Dr Hanna Rutkowska
The elimination of homography in thirteen editions of the Kalender of Shepherdes as an example of the orthographic regularisation process in Early Modern English printed books
This is a paper summarising the findings of a corpus-based, qualitative and quantitative comparative study which traces the process of the elimination of homography in thirteen editions of the Kalender of Shepherdes (listed in Jackson et al. 1976 and Wing 1982-98), a comprehensive compendium of prose and verse texts on a variety of subjects, e.g. astronomy, medicine, and religion, published between 1506 and 1656. The corpus contains over 0.9 million words, and constitutes a database of transcriptions prepared by the present author, and based on the facsimiles available at Early English Books Online.
Orthographic distinction between homophones, together with the indication of morphological spelling, vowel length, and the establishment of etymological spelling, are considered the most important variables to be taken into consideration in the analysis of the process of the orthographic regularisation and standardisation in Early Modern English (Salmon 1999). A close comparative examination of the editions which are included in the corpus indicates that most of the printers under consideration made conscious efforts to lower the level of homography in their orthographic systems, distinguishing between homophones by means of different spellings. The process was gradual, but with regard to native words homography seems to have reached the level comparable to Present-Day English by the 1650s.
The printers’ usage has been confronted with the recommendations of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century lexicographers, grammarians and spelling reformers. This confrontation has revealed that language authorities’ opinions could not have triggered the tendency to eliminate homography among the printers, because this trend had started before their writings were published. However, their publications could have supported the already advanced process of spelling regularisation.
The discussed study is a part of a recently finished post-doctoral project analysing the orthographic systems of early printers of books published in English, funded by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education (project no. N N104 055438).
References:
EARLY ENGLISH BOOKS ONLINE at http://wwwlib.umi.com/eebo/ (Last access 2012-05-12)
LASS, Roger (ed.), 1999, The Cambridge History of the English Language. Volume III: 1476-1776, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
JACKSON - Frederic Sutherland FERGUSON - Katharine F. PANTZER (eds.), 1976, A short-title catalogue of books printed in England, Scotland and Ireland and of English books printed abroad, 1475-1640, Volume 2: I–Z, London: Bibliographical Society. (STC)
SALMON, Vivian, 1999, “Orthography and punctuation”, in: Roger LASS (ed.), 13-55.
WING, Donald Goddard, 1982-1998, Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales and British America and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, New York: The Modern Language Association of America. (Wing)
Marcin Kilarski
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań
kilarski@amu.edu.pl
A functional typology of nominal classification systems
Current research on nominal classification systems relies on typologies based on their morphosyntactic properties, resulting in the commonly used distinction between gender/noun classes and classifiers (cf. Aikhenvald 2000; Grinevald 2000; Senft 2007). In this talk I will report on a functional typology of nominal classification proposed by Contini-Morava and Kilarski (in press).
Nominal classification systems serve two main types of functions: semantic, i.e., use of classification markers to expand the referential power of the lexicon, and discourse/pragmatic, i.e., use of classification markers to establish and manipulate the status of discourse referents. On the one hand, most of these functions are shared across morphosyntactic types; for example, all types of nominal classification can be used to express a speaker’s attitude toward the referent. On the other hand, as a result of a different realization, some of the functions are more likely to be bound to a particular means of expression. For example, the use of classification markers to create new lexical items is more characteristic of noun classes where nouns are overtly marked, whereas distinctions which are conveyed by separate lexical items in a non-classifier language can be made by using different classifiers with a single lexical item.
Such uses of classification markers have implications for our understanding of not only morphosyntactic and functional properties of nominal classification systems but also other related issues such as the respective semantic contributions of classification markers and nouns as well as the interaction with other grammatical phenomena such as number and word order.
References:
Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2000. Classifiers: A typology of noun categorization devices. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Contini-Morava, Ellen and Marcin Kilarski. in press. “Functions of nominal classification”, Language Sciences.
Grinevald, Colette. 2000. “A morphosyntactic typology of classifiers”, in: Gunter Senft (ed.), Systems of nominal classification. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 50-92.
Senft, Gunter. 2007. “Nominal classification”, in: Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens (eds.), The Oxford handbook of cognitive linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 676-696.
