The aim of this volume is to provide an overview of English in the Late Modern period (1700–1950), with particular emphasis on the 19th century. Although the 1800s are often viewed as relatively stable linguistically, this collection demonstrates that while some features of the language were indeed stable, a number of others were undergoing change. The case studies in this volume draw on corpus linguistic methods, in large part deriving their materials from CONCE (Corpus of Nineteenth-Century English), a one-million-word corpus comprising a number of written and speech-related genres. In their introduction, the editors contextualize the research paradigm of the volume by providing an overview of CONCE. They then outline the ways in which the individual studies uncover stability, change, or both in 19th-century English.
Larisa Oldireva Gustafsson focuses on the use of the passive and finds it to be stable overall. There is also constancy in the operation of constraints on its use. Christine Johansson considers that and wh-relatives and finds that throughout the 19th century, the shift toward that was in its initial stages; the wh- forms predominated, even in Trials, a speech-related genre. Mark Kaunisto's study of anaphoric reference in that/those + of constructions reveals that, as in present-day English, this was primarily a feature of formal styles. There is no visible diachronic trend in the overall frequencies of these constructions. Erik Smitterberg examines partitive constructions: Although their use is relatively stable, there is an increasing tendency across the century for the complement to govern concord.
Ingegerd Bäcklund's chapter examines the modification of common nouns with male and female reference. She finds links between prescribed gender roles and descriptions of men and women, while also uncovering evidence suggesting that the norms for female reference changed as women's social sphere broadened throughout the 1800s. Peter Grund & Terry Walker's investigation of the subjunctive in adverbial clauses reveals a form in decline, particularly in speech-related genres, where the indicative rises in frequency over the course of the century, while Merja Kytö & Suzanne Romaine's investigation of adjective comparison reveals a shift toward the older inflectional forms.
Juhani Rudanko draws on data from CONCE, LOB, and the Bank of English Corpus to investigate developments in the use of in –ing constructions. He demonstrates that the range of verbs that subcategorize for this type of complement has undergone semantic broadening over the past two centuries. Christian Mair, relying on the Oxford English Dictionary, finds that throughout the Late Modern Period, gerunds replaced infinitival complements of the verb remember. Tony Fairman's contribution looks at word choice (Anglo-Saxon vs. Latinate) and spelling. His focus is literacy, and the analysis is qualitative rather than quantitative; the data come from English Record Office documents.
Taken together, the chapters in this volume demonstrate that the 19th century is an engaging period for historical linguistic research. This collection also highlights several other issues in language variation and change, including the roles of gender and genre and their interfaces, as well as intraspeaker/writer variability.
