The study of the recent history of English is crucial in making connections between early and present-day English. This volume focuses on the nineteenth century, an important period of both stability and change for the English language. Through ten detailed case studies, it highlights the relationships between English, its users and nineteenth-century society, looking particularly at gender differences and variation across genres. It also discusses major structural aspects of nineteenth-century English, such as nouns, verbs and adjectives, and Germanic vs Romance vocabulary. Although the nineteenth century is often viewed as a relatively stable period in the development of the language, this volume shows the 1800s to be a time of significant change, some of which continued into the twentieth century. By making comparisons possible with both earlier and later periods, it makes an important contribution to our overall understanding of the history of the English language.
MERJA KYTÖ is Professor of English Language at Uppsala University, Sweden.
MATS RYDÉN is Professor Emeritus of English Language at Uppsala University, Sweden.
ERIK SMITTERBERG is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow in English Linguistics at Stockholm University, Sweden.
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.
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)
Already published
CHRISTIAN MAIR Infinitival Complement Clauses in English: a Study of Syntax in Discourse
CHARLES F. MEYER Apposition in 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 (ed.) 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
Edited by
MERJA KYTÖ
Uppsala University, Sweden
MATS RYDÉN
Uppsala University, Sweden
ERIK SMITTERBERG
Stockholm University, Sweden
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First published 2006
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| List of plates | page ix | ||
| List of figures | x | ||
| List of tables | xi | ||
| List of contributors | xvii | ||
| Acknowledgements | xix | ||
| Introduction: Exploring nineteenth-century English – past and present perspectives | 1 | ||
| Merja Kytö, Mats Rydén and Erik Smitterberg | |||
| 1 | Modifiers describing women and men in nineteenth-century English | 17 | |
| Ingegerd Bäcklund | |||
| 2 | Words in English Record Office documents of the early 1800s | 56 | |
| Tony Fairman | |||
| 3 | The subjunctive in adverbial clauses in nineteenth-century English | 89 | |
| Peter Grund and Terry Walker | |||
| 4 | The passive in nineteenth-century scientific writing | 110 | |
| Larisa Oldireva Gustafsson | |||
| 5 | Relativizers in nineteenth-century English | 136 | |
| Christine Johansson | |||
| 6 | Anaphoric reference in the nineteenth century: that/those + of constructions | 183 | |
| Mark Kaunisto | |||
| 7 | Adjective comparison in nineteenth-century English | 194 | |
| Merja Kytö and Suzanne Romaine | |||
| 8 | Nonfinite complement clauses in the nineteenth century: the case of remember | 215 | |
| Christian Mair | |||
| 9 | The in -ing construction in British English, 1800–2000 | 229 | |
| Juhani Rudanko | |||
| 10 | Partitive constructions in nineteenth-century English | 242 | |
| Erik Smitterberg | |||
| Appendix | 272 | ||
| References | 278 | ||
| Name index | 290 | ||
| Subject index | 293 |
| I. | Mary Cramp’s signature (CKS(M): Horsmonden, P192/1/7) | page 59 |
| II. | A bill by John Goatham (CKS(M): Bredgar, P43/12/7/Bundle 5; microfilm 699) | 73 |
| 3.1 The distribution of adverbial clauses according to verb form, genre and period | page 96 | ||
| 3.2 The distribution of subjunctive and indicative forms according to verb (form) | 102 | ||
| 4.1 Proportion of future BE-passives | 117 | ||
| 4.2 Proportion of conditional BE-passives | 119 | ||
| 5.1 Female and male nineteenth-century letter writers (periods 1 and 3) | 140 | ||
| 7.1 Per cent of inflectional forms of adjective comparison from Late Middle English to Modern English (based on table 3 and figure 1 in Kytö and Romaine 1997: 335–6) | 197 | ||
| 7.2 Inflectional superlatives in men’s and women’s letters (with and without dearest) | 208 | ||
| 10.1 The distribution of the five subgroups of partitive constructions in the subcorpus | 252 | ||
| 10.2 The percentage of quantitative partitives by genre in the subcorpus | 254 | ||
