Standard English has evolved and developed in many ways over the past hundred years. From pronunciation to vocabulary to grammar, this concise survey clearly documents the recent history of standard English. Drawing on large amounts of authentic corpus data, it shows how we can track ongoing changes to the language, and demonstrates each of the major developments that have taken place. As well as taking insights from a vast body of literature, Christian Mair presents the results of his own cutting-edge research, revealing some important changes which have not been previously documented. He concludes by exploring how social and cultural factors, such as the American influence on British English, have affected standard English in recent times. Authoritative, informative, and engaging, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in language change in progress - particularly those working on English, and will be welcomed by students, researchers, and language teachers alike.
CHRISTIAN MAIR is Chair in English Linguistics at the Universität Freiburg, Germany, with research interests in the corpus-based description of modern English grammar, and in the study of regional variation and ongoing changes in standard English worldwide. He is author of Infinitival clauses in English: a study of syntax in discourse (Cambridge University Press, 1990).
General editor: Merja Kytö (Uppsala University)
Editorial Board: Bas Aarts (University College London), John Algeo (University of Georgia), Susan Fitzmaurice (Northern Arizona
University), Richard Hogg (University of Manchester), Charles F. Meyer (University of Massachusetts)
The aim of this series is to provide a framework for original studies of English, both present-day and past. All books are based securely on empirical research, and represent theoretical and descriptive contributions to our knowledge of national varieties of English, both written and spoken. The series covers a broad range of topics and approaches, including syntax, phonology, grammar, vocabulary, discourse, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics, and is aimed at an international readership.
Already published in this series
Christian Mair Infinitival complement clauses in English: a study of syntax in discourse
Charles F. Meyer Apposition on contemporary English
Jan Firbas Functional sentence perspective in written and spoken communication
Izchak M. Schlesinger Cognitive space and linguistic case
Katie Wales Personal pronouns in present-day English
Laura Wright The development of standard English, 1300–1800: theories, descriptions, conflicts
Charles F. Meyer English Corpus Linguistics: theory and practice
Stephen J. Nagle and Sara L. Sanders (eds.) English in the Southern United States
Anne Curzan Gender shifts in the history of English
Kingsley Bolton Chinese Englishes
Irma Taavitsainen and Päivi Pahta (eds.) Medical and scientific writing in Late Medieval English
Elizabeth Gordon, Lyle Campbell, Jennifer Hay, Margaret Maclagan, Andrea Sudbury and Peter Trudgill New Zealand English: its origins and evolution
Raymond Hickey (ed.) Legacies of colonial English
Merja Kytö, Mats Rydén and Erik Smitterberg (eds.) Nineteenth century English: stability and change
John Algeo British or American English? A handbook of word and grammar patterns
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521832199
© Christian Mair 2006
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2006
Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
ISBN-13 978-0-521-83219-9 hardback
ISBN-10 0-521-83219-5 hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
The following authors and publishers have given permission to use extended quotations from their work:
© Tom Leonard, from Intimate voices: poems 1965–1983, Etruscan Books Devon 2003 (for “i've not got a light”)
© India Knight/The Sunday Times, 11 November 2001 (for the extract from India Knight, “Speak proper? Not likely”)
© Little, Brown Book Group (for the passage reproduced from Sarah Waters, The night watch, London: Virago Press, 2006)
© OUP (for Appendix 4, “Motswana–mussy”)
Every effort has been made to secure necessary permissions to reproduce copyright material in this work, though in some cases it has proved impossible to trace or contact copyright holders. If any omissions are brought to our notice, we will be happy to include appropriate acknowledgments on reprinting or in any subsequent edition.
