This book heralds the release of the Corpus of History English Texts (CHET). CHET is a recent addition to the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing, an ongoing series of diachronic corpora compiled by the MuStE research group at the University of A Coruña (www.udc.es/grupos/muste). Each corpus in the Coruña series covers the same historical period of 1700 to 1900, and has been carefully designed so as to be directly comparable with other corpora in the series. While its name may suggest an exclusive focus on STEM disciplines, the Coruña Corpus project actually aims to provide resources for studying the evolution of academic writing in English across the whole disciplinary spectrum, from Astronomy to Philosophy, and from Life Sciences to History, the subject of the current volume.
As with the two previous edited collections emerging from this project (also published by John Benjamins), the aim of the book is not to provide a coordinated set of claims about the development of historical writing during the period covered by CHET, but rather to showcase the variety of research questions that can be addressed using the corpus, either by itself or in combination with other corpora in the Coruña stable. Ultimately, the book is successful in this aim, although it must be said that this is only after a somewhat shaky start.
The Foreword (by Javier Pérez-Guerra) informs the reader that the opening chapter will be by MuStE research group lead Isabel Moskowich, and that this chapter will provide ‘some background about the discipline in the period, the trigger for compilation [sic] and [a] description of the corpus material’ (p. 2). However, chapter 1 in the published volume is not by Isabel Moskowich, and does not actually do any of the abovementioned things. Instead, chapter 1 presents the reader with a sprawling and at times rather scattershot essay by Elena Alfaya Lamas, which attempts nothing less than a comprehensive historiographical survey stretching all the way back to Herodotus and Bede. While the breadth of scholarship on display here is certainly impressive on its own terms, much of the information presented in this chapter is of dubious relevance to the specific concerns of the volume. I found myself wishing that the author had focused much more sharply on describing the situational contexts of historical writing and the development of history as a distinctive academic discipline during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as the title of this chapter (‘A review of the development of historical writing and writers in English from 1700 to 1900’) had led me to expect.
Expectations of a general introduction continue to be confounded by chapter 2, in which Marina Dossena plunges the (now increasingly baffled) reader into a discussion of how Native Americans are represented in late modern historical writing (‘“There were always Indians passing to and fro”: Notes on the representation of Native Americans in CHET documents’). Not only is this chapter self-evidently out of place at this point in the book, but it is even doubtful whether it really belongs in this book at all. First of all, and as the author herself admits on p. 23, only a small handful of texts in CHET contain any references to Native Americans whatsoever. This makes the chapter an odd choice for inclusion in a book whose purpose is to showcase CHET as a resource for corpus-based research. Furthermore, the analysis upon which the chapter reports does not even seem to be ‘corpus-based’ in any modern (i.e. computer-assisted) sense. The author claims that her research was carried out using a combination of Reisigl and Wodak's Discourse Historical approach to Critical Discourse Analysis and Martin and White's Appraisal theory, but the analysis presented in the chapter consists of a series of ad hoc impressionistic observations that show no signs of having been generated by either of these research frameworks, let alone by the systematic application of computational tools and methods of any discernible kind.
So far, then, not so good. Thankfully, the reader's patience is rewarded by chapter 3, which finally delivers the long-anticipated general introduction to CHET by Isabel Moskowich (‘An introduction to CHET, the Corpus of History English Texts’). And well worth the wait it is, too. Not only does Moskowich's brisk and elegantly written survey cover all of the key information that a potential user of CHET might need to know, from sampling policies and periodisation to annotation and metadata handling, but it also does an excellent job of establishing the emerging contexts of historical writing during the two centuries covered by the corpus, thereby whetting the reader's appetite for the research papers that follow in the rest of the volume.
Of these, by far the most impressive contributions are chapter 4, by Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Katrin Menzel and Elke Teich, and chapter 5, by Leida Maria Monaco. Degaetano-Ortlieb et al.'s study (‘Typical linguistic patterns of English history texts from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century: An information-theoretic approach’) uses cutting-edge quantitative methods to study the emergence and development of characteristic linguistic patterns in historical discourse during the late modern period. Starting with a comparative analysis of POS-trigrams across CHET and two other corpora (representing general written English of the period and academic writing in the natural sciences respectively), they identify the patterns NOUN + PREPOSITION + NOUN and PAST TENSE VERB + TO + INFINITIVE VERB as being distinctive of late Modern English historical writing. The authors find that the lexical productivity of these two patterns increases over time in CHET, indicating an ever more varied usage of these two patterns between 1700 and 1900. This in turn suggests that the range of entities, concepts, themes and topics covered by historical writing underwent a substantial expansion during this period.
Monaco's chapter (‘Exploring the narrative dimension in late Modern English History texts’) is also commendably bold and wide-ranging, focusing as it does on the role that narrative plays in the development of history as a distinctive academic discourse during the eighteenth century. Using the general methodology of Multidimensional Analysis, she carries out a comparative study of narrative and non-narrative features in eighteenth-century subsets of CHET and three other Coruña corpora: CETA, representing Astronomy, CEPhiT, representing Philosophy, and CELiST, representing Life Sciences. As might be expected, she finds that narrative features are more characteristic of historical writing than they are of the other disciplines under analysis. More intriguingly, however, she also observes that narrativity as a register dimension actually increases in prominence in historical writing during the eighteenth century. This suggests – somewhat counterintuitively, to me at least – that the prominent role that narrative plays in contemporary historical writing may have emerged only relatively recently.
