Bringing historical contexts and language use together, or how to do historical sociopragmatics: Historical sociopragmatics, by J. Culpeper (ed.) (2011)

No abstract available

Long lexical bundles and standardisation in historical legal texts

Standardisation on the level of text is visible in the employment of stable and fixed expressions for a specific textual purpose. When gauging the extent of standardisation in texts, one of the parameters which should be taken into consideration is the length of such stable patterns. Since it is more difficult, and therefore rarer, to reproduce long chunks of text in an unchanged form, such a practice points towards greater standardisation. To explore the textual behaviour of long fixed strings in legal texts, this paper concentrates on long lexical bundles built out of eight consecutive elements (8-grams) and their frequency and function in historical legal texts. The database for this pilot paper comprises two collections of legal and administrative texts written in Scots between the fourteenth and the sixteenth century. The research results point to a considerable degree of textual standardisation throughout the corpus and to the most prominent functions of long repetitive chunks in historical legal discourse.This research is supported by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education, grant nr N N104 014337

Standaryzacja tekstu w perspektywie historycznej. Analiza zbitek leksykalnych

Udostępnienie publikacji Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego finansowane w ramach projektu „Doskonałość naukowa kluczem do doskonałości kształcenia”. Projekt realizowany jest ze środków Europejskiego Funduszu Społecznego w ramach Programu Operacyjnego Wiedza Edukacja Rozwój; nr umowy: POWER.03.05.00-00-Z092/17-00

Book Review: Diachronic corpus pragmatics Irma Taavitsainen, Andreas H. Jucker and Jukka Tuominen (eds.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 2014. 335 pp. ISBN 9789027256485 (hardbound), EUR 95.00

No abstract available

The language of William Dunbar: Middle Scots or Early Modern Scots?

This paper provides linguistic arguments for a new periodisation of the Scots language where adequate space for the Renaissance, or the early modern period, would be created. In his search for the definition of the ‘middle’ period in Germanic languages, Roger Lass (2000) selected a range of linguistic features whose absence or presence would testify to a specific degree of archaism in the language of a given author, with special attention paid to Middle English poetry. This paper uses the same methodology to establish whether the language of William Dunbar warrants the label ‘middle’, which is traditionally applied to his writing, or perhaps a less anachronistic designation would be appropriate. A series of linguistic tests (phonological and morphological) proves that the language used in Dunbar’s poetry at the beginning of the sixteenth century does not qualify as a ‘middle’ stage in the history of a Germanic language. It is argued that, if one wants to achieve coherence with other Germanic periodisations on linguistic grounds, one should treat William Dunbar’s language as early modern Scots

Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen. 2013. English Historical Pragmatics

No abstract available

Multilingualism in Greater Poland court records (1386-1448): tagging discourse boundaries and code-switching

No abstract available

Twentieth anniversary of Gazeta de Antropología. From local precariousness to global cyberspace

Nuestra revista Gazeta de Antropología nació con la intención de contribuir a promover los estudios de antropología, por entonces todavía alejados de las aulas y de las instituciones académicas. Entiende estos estudios en el sentido más general de la disciplina, tanto en sus dimensiones más etnográficas, locales y tradicionales, como en sus aspectos más teóricos, cosmopolitas y modernos.Our journal Gazeta de Antropología was born with the aim of contributing to the promotion of studies in anthropology, at a time when they ware still far from the classroom and academic institutions. Theese studies are understood in the broadest sense of discipline, in their ethnographic dimensions, local and traditional, as in their more theoretical aspects, cosmopolitan and modern.Grupo de Investigación Antropología y Filosofía (SEJ-126). Universidad de Granad

Phonotactics, graphotactics and contrast:The history of Scots dental fricative spellings

The spelling conventions for dental fricatives in Anglic languages (Scots and English) have a rich and complex history. However, the various – often competing – graphemic representations (<þ>, <ð>, <y> and <th>, among others) eventually settled on one digraph, <th>, for all contemporary varieties, irrespective of the phonemic distinction between /ð/ and /θ/. This single representation is odd among the languages’ fricatives, which tend to use contrasting graphemes (cf. <f> vs <v> and <s> vs <z>) to represent contrastive voicing, a sound pattern that emerged nearly a millennium ago. Close examinations of the scribal practices for English in the late medieval period, however, have shown that northern texts had begun to develop precisely this type of distinction for dental fricatives as well. Here /ð/ was predominantly represented by <y> and /θ/ by <th> (Jordan 1925; Benskin 1982). In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, this ‘Northern System’ collapsed, due to the northward spread of a London-based convention using exclusively <th> (Stenroos 2004). This article uses a rich body of corpus evidence for fifteenth-century Scots to show that, north of the North, the phonemic distinction was more clearly mirrored by spelling conventions than in any contemporary variety of English. Indeed, our data for Older Scots local documents (1375–1500) show a pattern where <y> progressively spreads into voiced contexts, while <th> recedes into voiceless ones. This system is traced back to the Old English positional preferences for <þ> and <ð> via subsequent changes in phonology, graphemic repertoire and letter shapes. An independent medieval Scots spelling norm is seen to emerge as part of a developing, proto-standard orthographic system, only to be cut short in the sixteenth century by top-down anglicisation processes

Charting the rise and demise of a phonotactically motivated change in Scots

Although Old English [f] and [v] are represented unambiguously in Older Scots orthography by <f> and <v> (or <u>) in initial and morpheme-internal position, in morpheme-final position <f> and <v>/<u> appear to be used interchangeably for both of these Old English sounds. As a result, there is often a mismatch between the spellings and the etymologically expected consonant. This paper explores these spellings using a substantial database of Older Scots texts, which have been grapho-phonologically parsed as part of the From Inglis to Scots (FITS) project. Three explanations are explored for this apparent mismatch: (1) it was a spelling-only change; (2) there was a near merger of /f/ and /v/ in Older Scots; (3) final [v] devoiced in (pre-)Older Scots but this has subsequently been reversed. A close analysis of the data suggests that the Old English phonotactic constraint against final voiced fricatives survived into the pre-Literary Scots period, leading to automatic devoicing of any fricative that appeared in word-final position (a version of Hypothesis 3), and this, interacting with final schwa loss, gave rise to the complex patterns of variation we see in the Older Scots data. Thus, the devoicing of [v] in final position was not just a phonetically natural sound change, but also one driven by a pre-existing phonotactic constraint in the language. This paper provides evidence for the active role of phonotactic constraints in the development of sound changes, suggesting that phonotactic constraints are not necessarily at the mercy of the changes which conflict with them, but can be involved in the direction of sound change themselves