The paper introduces our new project on diachronic sociolinguistics, focusing on the problems of compiling a representative corpus for this purpose. We study long-term linguistic change in the Late Middle and Early Modern English periods (1420-1680) in a computer-readable corpus of personal letters, which is designed specifically for the purposes of sociohistorical research. When completed, the Helsinki Corpus of Early English Correspondence will comprise some 1.5 million running words representing all the literate social ranks of the time, both sexes, and different ages and occupations. In our case, the issues that a corpus compiler must deal with include the coverage of all the sociolinguistically relevant categories of data, authenticity of extant materials, and the quality of editing

Nevalainen, Terttu

Raumolin-Brunberg, Helena

English

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Terttu Nevalainen & Helena Raumolin-Brunberg*Sociolinguistics and Language History: The Hel-sinki Corpus of Early English Correspondence1AbstractThe paper introduces our new project on diachronic sociolinguistics, focusing on theproblems of compiling a representative corpus for this purpose. We study long-term lin-guistic change in the Late Middle and Early Modern English periods (1420-1680) in acomputer-readable corpus of personal letters, which is designed specifically for the pur-poses of sociohistorical research. When completed, the Helsinki Corpus of Early Eng-lish Correspondence will comprise some 1.5 million running words representing all theliterate social ranks of the time, both sexes, and different ages and occupations. In ourcase, the issues that a corpus compiler must deal with include the coverage of all thesociolinguistically relevant categories of data, authenticity of extant materials, and thequality of editing.1. IntroductionOur new project investigates the extent to which modern sociolinguis-tic models and methods are applicable to diachronic linguistics. Despiteall the recent work on historical corpora, the kind of material that weneed is not available in sufficient quantities in electronic form. We havetherefore had to start by compiling a sociolinguistically representativecorpus for the periods that we are interested in. As its title suggests, theHelsinki Corpus of Early English Correspondence consists of letters. Itcovers the Late Middle and Early Modern English periods from 1420 to1680. 1351 The people working on the project are Terttu Nevalainen, director of the project,Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, full-time researcher (both are happy to answer any inquir-ies), and two part-time research assistants, Arja Nurmi and Minna Palander-Collin. Ourpostal address is: Department of English, P.O. Box 4 (Hallituskatu 11), FIN-00014 Uni-versity of Helsinki. E-mail: tnevalainen@cc.helsinki.fi, raumolinbrun@cc.helsinki.fi.* Terttu Nevalainen & Helena Raumolin-BrunbergUniversity of HelsinkiDepartment of EnglishP.O.Box 4 (Hallituskatu 11)00100  Helsinki (FIN)Hermes, Journal of Linguistics, no. 13 – 1994Our problems in constructing the framework for our study are inprinciple the same as modern sociolinguists are faced with today. Ourwhole undertaking is licensed by the principle of uniformitarianism, theclaim that the kind of social factors that operate in present societiesshould also have applied in societies of the past. In other words, if so-cial factors,  roles and structures, commonly correlate with languagechange today, they should also have been relevant to linguistic changethree or four hundred years ago (Labov 1994, 21-25). It should be emphasized that the aim of our project is to explore theextent to which modern sociolinguistic models and methods apply tothe past. We are, by no means, taking them for granted and advocatingany naïve one-to-one correspondence between such constructs as socialclass in present-day urban sociolinguistics and the social ranks of pre-industrial societies. One of our problems is precisely to come up withanalytic tools that are historically justified.This paper concentrates on different aspects of representativeness ofthe corpus we are compiling. Section 2 introduces the current state ofour work and compares it with the diachronic part of the Helsinki Cor-pus of English Texts. Section 3 discusses the ‘hard’ facts that we use toscreen our materials and assess their validity. Section 4 completes thepicture with the ‘soft’ facts that must be taken into account if we are tomake the most of the data that we have at our disposal. Both these as-pects will influence not only our corpus organization as a whole butalso the kind of information to be supplied for each text in the corpus.This point is taken up in section 5, and some of our results so far are dis-cussed in section 6. 