Chapter 6 (‘Time and history: A preliminary approach to binomials in late Modern English Astronomy and History texts’), by Paloma Núñez-Pertejo, compares binomials in CHET and CETA, and finds that hapaxes are more common than conventionalised binomial forms in both corpora. Although it is tempting to see this as corroborating Degaetano-Ortlieb et al.'s observations of increasing lexical productivity in historical discourse, Núñez-Pertejo's data do not allow us to make any such inferences as her study somewhat disappointingly treats CHET and CETA as synchronic corpora, ignoring their potential for diachronic analysis.
The diachronic perspective is restored in chapter 7 (‘“Were this eſtimation, however, to be depended on”: Inversion conditionals as evidence of paradigmatic change in CHET’), in which Luis Puente-Castelo considers inverted conditional forms (e.g. Had she known earlier, she would have sacked him) as a potential linguistic barometer of epistemological change. Comparing CHET with CETA, CEPhiT and CELiST, he finds that inversion conditionals gradually fall out of use over time in all disciplines except History, where usage trends continue at much the same level throughout the period. While the reasons for this are not clear, the author offers the interesting speculation that the continued use of inversion conditionals in historical writing may indicate a longer-lasting influence of scholasticism on history as a research paradigm than is the case in other fields of study.
In chapter 8, ‘Modal verb categories in CHET’, Francisco Alonso-Almeida and Francisco J. Álvarez-Gil find that epistemic modals are dominant in historical writing of the period, followed by deontic modals and then dynamic modals. This ranking seems to me to be broadly consistent with what we might expect in twenty-first-century usage; if so, this invites the speculation that conventional modal meanings may have stabilised at a very early date in historical writing. Unfortunately, the authors do not provide any comparative or diachronic perspectives on their data, and in so doing leave this and many other potentially interesting questions arising from their research entirely unaddressed.
In chapter 9, ‘A corpus-based study of some certainty adverbs in the Corpus of History English Texts’, María José Esteve Ramos and Inés Lareo report on a study of assertiveness (as expressed through the presence of certainty adverbs such as assuredly, doubtless and fundamentally) across a range of variables in CHET. With regard to the variable of genre, they find that late modern historical claims are advanced most confidently in lectures, and least assertively in treatises. They also find that assertiveness generally increases with age, and is slightly more common in history texts written by male authors than it is in texts by women historians.
Gender variation is also in focus in chapter 10, by Begoña Crespo: ‘How intimate was the tone of female History writing in the Modern period? Evidence from the Corpus of History English Texts’. Somewhat in contrast to Esteve Ramos and Lareo, Crespo's diachronic and comparative study of a range of linguistic features expressing (im)personalisation problematises the notion that women academics write in a more ‘intimate’ and ‘personal’ way than do their male counterparts. Comparing texts by women writers in CHET against a selection of texts by female scientists drawn from the Penn-Parsed Helsinki Corpus of Modern British English (PPCMBE), Crespo finds that ‘[f]emale texts seem to fit into the general patterns of scientific writing, shifting towards the depersonalised discourse of modern science’ (p. 211). While these conclusions seem eminently plausible to me, I was nevertheless puzzled as to why Crespo chose to base her analysis on a comparison of two corpora of women's writing, when she could just as easily – and surely far more relevantly – have made a direct comparison of (im)personal features in the writing of female and male historians in CHET.
Chapter 11, by Margarita Mele-Marrero, looks at pronominal forms of self-reference in CHET and CETA (‘Neither I nor we: Inexplicit authorial voice in eighteenth-century academic texts’). After profiling a subset of authors from each corpus, Mele-Marrero then zooms in on three individual authors whom she observes to be unusual cases in that they use neither I nor we in their writing. Unfortunately, this ‘close focus’ strategy proves to be largely unrevealing, and the latter part of the chapter palpably struggles to find anything of consequence to say about these three authors’ apparent stylistic preferences. More successful in this regard is chapter 12, which reports on María Luisa Carrió-Pastor's study ‘Do writers express the same attitude in historical genres? A contrastive analysis of attitude devices in the Corpus of History English Texts’. ‘Attitude devices’ are operationalised here as a list of adjectives, verbs, nouns and adverbs expressing evaluative meanings. In line with several other chapters in this collection, Carrió-Pastor finds that the linguistic focus of her analysis is sensitive to genre variability; in particular, attitude devices are more commonly used in lectures than they are in treatises or essays.
Finally, Iria Bello brings the volume to a close with a careful and thorough study of additive markers that serve a text-cohesive function (‘On cognitive complexity in scientific discourse: A corpus-based study on additive coherence relations’). After establishing a useful distinction between ‘focus operators’ (such as even and also) and ‘connectives’ (such as on the other hand and moreover), Bello finds that the former are much more common in late modern historical writing, although the usage profiles of both types have fluctuated considerably over the period represented by CHET.
In summary, this book is a welcome addition to the newly burgeoning research literature in historical corpus linguistics. It celebrates a milestone achievement in diachronic corpus compilation, and both broadens and deepens our understanding of how academic English has developed over time and across disciplines. Notwithstanding this, I have to confess that I came away from the book wishing that it had included more ambitious and cutting-edge studies of the kind exemplified by Degaetano-Ortlieb et al. and Monaco, and correspondingly fewer studies in the more traditional ‘description of language feature X in corpus Y’ mould. While there is nothing wrong with the latter approach in principle, in practice it can all too easily result in unadventurous research that merely confirms or adds further detail to what we (think we) already know about particular features and/or text types, whereas the more exploratory and data-driven approaches showcased by Degaetano-Ortlieb et al. and Monaco have far greater potential to break exciting new ground in the field. The only other reservation that I have about the book is that the content and ordering of its opening chapters would have benefited from the exercise of a much firmer editorial hand. In lieu of this, readers with limited time to devote to this book may be advised that they can safely skip its first two chapters altogether, and treat the excellent third chapter by Isabel Moskowich as the de facto opening chapter of the volume.
