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Watching English Change
Examines the ways language has changed in the twentieth century. It concentrates on standard English and takes a historical rather than sociolinguistic view of the changes which have occurred.
- GenresLinguistics
216 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
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December 31, 2021
This is a very nice introduction to the field of language variation & change, mostly easy to follow, sometimes even a bit too introductory. A few sections feel a bit confused/confusing/both (e.g. the one on forms of address), but I appreciate the scope of the book (and I was pleasantly surprised when reading the chapter on sound changes as it turned out ten times more captivating than I had expected).
I was kinda upset that there wasn't much syntax and syntactic change, but I understand that it is methodologically quite complicated to observe (by the way, given that the book was published as early as in 1994, it is really impressive-ish how Bauer juggles various types of data, doing a lot of manual analysis). At least the lack of syntax got me googling; if you find yourself wondering like I did, there is quite a nice paper on syntactic change in English (C. Mair & G. Leech, "Current changes in English syntax") and another on stylistic change in English (G. Leech et al., "English style on the move: Variation and change in stylistic norms in the twentieth century"). And if you're like really fancy and into valency (ha!), you might enjoy "Valency changes in the history of English" by Elly van Gelderen (all these papers are really easy to find online).
(Also I can't help myself and have to mention that there is a recent paper called "Innovation in functional categories: Slash, a new coordinator in English" by Brent Woo, which is not really that much about variation & change, but at the same time kind of is, and it is a really nice read, again available online.)
I was kinda upset that there wasn't much syntax and syntactic change, but I understand that it is methodologically quite complicated to observe (by the way, given that the book was published as early as in 1994, it is really impressive-ish how Bauer juggles various types of data, doing a lot of manual analysis). At least the lack of syntax got me googling; if you find yourself wondering like I did, there is quite a nice paper on syntactic change in English (C. Mair & G. Leech, "Current changes in English syntax") and another on stylistic change in English (G. Leech et al., "English style on the move: Variation and change in stylistic norms in the twentieth century"). And if you're like really fancy and into valency (ha!), you might enjoy "Valency changes in the history of English" by Elly van Gelderen (all these papers are really easy to find online).
(Also I can't help myself and have to mention that there is a recent paper called "Innovation in functional categories: Slash, a new coordinator in English" by Brent Woo, which is not really that much about variation & change, but at the same time kind of is, and it is a really nice read, again available online.)
Displaying 1 of 1 review