| 0.1 Word counts for period samples in CONCE and for the whole corpus, excluding the words within reference codes and text-level codes | page 5 | ||
| 0.2 Description of the genres in CONCE | 6 | ||
| 0.3 Word counts for period, genre and period/genre subsamples in CONCE and for the whole corpus, excluding the words within reference codes and text-level codes | 7 | ||
| 0.4 Word counts for the letters by female and male writers in CONCE, excluding the words within reference codes and text- level codes | 8 | ||
| 1.1 Number of words by female and male writers per period in the sub-corpus | 19 | ||
| 1.2 Distribution of modifiers with female and male reference over time | 25 | ||
| 1.3 Number of modifiers per 1,000 words | 25 | ||
| 1.4 Distribution of intrapersonal vs interpersonal semantic categories over time | 26 | ||
| 1.5a Distribution of modifiers with female reference between intrapersonal and interpersonal semantic categories | 27 | ||
| 1.5b Distribution of modifiers with male reference between intrapersonal and interpersonal semantic categories | 27 | ||
| 1.6a Distribution of female reference across intrapersonal categories | 28 | ||
| 1.6b Distribution of male reference across intrapersonal categories | 28 | ||
| 1.7a Distribution of female reference across interpersonal categories | 29 | ||
| 1.7b Distribution of male reference across interpersonal categories | 29 | ||
| 1.8 Distribution of strings of modifiers with female vs male reference | 32 | ||
| 1.9 Distribution and relative frequency of of-phrases with female vs male reference | 33 | ||
| 1.10a Distribution of of-phrases with female reference across semantic categories | 34 | ||
| 1.10b Distribution of of-phrases with male reference across semantic categories | 34 | ||
| 1.11 Frequency of modifiers in texts by female and male writers | 35 | ||
| 1.12a Frequency of intrapersonal and interpersonal modifiers used by female writers | 36 | ||
| 1.12b Frequency of intrapersonal and interpersonal modifiers used by male writers | 36 | ||
| 1.13a Distribution of reference in texts by women | 37 | ||
| 1.13b Distribution of reference in texts by men | 37 | ||
| 1.14 Modifiers used by female vs male writers according to semantic category | 38 | ||
| 1.15a Distribution of positive, negative and neutral modifiers with female reference | 41 | ||
| 1.15b Distribution of positive, negative and neutral modifiers with male reference | 41 | ||
| 1.16a Distribution of positive, negative and neutral modifiers with female and male reference in texts by female writers | 42 | ||
| 1.16b Distribution of positive, negative and neutral modifiers with female and male reference in texts by male writers | 42 | ||
| 1.17 Mental State modifiers used with both female and male reference | 44 | ||
| 1.18a Mental State modifiers only used with female or male reference in period 1 | 45 | ||
| 1.18b Mental State modifiers only used with female or male reference in period 2 | 46 | ||
| 1.18c Mental State modifiers only used with female or male reference in period 3 | 47 | ||
| 1.19a Distribution of reference for positive Mental State modifiers used only about women and only about men | 48 | ||
| 1.19b Distribution of reference for negative Mental State modifiers used only about women and only about men | 48 | ||
| 1.20a Distribution of positive, negative and neutral modifiers with female reference in Wallin-Ashcroft (2000) | 51 | ||
| 1.20b Distribution of positive, negative and neutral modifiers with male reference in Wallin-Ashcroft (2000) | 51 | ||
| 2.1 Tokens: Anglo-Saxon vs Latinate | 78 | ||
| 2.2 Types: Anglo-Saxon vs Latinate | 78 | ||
| 3.1 The distribution of the subjunctive and modal auxiliaries according to period | 93 | ||
| 3.2 The distribution of adverbial clauses according to verb form and period | 93 | ||
| 3.3 The distribution of adverbial clauses according to verb form and genre | 94 | ||
| 3.4 The distribution of adverbial clauses according to verb form, gender and period in the Letters genre | 98 | ||
| 3.5 The distribution of the verb forms according to conjunction | 99 | ||
| 3.6 The distribution of subjunctive forms according to verb type | 101 | ||
| 3.7 The distribution of adverbial clauses according to verb form, genre and period | 104 | ||
| 3.8 The frequency of the subjunctive after if vs other conjunctions according to genre | 105 | ||
