The Diffusion of Language Change in Late Modern English
My project on Late Modern English (LModE, 1700-1900) will result in a book that sheds light on a key issue in historical linguistics: the connection between socio-cultural and linguistic change. LModE is important in this respect because it seems to feature less language change than expected. The increased social and geographical mobility of speakers during the period must have led to weakened social networks, which should promote language change; but the structure of LModE instead appears to be largely stable. This paradox needs to be addressed, as it seems to undermine the important theoretical assumption that socio-cultural and linguistic changes are linked. In the book, I argue that LModE actually exhibits a great many changes in the frequency of linguistic features, but as these changes (i) occur at the level of the individual speaker and (ii) do not lead to the appearance of new linguistic features, an illusion of stability is created. I also show that it is precisely such changes that correlate with weakened social networks. I illustrate this argument in four corpus-based case studies of two important types of change in LModE grammar: colloquialization (i.e. features characteristic of spoken usage become more frequent in writing) and densification (i.e. a given meaning is condensed into an expression with fewer words). The case studies also add to our knowledge of what remains an understudied period in the history of English.
Final report
My RJ Sabbatical enabled me to complete my book project on syntactic change in Late Modern English. My monograph was published in late 2021 by Cambridge University Press. The monograph format was well suited to the project because it enabled me to combine a large-scale theoretical discussion of language change and of how Late Modern English fits into theories about how languages change with careful empirical studies. It would have been difficult to achieve this combination in separate articles. As the book was published by a well-known international publisher, it has already been reviewed favourably in a prominent journal, and further reviews are expected.
Beside the publication itself, the funding also enabled me to present a paper on some of the results of the project at a conference in a series focusing specifically on the Late Modern English period, i.e. 1700-1900. I thus got an opportunity to discuss the contents of the book with experts in the field and to spread the results of the project to an even wider audience.
The main aim of the book is to contextualize syntactic change in Late Modern English in order to resolve what I call "the stability paradox". Research on the influence of social networks on language use has shown that languages change more quickly when the communities where they are spoken are characterized by relatively weak ties between the people that make up the networks; in contrast, strong ties make the language used more conservative. From this perspective, Late Modern English should undergo considerable change, as increased geographical and social mobility (e.g. urbanization and the growing middle classes) during the period contributed to many old networks with strong ties being disrupted and replaced with weaker ties in urban environments. Nevertheless, research appears to indicate that English undergoes relatively few changes between 1700 and 1900. The stability paradox thus consists in the fact that Late Modern English appears stable even though it should undergo change.
In the book's theoretical discussion, I show that Late Modern English gives an appearance of stability owing to several interconnected factors. First, most people who affected one another's language use through weak network ties spoke relative similar dialects to begin with; migration to many of the cities was primarily from the surrounding countryside. This means that adjustments to their idiolects (their individual versions of the English language) became relatively minor even though a large number of idiolects were affected. Secondly, many language users who were upwardly mobile socially changed their language in the direction of Standard English, since that variety enjoyed high overt prestige. These changes thus become more or less invisible, as Standard English was already fully documented and described. Thirdly, Standard English also predominates extra clearly in the documents we have access to from the period between 1750 and 1900, because this period falls between (i) the development of Standard English as a well-described, desirable variety and (ii) the technological developments that would soon enable the recording of informal speech. These and other factors thus create an illusion of linguistic stability.
I further argue that studies based on corpora, i.e. large, digitized collections of texts, are particularly suitable in order to examine the changes that do leave traces in texts. This is because these changes are often noticeable as quantitative increases or decreases in the frequencies of different linguistic features, and large databases that facilitate the automatic retrieval of syntactic patterns can then be necessary to reveal change.
In my book, I examine two features that may indicate that written 19th-century English became more colloquial: contractions of the negator 'not', e.g. 'won't' for 'will not', and the use of the conjunction 'and' to link clauses rather than phrases. Changes of this type characterize genres that undergo popularization and are aimed at a wide audience; however, changes can be slowed down if the colloquial features are overtly criticized in prescriptive sources. This is apparent from the results: 'not'-contraction, which was often criticized, became more common especially in genres such as drama and fiction, where everyday dialogue is often represented, while similar increases are not noticeable in press language. Newspapers instead feature increasingly many clauses linked by 'and', which was not subject to criticism (except when 'and' appears in sentence-initial position).
I also examine two features that indicate densification in language (i.e. that the same meaning is expressed using fewer words than previously): nouns as premodifiers in noun phrases, e.g. 'telegraph' in 'the telegraph wires', and participle clauses, e.g. 'passing the windways' in 'the air passing the windways'. The results show that especially nouns as premodifiers become considerable more frequent in 19th-century newspaper language. Journalistic prose thus becomes more colloquial at the same time as it undergoes densification; this is because it has to take into account both a larger group of target readers and a need to fit as much content as possible into a limited space in the paper.
