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Focusing on the sociolinguistic history of Germanic languages, the current volume challenges the traditional teleological approach of language historiography. The 30 contributions present alternative histories of ten ‘big’ as well as ‘small’ Germanic languages and varieties in the last 300 years. Topics covered in this book include language variation and change and the politics of language contact and choice, seen against the background of standardization processes of written and oral text genres and from the viewpoint of larger sections of the population.
The chapters in this volume take as their focus aspects of three of the languages of Scotland: Scots, Scottish English, and Scottish Gaelic. They present linguistic research which has been made possible by new and developing corpora of these languages: this encompasses work on lexis and lexicogrammar, semantics, pragmatics, orthography, and punctuation. Throughout the volume, the findings of analysis are accompanied by discussion of the methodologies adopted, including issues of corpus design and representativeness, search possibilities, and the complementarity and interoperability of linguistic resources. Together, the chapters present the forefront of the research which is currently being directed towards the linguistics of the languages of Scotland, and point to an exciting future for research driven by ever more refined corpora and related language resources.
This volume examines a fundamental concept of language within a historical perspective. The concept is that of public and private communication, the historical period ranges from the late middle ages to the late modern, and the language is English. In short, what are the linguistic traits, discursive practices, communicative settings and intentions which identify and contrast public from private communication, supposing it is possible to make such a fine distinction? The volume contains contributions from top international scholars working in the fields of, for example, historical correspondence, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century print news, sixteenth-century liturgy and political discourse, the language of quack doctors, late modern travel writing, personal notebooks, and even the eighteenth-century public discourse of shopping. As this ground-breaking volume is not just about key concepts in the history of the English language, but also examines at a more general level the concept of private and public communication, the various chapters will interest scholars working in language and communication generally as well as English historical discourse.
The volume collects original studies highlighting contemporary trends in historical sociolinguistics, as well as current research on the relationship between sociolinguistics and historical linguistics, social motivations of language variation and change, and corpus-based studies. Distinctive features of the book, which make it appealing to a wider audience, are the interdisciplinary nature of the chapters and the range of languages addressed.
This volume offers a comprehensive overview of the range of varieties of English spoken on the island of Ireland, featuring information on their historical background, structural features, and sociolinguistic considerations. The first part of the volume explores English and Irish in their historical framework as well as current issues of contact and bilingualism. Chapters in Part II and Part III investigate the structures and use of Irish English today, from pronunciation and grammar to discourse-pragmatic markers and politeness strategies, alongside studies of specific varieties such as Urban English in Northern Ireland and the Irish English spoken in Dublin, Galway, and Cork. Part IV focuses on the Irish diaspora, with chapters covering topics including Newfoundland Irish English and Irish influence on Australian English, while the final part looks at the wider context, such as the language of Irish Travellers and Irish Sign Language. The handbook also features a detailed glossary of key terms, and will be of interest to a wide range of readers interested in varieties of English, Irish studies, sociolinguistics, and social and cultural history.
This book details the development of eleven modal auxiliaries in late 18th- and 19th-century Canadian English in a framework of new-dialect formation. The study assesses features of the modal auxiliaries, tracing influences to British and American input varieties, parallel developments, or Canadian innovations. The findings are based on the "Corpus of Early Ontario English," "pre-Confederation Section, "the first electronic corpus of early Canadian English. The data, which are drawn from newspapers, diaries and letters, include original transcriptions from manuscript sources and texts from semi-literate writers. While the overall results are generally coherent with new-dialect formation theo...
The colloquium 'Perspectives on Prescriptivism' (20-22 April 2006) was hosted by the University of Catania in Ragusa. The organisers wished to encourage participants to look at linguistic prescriptivism from a wide range of perspectives. Some of the questions raised are answered in this volume.
The volume presents a set of invited papers based on analyses of legal discourse drawn from a number of international contexts where often the English language and legal culture has had to adjust to legal concepts very different from those of the English law system. Many of the papers were inspired by two major projects on legal language and inter-multiculturality: Generic Integrity in Legislative Discourse in Multilingual and Multicultural Contexts based in Hong Kong and carried out by an international team and Interculturality in Domain-specific English, a national project supported by the Italian Ministry for Education and Research, involving research units from five Italian universities
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This volume offers a collection of twelve original papers on language use and attitudes towards language from both a historical and a present-day perspective. The first part of the book focuses on the general theme of language use and on attitudes towards language use in both the past and the present. The second part concentrates on actual language use in personal and public letters from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. The third part is mainly concerned with the possible impact of usage guides, and also addresses the problem of language and cultural misunderstanding and the apparent need for usage guides for cultural allusions. Language Use, Usage Guides and Linguistic Norms will be of interest to scholars of language use in both the past and the present, as well as to anyone interested in the interplay between actual language use and prescriptive attitudes towards language.