| 3.9 Instances of the ten most common conjunctions which occur with the subjunctive presented according to mood and genre | 105 | ||
| 3.10 The frequency of the subjunctive after as, as if, if, unless and whether according to period | 106 | ||
| 3.11 The frequency of the subjunctive after the conjunction if according to genre | 106 | ||
| 3.12 The distribution of subjunctive and indicative forms with the verb BE | 107 | ||
| 3.13 The distribution of subjunctive were and indicative was | 107 | ||
| 3.14 The distribution of subjunctive and indicative forms with verbs other than BE | 107 | ||
| 4.1 The distribution of passives across time and genre in CONCE (based on Geisler 2002: 252) | 113 | ||
| 4.2 The distribution of BE-passives in Science | 114 | ||
| 4.3 The distribution of passives in relation to grammatical parameters | 115 | ||
| 4.4 The distribution of BE-passives in relation to syntactic parameters | 121 | ||
| 4.5 The distribution of BE-passives in relation to syntactic parameters of simple and complex sentences | 122 | ||
| 4.6 Past participles of verbs commonly occurring in the passive in scientific (CONCE) and academic (LSWE) writing (verb forms occurring in both corpora underlined) | 125 | ||
| 4.7 Phrasal associations of found, given, made and seen in the samples from Materials for the Study of Variation by Bateson (1894) | 127 | ||
| 4.8 Raw frequencies of BE-passives with past participles of increase and produce in Science | 128 | ||
| 4.9 The distribution of passives in samples of Charles Darwin’s writing included in CONCE (period 2, 1850–70) | 129 | ||
| 4.10 The distribution of BE-passives in relation to grammatical parameters in the writings of Darwin | 129 | ||
| 4.11 The distribution of BE-passives in relation to syntactic parameters in the writings of Darwin | 130 | ||
| 4.12 The distribution of BE-passives in relation to syntactic parameters of compound and complex sentences in the writings of Darwin | 131 | ||
| 5.1 Wh-forms and that in Science | 137 | ||
| 5.2 Wh-forms and that in Trials | 138 | ||
| 5.3 Wh-forms and that in Letters | 140 | ||
| 5.4a Relativizers in Science, Trials and Letters (periods 1 and 3) | 141 | ||
| 5.4b Clause functions of the relativizer which | 142 | ||
| 5.4c Clause functions of the relativizer that | 143 | ||
| 5.4d Pied piping and stranding in Science, Trials and Letters (periods 1 and 3) | 144 | ||
| 5.5 Wh-forms and that: type of antecedent in Trials (periods 1 and 3) | 149 | ||
| 5.6 Wh-forms and that: type of antecedent in Letters (periods 1 and 3) | 149 | ||
| 5.7 Wh-forms and that: type of antecedent and clause function in Trials (periods 1 and 3) | 152 | ||
| 5.8 Wh-forms and that: type of antecedent and clause function in Letters (periods 1 and 3) | 154 | ||
| 5.9a The syntactic environments of wh-forms and that (Science, Trials and Letters, periods 1 and 3) | 155 | ||
| 5.9b The syntactic environments of wh-forms and that (Science, periods 1 and 3) | 158 | ||
| 5.9c The syntactic environments of wh-forms and that (Trials, periods 1 and 3) | 161 | ||
| 5.9d The syntactic environments of wh-forms and that (Letters, periods 1 and 3) | 163 | ||
| 5.10a The use of wh-forms and that across speaker roles in Trials (periods 1 and 3) | 167 | ||
| 5.10b The use of relativizers across speaker roles in Trials (periods 1 and 3) | 168 | ||
| 5.10c Pied piping and stranding across speaker roles in Trials (periods 1 and 3) | 170 | ||
| 5.11 Wh-forms and that in women’s and men’s letters (periods 1 and 3) | 172 | ||
| 5.12a Wh-clauses and that-clauses in women’s letters (periods 1 and 3) | 173 | ||
| 5.12b Wh-clauses and that-clauses in men’s letters (periods 1 and 3) | 173 | ||
| 5.13a Wh-clauses and that-clauses in women’s letters (period 1) | 174 | ||
| 5.13b Wh-clauses and that-clauses in men’s letters (period 1) | 174 | ||
| 5.14a Wh-clauses and that-clauses in women’s letters (period 3) | 175 | ||
| 5.14b Wh-clauses and that-clauses in men’s letters (period 3) | 175 | ||
| 5.15a The use of relativizers in women’s and men’s letters (periods 1 and 3) | 176 | ||
| 5.15b Pied piping and stranding across gender in letters (periods 1 and 3) | 178 | ||
| 6.1 Anaphoric that of/those of constructions in the CONCE corpus, period 1 (1800–30) | 190 | ||
| 6.2 Anaphoric that of/those of constructions in the CONCE corpus, period 2 (1850–70) | 190 | ||
