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An Introduction to Early Modern English

An Introduction to Early Modern English, helps students of English and linguistics to place the language of the period 1500-1700 in its historical context as a language with a common core but also one which varies across time, regionally and socially, and according to register. The volume focuses on the structure of what contemporaries called the General Dialect--its spelling, vocabulary, grammar and punctuation--and on its dialectal origins. The book also discusses the language situation and linguistic anxieties in England at a time when Latin exerted a strong influence on the rising standard language.

2.1 Range of evidence Early Modern English provides the modern student with
much ampler textual and metalinguistic materials than any earlier period. For the
first time, we have contemporary analyses of the pronunciation, grammar and
vocabulary of English, and can read descriptions of its regional and social
varieties in teaching manuals and textbooks of different kinds. All this information
is valuable in that it gives the modern reader and researcher a window on the
period and its ...

Sociolinguistics and Language History

Studies Based on the Corpus of Early English Correspondence

What role has social status played in shaping the English language across the centuries? Have women also been the agents of language standardization in the past? Can apparent-time patterns be used to predict the course of long-term language change? These questions and many others will be addressed in this volume, which combines sociolinguistic methodology and social history to account for diachronic language change in Renaissance English. The approach has been made possible by the new machine-readable Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC) specifically compiled for this purpose. The 2.4-million-word corpus covers the period from 1420 to 1680 and contains over 700 writers. The volume introduces the premises of the study, discussing both modern sociolinguistics and English society in the late medieval and early modern periods. A detailed description is given of the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, its encoding, and the separate database which records the letter writers' social backgrounds. The pilot studies based on the CEEC suggest that social rank and gender should both be considered in diachronic language change, but that apparent-time patterns may not always be a reliable cue to what will happen in the long run. The volume also argues that historical sociolinguistics offers fascinating perspectives on the study of such new areas as pragmatization and changing politeness cultures across time. This extension of sociolinguistic methodology to the past is a breakthrough in the field of corpus linguistics. It will be of major interest not only to historical linguists but to modern sociolinguists and social historians.

These questions and many others will be addressed in this volume, which combines sociolinguistic methodology and social history to account for diachronic language change in Renaissance English.