2. Current state of the projectFinanced by the Academy of Finland, our project started in September1993 and is due to finish by the end of 1995. Our team has so farsampled data from about forty collections of correspondence. Some 1.4million running words have been selected for further processing, and1.1 million words have already been stored in computer-readable form.Out of these,  some 650,000 words have been proofread once, and con-stitute the basic material of our pilot studies. Within the limits of ourbudget, we are aiming at a total of 1.5 million running words. This isestimated to furnish enough material for both real-time and apparent-time studies of language change.136These figures are much higher than those for the letters sampled forthe Late Middle and Early Modern English sections of the diachronicpart of  the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts (less than 100,000 runningwords of correspondence altogether), or any other historical corpuscontaining letters from our period (see Kytö et al. 1993). All the Hel-sinki Corpus data are supplied with participants’ descriptions, but thesmall number of letters included makes it less suitable for detailed so-ciohistorical studies than we had hoped. We shall of course have to bear in mind that the Helsinki Corpus is alongitudinal general-purpose corpus, covering a time span of about onethousand years from the 8th to the 18th century. It was originally com-piled for studies in textual variation in exactly the same way as theBrown and LOB corpora were. This means that its criteria for selectionwere oriented towards textual rather than social representativeness. TheEarly Modern English section, for instance, consists of fifteen differenttext types, which together make up 550,000 words (see Nevalainen &Raumolin-Brunberg 1993). As our present interests are more focused,the criteria of selection applied are also differently weighted. It goeswithout saying that the main criterion is the authenticity of our material.3. ‘Hard’ facts, or problems of authenticity The authenticity of our primary data involves a large number of prob-lems. Since it is outside the scope of our type of corpus work to editunedited manuscripts, the only sources that we have consist of letterswhich are available in an edited form. In an ideal case we have in front of us a carefully edited collectionbased on letters that were actually delivered from one person to another.It is also important that these letters were written personally by peoplewhose social backgrounds are fully indentifiable. Collections like thisexist, but unfortunately their number is not very large. Good examplesare the Barrington Family Letters (1628-1632) and the well-known let-ters by Dorothy Osborne to her future husband, Sir William Temple(1652-1657). On the other hand, there are many collections where the majority ofletters, but not all, are based on autograph sources. A typical instance isa collection compiled around one person who was the recipient ofseveral authentic letters but, as far as his or her own letters are con-137cerned, the only material that remains is a collection of drafts or a let-ter-book of copies. This is for example the case with the diarist SamuelPepys’ family letters (1663-1680). Copies of letters sent by Pepys arefound in a letter-book, written in a secretary’s hand, which is every nowand then interspersed by corrections in Pepys’ own writing. One step further, there are whole collections of letters edited fromcopies, like The Letters of John Holles, 1587-1637, which were editedby P.R. Seddon from four letter-books that had been copied by theeldest son of John Holles at different times. Going further still, the let-ters written by the Plumpton family from Yorkshire (1480-1549/50)were edited in 1839 from early seventeenth-century copies.Furthermore, it was customary for persons in high administrativeoffices to use secretaries and amanuenses for writing letters. This wasmore or less the rule for royal letters, at least the non-private ones. Atthe other end of the social scale, due to widespread illiteracy, the lowerand middle sections of society and especially women had to rely onsecretarial help in their correspondence. A good piece of evidence ofthe extent of illiteracy at the turn of the seventeenth century is theSouthampton captain Thomas Stockwell, who, although considered agentleman, used a mark instead of a signature in his letters and businesscontracts.The above examples raise the general issue of how to deal with draftsand copies and with non-autograph letters. We must not forget that thecorpus we are compiling is not designed simply to represent the lan-guage of one period or another. Our aim is rather to create a sociallyrepresentative corpus, and hence it is vital that the language we study issomething that was produced by an identifiable person.It was relatively easy to decide how to deal with drafts and copiesthat were written by the sender personally. They are treated like authen-tic letters; in any case they are autograph and could have been deliveredto the recipient. The letter-book copies in a secretary’s hand but correc-ted by the sender have also been given a high priority. As the editor H.T.Heath of the Pepys collection (1955) argues, the procedure was probab-ly such that Pepys first dictated a letter to his secretary, who wrote itdown in the letter-book. Then it was corrected by Pepys, and on thiscorrected draft the secretary wrote the letter, which Pepys signed. 