| 6.3 Anaphoric that of/those of constructions in the CONCE corpus, period 3 (1870–1900) | 191 | ||
| 6.4 Anaphoric that of/those of constructions in the CONCE corpus | 192 | ||
| 7.1a Inflectional versus periphrastic comparative forms in the CONCE corpus; the incidence of the forms per 100,000 words | 199 | ||
| 7.1b Inflectional versus periphrastic superlative forms in the CONCE corpus; the incidence of the forms per 100,000 words | 199 | ||
| 7.2a Inflectional versus periphrastic comparative forms in the seven genres and three subperiods; the incidence of the forms per 100,000 words | 202 | ||
| 7.2b Inflectional versus periphrastic superlative forms in the seven genres and three subperiods; the incidence of the forms per 100,000 words | 203 | ||
| 7.3a Inflectional and periphrastic comparatives in men’s and women’s letters; incidence per 1,000 words | 207 | ||
| 7.3b Inflectional and periphrastic superlatives in men’s and women’s letters; incidence per 1,000 words | 207 | ||
| 7.4 Inflectional superlatives in men’s and women’s letters (instances of dearest removed from the figures); incidence per 1,000 words | 208 | ||
| 7.5 Inflectional and periphrastic comparative forms in disyllabic adjectives | 210 | ||
| 7.6a Disyllabic comparative forms: attributive uses | 211 | ||
| 7.6b Disyllabic comparative forms: predicative uses | 211 | ||
| 8.1 Gerunds and infinitives after remember in the OED quotation base (approximate frequencies based on simplified search procedure) | 220 | ||
| 8.2 Gerunds and infinitives after remember in the OED quotation base – normalized frequencies (including all relevant constructions, and rounded to the first decimal) | 221 | ||
| 8.3 Notional subjects in gerundial constructions after remember | 223 | ||
| 9.1 The occurrence of in -ing patterns by matrix verb in CONCE | 234 | ||
| 9.2 The occurrence of in -ing patterns by matrix verb in LOB | 235 | ||
| 9.3 The occurrence of in -ing patterns by matrix verb in the Times subcorpus | 238 | ||
| 9.4 The occurrence of in -ing patterns by matrix verb in the Spoken British English subcorpus | 239 | ||
| 10.1 Partitive constructions by period and genre in the subcorpus | 248 | ||
| 10.2 Partitive constructions by period and gender in the Letters genre in the subcorpus | 248 | ||
| 10.3 Partitive constructions per 1,000 words by period and genre in the subcorpus | 249 | ||
| 10.4 Partitive constructions per 1,000 words by period and gender in the Letters genre in the subcorpus | 251 | ||
| 10.5 Partitive constructions by subgroup and period in the subcorpus (row percentages within brackets) | 252 | ||
| 10.6 Partitive constructions by subgroup and genre in the subcorpus (row percentages within brackets) | 253 | ||
| 10.7 Partitive constructions by subgroup and gender in the Letters genre in the subcorpus (row percentages within brackets) | 259 | ||
| 10.8 Partitives with number as partitive noun: singular vs plural concord in nineteenth- and late twentieth-century English (row percentages within brackets) | 264 | ||
| 10.9 Verbal concord with partitives containing the sequence a(n) (. . .) number of or the (. . .) number of in nineteenth- and late twentieth-century English (row percentages within brackets) | 265 | ||
INGEGERD BÄCKLUND is a Docent and retired Senior Lecturer in English Linguistics at Uppsala University (Sweden). Her research interests include present-day spoken and written English syntax as well as various aspects of academic and professional writing, such as metatext.
TONY FAIRMAN is a teacher of English as a Second or Foreign Language, with experience in Britain, Germany and Africa. He has published on pedagogical matters and more recently on Late Modern English.
PETER GRUND, who is currently doing post-doctoral research at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, received his PhD in English Linguistics from Uppsala University in 2004. In his thesis he presented an edition of an Early Modern English alchemical text. His research interests include English historical linguistics, historical genre analysis, manuscript studies and editing.
LARISA OLDIREVA GUSTAFSSON received her PhD in English Linguistics from Uppsala University in 2002. In her thesis she investigated variation in the use of preterite and past participle forms in Early and Late Modern English. She is currently working on Late Modern English grammatical theory.
