The History of the Present English Subjunctive

Author(s):  
Lilo Moessner

Based on the definition of the subjunctive as a realisation of the grammatical category mood and an expression of the semantic/pragmatic category modality the book presents the first comprehensive and consistent description of the history of the present English subjunctive. It covers the periods Old English (OE), Middle English (ME), and Early Modern English (EModE), and it considers all contruction types in which the subjunctive is attested, namely main clauses, noun clauses, relative clauses, and adverbial clauses. Besides numerically substantiating the well-known hypothesis that the simplification of the verbal syntagm led to a long-term frequency decrease of the subjunctive, it explores the factors which governed its competition with other verbal expressions. The data used for the analysis come from The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts; they comprise nearly half a million words in 91 files. Their analysis was carried out by close reading, and the results of the analysis were processed with the statistical program SPSS. This combined quantitative-qualitative method offers new insights into the research landscape of English subjunctive use and into the fields of historical English linguistics and corpus linguistics.

Author(s):  
Lilo Moessner

This chapter sets the present book off against previous studies about the English subjunctive in the historical periods Old English (OE), Middle English (ME), and Early Modern English (EModE). The aim of the book is described as the first comprehensive and consistent description of the history of the present English subjunctive. The key term subjunctive is defined as a realisation of the grammatical category mood and an expression of the semantic/pragmatic category root modality. The corpus used in the book is part of The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, comprising nearly half a million words in 91 files. The research method adopted is a combination of close reading and computational analysis.


Histories ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 108-121
Author(s):  
Satoshi Murayama ◽  
Hiroko Nakamura

Jan de Vries revised Akira Hayami’s original theory of the “Industrious Revolution” to make the idea more applicable to early modern commercialization in Europe, showcasing the development of the rural proletariat and especially the consumer revolution and women’s emancipation on the way toward an “Industrial Revolution.” However, Japanese villages followed a different path from the Western trajectory of the “Industrious Revolution,” which is recognized as the first step to industrialization. This article will explore how a different form of “industriousness” developed in Japan, covering medieval, early modern, and modern times. It will first describe why the communal village system was established in Japan and how this unique institution, the self-reliance system of a village, affected commercialization and industrialization and was sustained until modern times. Then, the local history of Kuta Village in Kyô-Otagi, a former county located close to Kyoto, is considered over the long term, from medieval through modern times. Kuta was not directly affected by the siting of new industrial production bases and the changes brought to villages located nearer to Kyoto. A variety of diligent interactions with living spaces is introduced to demonstrate that the industriousness of local women was characterized by conscience-driven perseverance.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Egi Putriana ◽  
Jufrizal Jufrizal ◽  
Fitrawati Fitrawati

The history of English language has three periods of time; Old English, Middle English, and Modern English. The linguistic forms in English development are different each period. This research aims to find out one of the changes, that is, the affix changes from Middle English to Modern English form that found in both of The Miller’s Tale Story Middle English and Modern English versions. This research also aims to find out the spelling changes in affixes. This research used descriptive qualitative method. The data, which are the collection of words that have affixes found in The Miller’s Tale, were identified based on the base of the words and its affixes and its were classified based on the type of its functions. Based on data analysis, there are seven affixes in Middle English which have been changed in Modern English form. These changes occur in the deletion of vowel, change of vowel, substitution of the affix, and elimination of the affix. The spelling change also influenced the change in suffixes. Some of the vocabularies change into the new words and some of the words change only in its vowel.


Author(s):  
Cátia Antunes

This chapter provides a case study of the entrepreneurship of Portuguese Jewish merchants in the Dutch Republic in the Early Modern period. Though similar case studies exist, none have focused specifically on Jewish entrepreneurs. The core aim is to determine which business strategies and values the Jewish entrepreneurs shared with their Dutch counterparts. It provides a history of the Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam, followed by a definition of the early modern entrepreneur. It then examines the trade routes, products, range of trading capital, and social networks of the Portuguese Jewish entrepreneurs, and concludes that Portuguese Jewish and Dutch merchants operated their businesses in similar ways, but Portuguese Jewish merchants were willing to step out of their religious and social boundaries in pursuit of a stronger economic position and were able to do so through financial support gained by dealing in diverse, high quality trade.


Author(s):  
Manuel F. Ugarte-Gil ◽  
Graciela S. Alarcón

The first description of cutaneous ulcerations consistent with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) has been attributed to Hippocrates. The term lupus first appeared in English literature in the tenth century. Until the nineteenth century, however, this term was used to describe different conditions. Osler first recognized that organ involvement may occur with or without skin involvement. With the discovery of LE cells and autoantibodies, the use of lupus murine models, and the recognition of familial aggregation and the importance of genetic factors, the pathogenesis of SLE started to be unravelled and allowed the definition of classification criteria. In parallel, the discovery of cortisone, the use of immunosuppressive drugs and antimalarials, the control of hypertension, and the availability of renal replacement therapy improved the prognosis of SLE from a 4-year survival of 51% to a 5-year survival >90%. Advances in genetics and targeted therapies will lead to better intermediate and long-term outcomes.


