Studies in the History of the English Language: A Millennial Perspective (review)

This volume includes eighteen articles first presented at the inaugural meeting of SHEL (Studies in the History of the English Language) held at UCLA in May 2000, plus one solicited article and one rejoinder. SHEL is intended as the North American equivalent of the International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL), which has met (roughly) biennially in Europe since 1979. This volume is distinguished from other conference proceedings in including a number of ‘millennial’ articles by well-known scholars intended to establish the state of the art and to set out directions for further research in various subfields of English historical linguistics.

The millennial articles treat the topics of mixed-language texts, dialectology, historical semantics/pragmatics, etymology, and historical metrics. Herbert Schendl, in a richly detailed review article entitled ‘Mixed-language texts as data and evidence in English historical linguistics’, argues that modern research in codeswitching has not yet been fully realized in work in historical linguistics. Despite some attention to medieval mixed-language texts, what is needed is a multilevel approach taking syntactic-grammatical, functional-pragmatic, discursive, and sociolinguistic factors into account. Problems that require further study are the distinction between switching and borrowing, the possibilities of mixed-codes, and speakers’ perceptions of codes. Schendl concludes by pointing out the obvious link between codeswitching and language shift and the possible insights that work on bilingualism may provide into language structure. In ‘Dialectology and the history of the English language’, William A. Kretzschmar, Jr. observes that despite the impetus to dialectology provided by the Neogrammarians, ‘the findings of dialectologists remain at odds with our traditional ways of thinking about sound change in historical linguistics’ (92). He provides a critical assessment of modern defenders of the Neogrammarian position such as Hans Kurath and William Labov, and argues that we should reject the concept of mechanical sound change yet retain a systematic focus on the facts of language variation. Dialectology can offer historical linguistics both studies of individual words and insights into language variation. Providing an extended example of the former, Kretzschmar ends by suggesting that ‘the new history of the English language could well be the trace of variation’ (105).

Elizabeth Closs Traugott, in ‘From etymology to historical pragmatics’, addresses the lag between synchronic and diachronic linguistics in the area of pragmatic-semantic change. She describes some recent work on the regularities and directionalities of semantic change motivated by lexical field theory, cognitive linguistics, grammaticalization, and historical pragmatics. Disputing those who reject unidirectionality in grammaticalization and see grammaticalization as merely an ‘epiphenomenon’, Traugott argues that three mechanisms—analogy, reanalysis, and subjectification—contribute to the overarching directionality in grammaticalization from content to procedural meaning. She provides a new model of grammaticalization and ends by setting out a number of challenges facing those studying semantic-pragmatic change in English. In ‘Origin unknown’, Anatoly Liberman reveals the dismal state of English etymology, as least as evidenced by existing dictionaries. Although some words are of undisputed etymology, there still exist many English words recorded as of ‘uncertain etymology’ or of ‘dialectal’ or ‘cant’ origin. The goal of etymology is to produce a root, but the origins of roots are themselves hidden and ‘every etymology sooner or later reaches a dead end’ (117). Liberman, however, believes that correct etymologies do exist for many words—in articles, notes, reviews, and books. What is needed, he feels, is a dictionary that critically evaluates all the existing literature and provides a cumulative bibliography; Liberman himself is at work on such a dictionary.

A debate concerning metrics is touched off by Thomas Cable in ‘Issues for a new history of English prosody’. Cable argues that Geoffrey Chaucer’s meter is a regular pattern of alternating stress with some flexibility allowed by the phonology. Foot structure and a rising prosodic...