Historical Dialectology in the Digital Age

About the Book

Edinburgh (now the Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics), such as eLALME (the electronic version A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English), LAEME (A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English) and LAOS (A Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots), this volume illustrates how traditional methods of historical dialectology can benefit from new methods of data-collection to test out theoretical and empirical claims. In showcasing the results that these resources can yield in the digital age, the book highlights novel methods for presenting, mapping and analysing the quantitative data of historical dialects, and sets the research agenda for future work in this field.
Bringing together a range of distinguished researchers, the book sets out the key corpus-building strategies for working with regional manuscript data at different levels of linguistic analysis including syntax, morphology, phonetics and phonology. The chapters also show the ways in which the geographical spread of phonological, morphological and lexical features of a language can be used to improve our assessment of the geographical provenance of historical texts.

Table of Contents:
Contents List of Figures and Tables Notes on Editors Notes on Contributors Preface Acknowledgements 1 Historical Dialectology and the Angus McIntosh Legacy Rhona Alcorn, Joanna Kopaczyk, Bettelou Los and Benjamin Molineaux Part 1 Creating and Mining Digital Resources 2 A Parsed Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English Robert Truswell, Rhona Alcorn, James Donaldson and Joel Wallenberg 3 Approaching Transition Scots from a Micro-perspective; The Dunfermline Corpus, 1573–1723 Klaus Hofmann 4 Early Spelling Evidence for Scots L-vocalisation: A Corpus-based Approach Benjamin Molineaux, Joanna Kopaczyk, Warren Maguire, Rhona Alcorn, Vasilis Karaiskos and Bettelou Los Part 2 Segmental Histories 5 Old and Middle English Spellings for OE hw-, with Special Reference to the ‘qu-’ Type: In Celebration of LAEME, (e)LALME, LAOS and CoNE Margaret Laing and Roger Lass 6 The Development of Old English ǣ: The Middle English Spelling Evidence Gjertrud F. Stenbrenden 7 The Development of Old English eo/ēo and the Systematicity of Middle English Spelling Merja Stenroos 8 Examining the Evidence for Phonemic Affricates: Middle English /t͡ʃ/, /d͡ʒ/ or [t-ʃ], [d-ʒ]? Donka Minkova Part 3 Placing Features in Context 9 The Predictability of {S} Abbreviation in Older Scots Manuscripts According to Stem-final Littera Daisy Smith 10 An East Anglian Poem in a London Manuscript? The Date and Dialect of The Court of Love in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.19 Ad Putter 11 ‘He was a good hammer, was he’: Gender as Marker for South-Western Dialects of English. A Corpus-based Study from a Diachronic Perspective Trinidad Guzmán-González Index

About the Author :
Rhona Alcorn is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh and CEO of Scots Language Dictionaries Ltd. She is also Deputy Director of the Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics. She was the first receipient of the Richard M. Hogg Prize, awarded annually by the International Society for the Linguistics of English since 2008. Joanna Kopaczyk is Lecturer in English Language & Linguistics at the University of Glasgow. She is a historical linguist with an interest in formulaic language, the history of Scots and historical multilingualism, which she approaches from pragmaphilological and corpus-driven perspectives. She previously worked at the University of Edinburgh, where she was one of the compilers of the From Inglis to Scots (FITS) corpus, and at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Pozna. Her recent co-edited volumes include Applications of Pattern-driven Methos in Corpus Linguistics (John Benjamins 2018) and Binomials in the History of English (Cambridge University Press 2017). Bettelou Los is Forbes Professor of English Language at the University of Edinburgh. She graduated from the University of Amsterdam in 1986 and has since held teaching and research positions at the University of Amsterdam, the Vrije Universiteit, the University of Nijmegen, Radboud University Nijmegen and other colleges of high education. She participates in the research program The Diachrony of Complex Predicates in West Germanic, and has published several papers on diachronic syntax. Previous publications include The Handbook of the History of English, Blackwell, as co-editor (2006), and The Rise of the To-Infinitive, Oxford University Press (2005). Benjamin Molineaux is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics, the University of Edinburgh. His interests are in synchronic and diachronic phonology and morphology, with special emphasis on stress systems. He has published on these topics as applied to the history of English, Scots and Mapudungun (a language of Chile and Argentina). As one of the compilers of the From Inglis To Scots (FITS) database he has applied corpus methods to mapping the earliest sound-to-spelling correspondences in the history of Scots (1380-500). He is currently using the same methods to explore the 400-year history of Mapudungun, as part of the Corpus of Historical Mapudungun. He holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford.

Review :
The present volume is a very valuable contribution to the field of English historical dialectology. It demonstrates that the door for the linguistic analysis of early and late medieval texts and their language has been opened anew. It shows that there is an opportunity for more nuanced questions and more precise insights through the options presented by digitised corpora and/or digital methods (as complements to traditional, analogue corpora and methods). The overarching question – namely how digital methods can be used to investigate diachronic variation and language change – is addressed at different linguistic levels. It is the interplay between spelling variation and pronunciation which comes to the fore, as it is at the heart of half of the contributions (chapters 4, 5, 6, 7, 8), but syntactic variation and change, as well as morphological and lexical variation, do also find their places. The individual chapters all present their data and analyses with clarity and conciseness...All in all, the volume is a very good collection of papers, and it will be a handy and useful resource for students and more experienced scholars interested in the state of the field and what one can do with digitised corpora and digital methods. The chapters in this volume provide a fascinating insight into the state of the art of historical dialectology, and, in the span of age and experience represented by the authors, ranging from Emeritus professors to doctoral candidates, reassure us that the future of this discipline and the legacy of Angus McIntosh are in safe hands... Historical Dialectology in the Digital Age thus gives the reader a greater understanding of the past and an intriguing glimpse into the future of historical dialectology. It will be of interest not only to historical linguists, but to those working with linguistic corpora of all kinds. Overall, Alcorn, Kopaczyk, Los, and Molineaux have brought together a great collection of papers that function as an excellent introductory work to the tools and methods available to the historical dialectologist working in the digital age. This volume both shows the value that digital methods hold for the study of historical linguistics and simultaneously underlines the need for new tools to continue to be developed. With its varied collection of contributions and contributors, this volume will appeal to both advanced scholars in the field of historical linguistics who are interested in keeping up with recent developments in the field, as well as to those wishing to acquaint themselves with the various tools and methods that are available. In short, HDDA is a valuable contribution to the field of historical dialectology and will hopefully serve to introduce its readers both to the true and tried methods of digital linguistic research as well as to new and exciting possibilities. Historical Dialectology in the Digital Age illustrates how historical dialectology has profited from the field’s speedy willingness to embrace and develop new digital technologies, and much of that initiative has come from the Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics. Despite its focus on English and Scots, researchers working on the historical dialectology of other languages will benefit greatly from reading this volume. This volume brings historical dialectology fully into the digital world. Not only do we learn about aspects of Medieval and Early modern varieties of English and Scots, but also the latest methods in corpus construction, tagging/annotation and analysis — making it essential reading for a wide array of historical linguists. With breadth yet no loss of coherence or depth, this volume can assure us that Angus McIntosh’s legacy is in good hands.