The occurrence of not-contraction (e.g. she isn’t) in three genres in CONCE is examined in detail. In an overall quantitative analysis, not-contraction is compared with uncontracted forms as well as operator contraction (e.g. she’s not). Other potential factors accounted for include the operator itself, gender, word order (e.g. is she not vs. is not she), and no-negation as an alternative negating strategy. A multifactorial, variationist analysis of contexts where not-contracted and uncontracted forms are the main variants demonstrates the importance of factors such as genre and tense. The results provide solid evidence of colloquialization in Drama and Fiction, where not-contraction becomes more frequent; they also reveal that women may have used contraction less than men, which is expected considering the stigmatization of not-contraction, and that the uncontracted is not she pattern in questions may have been used as a more acceptable way of rendering spoken contractions in writing.

Chapter 2 accounts for the general expectation that periods characterized by the dissolution of strong network ties and the establishment of weak ones can be expected to feature a great deal of language change. A survey of sociocultural and linguistic change in England between 1700 and 1900 then demonstrates that structural language change is less prevalent than could be expected given what must have been an increasing prevalence of weak network ties during the period. It is argued that the correlation between weak ties and language change in fact still holds, but that traditional estimates of the amount of language change in Late Modern English do not capture the full extent of the developments that take place between 1700 and 1900.

In this chapter, the stability paradox is resolved. It is demonstrated that the idiolect is the true locus of language change. Language change can be of three basic types: independent innovation, propagation, and propagation-dependent innovation. Independent innovation is the type that is most likely to lead to structural change, but it does not correlate with social factors like network ties. The apparent stability of Late Modern English is due to a large number of idiolects undergoing change that mostly consists in propagation and propagation-dependent innovation. As most of the changes are the result of idiolects adopting features that existed in other idiolects already, these changes do not typically alter the structure of the communal language. Moreover, the emergence of Standard English both provided an existing target for which many speakers aimed and concealed a great deal of the variation that did occur through its predominance in printed texts.

This chapter outlines the three aims of the book: to resolve the stability paradox; to reconcile an idiolect-centred perspective on language change with corpus-linguistic methodology; and to carry out four case studies of colloquialization and densification. Some limitations in scope are also addressed, and the structure of the remainder of the book is outlined.

In this chapter, the units linked by the co-ordinator and are shown to correlate with orality: oral genres use more super-phrasal (e.g. clausal) co-ordination, while higher proportions of phrasal co-ordination characterize literate genres. A development towards more super-phrasal co-ordinationcan thus indicate colloquialization. Analyses demonstrate that newspapers, parliamentary debates, and letters written by men exhibit this very trend in diachrony, while women’s letters unexpectedly develop in the opposite direction. The latter change, however, is shown to be a result not of anti-colloquialization, but of an increased reliance on the sentence as a unit of written discourse in letters by women; main clauses are increasingly placed in separate sentences or separated by semicolons rather than being linked with dashes and co-ordinators, which was a feature of several women’s idiolects in the early nineteenth century. Sentence-initial and, which was a proscribed feature, is the focus of a separate study and is shown to increase in frequency in speech-based and speech-purposed writing. Overall, the results point to colloquialization in several genres.

Participle clauses as postmodifiers in noun phrases (e.g. the window broken by the thief) have been discussed as a potential indication of densification, as they are shorter than their most obvious alternative, that is, finite relative clauses. A careful examination reveals that only a subset of tokens of participle and relative clauses can be considered equivalent and exchangeable, and to reflect this finding both variationist and text-linguistic analyses are carried out. There is some evidence of densification in newspaper language and, to some extent, scientific texts; history texts, in contrast, develop in the opposite direction, underscoring the importance of considering subgenres of academic writing. Among the newspapers considered, the Poor Man’s Guardian, which was aimed at working-class readers, shows no tendencies towards densification; this may be due to journalists’ perceptions about the paper’s readership. The issue of whether variationist or text-linguistic approaches are more suitable is discussed. Non-restrictive participle clauses are shown not to indicate densification; instead, they function as a characterizing or backgrounding device in narrative texts.

In the final chapter, the three aims of the book are returned to and discussed from a holistic perspective. The book ends with a few concluding remarks.

In this chapter, the idiolect-centred approach to language change is reconciled with historical corpus linguistics as a methodology. The issue of what corpus-based studies can and cannot tell us is discussed in terms of the granularity of the analyses. The two types of change in focus in the case studies, colloquialization and densification, are introduced. The two main ways of operationalizing frequency in syntactic studies, namely variationist and text-linguistic approaches, are contrasted. Finally, the two corpora on which the case studies are based, CONCE and CNNE, are introduced; CNNE and its relationship to the newspaper market in nineteenth-century England is discussed in some detail, as CNNE is a new corpus and as the newspaper trade underwent far-reaching changes during the period covered by the corpus. The importance of considering a wide variety of genres owing to the increasing linguistic genre differences that characterize Late Modern English is emphasized.

The increase in nouns as premodifiers in noun phrases (e.g. the stone church) is a well-known aspect of densification in Late Modern English. The corpus analysis shows that both common and proper nouns become more frequent as premodifiers. While newspapers represent the most advanced usage, the general increase in the frequency of this feature and the fact that women use it more than men in letters indicate that there may be two separate developments underway: a general increase in premodifying nouns in the communal language as a change from below and a separate trend towards additional usage as part of the densification of informational writing. Semantic analyses show that most semantic relationships between common nouns as premodifiers and their heads were already present by 1800, though some tendencies towards more opaque combinations could be found in genres where a high frequency of the feature was noted; as regards proper nouns as premodifiers, the increase in frequency was coupled with a trend towards more animate referents. Overall, the results provide clear evidence of densification in, above all, newspaper language.

Late Modern English (lModE) is characterised by comparatively few changes to the inventory of morphosyntactic variants (Denison 1998: 92–3). However, a great deal of linguistic change takes place in the period, as the frequencies and relative proportions of many linguistic features (e.g. the progressive and be vs. have as the perfect auxiliary with intransitive main verbs) change greatly between 1700 and 1900.