English in Nineteenth-Century England: An Introduction (review)

English of the nineteenth century has not received as much attention as that of earlier periods, no doubt because of its relative recency or perhaps the sheer amount of written data available (7–9). This book, an overview of developments in English in England between 1800 and 1900, is a preliminary attempt at redressing this imbalance. In addition to discussing a number of (socio) linguistic features of this period, Görlach provides 98 texts (culled from a database of 660) representative of various genres and styles. G states (viii) that the book should serve as a ‘handy companion volume’ to more comprehensive surveys, but the inclusion of 82 exercises suggests that he also intended it to be used as a course textbook.

In the introduction (1–25), Gdiscusses the motivation for the book and outlines the historical foundations of nineteenth century English. Ch. 2 (26–43) deals with the differences between written and spoken varieties, as well as social and regional varieties and contemporaneous attitudes towards them. Ch. 3 (44–64) discusses spelling and spelling reform, conventions of punctuation and pronunciation, and prosodic considerations. Chs. 4 (65–68) and 5 (69–91) survey the use of and changes in inflectional morphology and syntax, respectively, and identify the features that differentiate nineteenth- from twentieth-century varieties of English. The lexicon is discussed in Ch. 6 (92–138), including interdialectal and foreign borrowing, word-formation, lexical semantics and semantic change, and onomastics. Ch. 7 (139–63) provides an outline of different genres and styles of texts which serves as an organizing principle for the texts reproduced in Ch. 9 (165–285). Ch. 10 (286–302) gives background information on the texts and their authors. Ch. 8 (164) lists preliminary conclusions.

As G himself admits (5), the boundaries of this survey are rather arbitrary: No sociolinguistic or historical landmarks coincide neatly with the years 1800 and 1900, and extraterritorial varieties of English were becoming more and more influential in the development of the language (1, 102). As a result, the usefulness of this survey as a textbook in a course on the history of English is lessened (except perhaps as supplementary reading), although it could serve as a guide to future research: Many of the suggested exercises are more appropriate as questions for large research projects than as course assignments. Immediately apparent is the need for more work on morphosyntactic change. If, as G suggests (70–71), the primary difference between nineteenth- and twentieth- century varieties of English in this area is quantitative rather than qualitative, it is obvious that more detailed and methodologically consistent statistical analysis is called for. This book’s (albeit cursory) listing of various morphosyntactic features, coupled with the extensive list of references, would be a useful starting-point for such research.