138As far as uncorrected secretarial letters are concerned, there is noway of knowing whether they were dictated or written in accordancewith some general instructions of the sender (see Davis 1971, xxxviii-xxxix). We cannot consider them really representative of the sender’slanguage. Our original thought was to exclude letters based on secretar-ial copies of this type. During the course of our work we have come torealize that there are subperiods and social ranks which are impossibleto reach if we totally ignore these copies. As a compromise we havedecided to include some of them as supplementary data.The quality of editing may also create problems. The existing edi-tions vary a great deal. Some date from the early nineteenth century,while others are very recent. Some have been produced for historiansby historians without any philological training, whereas some otherstestify to outstanding historical and linguistic expertise. Recently editedcollections usually have good accounts of editorial principles, whilesome of the older ones hardly provide any information at all. Our main problem is the frequent modernization of spelling. Al-though there are research topics that could be pursued despite changedorthography, at least at this stage of our work we consider modernizedspelling a sufficient drawback to exclude the edition from the corpus.We shall nevertheless have to allow for some minor changes that havebeen made in most collections. Typically, capitalization and punctua-tion have been modernized and abbreviations expanded. 4. ‘Soft’ facts, or problems of coverageAll these ‘hard’ facts apply at the microlevel, that is, they will have tobe determined with respect to each and every letter included in the cor-pus. There are also certain macrolevel considerations that have guidedour selection procedure as a whole. We shall here discuss two closelyrelated issues: socioregional representativeness, on the one hand, andlinguistic representativeness, on the other. It is true of both of them, ofcourse, that we are dealing with an imperfect historical record. Al-though the number of texts that have been preserved from the Late Mid-dle and especially Early Modern period is considerable, there are boundto be gaps. We are in fact lucky to have so many letter-writers who werekeen archivists themselves, or had the misfortune of being sued by theiradversaries, with the result that their personal correspondence was con-fiscated by courts as legal evidence.139The requirement of social representativeness means that we shallhave to obtain data from both sexes, young and old people alike, andfrom as many social ranks as possible. The most difficult requirement isthe last one. To gain some idea of the social stratification of the timeswe are studying, we might look at the system of rank and status in Stu-art England. Table 1 is reconstructed on the basis of Laslett (1983, 38). Table 1. Rank and status in Stuart England (based on Laslett 1983, 38).Grade Title OccupationalNameN 1. Dukeo Archbishop G b l 2. Marquesse 3. Earl  Lord, Lady noneE  m e 4. Viscount n  N  5. Baron BishopT G 6. Baronet Sir, Dame P Army Officer,e   7. Knight r Doctor of R   n   8. Esquire Mr, Mrs o Medicine,t   9. Gentleman  f  Merchant,l     e  etc.Y   e sm  se   in   oClergyman ns10. Yeoman Goodman, Goodwife    (Goody)11. Husbandman    Husbandman   12. Craftsman  (Name of Craft)Tradesman Carpenter, etc.Artificer none13. Labourer   Labourer14. Cottager    Pauper        none140Concentrating on the major distinctions, it is relatively easy to obtaindata from people representing nobility and gentry, and professionalpeople such as clergymen. The problem is obtaining representatives ofthe majority of the English population who rank below the gentry.Throughout our period, but especially in the first half, the rate of fullliteracy (both reading and writing) is extremely low among the lowersocial ranks. Hence we should be prepared to relax our ‘hard’-fact cri-teria if we are fortunate enough to find correspondence by people repre-senting these ranks. Usually it is the background information that ismissing in the case of our yeomen and petty merchants. Full literacy is also amazingly low among women. According to thefindings of David Cressy (1980,  119-121), the overall literacy of Eng-lish women in the second half of our period was at the same level as thatof lowest-ranking men, manual labourers. So letters attributed towomen even in poorly edited sources are valuable to us. So far we haveonly excluded modernized editions containing women’s letters.Not surprisingly, full regional coverage is not a possible goal in ourcase. For one thing, the best representatives of rural dialects were illite-rate. With the rise of the standard language, a dialect atlas of EarlyModern English is not envisaged even by historical dialectologists. Ourpractical solution has been to concentrate, whenever possible, on threebroad areas: London and its vicinity, Norfolk, and the ‘North’. They areall linguistically motivated; London because of its role in the standard-ization process of the English language, Norfolk and the Northerncounties as different regional varieties and as input to the process ofstandardization. All three are well-represented in historical records andoffer a fair amount of diachronic continuity, sometimes