It is an astonishing fact that the dynamo producing some of the most
powerful scholarship on the history of the English language is not even
in Indo-European territory. Under the inspired leadership of Professor
Matti Rissanen, Helsinki has reached an unprecedented level of effort
in this field, and, when Rissanen retired in 2001, Terttu Nevalainen
became his successor as director of the Research Unit for Variation and
Change in English. This volume celebrates her elevation to her new role
and, at the same time, her fiftieth birthday.
VARIENG (as the unit is known) became “one of the National
Centres of Excellence in Finland co-funded by the Academy of Finland
and the University of Helsinki.” In April 2002, when this volume
was ready for publication, “The current personnel
consist[ed] of 18 scholars, 16 postgraduate students and 15
part-time research assistants. The Unit also has 15 collaborating
scholars from other universities” (p. xvix). Funds have been
promised through 2005, and we may hope the benefactors will continue
supporting the astonishing productivity, sound planning, and fine
scholarship of the group.
Interest in the history of English is not new in Finland, and the
same series in which this volume appears was also the publisher of
Mustanoja's Middle English syntax in
1960. While various corpora were produced in the
United States and Britain for the analysis of variation by genre beginning
in the 1960s, these were for recent or contemporary English, and they were
seen as showing variability within a genre (e.g., scientific writing) or mode
(e.g., spoken English). Lexicography and EFL/ESL materials were seen as
the main beneficiaries, and, coming as they did when mere performance was
scorned in favor of the ever-elusive competence, they were not seen as
having much to offer general linguistics or even English studies. With
very few exceptions (one in Scotland, one in the U. S.), there were no
corpora designed for historical study, except insofar as a concordance
to a major English author (e.g., Shakespeare) might be used to inquire
more deeply into, say, the pronoun or auxiliary verb systems at the end
of the 16th century.
All this changed when Rissanen and his team designed and produced the
Helsinki Corpus of English Texts and the Helsinki Corpus
of Older Scots. American scholars soon followed in building
historical corpora, and a series of articles and monographs beginning
with Biber & Finegan 1989 made this work
better known in the United States. In Britain those affiliated with the
Survey of English Usage at University College, London, watched these
developments closely. The late Professor Sidney Greenbaum, successor to
Randolph Quirk as director of the Survey, organized the ambitious
International Corpus of English (ICE) with branches around the
anglophone world (e.g., Australia, South Africa, Ireland), and, though
these corpora were contemporary rather than historical, they were
designed with an eye to the work going on in Helsinki. Now systematic
plans are in place to select, enlarge, and provide linguistic tagging
for these corpora (see Meurman-Solin 2001).
Access to many of them is sometimes limited (though not to the two
pioneering Helsinki corpora) because copyright restrictions may apply
and prevent distribution even of short specimen texts, but several are
available to all at low cost or for a modest subscription
price.1
NOTE: This issue of access is one that
needs to be addressed. European copyright law is far more restrictive
than U.S. law, and in the Untied States the principle of “fair
use” allows brief extracts of almost anything that is not poetry
to be used freely for scholarly purposes. Indeed, there is a provision
in the U.S. constitution guaranteeing that the public has, eventually,
the right to all products of science and creativity, though the Supreme
Court has said recently that the Congress may delay giving the public
its right for as long as it likes. But brief extracts of linguistic data
do not reduce the demand for the whole work; in fact, they probably
increase it by drawing attention to, for instance, the early letters of
an English noblewoman available only in a copyrighted edition (see St. Clare Byrne 1981). Limiting access to these corpora
to those actually present at the site where they are produced is not
designed to extend access beyond the members of the club, and the practice
of keeping others away on the grounds of “copyright” is to me
wrong, especially when the data have been gathered with support of a U. S.
government agency. The analogy to the maps of the human genome seems to me
compelling, and we should seek more collaboration rather than
less.
Contributors to this volume present their work under the five
headings that make up the subdivisions of the VARIENG group. It is not
possible to mention all contributors here, and the editors give a
thumbnail sketch of each cluster in their introductory material
(3–8), to which readers of this review are referred.
Rissanen remains associated with the first group, “Internal
Processes of Language Change,” and it is the subunit with the
longest history of publication. In the four papers published here,
grammaticalization (of wit and anent) reveals how
once flourishing oppositions (e.g., Old English witan and
cnawan) wither to stumps like to wit or
unwittingly. Both papers raise larger questions about language
change within the context of these particular examples. A similar
process is displayed in the shifting meanings of bliss and
happiness, with OE bliss being displaced by
happy, and happy, formerly a word applied to the
corporate joys of eternity, shifting to feelings of individuals in the
here and now. The final paper, somewhat inconclusively, treats the
issue of the extent to which borrowed words “fill gaps” in
the existing lexicon.
Nevalainen still has charge of the second subunit, “Historical
Sociolinguistics,” a position she has occupied since 1993, and
most new corpora under development within it are organized to produce
the most revealing results for questions of gender, status, community,
time, style, and mode. Helena Raumolin-Brunberg begins this section of
five papers with this question: “Could there be anything more
exciting than to trace the path of a linguistic innovation while it
diffuses into varying linguistic and non-linguistic contexts?”
(101). The implicit answer is “No, nothing could.” Drawing
on prior scholarship, she examines the idea of “stable
variation” and asks whether or not the conditioning factors for
such variation remain the same over time. While very guarded in her
conclusion, she states that “linguistic variation does not remain
entirely stable for very many generations of speakers” (113).
Data-reporting essays in this section look at the “personal
letters” data sets and related materials: verb types (by semantic
function), thou/you pronoun alternation, and relation of
practice to precept in Robert Lowth's unpublished letters
(particularly the choice between auxiliary be/have with
verbs like come, got, gone, arrive). The final essay argues
that, for modal verbs at least, the “sampler” corpus (0.45
million words) is as good as the comprehensive one (2.7 million words),
thus suggesting that the burdens of copyright may not weigh so heavily
on results as might be feared, at least for very frequent events.
The subunit “Dialectology and Regional Variation” has two
parts, and two of the three papers in the corresponding section are by
the heads of each part: one on temporal subordinators (e.g., while,
until) in Scots, and one on the verbal inflection
–s in Devonshire. The third reports gender differences
in the use of relativizer what in the interviews conducted in
the 1950s by the late W. Nelson Francis in northern Norfolk for the
Survey of English Dialects, supplemented by further recordings made in
1988–1991.
The four essays in “Text Conventions and Genre Evolution”
begin with one describing the “Corpus of early English medical
writing” (from 1375 to 1750), a collection that is already
influencing our understanding of the role of scientific writing in the
evolution of Middle English, the prior view having been shaped by an
overemphasis on literary-theological texts. Irma Taavitsainen, the head
of this independent unit within VARIENG, and her colleagues describe a
broad array of investigations involving “thought-styles” in
scientific writing. The remaining papers in the section are not
corpus-based; they illuminate “conventions” in two medieval
texts (a herbal and a romance) and one modern short story.
“Pragmatic Variability” is a subunit concerned with
“social, cognitive, and cultural variation and variability in
present-day discourse” (7, 321). Databases of 1994 news coverage
of the sinking of the ferry M/S Estonia and of journalism
devoted to national holidays (especially the U.S. Fourth of July)
illustrate the ways in which language choice, broadly conceived, gives
insight into ideology. The volume concludes with an illustration of
uncritical “recycling” of news from secondary sources
(e.g., prior news reports, releases from interest groups); the
transmogrification of speculations and estimates into
“facts” is especially troubling and pervasive.
This excellent volume concludes with a brief index.
