The future of historical sociolinguistics?
In this chapter we discuss the current achievements of historical sociolinguistics and highlight new insights provided by the contributions in the volume. Taking the essay by Nevalainen (2015) as a starting point, we consider the themes of crossing boundaries and bridging gaps between different levels of analysis and different paradigms, as well as proposing new paths for historical sociolinguistics as part of the wider field of digital humanities.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 1.1Purpose of the volume
- 1.2
Nevalainen’s 2015 essay
- 2.New insights
- 2.1Methodological innovations
- 2.2New data for historical sociolinguistic research
- 2.3Theory: Bridging gaps, new challenges
- 3.Conclusion: The future?
-
References
References (58)
References
Anderwald, Lieselotte. 2016. Language between description and prescription: Verb categories in nineteenth-century grammars of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Auer, Peter & Frans Hinskens. 2005. The role of interpersonal accommodation in a theory of language change. In Peter Auer, Frans Hinskens & Paul Kerswill (eds.), Dialect change: Convergence and divergence in European languages, 335–357. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Bell, Allan. 2013. The guidebook to sociolinguistics. Malden & Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Culpeper, Jonathan & Minna Nevala. 2012. Socio-cultural processes and the history of English. In Nevalainen & Closs Traugott (eds.), 365–391.![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Fairclough, Norman. 1992. Discourse and social change. Cambridge: Polity Press.![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Hinneburg, Alexander, Heikki Mannila, Samuli Kaislaniemi, Terttu Nevalainen & Helena Raumolin-Brunberg. 2007. How to handle small samples: Bootstrap and Bayesian methods in the analysis of linguistic change. Literary and Linguistic Computing 22(2). 137–150. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Hope, Jonathan & Michael Witmore. 2010. The Hundredth Psalm to the tune of “Green Sleeves”: Digital approaches to Shakespeare’s language of genre. Shakespeare Quarterly 61(3). 357–390. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Janda, Richard D. & Brian D. Joseph. 2003. On language, change, and language change – or, of history, linguistics, and historical linguistics. In Brian D. Joseph & Richard D. Janda (eds.), The handbook of historical linguistics, 3–180. Malden & Oxford: Blackwell. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Jucker, Andreas & Daniela Landert. 2015. Historical pragmatics and early speech recordings: Diachronic developments in turn-taking and narrative structure in radio talk shows. Journal of Pragmatics 79. 22–39. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Kytö, Merja (ed.). 1996. Manual to the diachronic part of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts: Coding conventions and list of source texts, 3rd edn. Helsinki: University of Helsinki. [URL] (10 April, 2017.)![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Labov, William. 1994. Principles of linguistic change, volume 1: Internal factors (Language in Society 20). Oxford: Blackwell.![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Lijffijt, Jefrey, Terttu Nevalainen, Tanja Säily, Panagiotis Papapetrou, Kai Puolamäki & Heikki Mannila. 2016. Significance testing of word frequencies in corpora. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 31(2). 374–397. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Lijffijt, Jefrey, Tanja Säily & Terttu Nevalainen. 2012. CEECing the baseline: Lexical stability and significant change in a historical corpus. In Jukka Tyrkkö, Matti Kilpiö, Terttu Nevalainen & Matti Rissanen (eds.), Outposts of historical corpus linguistics: From the Helsinki Corpus to a proliferation of resources (Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English 10). Helsinki: VARIENG. [URL] (10 April, 2017.)
Lyding, Verena, Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, Henrik Dittmann & Chris Culy. 2012. Visualising linguistic evolution in academic discourse. In Miriam Butt, Sheelagh Carpendale, Gerald Penn, Jelena Prokić & Michael Cysouw (eds.), Proceedings of the EACL 2012 joint workshop of LINGVIS & UNCLH, 44–48. Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics.![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Mäkelä, Eetu, Tanja Säily & Terttu Nevalainen. 2016. Khepri – a modular view-based tool for exploring (historical sociolinguistic) data. In Maciej Eder & Jan Rybicki, (eds.), Digital Humanities 2016: Conference abstracts, 269–272. Kraków: Jagiellonian University & Pedagogical University.![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Mannila, Heikki, Terttu Nevalainen & Helena Raumolin-Brunberg. 2013. Quantifying variation and estimating the effects of sample size on the frequencies of linguistic variables. In Manfred Krug & Julia Schlüter (eds.), Research methods in language variation and change, 337–360. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Meurman-Solin, Anneli. 2007. Annotating variational space over time. In Anneli Meurman-Solin & Arja Nurmi (eds.), Annotating variation and change (Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English 1). Helsinki: VARIENG. [URL] (10 April, 2017.)![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Nevala, Minna & Arja Nurmi. 2013. The Corpora of Early English Correspondence (CEEC400). In Anneli Meurman-Solin & Jukka Tyrkkö (eds.), Principles and practices for the digital editing and annotation of digital data (Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English 14). Helsinki: Varieng. [URL] (10 April, 2017.)![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Nevalainen, Terttu. 2012. New perspectives, theories and methods: Historical sociolinguistics. In Alexander Bergs & Laurel Brinton (eds.), English historical linguistics: An international handbook, vol. 2 (Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science 34.2), 1438–1457. Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Nevalainen, Terttu. 2015. What are historical sociolinguistics? Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 1(2). 243–269. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Nevalainen, Terttu & Elizabeth Closs Traugott (eds.). 2012. The Oxford handbook of the history of English. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Nevalainen, Terttu, Minna Palander-Collin & Tanja Säily (eds.). Forthcoming. Patterns of change in 18th-century English: A sociolinguistic approach (Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Nevalainen, Terttu & Helena Raumolin-Brunberg. 1994. Sociolinguistics and language history: The Helsinki Corpus of Early English Correspondence. Hermes, Journal of Linguistics 13. 