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globe-trotter as appearing in nine of them, e.g. Polish globtroter, pronounced [gloptroter], Dutch globetrotter [ lo bətrɔtər], and translated in two more, while the more recent (blue) jeans has been borrowed in thirteen of the sixteen. And that is just the European picture. The French department store chain Monoprix ran a clothing promotion in 2004 under the banner ‘Urban tendance’, explicitly intended to be an anglicisation of the French tendance urbaine ‘urban trend’. English doesn’t have to be fully understood to be influential.

1.6The surviving historical texts

If the main evidence for English pre-1900, indeed pre-1950, is written, the nature of the texts becomes important: it is clear that language varies considerably according to genre and register.

Much OE writing was lost by scraping and re-use of the parchment or vellum, by destruction in Viking raids, in Henry VIII’s much later dissolution of the monasteries, or by other accidents. The total surviving to the present is some 31/2 million words, though multiple copies of some major texts would add to that figure. It includes a body of poetry largely confined to four manuscripts, syntactically archaic, preserving a number of synonyms (of nouns above all) on which its alliterative metre depended, and all in a mixed dialect with midlands and northern characteristics. There are Anglo-Latin glossaries, and Latin texts glossed word for word in OE between the lines. And there is prose, much of it religious, much of it translated more or less faithfully from Latin, nearly all in the West Saxon dialect. The most important wholly non-translated prose is the AngloSaxon Chronicle, started under King Alfred in the late ninth century, backdated to the earliest historical or legendary time known to its first compilers, and added to more or less continuously right up to the twelfth century. The beautifully written sermons and saints’ lives of Ælfric, in parts freely translated from Latin, are often described as being in rhythmical prose; they date from around AD 1000. Virtually the whole surviving corpus of OE is available in electronic form from the compilers of the Toronto Dictionary of Old English, and parts of it are currently being tagged and parsed by syntacticians.

Early ME texts include a number of late copies of OE works. In addition to text types evidenced in the OE period, there is poetry based on French models and prose and verse texts translated from French. The dialectal variety is much greater than in the OE period, yet the prose of the period is not evenly spread around the country. Later ME remains dialectally diverse but with more of the country represented in prose. As of October 2000, the largest electronic archive of Middle English held 19 million words, by no means the complete corpus.

By the early ModE period the effects of standardisation are reducing the dialectal variety found. On the other hand, the quantity and variety as far as genre is concerned goes up remarkably, and from this point it becomes difficult to make useful generalisations about the texts available. Incidentally, by available we mean

36 D AV I D D E N I S O N A N D R I C H A R D H O G G

‘on paper’. It would not be prudent to list the electronic corpora of ModE here, as the information dates rather quickly. Nor do we wish to imply that computerreadable texts are the be-all and end-all of linguistic research – certainly not without checking the context of each example.

1.7Indirect evidence

We have said something of the forms of English which provide the main evidence for a history of the language. Simple inspection can give us much information about the language of a particular time and place. A single text may sometimes provide subtle evidence of language change. When Jane Austen’s Emma says ‘Cannot you imagine, Mr Knightley, what a sensation his coming will produce?’, the textual italics may prompt us to suspect that Emma’s usage – the sense ‘communal excitement’ – was newfangled or ‘trendy’ in 1816 (and just the kind of thing to provoke Mr Knightley), a suspicion nicely confirmed in one of OED’s citations from 1818: ‘His death produced what in the phraseology of the present day is called, a great sensation.’ Thus a detail of typography bears here on individual lexical history. Then again, a so-called ‘occasional spelling’ can be instructive. A letter of 1461 contains <seschyons> for sessions, from which we can be sure that the sound change from [sesiənz] or [sesjənz] to [seʃənz] had at least begun in that dialect by then. Or to take a more complex pair of examples, OED records <wright> as separate, occasional, seventeenth-century spellings for both right and write. Since right has never had an initial [w] sound, we may assume that the initial cluster [wr] of words like wren and write had been simplified to [r] by then, otherwise we could not explain the ‘mistake’; likewise, since write has never had a [x] sound before the [t], such a ‘reverse spelling’ implies that [x] had by then been lost from words like light and right, which, as their historic spellings attest, did once have the cluster [xt] (cf. German Licht, recht). So from these occasional spellings we deduce a terminus ante quem, or latest possible date, for important sound changes.

Another useful source for reconstructing phonological or phonetic history is rhymes and puns, always making due allowance for bad puns, poor rhymes, near-rhymes and eye-rhymes. When Falstaff asserts, ‘If Reasons were as plentie as Blackberries, I would giue no man a Reason vpon compulsion’, a likely pun between reasons and raisins corroborates our belief (on other grounds) that those words shared the same first vowel in Shakespeare’s English. And if that is so, we must explain how they have come to differ in most nonIrish varieties of English since the eighteenth century (see Section 2.7.2 and Section 7.7).

