Table Of ContentContact, Variation, and Change in the History of English
Studies in Language Companion Series (SLCS)
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Editors
Werner Abraham Elly van Gelderen
University of Vienna / Arizona State University
University of Munich
Editorial Board
Bernard Comrie Christian Lehmann
Max Planck Institute, Leipzig University of Erfurt
and University of California, Santa Barbara
Marianne Mithun
William Croft University of California, Santa Barbara
University of New Mexico
Heiko Narrog
Östen Dahl Tohuku University
University of Stockholm
Johanna L. Wood
Gerrit J. Dimmendaal University of Aarhus
University of Cologne
Debra Ziegeler
Ekkehard König University of Paris III
Free University of Berlin
Volume 159
Contact, Variation, and Change in the History of English
Edited by Simone E. Pfenninger, Olga Timofeeva, Anne-Christine Gardner,
Alpo Honkapohja, Marianne Hundt and Daniel Schreier
Contact, Variation, and Change
in the History of English
Edited by
Simone E. Pfenninger
Olga Timofeeva
Anne-Christine Gardner
Alpo Honkapohja
Marianne Hundt
Daniel Schreier
University Zurich
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Contact, Variation, and Change in the History of English / Edited by Simone E. Pfenninger,
Olga Timofeeva, Anne-Christine Gardner, Alpo Honkapohja, Marianne Hundt
and Daniel Schreier.
p. cm. (Studies in Language Companion Series, issn 0165-7763 ; v. 159)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. English language--Variation--History. 2. Languages in contact--History. 3. Linguistic
change--History. I. Pfenninger, Simone E.
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Table of content
At the crossroads of language change, variation, and contact 1
Simone E. Pfenninger, Olga Timofeeva, Anne-Christine Gardner,
Alpo Honkapohja, Marianne Hundt and Daniel Schreier
part i. Language change
Knitting and splitting information: Medial placement
of linking adverbials in the history of English 11
Ursula Lenker
The order of adverbials of time and place in Old English 39
Susanne Chrambach
The demise of a preterite-present verb: Why was unnan lost? 61
Anna Wojtyś
Gradience in an abrupt change: Stress shift in English disyllabic
noun-verb pairs 83
Betty S. Phillips
Vowels before /r/ in the history of English 95
Raymond Hickey
part ii. Language variation
“Pained the eye and stunned the ear”: Language ideology
and the progressive passive in the nineteenth century 113
Lieselotte Anderwald
Watching as-clauses in Late Modern English 137
Cristiano Broccias
Colloquialization and “decolloquialization”: Phrasal verbs
in formal contexts, 1650–1990 163
Paula Rodríguez Puente
Letters of Artisans and the Labouring Poor (England, c. 1750–1835):
Approaching linguistic diversity in Late Modern English 187
Mikko Laitinen & Anita Auer
i Contact, Variation, and Change in the History of English
New-dialect formation in medieval Ireland: A corpus-based study
of Irish English pre-modal verbs 213
Marije van Hattum
Tracing uses of will and would in Late Modern British and Irish English 239
Patricia Ronan
part iii. Variation and change in contact situations
The subjunctive mood in Philippine English: A diachronic analysis 259
Peter Collins, Ariane Macalinga Borlongan,
Joo-Hyuk Lim & Xinyue Yao
Revisiting a millennium of migrations: Contextualizing
Dutch/Low-German influence on English dialect lexis 281
Emil Chamson
〈U〉 or 〈o〉: A dilemma of the Middle English scribal practice 305
Jerzy Wełna
Index 325
At the crossroads of language change,
variation, and contact
Simone E. Pfenninger, Olga Timofeeva, Anne-Christine
Gardner, Alpo Honkapohja, Marianne Hundt & Daniel Schreier
University of Zurich
1. The present volume
This collection of 14 selected, peer-reviewed papers is at the crossroads of three
fields of inquiry that are of great importance in historical linguistics: language
change, (socio)linguistic research on variation, and contact linguistics. The
essays of this volume aim at facilitating exchange between these three fields,
predominantly by means of approaching specific topics from at least two per-
spectives, juxtaposing the roles of language contact, variation, and/or change
against the backdrop of a variety of theoretical frameworks. At the same time
the volume aims to provide an insight into current research issues in these fields.
Owing to a range of recently-developed methodological innovations, such as
methods for quantifying linguistic variation (which is a prerequisite for lan-
guage change) or new corpus-based methods for investigating text-type varia-
tion, the contributors are able to trace linguistic change in different periods and
contact situations, demonstrate how variation occurs, and how language change
acts upon this variation. Another strand of research in historical linguistics has
started to systematically compare language use and contemporary usage guides
and grammars, thereby adding a new dimension to language variation and
socio-historical reasons for change. Thus, the chapters go beyond core issues
of language variation and change, focusing on the boundary between word and
grammar, discourse and ideology in the history of the English language. This is
important inasmuch as it has become increasingly clear in recent years that dia-
chronic change cannot be fully understood without a close analysis of variation
across written genres, language use in society as well as the external influence of
language contact.
