Edited by Paula Rautionaho, Arja Nurmi and Juhani Klemola
This book showcases eleven studies dealing with corpora and the changing society. The theme of the volume reflects the fact that changes in society lead to changes in language and vice versa. Focusing on the English language, be it from Old English to the present, or a shorter time span in the… read more
Edited by Tanja Säily, Arja Nurmi, Minna Palander-Collin and Anita Auer
This volume explores potential paths in historical sociolinguistics, with a particular focus on the inter-related areas of methodological innovations, hitherto un- or under-explored textual resources, and theoretical advancements and challenges. The individual chapters cover Dutch, Finnish and… read more
Edited by Päivi Pahta, Minna Nevala, Arja Nurmi and Minna Palander-Collin
This volume presents a ground-breaking overview of the interconnections between socio-cultural reality and language practices, by looking at the different ways in which social roles are performed, maintained, adopted and assigned through linguistic means. The introductory chapter discusses and… read more
Edited by Arja Nurmi, Minna Nevala and Minna Palander-Collin
The Language of Daily Life in England (1400–1800) is an important state-of-the art account of historical sociolinguistic and socio-pragmatic research. The volume contains nine studies and an introductory essay which discuss linguistic and social variation and change over four centuries. Each study… read more
This article focuses on the news reporting on Oscar Wilde during the 1895 trials in which he was accused of sodomy and gross indecency. We discuss the positive and negative labelling associated with Wilde during and after the trials. Our data are drawn from the British Library Newspapers,… read more
This article discusses the multilingual practices identified in the public and private writings of Laurence Sterne, novelist and clergyman. The data used consists of Sterne’s two novels as well as a selection of his personal correspondence. Sterne uses a wide variety of languages in his texts,… read more
In this chapter we discuss the current achievements of historical sociolinguistics and highlight new insights provided by the contributions in the volume. Taking the essay by Nevalainen (2015) as a starting point, we will consider the themes of crossing boundaries and bridging gaps between… read more
The negotiation of power and social distance in personal correspondence can be expressed e.g. through deontic modality. By estimating the relative power of writer-recipient dyads and recreating their social network to estimate social distance, this paper attempts to create ways in which to study… read more
Social space can be expressed by e.g. the use of modality and person reference. We discuss how variation in power and distance affects the ways an eighteenth-century governess, Agnes Porter, is constrained by her professional role, and by what linguistic means she negotiates shifts between… read more
no human being talks the same way all the time (Hymes 1984: 44) The article examines variation in the use of multilingual resources in the verbal repertoire of one individual in different social roles involving various contexts of discourse in eighteenth-century England. We discuss the language… read more
This study examines code-switching in eighteenth-century interpersonal communication, focusing on the correspondence of musician and music historian Charles Burney. The paper builds on our previous work on code-switching in the history of English texts, and draws on insights gained in research in… read more
