Introduction

The USA presents rich terrain for studying processes and outcomes of language contact. Home to approximately 311 languages, it is not only the fifth most linguistically diverse country in the world (Gordon 2005), but also currently the fifth largest Spanish-speaking nation (CIA 2008). This multilingual reality is often overshadowed by the predominance of English, spoken by just over 80 percent of the largely monolingual population (US Census Bureau 2000a). Multilingual since time immemorial, the territory currently occupied by the USA has hosted a full gamut of contact phenomena, from instances where only a few words are borrowed from one language into another, to others in which new languages of various kinds are created. Long before Europeans arrived, many Native American groups solved the problem of communication across tribal boundaries through lingua francas (i.e. common languages) such as Mobilian Jargon (a pidginized form of Choctaw-Chickasaw in widespread use across the Mississippian complex), and Chinook Jargon (an interethnic pidgin spoken along the Pacific northwest coast from Oregon to the Alaska panhandle and inland along major rivers).

Three great waves of European colonization introduced English along with at least seven major languages (Danish, Dutch, French, German, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish), three of which (Spanish, French, and German) became prominent languages of immigration. Each of these provided sources for common American words (e.g. Swedish smorgasbord, Dutch scout, French prairie, German kindergarten, Spanish ranch).

Introduction

The patterns of variation in adjective comparison in a synchronic and diachronic perspective is a topic which has recently attracted a good deal of attention (see Kytö 1996a; Kytö and Romaine 1997, 2000; Leech and Culpeper 1997; and Mondorf 2002 and 2003, for a selective sample of studies). This variation involves competition between the inflectional comparative/superlative (e.g. happier/happiest), historically the older form, and the newer periphrastic construction (e.g. more/most elegant). The double comparative (more quicker) and double superlative (e.g. most delightfulest) forms were much less frequent in the history of English. They are now considered non-standard. In this chapter we will extend our analyses by considering patterns of variation in adjective comparison in nineteenth-century English, in the light of the data drawn from the CONCE corpus and, in reference to our earlier work on the topic, the ARCHER corpus (for A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers, see Biber et al. 1994a and 1994b).

In our studies we have identified some of the major linguistic and extralinguistic factors constraining variation, in particular, word structure and genre. As far as word structure is concerned, we looked at word length and the nature of the word ending as major grammatical determinants influencing the variation, although there are other linguistic factors in need of consideration, as we will show later on in the present study (for earlier observations, see e.g. Leech and Culpeper 1997: 357–8, 366–9, and Mondorf 2002 and 2003).

Introduction

Britain's three and a half centuries of imperialism spread not just varieties of standard and regional English but also resulted in the creation of more English lexicon pidgins and creoles than any other language. The aim of this chapter is to document the origins and nature of the English input to the pidgins and creoles in the Pacific with lexical affiliation to English. For simplicity's sake, I adopt the following definitions of the terms ‘pidgin’ and ‘creole’, although they are not without controversy (see Romaine 1988 for more detailed discussion). A pidgin is a contact variety restricted in form and function and native to no one, which is formed by members of at least two (and usually more) groups of different linguistic backgrounds. A creole is a nativised pidgin, expanded in form and function to meet the communicative needs of a community of native speakers.

By the time Captain James Cook died in the Hawaiian islands in 1779, Europeans had ‘discovered’ virtually all of the major islands in the Pacific and fixed their locations on maps. This marked the end of an age of exploration and discovery and the beginning of an era of commercial exploitation, missionisation and colonisation. In 1788 the first English settlement was established at Port Jackson, New South Wales, and whalers entered Pacific waters from Cape Horn. In 1797 the London Missionary Society began work in Tahiti.

Pre-contact: languages before English in North America

English speakers were relatively late participants in the expansion of European colonialism. Long before English was much used outside the British Isles other European languages such as Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch had reached around the world. The first signs of the global expansion that was to characterize the development of English in subsequent centuries and bring it into contact with many other languages appeared in the sixteenth century. Before that time English was little used abroad, and languages outside Europe had hardly any direct influence on it.

The waves of settlement and immigration that brought the first settlers to the North American continent covered an enormous time span and involved widely scattered settlements. Initially, there was little two-way contact between the first English settlers and the indigenous people in North America (R. Bailey 1991a, 62). English speakers had come explicitly as colonists, unlike the French, for instance, who came to trade. The English settlers lived in self-contained communities dependent on Britain for supplies until necessity drove them to seek help locally. The earliest words to make their way back to England came in travelers' reports and were more usually from European rather than indigenous languages. Even many of the indigenous words such as tobacco that eventually were to become part of international English came in via another European language first (§ 4.2.2.2).

Introduction

In this paper we will address the standardisation processes in American and British English with reference to competing forms of adjective comparison. The primary competition is between the older inflectional comparative (e.g. faster) and the newer periphrastic construction (e.g. more beautiful), with the much less frequent double comparative (e.g. more richer) now considered non-standard. In this study we will focus on the paradigm of the non-defective adjectives, a central category illustrated by the above uses. We thus omit from discussion the group of defective (or heterogeneous) adjectives (e.g. good, better, best).

Our main sources of data here will be the pilot version of the Corpus of Early American English (1620–1720) and ARCHER (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers; see Biber et al. 1994a and 1994b). For the purposes of this study we have taken from ARCHER some 750,000 words representing five text types sampled from the subperiods containing texts from both British and American English, i.e. 1750–1800, 1850–1900, and 1950–1990. Together, this yields a corpus of nearly a million words which allows us to address similarities and differences in standardisation processes affecting these two varieties of English at the same time as it tests the potential of ARCHER for this type of comparative study. Both corpora comprise various text types, which allows us also to explore the question of the extent to which genre or text type influences standardisation. Previous diachronic research has revealed both word structure and text type as important factors.