Description
Book SynopsisThe papers collected in this volume were first presented at the 14th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (Bergamo, 2006). Alongside studies of syntax, morphology, lexis and semantics, published in two sister volumes, many innovative contributions focused on geo-historical variation in English. A carefully peer-reviewed selection, including two plenary lectures, appears here in print for the first time, bearing witness to the increasing scholarly interest in varieties of English other than so-called ‘standard’ English. In all the contributions, well-established methods of historical dialectology combine with new theoretical approaches, in an attempt to shed more light on phenomena that have hitherto remained unexplored, or have only just begun to be investigated. Perceptual dialectology is also taken into consideration, and state-of-the-art tools, such as electronic corpora and atlases, are employed consistently, ensuring the methodological homogeneity of the contributions.
Table of Contents1. Foreword; 2. Introduction; 3. The early Middle English scribe: Sprach er wie er schrieb? (by Laing, Margaret); 4. Essex/Suffolk scribes and their language in fifteenth-century London (by Matheson, Lister M.); 5. Middle English word geography: Methodology and applications illustrated (by Linares, Maria Jose Carrillo); 6. Northern Middle English: Towards telling the full story (by Cuesta, Julia Fernandez); 7. The origins of the Northern Subject Rule (by Haas, Nynke de); 8. Dynamic dialectology and social networks (by Ogura, Mieko); 9. The Celtic hypothesis hasn't gone away: New perspectives on old debates (by Filppula, Markku); 10. On the trail of "intolerable Scoto-Hibernic jargon": Ulster English, Irish English and dialect hygiene in William Carleton's Traits and stories of the Irish peasantry (First Series, 1830) (by McCafferty, Kevin); 11. Exceptions to sound change and external motivation (by Hickey, Raymond); 12. Index of subjects
