Official Program for NARNiHS 2021
Third Annual Meeting
North American Research Network in Historical Sociolinguistics
A Sister Society of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA)
[ go to the site of the LSA 2021 Virtual Annual Meeting ]
This year fully online via video-conference!
==> download the official NARNiHS 2021 program as PDF <==
Times are listed in U.S. Eastern Time (New York) with additional indication of Pacific Time (Vancouver) and Central European Time (Prague) for reference.
==> Move your mouse over each presentation,
==> or tap each presentation on your tablet,
==> to see a short abstract!
Friday, 8 January 2021
Session 1: Norms – Between Homogeneity and Variation
Chair: Israel Sanz-Sánchez (West Chester University, USA)
Time: 11:00–12:30 (New York) — 8:00-9:30 (Vancouver) | 17:00-18:30 (Prague)
| 11:00 08:00 17:00 |
What do prescriptivists know about usage? The influence of usage on Siegenbeek’s Woordenlijst (1847).
Marten van der Meulen and Gijsbert Rutten (Radboud University Nijmegen and Leiden University, The Netherlands).Much contemporary research into prescriptivism focuses on the influence of prescriptivism on language use. Rarer is work investigating the influence of usage on prescriptivism. We investigate this influence by presenting a Dutch case study. We discuss the puristic Lijst van woorden en uitdrukkingen met het Nederlandsch Taaleigen strijdende (1847) by Siegenbeek. We analyze statements about usage in this list, including the use of frequency words. Next, we analyze corpus data from 1750-1847, using Nederlab (3507 texts, 30.3 million words). We discuss the results in the context of different types of prescriptivism (Curzan 2014) and the frequency illusion (Zwicky 2006). |
| 11:30 08:30 17:30 |
The spread of archaising, codified forms in the Buonarroti corpus: Dynamics of standardisation in early modern Tuscany.
Eleonora Serra (University of Cambridge, England).This paper examines the spread of two morphological features codified in grammars in a corpus of private letters from sixteenth-century Tuscany. This is the correspondence of Michelangelo Buonarroti’s family and their contacts (395000 words, written between 1496 and 1585), including letters by 198 writers from different social backgrounds. The results suggest that change from above in social terms can be detected at the level of informal writings. I complement this analysis with a micro-level approach which examines the language of individual members of one generation of the Buonarroti family, relating individuals’ network structures to their participation in linguistic change. |
| 12:00 09:00 18:00 |
Politics, Pragmatism and Persistence: Written Scots during the Union debates in personal correspondence.
Sarah van Eyndhoven (University of Edinburgh, Scotland).The year 1707 in Scotland marked the political unification of two nations, but also a cornerstone in the disappearance of written Scots. Yet both linguistic and political awareness were increasing, making this a unique time-period to examine. Looking at the correspondence of the Earl of Seafield, a key figure involved in the Union of the Parliaments, I analyse how Scots manifests in his letters. I examine Scots on orthographic, phonological and lexical levels, and consider possible interactions with his political and national identity. Scots is shown not only to persist in writing, but also to be utilised in politically-charged ways. |
Break
Time: 12:30–13:30 — 9:30-10:30 (Vancouver) | 18:30-19:30 (Prague)
Session 2: Contact and Sound Change
Chair: Fernando Tejedo-Herrero (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA)
Time: 13:30–15:00 (New York) — 10:30-12:00 (Vancouver) | 19:30-21:00 (Prague)
| 13:30 10:30 19:30 |
Dialectal phonetic features as an indicator of language shift in the conditions of language contact. A diachronic look at the insular Polish dialect in Russian surroundings (Vershina, Irkutsk Oblast, Siberia).
Michał Głuszkowski (Nicolaus Copernicus University, Chair of Slavic Languages, Toruń, Poland).It has been observed that the contact with the Russian language stimulates the processes of devoicing on word boundaries, as well as inhibits word-internal voicing and mazurism in the Lesser Polish dialect island in Eastern Siberia. The aim of the present study is to analyze the dependency of the level of maintenance of the dialectal phonetic features in the subsequent generations of the inhabitants of Vershina on their age. Tracing the generational differences allows us to illustrate the process of the evolution of an insular dialect and and present them on a timeline 1910-2019. |
| 14:00 11:00 20:00 |
The actuation of allophonic PRICE-raising in Kansas City in late 1800s speech.
Christopher Strelluf (University of Warwick, England).This presentation attempts to account for the actuation of Canadian Raising in Kansas City in the late twentieth century. It explores PRICE vowels in recordings of 11 Kansas Citians born between 1884 and 1914, along with a larger sample of newer sociolinguistic interviews. It shows that PRICE underwent diphthongization as a result of social changes between the Civil War and World War II, and that diphthongization provided the phonetic precursor for allophonic raising. It argues that the Actuation Problem for the recent sound change can only be solved by understanding the motivations and actions of the earlier sound change. |
| 14:30 11:30 20:30 |
Orthographic Development of the Palatal Nasal /ɲ/ in Balearic Catalan as an Indicator of Contact-Induced Change.
