scholarly journals Register Variation in Word-formation Processes

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-167
Author(s):  
Paula Rodríguez-Puente
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
General Trend ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Formation Processes ◽  
Register Variation ◽  
Early Modern English

This paper traces the development of two roughly synonymous nominalizing suffixes during the Early Modern English period, the Romance -ity and 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 registers distributed along the formal-informal and the speech-written continua. Results indicate that -ness tends to lose ground in favor of -ity between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, a change which seems to have begun in formal written registers and spread towards ‘oral’ ones, probably aided by a general trend in written registers for the adoption of a more learned and literate style during the eighteenth century.

scholarly journals Intensificatory Tautology in the History of English: A Corpus-based Study

2021 ◽  
pp. 007542422199909
Author(s):  
Victorina González-Díaz
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Formation Processes ◽  
Structural Reorganization ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Noun

This paper explores the development and establishment of intensificatory tautology (specifically, size-adjective clusters, e.g., “ great big plans,” “ little tiny room”) in the history of English. The analysis suggests that size-adjective clusters appear in the Late Middle English period as a result of the functional-structural reorganization of the English noun phrase. It is only towards the end of the Early Modern English period that they start to become (relatively) productive in the language, and in Present-Day English that they acquire a wide(r) intensifying functional range (i.e., adjective modifier, emphasizer, degree intensifier) and become associated with informal, spoken-based registers. More broadly, the paper suggests that more research is needed as regards the role of collocation in processes of intensifier creation in the noun phrase and, more generally, as regards how collocation interacts with word-formation processes in this context.

From ‘quickly’ to ‘fairly’: on the history ofrather

2008 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 345-359 ◽  
Author(s):  
MATTI RISSANEN
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Type I ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Semantic Development ◽  
Syntactic Development

In this article I describe the semantic and syntactic development of the moderatorratherfrom Old to Present-day English using a variationist approach.Ratheroriginates in an Old English comparative adverb indicating speed, and hence time, but the loss of the indication of speed and movement can already be traced in the Old English period. In Middle English the ‘preferential’ senses ofrather(e.g. the type ‘I would rather do X than Y’) become more common than the temporal senses. This contrastive meaning constitutes the unmarked use ofratherin Early Modern English, but it gradually weakens in the course of the Modern English period. The moderator use becomes popular in the second half of the eighteenth century. The semantic development outlined above goes hand in hand with a syntactic development from an original adjunct into a subjunct and conjunct, and finally into a modifier of adjectives and adverbs.

The magistrate, the community and the maintenance of an orderly society in eighteenth-century England

2003 ◽  
Vol 76 (191) ◽  
pp. 54-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gwenda Morgan ◽  
Peter Rushton
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Physical Assault ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
Employment Relations ◽  
Central Figure ◽  
North East ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
The Many

Abstract The lone magistrate was the central figure of early modern English law enforcement, yet few records of his activities survive. This study of one of the rare notebooks kept by a local J.P. in north-east England in the eighteenth century suggests that his primary purpose was to negotiate peace between disputants rather than to secure prosecution and conviction of those accused of crimes. Prosecutions in court were few. Reconciliation was mixed with enforcement in areas such as employment relations, poor relief and the maintenance of illegitimate children, but here, as in the many cases of physical assault, outcomes were frequently ‘agreed’.

Preposition stranding with wh-relatives: a historical survey

2000 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 295-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gunnar Bergh ◽  
Aimo Seppänen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Middle English ◽  
General Trend ◽  
Written Language ◽  
Historical Survey ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Preposition Stranding ◽  
Grammatical Change

In the course of their history, English wh-relatives are known to have undergone a syntactic change in their prepositional usage: having originally occurred only with pied-piped prepositions, they came to admit preposition stranding as an alternative pattern. The present article presents an overview of this process, showing a modest beginning of stranding in Late Middle English, an increase in Early Modern English, and then a clear decrease in the written language of today, against a more liberal use in spoken English, standard as well as nonstandard. The drop in the incidence of stranding is thus not an expression of a genuine grammatical change but due to notions of correctness derived from the grammar of Latin and affecting written usage. The general trend of the development outlined is mirrored by relative that, with which the pied piping attested in Middle English completely disappeared from the language.

The Jessey Circle and the Invention of Baptist Identity

2019 ◽  
pp. 12-37
Author(s):  
Matthew C. Bingham
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Baptist Identity ◽  
Scholarly Discussion ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early English ◽  
Interpretive Framework

Chapter 1 introduces the individuals described in standard histories as “Particular Baptists.” Drawing upon the manuscript collection of the early eighteenth-century Baptist historian Benjamin Stinton, the chapter surveys their origins, formation, and early attempts at ecclesiastical organization. But, more importantly, the chapter examines the development of Baptist historiography and the ways in which the deliberate distortions of early Baptist historians continue to influence present scholarship. As the chapter contends, the basic interpretive framework within which early English Baptists have been understood is seriously flawed. Rather than growing organically out of the evidence, many of the fundamental conventions which govern scholarly discussion of early modern English Baptists have been bequeathed to modern historians by eighteenth-century Baptist churchmen. These early denominational historians wrote the story of their collective past with an eye firmly fixed upon the needs of their own collective present, and their decisions continue to negatively affect modern scholarship.

Crises of Self and Succession

2020 ◽  
pp. 282-302
Author(s):  
Edith Hall
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Restoration Drama ◽  
Early Modern English

This chapter addresses the theatrical reception of the Persian king Cambyses II as portrayed in Herodotus book III. The Achaemenid madman, whose death without issue creates an acute succession crisis, plays a noteworthy part as the ‘star’ of two of the most successful theatre works between 1560 and 1667. The first is Thomas Preston’s The Lamentable Tragedy Mixed Full of Pleasant Mirth Containing the Life of Cambises King of Persia (1560 or 1561, the earliest surviving Elizabethan tragedy). The second is Elkanah Settle’s Restoration drama Cambyses (1667). It is argued that both plays project the conflicted early modern English self and its fractured religious and political psyche and that Settle’s play foreshadows the emergent eighteenth-century ‘She-Tragedy’ and ‘Sentimental Drama’, in which the fantasy of familial domestic harmony, and honourable love, were to become the theatre’s ideological counterpart of the British bourgeois settlement.

Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire M. L. Bourne
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Book Trade ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Performance Effects ◽  
History Of

Typographies of Performance is the first book-length study of early modern English playbook typography. It tells a new history of drama from the period by considering the page designs of plays by Shakespeare and others printed between the end of the fourteenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century. It argues that typography, broadly conceived, was used creatively by printers, publishers, playwrights, and other agents of the book trade to make the effects of theatricality—from the most basic (textually articulating a change in speaker) to the more complex (registering the kinesis of bodies on stage)—intelligible on the page. The coalescence of these experiments into a uniquely dramatic typography that was constantly responsive to performance effects made it possible for “plays” to be marketed, collected, and read in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a print genre distinct from all other genres of imaginative writing. It has been said, “If a play is a book, it is not a play.” Typographies of Performance shows that “play” and “book” were, in fact, mutually constitutive: it was the very bookishness of plays printed in early modern England that allowed them to be recognized by their earliest readers as plays in the first place.

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