionaries and thesauri can be used to study the history of individual words or word families.

There are further thematic connections between the chapters in the present section and the other sections of the handbook. For instance, the central principles of the variationist framework (Chapter 1 in Section 1) are echoed in the methodologies adopted for several chapters in Section 4. Among them are Chapter 21 on the development of nominal modifiers of head nouns, by Douglas Biber, with Jesse Egbert, Bethany Gray, Rahel Oppliger, and Benedikt Szmrecsanyi, and Chapter 27 on third-person present singular verb inflection in Early Modern English speech-related genres, by Terry Walker. The latter chapter, along with Chapter 28 on the study of speech presentation in early English manuscripts, by Colette Moore, also draws on the historical pragmatics framework presented in Chapter 3 in Section 1. Chapter 22 on how to identify micro-changes in subjectification processes, by Elizabeth Closs Traugott, draws on the construction grammar framework (Chapter 4 in Section 1), and has close affinities with Chapter 15 in Section 3, on semantic and pragmatic change. Chapter 24 on multilingualism in the Middle Ages, by Tim William Machan, can be related to language-contact issues discussed in Chapters 19 and 20 in Section 3. Finally, morphosyntactic change which is discussed in Chapter 14 in Section 3, is in focus in Chapter 26, by Cynthia Allen, who investigates aspects of typological change of English from a synthetic to an analytic language, with special attention paid to developments in the genitive case and the different ways of expressing possession in Old and Middle English.

Rather than illustrating the development of particular linguistic features in the history of the English language, the chapters in Section 4 are primarily intended to show how linguistic analyses of individual research questions can be conducted in order to answer the research questions asked. Indeed, many of the chapter authors comment on the relevance and manageability of research questions from the perspective of the research process.

The overall aim of the chapters in Section 4 has been to guide the reader, by highlighting the research process and its different stages explicitly and transparently from beginning to end. These stages invariably involve choices and reasoning on the researcher's part which can often go unmentioned in publications or research reports. The authors of the chapters were encouraged to make frequent use of meta-textual commentary to give advice on what to do and not to do when studying a particular linguistic phenomenon. Accordingly, in their investigation of variation and change in s-genitives, of-genitives, and noun–noun phrases indicating possession (e.g. the Communist Party's chief, the chief of the Communist Party, and the Communist Party chief, respectively), the authors carefully document the stages and procedures for their analyses and report on the consequences of their different analytical decisions. Importantly, they position their study in the current language-theoretical framework and identify the gap in the field that their study is intended to fill (Chapter 21). They also highlight the methodological issues that are pressing for empirical investigations of grammatical change in general, and in variationist versus text-linguistic research designs, in particular. The authors conclude by arguing for the need to consider the full set of linguistic variants of potential relevance in structural shifts, to pay attention to both variationist and text-linguistic research designs, and to take into consideration register variation.

While the focus in Chapter 21 was on the implications of selecting different analytical approaches to frequencies in the study of language variation, Chapter 22, by Traugott, presents an investigation where the mere identification of the object of study, subjectification, requires that the researcher should opt for one specific approach and align the data collection to follow its premises. This investigation adopts a construction grammar perspective and aims at identifying formal correlates of subjectification phenomena. The meaning developments can be traced over time after the form–meaning pairs have been established. The author discusses three case studies, BE going to, beside, and besides, and the subjectification of churl, as representative examples of grammatical and lexical developments in regard to subjectification.

On the whole, the investigations included in the present section of the handbook are meant to provide glimpses of central research methodologies of current interest in English linguistics. They cover a wide range of linguistic phenomena, exemplifying research at the phonological, morphosyntactic, lexical, semantic, and pragmatic levels of language. The evidence is drawn from a variety of data sources, among them early manuscripts, computerized multigenre and specialized corpora, dictionaries, and thesauri. In Chapters 27 (Walker) and 28 (Moore), attention is paid to data representative of past ‘spoken’ language, an area of increasing interest not only in research on the history of English but also in the study of the history of e.g. French. In Section 4, tribute is paid throughout to such indispensable reference works as the MED and OED. In toto, the investigations in this section throw light on the long diachrony of the English language, highlighting the developments from the Old English period to Present-day English.