CHRISTINE JOHANSSON received her PhD in English Linguistics from Uppsala University in 1995, and is now a Senior Lecturer in English Linguistics at Uppsala University. She has published on the use and distribution of relativizers in past and Present-day English.
MARK KAUNISTO is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Department of English, University of Tampere (Finland). His research interests include historical and present-day word-formation processes in English, morphology, and corpus linguistics. In his PhD thesis, he examined the variation and change in the use of English adjective pairs ending in -ic/-ical.
MERJA KYTÖ is Professor of English Language at Uppsala University. She specializes in historical linguistics and corpus studies. She has participated in the compilation of various historical corpora, among them the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts. Her current research projects include work on a volume devoted to characteristics of spoken interaction of the past in collaboration with Dr Jonathan Culpeper (Lancaster University, UK).
Professor Dr CHRISTIAN MAIR holds a Chair at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg (Germany). He has contributed significantly to advances in modern corpus linguistics by compiling the Freiburg updates of the LOB (Lancaster-Olso/Bergen) and Brown corpora, FLOB (Freiburg-LOB) and Frown (Freiburg-Brown) and by developing corpus methodology as regards, among other things, the use of the Oxford English Dictionary in linguistic investigations. His current research interests include recent change in English and developments in Late Modern English.
SUZANNE ROMAINE has been Merton Professor of English Language at the University of Oxford since 1984. Her research interests lie primarily in historical linguistics and sociolinguistics, and she has published extensively in areas such as societal multilingualism, linguistic diversity, language change, language acquisition and language contact. She has conducted fieldwork in Europe as well as in the Pacific Islands region. Her other areas of interest include corpus linguistics, language and gender, literacy and bilingual/immersion education.
JUHANI RUDANKO is Professor of English at the University of Tampere. He has worked on aspects of English grammar, including the system of English predicate complementation and its development in recent centuries, and on pragmatics and the application of pragmatic theory to the study of Shakespeare; he has also published on the early history of the American Bill of Rights.
MATS RYDÉN is Professor Emeritus of English Language at Uppsala University. He has published widely on Early and Late Modern English syntax, on topics such as relative markers, the be/have variation with intransitives, and the progressive. His current research interests include the history of botanical terminology in English.
ERIK SMITTERBERG received his PhD in English Linguistics from Uppsala University in 2002; he is currently a Post-doctoral Research Fellow in English Linguistics at Stockholm University. His thesis topic, the progressive in nineteenth-century English, reflects his specific interest in Late Modern English syntax and corpus linguistics.
TERRY WALKER is a Senior Lecturer in English at Mid-Sweden University. She received her PhD in English Linguistics from Uppsala University in 2005; the topic of her thesis was variation and development in the use of you and thou in Early Modern English dialogues. Her research interests include historical pragmatics, sociolinguistics, variation studies and the compilation of historical corpora.
Many scholars will agree that knowledge of the past is necessary for a full understanding of the present. Nineteenth-century English, the subject of this book, is part of the linguistic past, but is also close enough to the present to give a modern impression in many respects. Partly as a consequence of this seemingly intermediate status, the English of the 1800s has received comparatively little attention from language historians. The ten case studies in the present volume aim at compensating for this relative dearth of research; they also shed light on the tension between stability and change which is shown to characterize nineteenth-century English.
In preparing this volume, we have received generous assistance from fellow scholars as well as academic institutions. It is our pleasure to acknowledge their contributions here.
We would first like to recognize the contribution of the International Conferences on the English Language in the Late Modern Period 1700–1900, held at Edinburgh in 2001 and at Vigo in 2004. These conferences have greatly increased interest in the study of Late Modern English, and helped us to come into contact with many researchers interested in the language of this period.
Financial contributions from several organizations have facilitated the completion of the present volume. We wish to thank the Department of English at Uppsala University, the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Örebro University, the Department of English at Stockholm University, and Helge Ax:son Johnsons stiftelse.
Many thanks are due to our fellow scholars who have contributed to this volume, for entrusting us with their studies and for responding to editorial suggestions in a highly co-operative spirit. We also gratefully acknowledge the valuable feedback we received on the manuscript from three anonymous readers. Finally, we thank Helen Barton, the linguistics editor at Cambridge University Press, for her kind support during the preparation of this book.
The Editors