even within oneand the same family, such as the Pastons and the Bacons.Linguistic representativeness ranks high on our agenda of  ‘soft’facts. As we are mostly interested in the diffusion of morphosyntacticchanges in English, single-letter informants are not very useful in thisrespect. Our average letter is far too short to provide enough instancesof morphosyntactic variables for statistical analysis. Whenever possiblewe have tried to secure a minimum of ten letters per informant, even ifnot all of them were dated, for instance. People represented by fewerletters can nevertheless be valuable, especially when they come fromthe lower ranks. The information they yield can be pooled from diffe-rent sources and used in studies of social stratification.1415. Corpus organizationFinally, the question remains how much and in what form to incorpora-te extralinguistic information into the corpus. At the moment we feelthat we can supply only some of the facts. Our participants’ descrip-tions are time-consuming to compile and some of the information need-ed is far from easy to come by (see Johansson 1993). Some of it is alsoconjectural, and hence a matter of our interpretation rather than solidfacts. We have therefore decided to work cyclically on three levels,hoping to learn from experience as we go on.At the moment we are experimenting with three databases intendedfor different purposes. We are in the process of building a letter databa-se, so far in hard copy format only, which will ideally contain thebackground information associated with each individual letter, its send-er and recipient, and their social identities. We are similarly in the pro-cess of devising a sender database of all our informants, and a databaseof all our letter collections. The latter will contain, for each collection,the kind of hard and soft information that has been discussed above.6. ProspectsThe first results of our project are very encouraging. Linguistic changein apparent time, such as variation in relation to age, for instance, canbe detected  in the language of late 15th-century London wool-mer-chants (Raumolin-Brunberg & Nevalainen, forthcoming). We are alsoat the moment busy studying the forms of address in the data. It is com-mon knowledge that a radical simplification of these forms took placein our period. What we do not know is the route through which thechange was implemented; was it from the highest ranks to the lowest,vice versa, or perhaps through social equals in each estate? In fact, oneof the key issues we are going to explore more fully is the questionwhether the notion of social stratification is of relevance to languagechange in our diachronic context of study. From what modern sociolin-guistics tells us, it ought to be.References1. Letter collectionsBarrington = Barrington family letters, 1628-1632. Ed. by A. Searle. Camden fourthseries 28. London: Royal Historical Society, 1983.142Holles = Letters of John Holles, 1587-1637. Ed. by P. R. Seddon. Vol 1. Thoroton So-ciety 31. Nottingham, 1975.Osborne = The Letters of Dorothy Osborne to William Temple. Ed. by G. C. MooreSmith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959 [1928].Paston = Paston letters and papers of the fifteenth century. Vol. 1. Ed. by N. Davis.Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.Pepys = The letters of Samuel Pepys and his family circle. Ed. by Helen TruesdellHeath. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955.Plumpton = Plumpton correspondence. A series of letters, chiefly domestick, written inthe reigns of Edward IV, Richard III, Henry VII and Henry VIII. Ed. by T. Staple-ton. Camden Society 4, 1839.2. Articles and monographsCressy, D. (1980): Literacy and the social order: Reading and writing in Tudor and Stu-art England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Johansson, S. (1993): Some aspects of the recommendations of the Text Encoding Ini-tiative, with special reference to the encoding of language corpora. In: M. Kytö, M.Rissanen & S. Wright, eds., 203-212.Kytö, M., M. Rissanen & S. Wright, eds. (1993): Corpora across the centuries, Pro-ceedings of the First International Colloquium on English Diachronic Corpora.Amsterdam: Rodopi.Labov, W. (1994): Principles of Linguistic Change Vol. 1: Internal factors. Oxford:Blackwell.Laslett, P. (1983): The world we have lost (further explored). London: Methuen. Nevalainen, T. & H. Raumolin-Brunberg (1993): Early Modern British English. In: M.Rissanen, M. Kytö & M. Palander-Collin, eds., Early English in the computer age,Explorations through the Helsinki Corpus (Topics in English Linguistics 11), 53-73.Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Raumolin-Brunberg, H. & T. Nevalainen (forthcoming). Like father (un)like son: asociolinguistic approach to the language of the Celys. In: J. Fisiak, ed., Studies inMiddle English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.143

Sociolinguistics and Language History: The Helsinki Corpus of Early English Correspondence

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Sociolinguistics and Language History: The Helsinki Corpus of Early English Correspondence

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