Abstract
It is difficult to overstate how dramatically our everyday lives have changed over the course of the last several decades due to advancements in computing, and, for most of us, such changes include how we do our work. In the field of linguistics, the “digital turn” has made an impact on many facets of our methods, not least of all data collection, which has gone beyond the gathering of evidence via interviews, introspection, and the study of texts to also include the compiling of massive bodies of electronic text for the analysis of language structure and use. The development of such corpora and the computational tools for analyzing them has been a boon to linguistics, including the study of the English language at earlier stages in its history.
Developments in English: Expanding Electronic Evidence consists of an introductory chapter by its four editors and thirteen essays divided into four sections. While the focus of the volume is on the analysis of linguistic features in digital resources—in particular, with an eye on how these features have changed over time—Taavitsainen et al. challenged the authors to place their analysis of specific linguistic features in their appropriate sociohistorical contexts, as well as to describe the theoretical principles underlying their work (1). Thus, the book covers a wide range of linguistic features, geographic locations, and time periods, and generally remains faithful to the book’s major theme of expanding electronic evidence, which refers not only to new corpora being compiled, but also to the use of prototypical corpora—old and new—along with “a variety of digital and digitizable sources . . . to produce a more rounded picture of the current situation in English linguistics” (7).
The focus of the volume’s first section, “Linguistic Directions and Crossroads: Mapping the Routes,” is on corpus linguistic methods and how these methods have transformed our understanding of current and historical language varieties. In chapter 2, Charles Meyer investigates the difference between “corpus-based” and “corpus-driven” approaches. The major difference is that, in using the former approach, hypotheses are formulated then tested on corpora, whereas, for the latter, analyses of corpora lead investigators to hypotheses or theories. Next, Stefan Gries argues for the importance of quantitative corpus approaches to linguistic analysis and offers eight lessons that can be drawn from such study, for example, “frequency effects should always be checked on multiple levels of corpus granularity to explore the homogeneity of the corpus.” In chapter 4, Bas Aarts, Sean Wallis, and Jill Bowie use the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English to investigate changes in the use of modal verbs, such as the decline of modal perfect have and other modal and nonmodal perfects.
The second section, “Changing Patterns,” presents three seemingly disparate topics that share several commonalities, among them an interest in the role that language contact has played in the evolution of specific linguistic forms. In chapter 5, Minoji Akimoto uses the Helsinki, ARCHER, and F-LOB corpora to investigate functional change in the historical paths of three words: desire, hope, and wish. Next, Matti Rissanen examines the historical paths of borrowed adverbial connectives, for example, considering (that), paying close attention to the roles played by speaker/writer and addressee/reader, as well as the process of grammaticalization, in their development. In chapter 7, Manfred Markus investigates the use of interjections, for example, well, ah, goodness, and wait, in Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary (1898-1905). He finds that they are often good indicators of regional dialect speech due to the emotionality associated with their use.
The third section, “Pragmatics and Discourse,” is a continuation of themes of the second section but focuses explicitly on more recent advancements in corpus linguistics. In chapter 8, Laurel Brinton uses several corpora to examine delocutive verbs, which are the result of interjections being converted to verbs meaning “to say [interjection],” for example, to wow. Next, Andreas Jucker relies on the Corpus of Historical American English (Davies 2012) to investigate the use of uh and um as “planners,” which are linguistic elements that are uttered as speakers plan their next utterance. In chapter 10, Thomas Kohnen uses the Corpus of English Religious Prose to explore the discourse of Christianity and its genres from the Middle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century, specifically focusing on such features as address terms, for example, thou and you, and stance marking, for example, I know and I suppose.
Finally, essays in the fourth section, “World Englishes,” present findings from English varieties and text types used throughout the world as well as the different approaches being used to investigate them. In chapter 11, Susan Fitzmaurice relies on a pool of white English-speaking informants born in Zimbabwe between 1979 and 1986 to investigate the sociolinguistic situation of a colony (and later country) noted for having a continuous migration flow. Andrea Sand then investigates features associated with informal speech, for example, discourse particles such as lah and lor, in the Corpus of Singapore Weblogs, currently under construction at the University of Trier. In chapter 13, Raymond Hickey studies phonological mergers and losses that occurred with the global spread of English, including such mergers as which-witch, hoarse-horse, and pin-pen. Finally, William Kretzschmar uses data from the Linguistic Atlas Projects to investigate variation and change in the complexity systems of American English.
As the editors state in the introduction, the volume is intended for graduate students and researchers in the areas of corpus linguistics, historical linguistics, and history of the English language; as such, the book is not intended for the casual reader. But for those readers who have competence in these areas and a desire to learn more, the volume has much to offer by way of introducing useful and interesting corpora, discussing methodological issues pertaining to their use, and presenting results from investigations of different linguistic features appearing in these collections.
Although by no means exhaustive, the volume covers a great deal of territory in time and space, and a wide range of linguistic features. With respect to time, the coverage spans from Old English to Present-Day English, with much discussion centering on English in its Middle and Early Modern periods. In geographic terms, the chapters provide ample coverage of British and American English, of course, but also include discussion of Irish and Scottish English, Australian and New Zealand English, and English in Singapore, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. The linguistic features that are studied range from relatively broad classes, such as modal verbs, interjections, and delocutives, to very specific features, which include the word desire and the adverbial connective considering (that). In addition, many different corpora are used by the researchers in the course of their investigations, including those with which perhaps all corpus linguists are familiar, such as the Brown Corpus and the Helsinki Corpus, but also lesser-known corpora that include the Corpus of English Religious Prose, Early Modern English Medical Texts, and the Corpus of Singapore Weblogs. For some of these corpora, the book offers insight into corpus creation and the challenges of working with developing corpora.
Perhaps due in part to its broad coverage, there are some issues with consistency in the volume. In terms of reading difficulty, the leap from the focus in chapter 2 on theory to the discussion of statistics in chapter 3 is bound to be challenging (and perhaps overly so) for many readers. Reversing the sequence of chapters 3 and 4 might have avoided this problem. In addition, the chapters on Zimbabwean English (chapter 11) and phonological mergers (chapter 13) are not based on electronic evidence in the same way that other chapters are; rather, the former is a sociolinguistic study and the latter a review of the findings of other scholars with little apparent connection to corpus studies. In this way, the book does take its eye off the main target: that of describing linguistic analysis using digital resources.
Setting aside such relatively minor issues, all of the chapters in the book are well researched and generally well written, and several chapters stand out for their ability to present a topic in a way that will benefit seasoned researchers and newcomers alike (e.g., chapter 8 by Brinton). The volume also has several features that make it user-friendly, including separate indexes for author and subject, and a comprehensive reference list. It also includes a comprehensive list of electronic resources that appears immediately before the reference section. Inspired at least in part by the studies compiled in this book, readers are sure to be using these same resources—as well as ones currently, or soon to be, in development—to conduct research along parallel lines, as linguistic analysis continues to find new ways of incorporating electronic evidence.