| List of figures | page ix | |
| List of tables | xi | |
| Acknowledgments | xv | |
| 1 | Setting the scene | 1 |
| 2 | Ongoing language change: problems of detection and verification | 12 |
| 2.1 “Visible” and “invisible” changes | 12 | |
| 2.2 The pitfalls of anecdotal observation | 15 | |
| 2.3 Documenting change | 21 | |
| 2.4 Outlook: a plea for methodological pluralism | 33 | |
| 3 | Lexical change in twentieth-century English | 36 |
| 3.1 Introduction | 36 | |
| 3.2 Case studies | 38 | |
| 3.3 Major trends | 53 | |
| 3.4 Neologizing in its social context | 69 | |
| 4 | Grammatical changes in twentieth-century English | 82 |
| 4.1 Introduction | 82 | |
| 4.2 Review of the literature | 84 | |
| 4.3 Aspect: twentieth-century changes in the structure and use of the progressive | 88 | |
| 4.4 The going to-future | 95 | |
| 4.5 Modality: must and shall – two modals on the way out, and possible replacements | 100 | |
| 4.6 Further developments in tense, aspect, modality: a synopsis of current research | 108 | |
| 4.7 Current changes in the English voice system | 111 | |
| 4.8 Nonfinite verb forms: some twentieth-century developments in the field of clausal complementation | 119 | |
| 4.9 Nouns, pronouns, adjectives | 140 | |
| 4.10 Conclusion | 154 | |
| 5 | Pronunciation | 156 |
| 5.1 Introduction | 156 | |
| 5.2 A history of RP in the twentieth century | 162 | |
| 5.3 “General American”: myth or reality? | 173 | |
| 6 | Language change in context: changing communicative and discourse norms in twentieth-century English | 181 |
| 6.1 Introduction | 181 | |
| 6.2 The colloquialization of written English in the twentieth century | 183 | |
| 6.3 Americanization? | 193 | |
| 6.4 Analysis of selected sample texts | 195 | |
| Conclusion | 200 | |
| Appendix 1 Brief survey of the corpora used for the present study | 206 | |
| Appendix 2 The OED Baseline Corpora | 210 | |
| Appendix 3 Estimating text size in the newspaper archives and the World Wide Web | 213 | |
| Appendix 4 A quarterly update of the OED Online (New Edition) – 13 March 2003: Motswana to mussy | 217 | |
| References | 231 | |
| Index | 242 | |
| 1.1 | Languages of publication in five natural sciences (1879–1980), (Tsunoda 1983) | page 9 |
| 2.1 | Four matching one-million-word corpora of written English | 24 |
| 3.1 | Frequency of use of selected computer neologisms in The Guardian (and Observer) on CD-ROM | 41 |
| 3.2 | Frequency of use of selected military neologisms in The Guardian (and Observer) on CD-ROM | 44 |
| 3.3 | March 2003 OED updates for words containing the combining form multi- | 55 |
| 3.4 | March 2003 OED updates – out-of-sequence entries | 56 |
| 3.5 | Frequency of selected verbs of the up/down + V type in The Guardian (and Observer) on CD-ROM | 65 |
| 3.6 | Spread of three deverbal adjectives in The Guardian (and Observer) on CD-ROM | 69 |
| 4.1 | Going to and gonna 1600–2000 – frequency as n/10,000 citations | 97 |
| 4.2 | Get-passives according to age in the BNC | 115 |
| 4.3 | Nonfinite complements of remember in the OED quotation base by century – normalized frequency as n/10,000 quotations | 127 |
| 4.4 | Help + infinitive 1600–2000 – frequency as n/10,000 quotations | 138 |
| 4.5 | Analytical and synthetic comparison for four classes of adjectives (Kytö and Romaine 1997: 344) | 150 |
| 5.1 | The decline of /ʊə/ (John Wells, source: http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/) | 166 |
| 5.2 | Major dialect areas in the US based on the Dictionary of American regional English (DARE) (Carver 1987) and the Phonological atlas of North America (Labov et al. 2006) (source: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phono_atlas/NationalMap/NationalMap.html) | 178 |
| 5.3 | Merger of the vowels in cot and caught (source: William Labov, http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phono_atlas/ICSLP4.html#Heading2) | 180 |
| A3.1 | Textual growth in The Guardian (and Observer) on CD-ROM | 215 |
| A3.2 | Deep breath in top-level Web domains, December 2002 to March 2003 | 216 |