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The past few decades have witnessed an unprecedented surge of interest in the language of the Late Modern English period. Late Modern English: Novel Encounters covers a broad range of topics addressed by international experts in fields such as phonology, morphology, syntax, lexis, spelling and pragmatics; this makes the collection attractive to any scholar or student interested in the history of English. Each of the four thematic sections in the book represents a core area of Late Modern English studies. This division makes it easy for specialists to access the chapters that are of immediate relevance to their own work. An introductory chapter establishes connections between chapters within as well as between the four sections. The volume highlights recent advances in research methodology such as spelling normalization and other areas of corpus linguistics; several contributions also shed light on the interplay of internal and external factors in language change.
More and more historical texts are becoming available in digital form. Digitization of paper documents is motivated by the aim of preserving cultural heritage and making it more accessible, both to laypeople and scholars. As digital images cannot be searched for text, digitization projects increasingly strive to create digital text, which can be searched and otherwise automatically processed, in addition to facsimiles. Indeed, the emerging field of digital humanities heavily relies on the availability of digital text for its studies. Together with the increasing availability of historical texts in digital form, there is a growing interest in applying natural language processing (NLP) methods...
The first book to intervene in debates on computation in the digital humanities Bringing together leading experts from across North America and Europe, Computational Humanities redirects debates around computation and humanities digital scholarship from dualistic arguments to nuanced discourse centered around theories of knowledge and power. This volume is organized around four questions: Why or why not pursue computational humanities? How do we engage in computational humanities? What can we study using these methods? Who are the stakeholders? Recent advances in technologies for image and sound processing have expanded computational approaches to cultural forms beyond text, and new forms of...
This volume presents a synchronic investigation of concessive constructions in nine varieties of English, based on data from the International Corpus of English. The structures of interest are complex sentences with a subordinate clause introduced by although, though or even though. Various functional and formal features are taken into account: (i) the semantic/pragmatic relation that holds between the propositions involved, (ii) the position of the subordinate clause, (iii) the conjunction that is used, and (iv) the syntax of the subordinate clause. By exploring patterns of variation from a Construction Grammar perspective, the study works towards an explanatory model, whose point of departure is at the functional (semantic/pragmatic) level, and which makes hierarchically organised predictions for different formal levels (clause position, choice of connective and realisation of the subordinate clause). It treats concessives as complex form-function pairings, and develops arguments and routines that may inform quantitative approaches to constructional variation more generally.
Recent studies on the syntax and semantics of complex sentences have dealt with several challenges to the traditional boundaries between coordination and subordination. Some constructions belong to one of the two types according to syntactic criteria but relate to the other type on semantic grounds, whereas other constructions are not compatible with either the canonical syntactic or semantic tests traditionally employed to establish this distinction. Other constructions, by contrast, seem to have evolved in such a way that they now cross the divide between both types. The collection of papers in this volume delves further into the theoretical implications of previous analyses and focuses on a wide array of data from different languages, taking those challenges as a point of departure to develop innovative perspectives and to advance thought-provoking ideas.
Eighteenth-century English is often associated with normative grammar. But to what extent did prescriptivism impact ongoing processes of linguistic change? The authors of this volume examine a variety of linguistic changes in a corpus of personal correspondence, including the auxiliary do, verbal -s and the progressive aspect, and they conclude that direct normative influence on them must have been minimal. The studies are contextualized by discussions of the normative tradition and the correspondence corpus, and of eighteenth-century English society and culture. Basing their work on a variationist sociolinguistic approach, the authors introduce the models and methods they have used to trace...
This book provides an insight into the standardisation process of German in eighteenth-century Austria. It describes how norms prescribed by grammarians were actually implemented via a school reform carried out by educationalist Johann Ignaz Felbiger on the order of Empress Maria Theresa. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were undertaken of certain Upper German features (e-apocope, the absence of the prefix ge- and the ending -t in past participles, and variants of the verb form sind) in reading primers, issues of the Wienerisches Diarium / Wiener Zeitung and petitionary letters. These reveal how such variants became increasingly 'invisible' in writing. This process of 'invisibilisation', i.e. a process of stigmatization which prevents the use of certain varieties and variants in writing, can be attributed to a number of factors: Empress Maria Theresa's appeal for a language reform, the normative work by eighteenth-century grammarians, the implementation of educational reforms, and the early introduction of East Central German variants in newspaper issues.
This book contributes to the discussion of challenges faced in different areas of corpus linguistics, namely the compilation, annotation, and analysis of linguistic corpora. In a field of growing corpus sizes and expanding possibilities of gathering data, some old issues persist, while at the same time new problems have emerged. As the compilation and study of language corpora gets increasingly sophisticated and complex, continuous attention on ways of dealing with the data in question and challenges in text selection and interpretation is needed. The contributions to this volume address problems relating to a variety of areas in corpus linguistic study, including corpus annotation, data variability, learner language, social media texts, and database utilization. The authors provide critical overviews and research-based analyses, discuss the nature of some of the common pitfalls, and offer solutions to existing problems.
The application of digital technologies to historical newspapers have changed the research landscape historians were used to. An Eldorado? Despite undeniable advantages, the new digital affordance of historical newspapers also transforms research practices and confronts historians with new challenges. Drawing on a growing community of practices, the impresso project invited scholars experienced with digitised newspaper collections with the aim of encouraging a discussion on heuristics, source criticism and interpretation of digitized newspapers. This volume provides a snapshot of current research on the subject and offers three perspectives: how digitisation is transforming access to and exp...
Texts of the past were often not monolingual but were produced by and for people with bi- or multilingual repertoires; the communicative practices witnessed in them therefore reflect ongoing and earlier language contact situations. However, textbooks and earlier research tend to display a monolingual bias. This collected volume on multilingual practices in historical materials, including code-switching, highlights the importance of a multilingual approach. The authors explore multilingualism in hitherto neglected genres, periods and areas, introduce new methods of locating and analysing multiple languages in various sources, and review terminology, theories and tools. The studies also revisi...