Sounds, Words, Texts and Change: Selected Papers from 11 ICEHL, Santiago de Compostela, 7-11 September 2000, vol. 2 (review)

This is one of two volumes of conference proceedings from the Eleventh International Conference on English Historical Linguistics. It contains thirteen papers on text typology, sociolinguistics, dialectology, suprasegmental phonology, etymology and lexicography, discourse analysis, and orthography, as well as more theoretical, metalinguistic matters.

Randy Bax’s paper on historical sociolinguistics discusses linguistic accommodation in the correspondence between Samuel Johnson and Hester Lynch Thrale. In ‘Style evolution in the English sermon’, Claudia Claridge and Andrew Wilson describe the evolution of sermons as a text type from the seventeenth century onwards on the basis of Douglas Biber’s dimensions of register variation. They come to the conclusion that Biber’s factor analysis needs to be expanded in order to work for the observed changes in sermon style. In ‘Lexical bundles in Early Modern English dialogues’, Jonathan Culpeper and Merja Kytö look at constructions such as in order to and investigate their grammatical properties, pragmatic and discourse functions, and distribution across text types. Philip Durkin takes a metalinguistic point of view in ‘Changing documentation in the third edition of the Oxford English dictionary’ and warns against uncritical use of (statistical) dictionary data. ‘A linguistic history of advertising’ is the focus of Manfred Görlach’s contribution. Görlach shows that there were interesting changes in style, content, and purposes of advertising between 1700 and 1890. Another more technical contribution comes from Raymond Hickey’s ‘Ebb and flow: A cautionary tale of language change’. Having considered structural and sociolinguistic factors in some (sound) changes in British and Irish English, Hickey cautions against the assumption that the presence of one feature at two times allows for an inference of unbroken transmission. In ‘Wreak, wrack, rack, and (w)ruin’, Christian Kay and Irené Wotherspoon investigate the development of (un-)etymological spelling variants of the <wr> type from the Old English period to the present day. Angelika Lutz asks, ‘When did English begin?’. She argues that the common tripartite division might work only in terms of morphosyntax; the lexical and cultural development calls for a bipartite division into ‘Anglo-Saxon’ up to around 1300 and ‘English’ after that. Chris McCully contributes a paper on ‘What’s afoot with word-final C? Metrical coherence and the history of English’ in which he eventually demythologizes the idea of the ‘Germanic foot’. John Scahill discusses Dan Michel, the alleged author/copyist of the Ayenbite of Inwyt, and his role as orthographic fossil or innovator. Irma Taavitsainen’s ‘Historical discourse analysis: Scientific language and changing thought-styles’ examines the transition from scholastic to empirical science. She exemplifies her case with speech-act verbs of reporting vs. private verbs. In ‘Key issues in English etymology’, Theo Vennemann presents new ways of looking at English etymologies. He stresses that ‘English’ was in language contact situations long before historical times and that sometimes even Vasconic and Semitic languages may have to be considered. Finally, Keith Williamson discusses the geographical and temporal distribution of four different morphosyntactic/orthographic features in ‘The dialectology of “English” north of the Humber, c. 1380–1500’.

The papers in this volume have been carefully selected, reviewed, and edited. They mostly represent new and exciting approaches to a wide range of both old and new questions and make this volume a valuable addition to the tradition of ICEHL proceedings.