Exploring Future Paths for Historical Sociolinguistics

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the usefulness of part-of-speech (POS) annotation in the study of sociolinguistic variation and genre evolution. Our data consist of private letters extracted from the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence, and the material studied covers the period from c.1410 to 1681. By focusing the research on changes in the frequencies of POS labels, we firstly aim to explore the extent to which POS ratios can be used as a tool in diachronic linguistic research (see e.g. Mair et al. 2002). Our second aim is to see if, and how, the genre of personal correspondence changed in the period studied. We are particularly interested in finding out whether the genre has become more informal or "oral" in the course of history by becoming structurally less complex, and thus increasingly corresponding to the norms of spoken language in terms of POS distribution (see e.g. Biber and Finegan 1989, 1992, 1997). Our third topic of inquiry focuses on sociolinguistic variation and sociolinguistically conditioned change. We are interested in seeing whether different discourse styles can be identified in the data by observing differences in POS ratios in texts written by different social groups. In particular, we will focus our attention on the nuclear family in order to test our hypothesis that intimacy between the sender and the recipient of the letter may have facilitated a colloquial style of writing and colloquialisation. In sum, we argue that POS annotation can be a useful tool in the sociohistorical study of genres and genre evolution, but it needs to be complemented by a thorough textual analysis: while we find that the changes in POS ratios correctly predict a gradual colloquialisation of the genre in terms of noun and verb frequencies, for example, they also give some conflicting information about colloquialisation as measured by structural complexity.

Registerial Adaptation vs. Innovation Across Situational Contexts: 18th Century Women in Transition

“…As for the second point, analyzing and comparing fixed time periods by pre-defining historical stages has been the standard practice (e.g., Kytö, 1993;Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg, 2003;Degaetano-Ortlieb, 2015Teich et al, 2016;Säily et al, 2017a;Degaetano-Ortlieb et al, 2019c). The rise in interest in the investigation of temporal dynamics of cultural sociolinguistic phenomena has triggered a whole wave of more exploratory, data-driven approaches targeted toward determining when particular changes occur rather than comparing predefined periods.…”