My project gives rise to two additional research questions that are connected to the available primary material and the choice of methodology, respectively. As regards primary material, my analyses show that it would be desirable to make more texts that were never printed accessible to linguistic research. Handwritten letters, diary entries, etc., especially those written by working-class speakers, would be a very welcome addition to existing sources, and they would also help us to answer theoretical questions about the extent of language change. As for methodological choices, I emphasize the complex question of how the frequency of a linguistic feature should be calculated: per a given number of words or in relation to the frequency of one or several features that comprise alternative ways of expressing the same meaning. I hope to be able to return to both questions in my future work.
Beside the publication itself, the funding also enabled me to present a paper on some of the results of the project at a conference in a series focusing specifically on the Late Modern English period, i.e. 1700-1900. I thus got an opportunity to discuss the contents of the book with experts in the field and to spread the results of the project to an even wider audience.
The main aim of the book is to contextualize syntactic change in Late Modern English in order to resolve what I call "the stability paradox". Research on the influence of social networks on language use has shown that languages change more quickly when the communities where they are spoken are characterized by relatively weak ties between the people that make up the networks; in contrast, strong ties make the language used more conservative. From this perspective, Late Modern English should undergo considerable change, as increased geographical and social mobility (e.g. urbanization and the growing middle classes) during the period contributed to many old networks with strong ties being disrupted and replaced with weaker ties in urban environments. Nevertheless, research appears to indicate that English undergoes relatively few changes between 1700 and 1900. The stability paradox thus consists in the fact that Late Modern English appears stable even though it should undergo change.
In the book's theoretical discussion, I show that Late Modern English gives an appearance of stability owing to several interconnected factors. First, most people who affected one another's language use through weak network ties spoke relative similar dialects to begin with; migration to many of the cities was primarily from the surrounding countryside. This means that adjustments to their idiolects (their individual versions of the English language) became relatively minor even though a large number of idiolects were affected. Secondly, many language users who were upwardly mobile socially changed their language in the direction of Standard English, since that variety enjoyed high overt prestige. These changes thus become more or less invisible, as Standard English was already fully documented and described. Thirdly, Standard English also predominates extra clearly in the documents we have access to from the period between 1750 and 1900, because this period falls between (i) the development of Standard English as a well-described, desirable variety and (ii) the technological developments that would soon enable the recording of informal speech. These and other factors thus create an illusion of linguistic stability.
I further argue that studies based on corpora, i.e. large, digitized collections of texts, are particularly suitable in order to examine the changes that do leave traces in texts. This is because these changes are often noticeable as quantitative increases or decreases in the frequencies of different linguistic features, and large databases that facilitate the automatic retrieval of syntactic patterns can then be necessary to reveal change.
In my book, I examine two features that may indicate that written 19th-century English became more colloquial: contractions of the negator 'not', e.g. 'won't' for 'will not', and the use of the conjunction 'and' to link clauses rather than phrases. Changes of this type characterize genres that undergo popularization and are aimed at a wide audience; however, changes can be slowed down if the colloquial features are overtly criticized in prescriptive sources. This is apparent from the results: 'not'-contraction, which was often criticized, became more common especially in genres such as drama and fiction, where everyday dialogue is often represented, while similar increases are not noticeable in press language. Newspapers instead feature increasingly many clauses linked by 'and', which was not subject to criticism (except when 'and' appears in sentence-initial position).
I also examine two features that indicate densification in language (i.e. that the same meaning is expressed using fewer words than previously): nouns as premodifiers in noun phrases, e.g. 'telegraph' in 'the telegraph wires', and participle clauses, e.g. 'passing the windways' in 'the air passing the windways'. The results show that especially nouns as premodifiers become considerable more frequent in 19th-century newspaper language. Journalistic prose thus becomes more colloquial at the same time as it undergoes densification; this is because it has to take into account both a larger group of target readers and a need to fit as much content as possible into a limited space in the paper.
My project gives rise to two additional research questions that are connected to the available primary material and the choice of methodology, respectively. As regards primary material, my analyses show that it would be desirable to make more texts that were never printed accessible to linguistic research. Handwritten letters, diary entries, etc., especially those written by working-class speakers, would be a very welcome addition to existing sources, and they would also help us to answer theoretical questions about the extent of language change. As for methodological choices, I emphasize the complex question of how the frequency of a linguistic feature should be calculated: per a given number of words or in relation to the frequency of one or several features that comprise alternative ways of expressing the same meaning. I hope to be able to return to both questions in my future work.