Studies in the Evolution of the English Language

Artur Kijak’s contribution titled “A historical phonology of the consonant-vowel interactions: The case of the English lateral” represents the same methodological approach, that of Element Theory. The author of the chapter aims to examine “the phonological interactions between the lateral and the preceding vowels in the history of English” as well as “the internal structure of the segments involved in such interactions.” Specifically, a successful attempt is made to shed light on the vocalization of the lateral and a number of vocalic developments motivated by this vocalization including diphthongization, vowel raising and lengthening. One of the merits of the chapter is that its author pursues the problem of an inconsistent behaviour of the lateral and explains why it has survived only in certain clusters. Moreover, the relationship between the context and the process of the lateral vocalization is also given due attention.

The last chapter in the first part of the volume titled “A quantitative analysis of internal spelling variation in George Joye’s 1534 translation of the Psalter” is a contribution by Jerzy Wójcik. The author investigates internal spelling variation of a 1534 English translation of the Psalter which displays a considerable amount of spelling variation typical of the early Modern English period. The assumption pursued in the chapter is, as argued by Shute (2017), that the observation of internal spelling differences between parts of the text enables one to draw certain conclusions concerning the number of compositors who prepared the text for printing. The statistical analysis of spelling variation offered in the text employs the so-called software R.

The part of the volume devoted to the syntactic evolution of English is introduced by Isabella Buniyatova’s contribution titled “Elimination of grammatical redundancy in the history of English: The case of negative constructions.” The chapter delves into the problem of multiple sentence negation involving negative concord (NC) in the history of the English language. Special attention is given to the elimination of redundant Neg-elements, including cliticized adverbs, pronouns, and adjectives. The author postulated that changes taking place in the English negation system represent the case of grammaticalization (see Fisher and Rosenbach 2000, Frisch 1997, Harris and Campbell 1995, Traugott 1995, 1996) studied on the basis of the data taken from literary sources. The historical evolution of the phenomenon in question is investigated through reference to three periods in the history of the English language, specifically Old English, Middle English and Early Modern English.

Sylvain Gatelais and Fabienne Toupin are authors of the chapter titled “The development of prepositional absent in Contemporary American English: a corpus-based constructional approach.” The contributors focus on the use of absent which is labelled “preposition” in dictionaries of English (see Slotkin 1985). If absent really functions as a preposition in present-day English, that is if it results from a shift of an adjective into a preposition, it might be an instantiation of a grammaticalization process (see Hopper and Traugott 2003), whereby a lexical category becomes a grammatical one. The authors argue, however, that the change is not merely the grammaticalization of an individual item, but rather the emergence of a new construction, a mechanism known as constructionalization (see Traugott & Trousdale 2013).

The chapter written by John G. Newman “The partitive genitive with fela and feawe in Old English and Middle English” is a successful attempt at conducting a detailed analysis of the partitive genitive with fela ‘many’ and feawe ‘few’ in Old and Middle English. The author validates relevant claims like those of Hooper (1976), Bybee (1988, 2007), Phillips (2006), and Newman (2012) by specifying whether “analogical modeling based on comparative token frequency may have allowed for resistance to the loss of the morphological partitive genitive initially, but facilitated that loss later.” One of the merits of the contribution is the suggestion that lower frequency nouns occurring with fela and feawe affected higher frequency nouns occurring with those words but lacking distinctly genitive plural marking. The ultimate result of this process was the disappearance of partitive genitive morphology.

In his contribution, “Borrowing and polysemy: an investigation of French loans in Middle English,” Richard Ingham focuses on the relationship between lexical borrowing and lexical polysemy in the Middle English period. The targeted period witnessed extensive borrowing from Old French. The author makes an attempt to measure “the extent to which loanwords were taken over into English in a single sense, as is typically the case with modern technological and cultural borrowing, or whether polysemous source-language lexemes were borrowed into English as polysemous in the same senses.” One of the most important findings of the research is the conclusion that the vast majority of OF lexemes instantiated as polysemous in OF/A-N and borrowed into English showed borrowed polysemy. The means by which more than a single sense of loanwords entered English is seen by the author as arising from bilingual activation.

The last chapter in the volume, “Scientific word-formation in eighteenth-century English” was written by Grzegorz Wlaźlak. This contribution examines the structure of complex lexemes coined in the eighteenth century which represented English scientific vocabulary. Specifically, the author pays attention to formations which contain Latinate affixes or neoclassical elements. The data subject to analysis are excerpted from a corpus which features scientific texts published in the first and second half of the eighteenth century, as well as dictionaries and encyclopedias compiled during that period. The analysis of texts targeted in the chapter corroborates a trend towards scientific language dynamism in word-formation, strengthened by a continuous tendency towards internationalization (see Görlach 2001 and Wlaźlak 2020).

Last but not least, I wish to express my gratitude to Professor Paweł Grata, Vice-Rector of College of Humanities at the University of Rzeszów, for his benevolence and significant financial support.