135–143.![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Nevalainen, Terttu & Helena Raumolin-Brunberg (eds.). 1996a. Sociolinguistics and language history: Studies based on the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (Language and Computers: Studies in Practical Linguistics 15). Amsterdam: Rodopi.![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Nevalainen, Terttu & Helena Raumolin-Brunberg. 1996b. The Corpus of Early English Correspondence. In Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg (eds.), 39–54.![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Nevalainen, Terttu & Helena Raumolin-Brunberg. 2003. Historical sociolinguistics: Language change in Tudor and Stuart England (Longman Linguistics Library). London: Pearson Education.![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Nevalainen, Terttu & Helena Raumolin-Brunberg. 2012. Historical sociolinguistics: Origins, motivations, and paradigms. In Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy & Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre (eds.), The handbook of historical sociolinguistics, 22–40. Malden & Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Nevalainen, Terttu & Helena Raumolin-Brunberg. 2017. Historical sociolinguistics: Language change in Tudor and Stuart England, 2nd edn. London: Routledge.![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Nevalainen, Terttu, Helena Raumolin-Brunberg & Heikki Mannila. 2011. The diffusion of language change in real time: Progressive and conservative individuals and the time depth of change. Language Variation and Change 23(1). 1–43. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Nevalainen, Terttu & Gijsbert Rutten (eds.). 2012. Comparative historical sociolinguistics. A special issue of Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 113(3).![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Nevalainen, Terttu & Heli Tissari. 2010. Contextualising eighteenth-century politeness: Social distinction and metaphorical levelling. In Raymond Hickey (ed.), Eighteenth-century English: Ideology and change (Studies in English Language), 133–158. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Palander-Collin, Minna. 2012. Social roles, identities, and networks. In Nevalainen & Closs Traugott (eds.), 412–421.![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Rohrdantz, Christian, Annette Hautli, Thomas Mayer, Miriam Butt, Daniel A. Keim & Frans Plank. 2011. Towards tracking semantic change by visual analytics. In Yuji Matsumoto & Rada Mihalcea (eds.), HLT ’11: proceedings of the 49th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: short papers – volume 2, 305–310. Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics.![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Rohrdantz, Christian, Andreas Niekler, Annette Hautli, Miriam Butt & Daniel A. Keim. 2012. Lexical semantics and distribution of suffixes: A visual analysis. In Miriam Butt, Sheelagh Carpendale, Gerald Penn, Jelena Prokić & Michael Cysouw (eds.), Proceedings of the EACL 2012 joint workshop of LINGVIS & UNCLH, 7–15. Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics.![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Romaine, Suzanne. 1982. Socio-historical linguistics: Its status and methodology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Säily, Tanja. 2014. Sociolinguistic variation in English derivational productivity: Studies and methods in diachronic corpus linguistics (Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki XCIV). Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Säily, Tanja, Terttu Nevalainen & Harri Siirtola. 2011. Variation in noun and pronoun frequencies in a sociohistorical corpus of English. Literary and Linguistic Computing 26(2). 167–188. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Säily, Tanja & Jukka Suomela. 2009. Comparing type counts: The case of women, men and -ity in early English letters. In Antoinette Renouf & Andrew Kehoe (eds.), Corpus linguistics: Refinements and reassessments (Language and Computers: Studies in Practical Linguistics 69), 87–109. Amsterdam: Rodopi. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Sairio, Anni. 2009. Language and letters of the Bluestocking network. Sociolinguistic issues in eighteenth-century epistolary English (Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki LXXV). Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Siirtola, Harri, Poika Isokoski, Tanja Säily & Terttu Nevalainen. 2016. Interactive text visualization with Text Variation Explorer. In Ebad Banissi, Mark W. McK. Bannatyne, Fatma Bouali, Remo Burkhard, John Counsell, Urska Cvek, Martin J. Eppler, Georges Grinstein, Wei Dong Huang, Sebastian Kernbach, Chun-Cheng Lin, Feng Lin, Francis T. Marchese, Chi Man Pun, Muhammad Sarfraz, Marjan Trutschl, Anna Ursyn, Gilles Venturini, Theodor G. Wyeld & Jian J. Zhang (eds.), Proceedings of the 20th international conference on Information Visualisation (IV 2016), 330–335. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Tagliamonte, Sali A. & Derek Denis. 2014. Expanding the transmission/diffusion dichotomy: Evidence from Canada. Language 90(1). 90–136. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid. 1987. The auxiliary do in eighteenth-century English. A sociohistorical linguistic approach. Dordrecht: Foris Publications. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid (ed.). 2008. Grammars, grammarians and grammar-writing in eighteenth-century England (Topics in English Linguistics 59). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
van der Wal, Marijke J. & Gijsbert Rutten. 2013. Ego-documents in a historical-sociolinguistic perspective. In Marijke J. van der Wal & Gijsbert Rutten (eds.), Touching the past. Studies in the historical sociolinguistics of ego-documents (Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 1), 1–17. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Vartiainen, Turo, Tanja Säily & Mikko Hakala. 2013. Variation in pronoun frequencies in early English letters: Gender-based or relationship-based? In Jukka Tyrkkö, Olga Timofeeva & Maria Salenius (eds.), Ex philologia lux: Essays in honour of Leena Kahlas-Tarkka (Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki XC), 233–255. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Wood, Johanna L. 2004. Text in context: A critical discourse analysis approach to Margaret Paston. In Terttu Nevalainen & Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen (eds.), Letter writing. Special issue of Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5(2). 229–254.![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
McCafferty, Kevin & Carolina P. Amador-Moreno
2023.
Emigrant Letters from Ireland. In
The Oxford Handbook of Irish English,
► pp. 314 ff.
![DOI logo](//benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.