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Processes of Change
Studies in Late Modern and Present-Day English
Editors
The present volume brings together leading scholars studying language change from a variety of sociolinguistic perspectives, complementing and enriching the existing literature by providing readers with a kaleidoscopic perspective of aspects of change in English from around 1700 until the present day. The volume presents a collection of in-depth studies on a broad spectrum of phonetic, lexical, grammatical and discourse variation, drawing on historical corpora, dictionaries, metalinguistic commentary, ego-documents, spoken language and survey data.
Apart from advancing our knowledge of processes of language change in varieties of English, including British English, Irish English, Australian English, South African English, American English and Canadian English, the individual chapters contribute to the theoretical debates on variation and change in Late Modern as well as Present-day English.
[Studies in Language Variation, 21] 2019. vii, 263 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Published online on 9 August 2019
Published online on 9 August 2019
© John Benjamins
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements | pp. vii–viii
- Chapter 1. IntroductionSandra Jansen | pp. 1–4
- Part I. Processes of change in Late Modern English
- Chapter 2. Enregisterment and historical sociolinguisticsJoan C. Beal | pp. 7–24
- Chapter 3. The obelisk and the asterisk: Early to Late Modern Views on Language and ChangeKate Burridge | pp. 1–14
- Chapter 4. A (great) deal of: Developments in 19th-century British and Australian EnglishClaudia Claridge and Merja Kytö | pp. 49–72
- Chapter 5. ‘but a[h] Hellen d[ea]r sure you have it more in your power in every respect than I have’ – Discourse marker sure in Irish EnglishKevin McCafferty and Carolina P. Amador-Moreno | pp. 73–94
- Chapter 6. Scotland’s contribution to English vocabulary in Late Modern timesMarina Dossena | pp. 95–114
- Chapter 7. Early immigrant English: Midwestern English before the dust settledSamantha Litty, Jennifer Mercer and Joseph Salmons | pp. 115–138
- Chapter 8. African American English in nineteenth-century Liberia: Processes of change in a transported dialectLucia Siebers | pp. 139–156
- Part II. Processes of change in Present Day English
- Chapter 9. Attitudes to flat adverbs and English usage adviceMorana Lukač and Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade | pp. 159–182
- Chapter 10. The modal auxiliary verb may and change in Irish EnglishJohn M. Kirk | pp. 183–202
- Chapter 11. Levelling processes and social changes in a peripheral community: Prevocalic /r/ in West CumbriaSandra Jansen | pp. 203–226
- Chapter 12. The goose vowel in South African English with special reference to Coloured communities in 5 citiesRajend Mesthrie and Simone Wills | pp. 227–246
- Chapter 13. Borders and languageJ. K. (Jack) Chambers | pp. 247–260
- Index
“[T]his volume enlightens readers that neither descriptivism nor prescriptivism should be underestimated. The former is an intriguing language garden that abounds with plentiful flowers of dialects, and the latter represents humans’ endeavor to keep the linguistic world of chaos in order. These two notions are intertwined, and somewhere in the middle, the modern linguistic map has formed during the long course of history.”
Jie Hu,Zhejiang University, in Language in Society 49:2 (2020)
Cited by (5)
Cited by five other publications
Docherty, Gerard, Paul Foulkes & Paul Kerswill
Yáñez-Bouza, Nuria
Kostadinova, Viktorija, Marco Wiemann, Gea Dreschler, Sune Gregersen, Beáta Gyuris, Ai Zhong, Maggie Scott, Lieselotte Anderwald, Beke Hansen, Sven Leuckert, Tihana Kraš, Shawnea Sum Pok Ting, Ida Parise Alessia Cogo, Elisabeth Reber & Furzeen Ahmed
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