English at the Onset of the Normative Tradition

De geschiedenis van het Engels: taalkunde en historiografi

Lowth als icoon van het prescriptivisme

De geschiedenis van het Engels: taalkunde en historiografi

Edward Pearson Esqr.: the language of an eighteenth-century secretary

De geschiedenis van het Engels: taalkunde en historiografi

Haagse Harry, a Dutch chav from The Hague? The enregisterment of similar social personas in different speech communities

This paper presents two remarkably similar characterological figures who are stereotyped embodiments of working-class personas: Haagse Harry in The Hague and chavs in England. The two figures have similar attires, class positions, attitudes, and associated attributes. We compare and contextualize the indexical links between their linguistic features and their social characteristics. Firstly, while chavs can be both men and women, the fictional persona Haagse Harry represents an all-male lower-working-class subculture. Secondly, while Haagse Harry consistently speaks Broad Haags, the language of chavs is not rooted in any single regional dialect but invariably indexes working-class features. Thirdly, Haagse Harry, and his sociolect, has a higher social status compared to the language and persona of chavs, who embody British class prejudice. We demonstrate that the repertoire of linguistic features deployed in the stylisation of characterological figures is strongly dependent on patterns of variation and ideas that are prevalent in the local speech community

Non-sexist Language Policy and the Rise (and Fall?) of Combined Pronouns in British and American Written English

This paper focuses on the use of combined pronouns (s/he, his or her, him/her, etc.) as an example of late twentieth-century non-sexist language reform which had an overt democratizing aim. Within the scope of second-wave feminism, the use of combined pronouns increased the visibility of women in discourse by encouraging the use of feminine pronouns (she, her, hers) alongside masculine pronouns (he, him, his). Despite their promotion, however, the use of combined pronouns is relatively rare. This paper uses the LOB and Brown families of corpora to diachronically and synchronically study patterns in the use of combined pronouns in written American (AmE) and British English (BrE) from the 1930s to the early 2000s. The analysis not only determines what forms these patterns take, but questions whether combined pronouns are influenced by (a combination of) syntax and/or semantics, and questions whether combined pronouns are really democratic at all

Contact as catalyst: The case for Coptic influence in the development of Arabic negation

This article discusses similar developments in the expression of negation in the histories of Egyptian-Coptic and Arabic and explores the evidence for these respective developments being related by language contact. Both Coptic and Arabic have undergone a development known as Jespersen’s Cycle (JC), whereby an original negative marker is joined by some new element to form a bipartite negative construction. The original marker then becomes optional while the new element becomes the primary negator. We present the results of a corpus study of negation in late Coptic, showing that, at the time when Arabic speakers began to settle in Egypt, the bipartite negative construction still predominated. This being the case, we argue that native speakers of Coptic learning Arabic as a second language played a key role in the genesis of the Arabic bipartite negative construction. More generally, we give reasons to doubt the a priori preference for internal explanations of syntactic change over those involving contact, as well as the assumption that the two are mutually exclusive. Rather, we suggest that not only purely internal but also (partially) contactinduced change can profitably be accounted for in terms of child language acquisition leading to a change in the grammars of individual speakers

Integrating syntactic theory and variationist analysis : The structure of negative indefinites in regional dialects of British English

This paper integrates syntactic theory and variationist analysis in an investigation of the variation between English 'not'-negation ('I don’t have any money'), 'no'-negation ('I have no money') and negative concord ('I don’t have no money'). Using corpora of three varieties of UK English spoken in Glasgow, Tyneside and Salford respectively, I test two theoretical accounts of the variation. Account 1 applies Zeijlstra’s (2004) agreement-based theory of negative concord to all three variants, such that n-words (e.g. 'nobody') which feature in 'no'-negation and negative concord are not inherently negative but agree with a negative operator in a higher NegP. Under Account 2, 'no'-negation is instead derived via negative-marking within the DP followed by movement to the higher NegP for sentential scope (Kayne 1998; Svenonius 2002; Zeijlstra 2011). These accounts, together with observations about the raising properties of functional versus lexical verbs, lead to the formulation of different hypotheses about the distribution of variants in speech according to verb type, verb phrase complexity, and the discourse status of the propositions expressed. Results of distributional analysis and mixed-effects modelling support Account 2 of the variation over Account 1, suggesting structural identity between 'not'-negation and negative concord (in contrast to 'no'-negation). This supports Tubau’s (2016) proposal that English negative indefinites have two distinct structures: one in which negation is marked syntactically in the DP and one in which they agree with a syntactically-higher NegP

Scientific Periodicals : The Philosophical Transactions and the Edinburgh Medical Journal

Peer reviewe

Towards new knowledge : The corpus of Late Modern English Medical Texts

Peer reviewe

Changing portrayals of medicine and patients in eighteenth-century medical writing : Lexical bundles in Public Health, Methods, and case studies

Peer reviewe