2 Simone E. Pfenninger et al.
2. Structure of the volume
The volume is structured into three parts, each addressing topics that con-
cern more than one of the areas mentioned above (language contact, variation
and change), so there is an inevitable dynamic element of cross-disciplinarity.
The three parts progress from domain-specific to domain-general processes
of language change and variation. The contributors of Part I, namely Lenker,
Chrambach, Wojtyś, Phillips, and Hickey, cast light upon a number of ques-
tions and issues concerning language change as it is driven from dependently
motivated principles; i.e. these authors explain diachronic changes by looking
at form as well as meaning from the point of view of the language, viewing
language as a process (rather than a product). In Part II, Anderwald, Broccias,
Rodrídguez-Puente, and Laitinen and Auer offer fresh perspectives on text-type
variation and linguistic variation in different socioeconomic and historical con-
texts, while van Hattum and Ronan discuss features of Irish English that are the
result of long periods of contact. One of the main insights in Part III is that no
change can be expected to be immune from global influences. This takes center
stage in the offerings by Collins et al., Chamson and Wełna, who seek external
explanations according to which phenomena are not investigated exclusively
with reference to and within the domain to which they belong; rather, they take
into account the way a language behaves when in contact with and influenced
by other languages.
2.1 Part I (“Language change”)
The volume opens with five chapters that zoom in on the complex interdepen-
dencies between synchrony and diachrony, variation and change, giving special
attention to morpho-syntactic change as well as changes related to information-
structural choices, phonology, and prosody in the history of English. In the first
paper, Ursula Lenker traces the development of the relatively recent phenomenon
of medial instead of initial placement of connectors such as however or therefore
from Middle to Present-Day English. Focusing on medially placed adverbials and
their discourse functions in Late Modern and Present-Day English, she comes to
the conclusion that there exists a principal distinction between two medial posi-
tions: (1) “post-initial” positions that place attention on the preceding elements
(a frame-setting adverbial or a subject) and (2) “post-verb” positions that sepa-
rate topic from comment/focus material and thus place attention on this material.
Even though these two discourse functions are only beginning to be discussed in
literature, usage guides and dictionaries do comment on the stylistic effects of the
medial positions of adverbials.
At the crossroads of language change, variation, and contact 3
The aim of Susanne Chrambach, then, is to investigate the order of Old English
adverbials of time and place in what she calls “clusters of adverbials”, that is, “adver-
bials occurring immediately adjacent to each other in a clause” (43). A survey
of literature on Present-Day English clusters shows that the scholarly consensus
on the order of the adverbials of time and place is that there is a clear prefer-
ence for place adverbials to precede time adverbials (place-before-time order).
Chrambach’s own study, based on an analysis of the York-Toronto-H elsinki Parsed
Corpus of Old English Prose, demonstrates that the reverse order, time-before-
place, characterizes Old English clusters of adverbials. The preference for this
order is observed from OE2 to OE4 subperiods of Old English, across translations
from Latin and original texts, regardless of individual authors and genres. Among
the factors that influence the order of the adverbials, clause p attern, complexity,
weight, obligatoriness, realization form, position of the cluster, kind of lexical verb,
etc. are considered, and the extent of their influence is tested in a multifactorial
analysis with the help of a binary logistic regression.
Anna Wojtyś focuses on the fate of the preterite-present verb unnan ‘to grant’
in Old and Middle English, giving special attention to the language internal and
external factors that might have influenced its decay and death in the late fourteenth
century. Statistics show that the use of unnan in the Old English period was mostly
limited to legal contexts, in particular, to writs, wills, and charters in which land
or other property was “granted” or “bequeathed” to people or monasteries. Even
though these documents continued to be copied in the Middle E nglish period,
new ones were typically composed in either Latin or French. While the legal sense
of the verb fell into disuse, in its second most frequent context – religious writings
(in such phrases as “God grant/ give/ allow”) – unnan had powerful competitors:
gifan and sellan ‘to give’ in Old English, and graunten ‘to grant’ in Middle English.
Wojtyś concludes that the loss of unnan was primarily conditioned by the socio-
linguistic change that affected the practices of writing charters after the Norman
Conquest.
Betty S. Phillips looks into the on-going analogical change in stress from ear-
lier disyllabic backstressed nouns and verbs to forestressed nouns and backstressed
verbs. Given Sereno & Jongman’s (1995) evidence of gradient stress in bisyllabic
words which can function as either nouns or verbs, Phillips investigates whether
the development of diatones in English (CONvict n, conVICT v. < conVICT n.
or v.) and the further shift of some diatones to initial stress (e.g. REsearch n. or v.)
might display a similar gradient component. Data from current U.S. and B ritish
pronunciations (Wells 2008) and their noun/verb frequency ratios as derived from
the Corpus of Contemporary American English reveal such an effect, but only for
the shift of diatones to initial stress. Words which had undergone the diatonic
stress shift were found to be influenced by their combined noun + verb frequency.