2003 ◽  
Vol 32 (5) ◽  
pp. 741-744
Author(s):  
Matthew J. Gordon

This is the sixth and presumably final volume in an ambitious series. The first four volumes were distinguished chronologically according to the traditional paradigm for the history of English: Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English, and Present Day English. The other two volumes are organized geographically. Volume 5 examined English outside England in most of the expected places (e.g., Scotland, Ireland, Australia), with the exception of North America, to which the present volume is devoted. As the general editor, Richard Hogg, writes (p. xi), the series is designed to offer “a solid discussion of the full range of the history of English” to anglicists and general linguists alike. Readers of the latter category will certainly find this volume accessible. In fact, the inclusion of a glossary of terms extends that accessibility to readers outside linguistics as well. Specialists, however, are likely to be disappointed by the unevenness of the collection.


2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (5) ◽  
pp. 1606-1656 ◽  
Author(s):  
SHAMI GHOSH

AbstractTirthankar Roy's recent synthesis on the economic history of early modern India claims to provide a new, overarching narrative placing this period within the broader sweep of the history of what Roy defines as ‘capitalism’ in India in the very long term. This article provides a detailed critique of Roy's monograph, suggesting that it suffers from some serious methodological deficits, arising not least from a future-oriented paradigm that imposes anachronistic concepts on this period, including the very notion of ‘India’. Furthermore, Roy's view of the economy as being fundamentally driven forward by the rise of a coastal polity, expanding inwards from Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta, sits awkwardly with his repeated claim that colonialism was of little significance for Indian economic history. Finally, this article suggests that this period might be more fruitfully approached not only by abandoning thetelosof what we know of India's future, but also by adopting both regionally focused and comparative approaches, turning away from long-distance trade as the primary lens through which to view the economy, and instead examining endogenous factors in the economies of individual regions and enriching our understanding of them by reference to studies of other world regions with comparable patterns of development in the same period. More nuanced ways of approaching economic change in the very long run, including the importance of developments in modes of consumption and market- and profit-oriented economic behaviour, are suggested as a better means of understanding both the economies of the late pre-colonial centuries in the Indian subcontinent and the development of capitalism, which should also be understood in a more specific manner than Roy allows.


Author(s):  
Javier Pérez-Guerra

AbstractThis paper examines the design of verb phrases and noun phrases, focusing on the diachronic tendencies observed in the data in Middle English, Early Modern, and Late Modern English. The approach is corpus-based and the data, representing different periods and text types, is taken from the


2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER PETRÉ

This article combines methodologies from corpus linguistics with an experimental-like setup more affiliated to psycholinguistic research. The resulting methodology allows us to gain more insight into cognitive motivations of language use in speakers from the past, and consequently to better assess their similarity to present-day speakers (the Uniformitarian Principle). One such cognitive motivation thought to be relevant in the early stages of grammatical constructionalization (grammaticalization) is covered by the evasive concept of ‘extravagance’ (i.e. the desire to talk in such a way that one is noticed). The methodology is tested on the Early Modern English extension of the [be Ving]-construction to progressive uses in present-tense main clauses. It is argued, on the basis of recurrent contextual clues, that [be Ving] in this novel use is motivated by extravagance. Interestingly, a comparison of two speaker/writer generations that are among the earliest to use this innovation with some frequency suggests that the encoding of extravagance shifted between them. At first, extravagance was signalled by coercion of the still stative semantics of [be Ving] into a progressive reading. In the second generation it had become an entrenched characteristic of the construction itself.


2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER PETRÉ

While the ‘progressive’ construction [BE Ving] (Hewas playing tenniswhen Jane came in) has been studied extensively both diachronically and synchronically, studies of its functional development tend not to extend further back than Early Modern English. This article draws attention to the functional changes [BE Ving] goes through already in Middle English, whose analysis sheds new light on the principles of early grammaticalization. To understand the observed changes, all uses of [BE Ving] are considered, not only those that have a clear verbal and aspectual function. During Middle English, important changes occurred in the frequencies of the various co-texts of [BE Ving]. They involve the increase in backgrounding adverbial clauses, which leads to the semanticization of ongoingness, a feature that was initially only associated with [BE Ving] by pragmatic implicature. The outcome is grammaticalization by co-text: co-textual changes paved the way for the acquisition of progressive semantics in [BE Ving] itself.


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