TY - BOOK ID - 1628009 TI - Social networks and historical sociolinguistics : studies in morphosyntactic variation in the Paston letters (1421-1503) PY - 2005 VL - 51 SN - 3110183102 9783110183108 311092322X 9783110923223 PB - Berlin ; New York : Mouton de Gruyter, DB - UniCat KW - Historical linguistics KW - English language KW - Grammar KW - Sociolinguistics KW - anno 1400-1499 KW - Grammar, Historical. KW - Variation. KW - Paston letters. KW - Grammar, Historical KW - Variation KW - Diachronic linguistics KW - Dynamic linguistics KW - Evolutionary linguistics KW - Language and languages KW - Language and society KW - Society and language KW - Sociology of language KW - History KW - Social aspects KW - Sociological aspects KW - Paston letters, A.D. 1422-1509 KW - Paston letters and papers of the fifteenth century KW - Language and culture KW - Linguistics KW - Sociology KW - Integrational linguistics (Oxford school) KW - Language and history KW - Germanic languages KW - Historical linguistics. KW - Sociolinguistics. UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:1628009 AB - The book presents an analysis of selected domains of morphosyntactic variation in a 250,000 word collection of the Middle English Paston Letters (1421-1503) from a historical sociolinguistic point of view. In the three case studies, two nominal and one verbal variable are described and discussed in detail: the replacement of Old English ‹h-› pronouns by borrowed ‹th-› pronouns, the introduction and spread of the ‹wh-› relativizers, and the spread and routinization of light verb constructions (take, make, give, have, do plus deverbal noun). While the study aims at a balanced integration of theories and methods from a number of different approaches in sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, typology, and language change, its main focus is social network theory and the role of the linguistic individual in the formation and change of language structures. Questions of individual language use and of deliberate versus unmonitored changes in the (individual) system take center stage and are discussed in the light of social network analysis. Traditional empirical social network analysis is carefully revised. Despite its many merits in present-day sociolinguistics, it often needs to be supplemented by hermeneutic-biographical analyses of the individual speakers' lives when applied to historical data. With this background, common theories and models of language change, such as grammaticalization, paradigmatic pressure, typological alignment, and generational shifts, are illustrated and evaluated from the point of view of single speakers and social groups, and their particular embedding in the speech community through various network structures. The book is of interest to advanced students and researchers in English and general linguistics, Middle English, historical linguistics and language change, corpus linguistics, as well as sociolinguistics. ER -