Volume 42, Issue Historica-vol-29

The preservation of some collections of late fifteenth-century private correspondence – like the Paston letters, the Cely letters, or the Stonor letters– offers a very useful corpus to carry out quantitative sociolinguistic analysis, as they involve writers of different sex, age, social extraction, and geographical location. The historical and philological interest of these documents is outstanding, not only because they offer data on the political and domestic history of fifteenth-century England, but also because they were composed at a crucial period in the development of the English language (during the expansion of the Chancery English variety). In the Paston Letters , William Paston II represents the social manifestation of the development of the awareness of a well-established standard with his ‘Memorandum on French Grammar’ (Letter 82), written between 1450 and 1454. This is an exceptional document that provides us with a description of the English language of the late Middle English period by a non-standard user, which highlights the covert versus overt prestige motivations in his contradictory sociolinguistic behaviour and in the social psychology of that late Middle English speech community and society. The aim of this paper is to illustrate this contradictory sociolinguistic practice and the awareness of prestige patterns in the late Middle English period with quantitative and qualitative analyses of his use of past be forms, as part of a larger project on medieval and contemporary was/were -levelling in East Anglian English.

Modern Catalan has a comparatively rare construction-type, namely a perfective past (preterit) that employs forms of the verb meaning go and an infinitive: vaig cantar ‘I sang’ (lit. ‘I-go to-sing’). Cross-linguistically, constructions of this type commonly encode future meaning. Traditional analyses attribute the origin of the construction to the narrative present, the use of present-tense forms with past-tense value in storytelling. I argue that the construction developed out of the use of the preterit of the motion verb and a purposive infinitive and that a key syncretism in Catalan verbal morphology allowed for the reanalysis of preterit forms of anar ‘to go’ as morphologically present. Later analogical changes to the auxiliary obscure the role of the preterit early in the development of the construction. This development indicates the importance of taking full advantage of textual resources in studying language change so that historical linguists can better understand diachronic processes, especially for use in reconstructing the history of languages with less robust written traditions. Analysis of this type also supplements the sometimes superficial approach used in grammaticalization studies when less data is available.

The Tannaitic literature includes different types of texts, the most fundemental of them are the formulation of law and the Halachic give-and-take. These two types of texts are located at the Halachic pole of the continuum of texts in Tannaitic language. This continuum is presented in the first two parts of this article, in which the four other types of texts are also described, those positioned somewhere between the Halachic pole and narrative pole on the continuum: the expounding of verse, the wise saying, the parable, and the ceremony description. The third and principal part of this article deals with the various types of narrative discourse units that belong to the seventh type of text in the Tannaitic literature – the narrative text: the units that begin with an introductory marker ( Ma‘ase, Barishona, Pa‘am ’ahat ), which appear about 400 times in the Mishna and Tosefta; and the units that have no marker (which may occur with an expression of time or marking the source at the beginning or without either of these), which appear about 300 times in the Mishna and Tosefta. The characteristics of the Barishona narrative discourse unit and its four components are described in detail in this article. The Tannaitic literature is Halachic in its nature, and consequently most of the texts included in it are more Halachic than narrative. Some of the narrative discourse units are clearly Halachic in nature, and all are clearly connected – both from the point of view of coherence and cohesion – to the prevailing Halachic sequence in which they appear.

This article addresses the development of Roman Jakobson's linguistic theory from its origins in the Prague Circle through the 1940s and 1950s. During that period Jakobson adapted his theory to concepts of Information Theory and cybernetics, two new “hard sciences” that had emerged during the 1940s. It is argued that such a reinterpretation was possible because of both Jakobson's and the Prague linguists' particular perspective on language. Three core elements of Jakobson's view on language support this claim: teleology, functionality and binarism. Each has a counterpart in Information Theory and/or cybernetics, making it possible to reinterpret Jakobson's linguistic analysis in information theoretic terms.

In the following paper I will approach the question of how will and shall lost their modal meanings to become future markers, i.e. in what constructions they were used and what specific meanings they conveyed in these linguistic contexts that allowed an interpretation in a mere future sense. Bybee et al. (The Evolution of Grammar. Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World, University of Chicago Press, 1994: 244) define a genuine future tense as “a prediction on the part of the speaker that the situation in the proposition, which refers to an event taking place after the moment of speech, will hold”. Thus, as a mere future a linguistic item must be devoid of any modal meaning and express just a prediction. Although willan and sculan still occurred as lexical verbs in Old English, they had already developed auxiliary status and were used in periphrastic constructions (cf. Wischer, Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 42: 165–178, 2006). Here they most often conveyed a deontic modal meaning (of volition or obligation). On the basis of data drawn from the ME part of the Helsinki Corpus I hope to shed some light on the use of will and shall in ME, as well as to contribute to a better understanding of the grammaticalisation process of future grams in general.