XXXIV Aedean Conference (Almería 2010)
PANEL: HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS (Coordinator: Elena Seoane Posse)
‘I've talk to some hallmates which is studying Social Work’: What New Englishes tell us about the History of English
Cristina Suárez Gómez (University of Illes Balears)
A Preliminary Study of Absolutely in Late Modern English: Evidence from 18th- and 19th-century British and American English
Paloma Núñez Pertejo (University of Santiago de Compostela)
SESSION 2
Lucía Loureiro Porto (University of Illes Balears) and Alejandro Alcaraz Sintes (University of Jaen)
Signs of the Northern Subject Rule in late Old Northumbrian: -s /-th variation in the Lindisfarne Glosses and the Northern Subject Rule
Marcelle Cole (University of Sevilla)
ABSTRACTS
‘I've talk to some hallmates which is studying Social Work’: What New Englishes tell us about the History of English
Cristina Suárez Gómez (University of Illes Balears)
The study of grammatical variation in New Englishes has become a favourite topic of research. Especially interesting is the fact that New Englishes often exhibit variation (and change) of phenomena also found in earlier periods of the English language (Kortmann 2006: 615). The present paper aims at exploring this connection between New Englishes and the history of English by comparing variation at the level of relativization in Hong-Kong English (HKE) and in the history of the English. Based on data drawn from the Helsinki Corpus and the spoken component of the ICE (International Corpus of English) corpus from Hong Kong (ICE-HK), I will analyze the use and distribution of relativizers, putting special emphasis on those aspects shared by both earlier stages of the English language and HKE.
Keywords: relativization, early English, Hong-Kong English, Accessibility Hierarchy, animacy
A Preliminary Study of Absolutely in Late Modern English: Evidence from 18th- and 19th-century British and American English
Paloma Núñez Pertejo (University of Santiago de Compostela)
There seems to be general agreement on the fact that the class of words usually referred to as ‘degree adverbs’ is one of the most active in terms of undergoing change. This paper investigates the use of the degree adverb absolutely from a diachronic perspective, with a special emphasis on some of its syntactic and semantic properties. For this purpose, two different corpora have been selected: A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers (ARCHER), and A Corpus of Late Modern British and American English Prose (COLMOBAENG). This research provides a descriptive account of the use of absolutely in 18th- and 19th-century British and American English, using authentic data from the abovementioned corpora.
Keywords: intensifiers, absolutely, historical linguistics, adverb of manner, modal meaning.
Lucía Loureiro Porto (University of Illes Balears) and Alejandro Alcaraz Sintes (University of Jaen)
Adjectives form a distinct category in some languages of the world (like Present-Day English), while in some others they are a subgroup of another class. Old English appears to belong to the first group of languages, but still confusion arises as for the characterization of some words, for example necessity lexemes such as behēfe, nīed, nīedþearf and þearf, which are variously classified as nouns and as adjectives in different reference works (e.g. Bosworth and Toller, Dictionary of Old English, Old English Thesaurus, etc.). For this reason, the aim of this paper is threefold: i) to find out if OE adjectives actually constituted a distinctive class, ii) to provide a list of nominal and adjectival features in Old English, and iii) to apply these criteria to necessity words so as to shed some light on their controversial characterization. The approach adopted is based on prototype theory and the data are taken from the Dictionary of Old English Corpus.
Keywords: adjective, noun, prototypes, categorization, Old English.
Signs of the Northern Subject Rule in late Old Northumbrian: -s /-th variation in the Lindisfarne Glosses and the Northern Subject Rule
Marcelle Cole (University of Sevilla)
This fresh consideration of -s/-th variation in the Lindisfarne glosses analyses late Old Northumbrian present-indicative verbal morphology within a modern methodological and theoretical framework and from a new angle, that of subject-type, for despite the existence of numerous quantitative studies on the subject (most famously Holmqvist 1922; Ross 1934; Blakeley 1949; Berndt 1956 and more recently Stein 1986) no study to date has taken the effect of subject-type into account. It will be seen that the selection of present-indicative endings in the glosses is environed, in addition to phonetic factors, by a tendency for subject type and adjacency to condition verbal morphology. Hence the type-of-subject and proximity constraints at the crux of the Northern Subject Rule were already a feature of late Old Northumbrian. The findings challenge the widespread assumption that the Northern Subject Rule constraint must have merged during the early Middle English period and that in the 10th century northern texts there is no evidence for syntactically conditioned agreement differentiation of the kind witnessed by the Northern Subject Rule (cf. de Haas & van Kemenade forthcoming; Pietsch 2005).
Keywords: morphological variation, type-of-subject constraint, Northern Subject Rule, Old Northumbrian