Volume 11, Issue 2

This article for the first time provides a corpus-based investigation of the variation and change in the system of German pronominal forms of address in the 19th and early 20th century. Today’s opposition between formal Sie (‘Siezen’) and informal Du (‘Duzen’) originates in the 18th century; Sie mainly replaced formal forms of address with Ihr (‘Ihrzen’) or Er / Sie (‘Erzen’). The data for our analyses are taken from two corpora of private correspondence – patient letters and emigrant letters – with a total of 2,748 letters by 788 writers. Contrary to previous findings that had mainly been based on grammar book accounts and/or anecdotal evidence, our results show that the use of the formal Sie pronoun was still rather common when addressing parents in the second half of the 19th century and even the early 20th century. There was no abrupt collapse of the four-tier system of pronominal address to today’s two-tier system but in some regional non-standard varieties of German a three-tier system continued to be used throughout the 20th century. The addressee, the linguistic context and a writer’s changing emotional state prove to be relevant factors of intra-individual variation. The data also suggest that male writers and experienced writers lead the change from formal Sie to informal Du in addressing parents. Overall, the observed change in pronominal address can be interpreted as a prototypical invisible-hand process.

This study of a corpus of varieties of Spanish finds that the level of orality of a text is a strong predictor of subject pronoun expression. Following previous studies’ application of orality to interrogative constructions in Brazilian Portuguese and French, an orality measurement was adapted for Spanish and applied to the new corpus Corpus Diacrónico del Español Latinoamericano: Edición de Sujetos (CorDELES). CorDELES was created to investigate the historic development of subject pronoun expression that led to the high rates of overt subject pronouns attested in current varieties of Latin American Spanish, specifically whether overt subject pronoun expression increases following contact with the enslaved Africans brought to the Caribbean during the colonial period. This contact hypothesis was used as a backdrop to investigate the effects of orality on a corpus. Indeed, the inclusion of orality as a predictor in a mixed-effects model found significant effects for a distinction between Spain and the Americas as well as an intriguing interaction between year and orality. These results add to the burgeoning body of work revealing the benefits of accounting for orality in corpus work.

This article strives to offer the historical sociolinguistic context needed to understand the use of Turkish loanwords in the informal Western Armenian spoken today. It does so by proposing a new framing for pre-twentieth-century Armenian dialects that underscores their openness to contact-induced change. This new framing aims to counter purist currents in scholarly and popular discourses that have treated loanwords in Armenian – Turkish and otherwise – as examples of corruption, contamination, and perversion, thereby vilifying them and erasing awareness of their longstanding normalcy and ubiquity in spoken varieties of Armenian. I begin by delving into this study’s contributions to two distinct audiences: historical sociolinguists and scholars of Armenian history and linguistics. After a brief overview of Armenian dialects in the nineteenth century, I draw on insights from contact linguistics and on a corpus of largely untapped Armenian-language materials to draw attention to contact features in one of the most well-documented Armenian dialects of the Ottoman Empire: the Armenian dialect of Istanbul. Here I focus specifically on Turkish contact features found at the lexical level in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and illustrate how studying them can offer historians new lines of inquiry and entry points into the largely unexplored social histories of Armenians in the Ottoman capital and beyond. I end with a brief look at how Ottoman Armenian intellectuals actively worked to stigmatize, pathologize and invisibilize Turkish contact features in the second half of the nineteenth century and how the ideologies they invented continue to shape the way many Western Armenian speakers use and think about language today.

This paper presents a case study of the writing of the young woman Rensche van der Walt in her personal diary during the Anglo-Boer War, specifically 1901 to 1902. A corpus of about 24,000 words was compiled from the diary, detailing the personal experiences of Van der Walt in concentration camps during the war. This study focuses on her use of the past tense to determine the extent to which it aligns with modern Afrikaans norms rather than Dutch norms, and it is contextualized against a control corpus of letters written during the same war. The results show that Van der Walt uses the Dutch preterit to a limited extent, while the modern Afrikaans past tense (based on the Dutch perfect) is the preferred choice. This aligns with the usage in the letter corpus. However, the past participles used in the diary are more regularized, with much fewer inflectional markings than in the letters, indicating that Van der Walt is slightly ahead of her time regarding this development – it is not unexpected, as young women are known to lead the adoption of new variants during periods of language change. The findings also shed light on the extent of variation still present in the past tense use of semi-literate writers of early Afrikaans, a topic which has not received much attention in corpus-based studies yet.

Speech reporting and reported speech are omnipresent in courtroom discourse and often regarded as crucial for presenting evidence during trial. Contemporary courtroom procedures emphasize the importance of accurately preserving previous speech, ideally aiming for a verbatim (word-for-word) record. However, the process of reporting speech rarely involves literal, unbiased replication of past utterances, making actual “verbatimness” largely unachievable. While the “verbatimness standard”, feasible or not, is commonplace in today’s courtrooms, its historical development and applicability in the past remain relatively unexplored. Using a combination of corpus-driven, statistical approaches and qualitative discourse analytic methods, the present study examines how speech is reported in late modern Flemish courtroom records, how the use of speech reporting strategies changes across time and how these strategies are set against the background of legal procedures and genre conventions. Additionally, the analysis explores different pragmatic and discursive functions of speech reporting to determine if (and how) they contribute to the construction of “verbatimness”. The study is further complemented by an examination of contemporaneous instruction manuals and training materials for scribes to gain a better understanding of conventions and regulations governing the process of drafting documentation in 19th-century Flemish courtroom.