James Ramsburg (University of Minnesota, USA).The current study examines the historical development of the palatal nasal grapheme in Balearic Catalan texts in an attempt to better characterize the origins of linguistic hispanicization on the Balearic Islands. From the 16th to the 20th centuries the palatal nasal phoneme /ɲ/, originally represented as <ny>, was written as <ñ>, <ñy>, or <yñ>. This study seeks to further characterize this phenomenon and better analyze how exactly various linguistic and social factors affected the use of either the native or contact-induced graphemes. The results suggest that year, location, and text genre were all significant predictors contributing to the usage of contact graphemes. |
Saturday, 9 January 2021
Session 3: Sources and Methods . . . and New Interpretations
Chair: Kelly E. Wright (University of Michigan, USA)
Time: 11:00–12:30 (New York) — 8:00-9:30 (Vancouver) | 17:00-18:30 (Prague)
| 11:00 08:00 17:00 |
Language and Religion: The Case of (Early) Modern Czech.
Alena A. Fidlerová (Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic).The paper addresses the problem of mutual relationship between the religious history of a nation and the views on the desirable form of its standard language. It focuses on the early 19th-century codification of modern Czech and argues that (1) in a way, it was in its motivation more “confessional” than the language choices of the authors of the preceding early modern era, and (2) that it was influenced both by its proponents’ views on the ideal Christian piety and by their assessment of the cultural significance of individual religious movements in the history of Czechs. |
| 11:30 08:30 17:30 |
Merits and Challenges of Late Modern English Pauper Petitions as a Source for Historical Sociolinguistic Investigations.
Anita Auer, Anne-Christine Gardner, Mark Iten (University of Lausanne, Switzerland).This paper critically discusses the merits and challenges of pauper petitions written under the Old Poor Law in England, c. 1795–1834, and their value for historical sociolinguistics. Based on a corpus of c. 2000 petitions, and couched in social, educational and migration histories, the paper sheds light on (a) the types of linguistic studies possible, (b) the (un)reliability of meta-linguistic social data retrieved from the pauper petitions, (c) the role of self-corrections in the writing process, and (d) the relationship between the petitions and dialect representations in contemporary literature, depositions, as well as grammars and manuals. |
| 12:00 09:00 18:00 |
“At Ones and Twos”: Wardens’ and Governors’ Ego-Centric Social Network Ties as Potential Channels of Transmission of the Language Shift to English in the Late Medieval Records of the Mercers’ and the Grocers’ London Livery Companies.
José Miguel Alcolado Carnicero (International Center for Higher Spanish Studies, University of Cantabria, Spain).This research evaluates the impact of the interpersonal relations at the micro-individual network level on the origins of a change in the choice from Latin and French to English for written domains in late medieval England. The paper proposes two analyses of the contacts between the administrators serving office when English manuscripts occur for the first time in the most prominent livery companies of the period: the London Mercers and the London Grocers. Their results show that, among the liverymen in office when the records are firstly shifted to English, the same people appear and are related to one another. |
Break
Time: 12:30 – 13:30 — 9:30-10:30 (Vancouver) | 18:30-19:30 (Prague)
Session 4: Syntax
Chair: Joseph Salmons (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA)
Time: 13:30–15:00 (New York) — 10:30-12:00 (Vancouver) | 19:30-21:00 (Prague)
| 13:30 10:30 19:30 |
Reassessing the role of the individual in syntactic variation and change.
Oliver Currie (University of Ljubljana, Slovenia).Based on a case-study of word order change in Early Modern Welsh (c.1550-c.1750), which shows marked variation between individual writers in the use of an emerging verb-initial construction, I will argue that analysing syntactic variation between individuals can also shed light more generally on the mechanisms and diffusion of syntactic change. From a theoretical perspective, I seek to combine the insights of recent work on individual syntactic variation in diachronic construction/cognitive grammar frameworks with those of “Third Wave” sociolinguistic studies which highlight the agency of individual speakers. |
| 14:00 11:00 20:00 |
The interplay of syntactic, semantic and social factors in the choice of the relativizer: some evidence from Greek documentary papyri (I-VIII AD).
Eleonora Cattafi (Ghent University/FWO Research Foundation Flanders, Belgium).Greek documentary papyri from Egypt have proved to be well-suited to sociolinguistic research because of the large body of textual data available, as well as for their internal diversity. In this presentation, I analyze the distribution of Greek relative markers in a corpus consisting of all relative clauses in letters, petitions and contracts collected in archives from the 1st to the 8th century AD. My aim is to identify the main linguistic and social factors influencing the choice of the relative marker in these texts and their relationship. |
| 14:30 11:30 20:30 |
Prepositional alternation before city names in Hexagonal French: A variationist and longitudinal account.
