IJES 2020, v. 20, n. 2
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- PublicationOpen AccessA Standardization Process in its Final Stages: Mineand Thinein A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760(Universidad de Murcia, Servicio de Publicaciones, 2020) Kytö, Merja; Walker, TerryThis study concerns the development of the determiners MINE/MYand THINE/THYin the Early Modern English period. The -Nforms had essentially been ousted before words starting with consonants over the Middle English period, and over the subsequent centuries, these forms also fell intodisuse before words starting with initial vowels and h. While the rise of the N-less variants has been the object of several previous studies, the present investigation aims at accounting for the fate of the declining N-variants in the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760, a data source comprising speech-related texts. We look into the chronological stages of development for the declining MINEand THINE forms, the genres that maintained these forms longest, and the speaker groups that were the last to use the forms. Comparisons are made with the results obtained in previous studies on MINE/MYand THINE/THY variation
- PublicationOpen AccessMorphological Spelling: Present-tense Verb Inflection in the Early Editions of The Book of Good Maners(Universidad de Murcia, Servicio de Publicaciones, 2020) Rutkowska, HannaThis study aims at contributing to the discussion on the role of the early printers in the regularisation and standardisation of the English spelling. It assesses the degree of early printers’ (in)consistency concerning morphological spelling, in particular the spelling of third person singular present tense (indicative) inflectional endings of verbs in six editions of The book of good maners (1487–1526), printed by William Caxton, Richard Pynson and Wynkyn de Worde. The analysis suggests that early printers could have been interested in regularising spelling already before normative guidance from scholars became available in the form of grammars and spelling books, that is before the middle of the sixteenth century. However, the levels of the printers’ spelling consistency varied, depending on the particular printing house and edition.
- PublicationOpen AccessRegister Variation in Word-formation Processes: The Development of -ityand -nessin Early Modern English(Universidad de Murcia, Servicio de Publicaciones, 2020) Rodríguez-Puente, PaulaThis paper traces the development of two roughly synonymous nominalizing suffixesduring the Early Modern English period, the Romance -ityand the native -ness. The aim is to assess whether these suffixes were favored in particular registers or followed similar paths of development, and to ascertain whether the ongoing processes of standardization and vernacularization may have affected their diachronic evolution. To this purpose, the type frequencies and rates of aggregation of new types of the two suffixes were analyzed in seventeen different registersdistributed along the formal-informal and the speech-written continua.Results indicate that -nesstends to lose ground in favor of -itybetween the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries,a change which seems to have begun informal written registersand spread towards ‘oral’ ones,probably aided by a general trend inwritten registers for theadoption ofa more learned and literate style during the eighteenth century.
- PublicationOpen AccessSuffixes in Competition:On the Use of -ourand -orin Early Modern English(Universidad de Murcia, Servicio de Publicaciones, 2020) Pacheco-Franco, Marta; Calle-Martín, JavierThis paper presents a corpus-driven analysis of the linguistic competition between the suffixes -our/-or in Early Modern English. It is conceived as a state of the art to provide an explanation of the development and distribution of these competing suffixes in Early Modern English. The study is based on the distribution of the most common set of words with alternative spellings in the period to investigate the development and the standardisation of the -our and -or groups. The study offers the quantitative distribution of the suffixes in the period corroborating the participation of phenomena such as linguistic extinction, specialisation, blocking and lexicalisation in the configuration of the contemporary morphological paradigm. The source of evidence comes from the corpus of Early English Books Online (Davies, 2017) for the period 1470–1690. In addition to this, the study also relies on sources such as the Evans Corpus (2011), the Corpus of Historical American English (Davies, 2010) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies, 2008).
- PublicationOpen AccessTransparently Hierarchical: Punctuation in the Townshend Family Recipe Book(Universidad de Murcia, Servicio de Publicaciones, 2020) Thaisen, JacobThe three scribes of a mid-seventeenth-century collection of medical recipes resemble each other in how they have punctuated the recipes, although they did not work simultaneously. They draw on similar repertoires of marks and they mark similar functions, but they do not use the same marks for the same functions. The principal function is the global one of indicating where the constitutive elements of the recipes begin and end. This function of indicating a text’s structural hierarchy goes back centuries and can seem old-fashioned for an Early Modern English manuscript produced when grammarians had started to discuss whether punctuation should mark syntactic units. A key observation is that recipes stand out among text-types by having a fixed, transparently hierarchical structure. This feature of them facilitates the researcher’s appreciation of how the punctuation functions and dismisses any impression of the scribes having deployed the marks haphazardly.