Finally here we can mention metalinguistic discussions, when speakers and writers explicitly consider language. Again, these can be within the history of English, as with the ‘orthoepists’ who discussed English pronunciation and

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100%

Figure 1.10 S-curve

spelling in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They provide a wealth of information, albeit sometimes hard to interpret, about the sounds of English in their time (see Chapter 2). Or they can cross language boundaries, as when, say, a French writer provides a guidebook to England or a textbook on English for his fellow-countrymen, complete with a ‘phonetic’ spelling of English phrases in the contemporary conventions of French, or vice versa.

1.8Why does language change?

All living languages are subject to change. How do they change? Many linguists distinguish between actuation or innovation on the one hand and propagation or diffusion on the other. Innovation is the introduction of a new variant, possibly initially characterisable as an error. Innovations may catch on or they may die off again. Diffusion is the spread of a variant from the point where it has become an option for a number of speakers. Diffusion is often observed to follow the pattern of an S-curve, presented in idealised form in Figure 1.10.

The diagram represents competition between two variants. The horizontal axis represents time, the vertical axis the proportion of available occasions on which an innovating variant is used rather than the older variant. At first the innovation is used sporadically, and for a long time its frequency increases slowly but remains low. Not till it is being used around 20 per cent of the time does the rate of increase start to grow noticeably. Now as the curve becomes steeper, the innovation becomes the dominant form within a relatively short period. By the time its relative frequency is running at some 80 per cent, the rate of increase is falling again, and the older form may survive at a low frequency – perhaps as a relic form in particular contexts – for a considerable time.

Diffusion of change requires the prior existence of variants – alternative ways of saying the same thing. Linguistic variation is familiar in our own speech communities. For example, many Englishes have the alternative pronunciations [i ð ə] and [a ð ə] for either, with little apparent social marking attached to either variant. Other examples of variation in at least some current varieties of English are the

For more complex phonological, morphological and syntactic examples see Chapters 2 and 3.

Social factors are relevant because one function of language, in addition to the apparently obvious one of communicating information, is to assert a speaker’s identity, which is in large part to identify the speaker as part of one social grouping and not another. Transmission via social networks is an important mechanism of propagation of change; see Chambers (2002), Croft (2000), J. Milroy (1992, 1993), L. Milroy (1987), Nevalainen (2000b), Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg (2003).

What we have called functional factors are relevant to innovation and perhaps also to propagation of change. Numerous types have been suggested. They include the avoidance of ambiguity, so that the obsolescence of the verb let ‘hinder’ (cf. the noun let in tennis) might be ascribed to an unfortunate clash with the more common verb let meaning ‘allow’, once phonetic change had made the two verbs (OE lettan, lætan, respectively) sound the same. A desire for expressiveness imposes pressure for change, which can be illustrated in the high turnover of intensifiers like very, awfully, terribly, real, dead, way, well, etc.: as one originally hyperbolic use becomes conventionalised, so the expressiveness of that choice begins to wane. Maintenance or development of iconicity, an explicit parallelism between linguistic form and meaning, is thought by some scholars (e.g. Haiman, 1983) to be an important motivating factor, as in a growing association by sound symbolism of initial /kr-/ with pejorative meaning – think of Christ! [as imprecation], cramped, crabby, cracked, crafty, crank, crappy, crashing (bore), crass, crazy, creep, cretin, crime, cripple, crisis, crock, crooked, cross, crow, crude, cruel, crummy, crypto-, etc. – and its possible role in the semantic change of chronic from ‘long-lasting’ to ‘objectionable’. (This is as much structural as functional.) Economy of effort, too, may play a part – typically working in the opposite direction to iconicity – for example in phonological reduction, such as the loss of /t/ in

Christmas.

Beyond these three broad categories there are extralinguistic factors to consider too. Changes in the world can play an obvious part, in that new concepts or inventions require new vocabulary. Cultural contact and population movement are further examples, as discussed above. (Note, however, that many historical linguists look first to internal factors in language change before having recourse to explanations from language contact.)

With all these pressures for change, you might expect language to be hopelessly unstable, and yet of course our parents can understand us – teenagers might disagree here – and even across gaps of centuries we can read Jane Austen, Shakespeare and even Chaucer without too much help. In other words, there is more inertia, more continuity, than change. The need to be understood, both by peers and by the older generation, applies a braking force on potential linguistic changes. The development of a written standard is another conservative influence, certainly on written English and plausibly also on some aspects of speech. (Spelling pronunciations like [ɒftən] instead of [ɒfən] for often are slightly different, as