Emmanuelle Buaillon (University of Victoria, Canada).Drawing on two corpora of vernacular speech spanning over a hundred years, this study seeks to provide a longitudinal account of prepositional variation before city names in Hexagonal French. Previous research on this phenomenon (e.g. Hernández, 2008; Huyghe, 2012) has taken a semantic and pragmatic approach. However, the use of variationist methods reveals that, in addition to linguistic predictors, social factors—particularly speaker’s age and location—are critical to explain the variable grammar of this feature. This study contributes to a better understanding of the comparative effects of time and geography on long term patterns of morphosyntactic variation. References: Hernández, P.C. (2008). La décoloration de la préposition sur : Une explication en termes d’intégration conceptuelle. Formes symboliques, 7, 1–19. Huyghe, R. (2012). Sur et les noms de territoires. Cuadernos de Filología Francesa, 23, 169–186. |
Sunday, 10 January 2021
Session 5: Syntax and Discourse
Chair: Alexandra D’Arcy (University of Victoria, Canada)
Time: 11:00–12:30 (New York) — 8:00-9:30 (Vancouver) | 17:00-18:30 (Prague)
| 11:00 08:00 17:00 |
From ‘buddy’ to ‘dude’ to ‘bro’: Vocative change in Ontario English.
Jeremy M. Needle and Sali A. Tagliamonte (University of Toronto, Canada).Beyond calling attention, vocatives (e.g. ‘honey’, ‘mister’) are embedded in cultural and discourse contexts and show wide variability over communities and across time. Vocatives have been studied from Early Modern English to the present day, revealing how language and society change together. We study familiarizers in vernacular Ontario English, including an urban/rural continuum and individuals born between 1950s-2000s. In the earlier 20th century, ‘buddy’ is the norm, ‘dude’ largely replaces it after the 1970s, and for adolescents born after 2000, ‘bro’ rises quickly. We suggest that vocatives are ideal for tracking historical processes in sociolinguistics. |
| 11:30 08:30 17:30 |
Old English Intensifiers: A Quantitative Analysis of the Old English Intensifier System
James Stratton (Purdue University, USA).This study uses variationist quantitative methods to examine the factors constraining and conditioning Old English intensifier variation.Both internal and external factors are found to operate on this system, with predicative adjectives favoring intensification over attributive adjectives, prose texts having higher intensification rates than verse texts, vernacular texts having higher intensification rates than Latin-based texts, and the rate of intensification increasing over time. The quantitative analysis of the Old English system also increases the time depth necessary for a more detailed reflection on the diachronic recycling, replacement, and renewal of intensifiers. |
| 12:00 09:00 18:00 |
A Historical Study of Propredicate do in Utah.
David Ellingson Eddington (Brigham Young University, USA).Propredicate do (PPD) is examined from a corpus of sermons given by people born between 1797 and 1957. DiPaolo (1993) claims that PPD in Utah is due English settlers. The statistics reveal that PPD is not particular to Utah since Utah born speakers use PPD at very similar rates, and in some time periods non-Utah born speakers used used PPD at higher rates. The English origin of PPD is contradicted by the fact that PPD was not common in England until the 1920s. PPD in Utah has been in steady decline since 1847. |
Monday, 11 January 2021
Session 6: Scripts and Graphemic Variation
Chair: Jenelle Thomas (University of Oxford, England)
Time: 11:00–1:00 (New York) — 8:00-10:00 (Vancouver) | 17:00-19:00 (Prague)
| 11:00 08:00 17:00 |
Language and script mixing in the epigraphic sources of medieval Scandinavia.
Alessandro Palumbo (University of Oslo, Norway).When Latin and the Roman alphabet were gradually introduced in Scandinavia from the late eleventh century, they encountered an 800-year-old native tradition based on the local vernaculars and the runic script. This resulted in a long coexistence of the two languages and scripts, to their mixing and mutual influence. In my talk, I will present the preliminary results of a project that investigates this encounter of written cultures by focusing on phenomena of language and script switching in epigraphic sources. Through a combination of epigraphic, multimodal and sociolinguistic analyses, the project aims to determine the carvers’ multilingual and multiscriptal proficiency, and the status relationship between the Latin and runic written traditions. |
| 11:30 08:30 17:30 |
Historical Sociolinguistics of Mayan Writing: Graphic and Graphemic Variation and Change.
David F. Mora-Marín (University of North Carolina, USA).This paper combines historical sociolinguistics and paleography to study graphic and graphemic variables in Epigraphic Mayan (ISO 639-3 emy) (ca. 400 bce-ce 1697). My previous work has shown the productivity of studying linguistic and orthographic variation in EMY (Mora-Marín 2017, 2019, 2020). This paper investigates graphic and graphemic variation involving three allograms used to spell *ʔaajaaw ‘lord, ruler’ by means of the Maya Hieroglyphic Database (MHD) (Macri and Looper 1991-2020) to trace their patterns of graphic variation and change, including contextual parameters (media, genre, text density) and sociopolitical networks during the Classic (ce 200-900) period. |
| 12:00 09:00 18:00 |
NARNiHS General Meeting (open to all) Note that this meeting is planned for one hour: 12:00-1:00 — 9:00-10:00 (Vancouver) | 18:00-19:00 (Prague). |