Now Out: Historical Dialectology in the Digital Age

The AMC is delighted to announce that a shiny new collection of papers – based mostly on work presented at the First AMC Symposium – has now hit the bookshops. Historical Dialectology in the Digital Age (eds. R. Alcorn, J. Kopaczyk, B. Los & B. Molineaux) brings together research from key figures in the field, looking into new methods and issues for exploring the dispersion of linguistic features in historical texts. We hope this will be a useful and thought-provoking resource, both for well-established researchers and advanced students.

From the publisher (Edinburgh University Press):

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A survey of applications of digital methods and tools to explore the linguistic features of regional varieties in historical texts

Drawing on the resources created by the Institute of Historical Dialectology at the University of Edinburgh (now the Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics), such as eLALME (the electronic version A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English), LAEME (A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English) and LAOS (A Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots), this volume illustrates how traditional methods of historical dialectology can benefit from new methods of data-collection to test out theoretical and empirical claims. In showcasing the results that these resources can yield in the digital age, the book highlights novel methods for presenting, mapping and analysing the quantitative data of historical dialects, and sets the research agenda for future work in this field.

Bringing together a range of distinguished researchers, the book sets out the key corpus-building strategies for working with regional manuscript data at different levels of linguistic analysis including syntax, morphology, phonetics and phonology. The chapters also show the ways in which the geographical spread of phonological, morphological and lexical features of a language can be used to improve our assessment of the geographical provenance of historical texts.

Table of Contents:

1 Historical Dialectology and the Angus McIntosh Legacy

Rhona Alcorn, Joanna Kopaczyk, Bettelou Los and Benjamin Molineaux

Part 1 Creating and Mining Digital Resources

2 A Parsed Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English

Robert Truswell, Rhona Alcorn, James Donaldson and Joel Wallenberg

3 Approaching Transition Scots from a Micro-perspective; The Dunfermline Corpus, 1573–1723

Klaus Hofmann

4 Early Spelling Evidence for Scots L-vocalisation: A Corpus-based Approach

Benjamin Molineaux, Joanna Kopaczyk, Warren Maguire, Rhona Alcorn, Vasilis Karaiskos and Bettelou Los

Part 2 Segmental Histories

5 Old and Middle English Spellings for OE hw-, with Special Reference to the ‘qu-’ Type: In Celebration of LAEME, (e)LALME, LAOS and CoNE

Margaret Laing and Roger Lass

6 The Development of Old English ǣ: The Middle English Spelling Evidence

Gjertrud F. Stenbrenden

7 The Development of Old English eo/ēo and the Systematicity of Middle English Spelling

Merja Stenroos

8 Examining the Evidence for Phonemic Affricates: Middle English /t͡ʃ/, /d͡ʒ/ or [t-ʃ], [d-ʒ]?

Donka Minkova

Part 3 Placing Features in Context

9 The Predictability of {S} Abbreviation in Older Scots Manuscripts According to Stem-final Littera

Daisy Smith

10 An East Anglian Poem in a London Manuscript? The Date and Dialect of The Court of Love in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.19

Ad Putter

11 ‘He was a good hammer, was he’: Gender as Marker for South-Western Dialects of English. A Corpus-based Study from a Diachronic Perspective

Trinidad Guzmán-González

Historical Dialectology in the Digital Age can be purched through Edinburgh University Press: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-historical-dialectology-in-the-digital-age-hb.html

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