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The essays of this volume employ diverse strategies for conceptualizing the history of English as at once chaotic and yet amenable to circumscribed analyses that incorporate a broad view of language change. Several of the world's leading scholars of the English language contribute to the overall perspective that an elaboration of linguistic, cultural, and social contexts and a renewed emphasis on the concrete historical conditions of language change are necessary to approach some long-standing obstacles in the study of the history of the English language. Designed for students, teachers, and scholars of the English language, Managing Chaos: Strategies for Identifying Change in English (SHEL ...
Martin Hilpert combines construction grammar and advanced corpus-based methodology into a new way of studying language change. Constructions are generalizations over remembered exemplars of language use. These exemplars are stored with all their formal and functional properties, yielding constructional generalizations that contain many parameters of variation. Over time, as patterns of language use are changing, the generalizations are changing with them. This book illustrates the workings of constructional change with three corpus-based studies that reveal patterns of change at several levels of linguistic structure, ranging from allomorphy to word formation and to syntax. Taken together, the results strongly motivate the use of construction grammar in research on diachronic language change. This new perspective has wide-ranging consequences for the way historical linguists think about language change. It will be of particular interest to linguists working on morpho-syntax, sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics.
Addresses current issues in corpus linguistics - methodological, theoretical and applied - with special reference to Englishes past and present.
With their extravagant musicality, Triplett’s poems explore the thinning lines between responsibility and complicity, the tangled “supply chain” that unnervingly connects the domestic to the political, personal memory to social practice, and age-old familial discords to our new place in the anthropocentric world. Equal parts celebration and lament for the mechanisms we shape and are shaped by, these poetic acts reveal the poet as an entangled mediator among registers of public and private, intimate and historical, voicings. Here we traffic in the blessings and burdens of the human will to shape a world. What’s more, as we follow these linked enchainings of the deeply en-worlded citizen, we reawaken to the central paradox of our time, the need to refuse easy answers, to stay open, trilling, between these necessary notes of critique and of compassion.
The 19 papers in this volume are a selection from a UCLA conference intended to take stock of the state of the field at the beginning of the new millenium and to stimulate research in English Historical Linguistics. The authors are predominantly U.S. scholars. The fields represented include morphosyntax and semantics, grammaticalization, discourse analysis, dialectology, lexicography, the diachronic study of code-switching, phonology and metrics.
Imagining Medieval English is concerned with how we think about language, and simply through the process of thinking about it, give substance to an array of phenomena, including grammar, usage, variation, change, regional dialects, sociolects, registers, periodization, and even language itself. Leading scholars in the field explore conventional conceptualisations of medieval English, and consider possible alternatives and their implications for cultural as well as linguistic history. They explore not only the language's structural traits, but also the sociolinguistic and theoretical expectations that frame them and make them real. Spanning the period from 500 to 1500 and drawing on a wide range of examples, the chapters discuss topics such as medieval multilingualism, colloquial medieval English, standard and regional varieties, and the post-medieval reception of Old and Middle English. Together, they argue that what medieval English is, depends, in part, on who's looking at it, how, when and why.
An inside look at the movement to make English the only official language in local communities around the US.
The availability of digital editions of early modern works brings a wealth of exciting archival and primary source materials into the classroom. But electronic archives can be overwhelming and hard to use, for teachers and students alike, and digitization can distort or omit information about texts. Teaching Early Modern English Literature from the Archives places traditional and electronic archives in conversation, outlines practical methods for incorporating them into the undergraduate and graduate curriculum, and addresses the theoretical issues involved in studying them. The volume discusses a range of physical and virtual archives from 1473 to 1700 that are useful in the teaching of ear...
Old St Paul’s and Culture is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that looks predominantly at the culture of Old St Paul’s and its wider precinct in the early modern period, while also providing important insights into the Cathedral’s medieval institution. The chapters examine the symbolic role of the site in England’s Christian history, the London book trade based in and around St Paul’s, the place of St Paul’s commercial indoor playhouse within the performance culture of sixteenth and seventeenth-century London, and the intersection of religion and politics through events such as civic ceremonies and occasional sermons. Through the organising theme of culture, the authors ...
Many early modern poets and playwrights were also members of the legal societies the Inns of Court and these authors shaped the development of key genres of the English Renaissance, especially lyric poetry, dramatic tragedy, satire, and masque. But how did the Inns come to be literary centers in the first place, and why were they especially vibrant at particular times? Early modernists have long understood that urban setting and institutional environment were central to this phenomenon: in the vibrant world of London, educated men with time on their hands turned to literary pastimes for something to do. Lawyers at Play proposes an additional, more essential dynamic: the literary culture of t...