Description:
Edinburgh (now the Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics), such as eLALME (the electronic version A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English), LAEME (A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English) and LAOS (A Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots), this volume illustrates how traditional methods of historical dialectology can benefit from new methods of data-collection to test out theoretical and empirical claims. In showcasing the results that these resources can yield in the digital age, the book highlights novel methods for presenting, mapping and analysing the quantitative data of historical dialects, and sets the research agenda for future work in this field.
Bringing together a range of distinguished researchers, the book sets out the key corpus-building strategies for working with regional manuscript data at different levels of linguistic analysis including syntax, morphology, phonetics and phonology. The chapters also show the ways in which the geographical spread of phonological, morphological and lexical features of a language can be used to improve our assessment of the geographical provenance of historical texts.
Brief description: Bettelou Los is Forbes Professor of English Language at the University of Edinburgh. She graduated from the University of Amsterdam in 1986 and has since held teaching and research positions at the University of Amsterdam, the Vrije Universiteit, the University of Nijmegen, Radboud University Nijmegen and other colleges of high education. She participates in the research program The Diachrony of Complex Predicates in West Germanic, and has published several papers on diachronic syntax. Previous publications include The Handbook of the History of English, Blackwell, as co-editor (2006), and The Rise of the To-Infinitive, Oxford University Press (2005).
Review Quotes: The present volume is a very valuable contribution to the field of English historical dialectology. It demonstrates that the door for the linguistic analysis of early and late medieval texts and their language has been opened anew. It shows that there is an opportunity for more nuanced questions and more precise insights through the options presented by digitised corpora and/or digital methods (as complements to traditional, analogue corpora and methods). The overarching question - namely how digital methods can be used to investigate diachronic variation and language change - is addressed at different linguistic levels. It is the interplay between spelling variation and pronunciation which comes to the fore, as it is at the heart of half of the contributions (chapters 4, 5, 6, 7, 8), but syntactic variation and change, as well as morphological and lexical variation, do also find their places. The individual chapters all present their data and analyses with clarity and conciseness...All in all, the volume is a very good collection of papers, and it will be a handy and useful resource for students and more experienced scholars interested in the state of the field and what one can do with digitised corpora and digital methods.--Ulrike Krischke, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München "Anglia, 2020, 138(1)"