ISLE Summer School 2026

Course description

While sociopragmatic variation is increasingly topical in research on contemporary varieties of English (see e.g. Schweinberger and Ronan, eds., 2024), research on the impact of social features on pragmatic variation in earlier varieties of English is in its infancy and not too much progress has been made since Culpeper’s (2009) early work. More recently, social factors are being considered when assessing the drivers of pragmatic variation (see, e.g. Elsweiler & Ronan 2024), but much work remains to be done. The current course first gives an overview of factors that are currently known and being researched. Second, we will work with contextualized examples of sociopragmatic variation in Late Modern Irish English to find which social factors can be shown to have an influence on the choice of pragmatic variables in 18th century letters. The database consists of 119 18th century letters from Irish letter writers, held at the National Library of Ireland, and 77 18th century immigrant letters from the CORVIZ corpus of Irish emigrant letters.

Optional preparatory reading

Culpeper, Jonathan. 2009. Historical sociopragmatics: An introduction. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 10(2). 179–86.

Elsweiler, Christine & Patricia Ronan. 2024. Salutation and leavetaking formulae in 18th century varieties of English. In: Schweinberger, M. & P. Ronan, eds., 173–204.

Schweinberger, Martin & Patricia Ronan (eds). 2024. Socio-Pragmatic Variation in Ireland: Using Pragmatic Variation to Construct Social Identities. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.

Course description

In this course we will investigate the concept of style from a corpus linguistic perspective. We will begin by exploring the notion of style itself, taking account of three major variants: authorial style, genre style and text style. We will discuss Enkvist’s (1973) classic concept of style markers and how these might be identified manually and automatically using the stylistic concept of foregrounding as a guide.

Following this introduction, we will discuss the use of corpora in stylistic analysis, paying particular attention to how and why the definition of a corpus might vary in stylistics compared to corpus linguistics. We then discuss the value of small corpora for stylistic analysis and consider the value that stylistic annotation can add to corpora.

Having laid the groundwork, we then move on to some practical corpus stylistic analysis. Here we will work with both annotated and unannotated corpora and a range of software to explore the operation of style across a range of text-types and time periods. Corpora that we will explore include the HUM19 corpus of 19th century British and Irish fiction, the Huddersfield EModE corpus of speech, writing and thought presentation, and a range of specialized text collections. Software that we will use includes AntConc (Anthony 2024) and Wmatrix (Rayson 2008). Our aim will be to show how corpora can be used to explore questions relating to aspects of style and its evolution over time.

References

Anthony, L. (2024) AntConc (Version 4.3.1) [Computer Software]. Tokyo: Waseda University. <http://www.laurenceanthony.net/software>.

Enkvist, N. E. (1973) Linguistic Stylistics. The Hague: Mouton.

Rayson, P. (2008) ‘From key words to key semantic domains’, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 13(4): 519–49.

Optional preparatory reading

Hoover, D., Culpeper, J. and O’Halloran, K. (2014) Digital Literary Studies: Corpus Approaches to Poetry, Prose, and Drama. Abingdon: Routledge.

McIntyre, D. and Walker, B. (2019) Corpus Stylistics: Theory and Practice. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Murphy, S. (2015) ‘I will proclaim myself what I am: corpus stylistics and the language of Shakespeare's soliloquies’, Language and Literature 24(4): 338–54.

Course description

In this course, we will examine how language change is reflected in different genres (also known as registers), that is, text categories that are defined based on language-external criteria such as the purpose and function of the text. The genre concept is of central importance to the historical study of English. As Weinreich et al. (1968: 188) note, “all change involves variability and heterogeneity”, and in recent decades “the notion of genre has dominated historical studies of language variation” (Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2017: 2, emphasis original). The analysis of many types of language change thus requires a framework where the change “is seen as mediated through genre” (Hundt and Mair 1999: 236). This is especially true of the Late Modern English period and beyond, because written genres have become increasingly diversified as regards their linguistic makeup over the last few centuries (see Biber and Finegan 1997 for illustration).

The course will demonstrate that including the genre parameter in studies can provide crucial information that can help us to interpret our findings. For instance, it is well known that certain types of change affect different genres to varying degrees (see, for instance, Biber and Gray 2012). Selecting appropriate genres can also facilitate the formulation of hypotheses about what past speech, the locus of most language change, may have been like (see Culpeper and Kytö 2010). Furthermore, the language of underprivileged speakers – a category that historically includes, among others, most women and members of the lower echelons of society – is represented only in some genres, and genre selection thus has important consequences for the representativity of results.

However, the last point also entails discussion of the challenges of a genre-based approach to language variation and change. Most historical linguists need to rely on what Labov (1972: 100) termed “bad data”, that is, data based on written texts which happen to have survived and which were produced without experimental control. Some genres and groups of speakers are absent from all or part of the historical record; for instance, we have no access to legal texts in English from most of the Middle English period, as “Law Latin” and then French were used for these purposes (Claridge 2012: 240). The course will include an account of such challenges.

The course will involve both lectures and applied sessions where participants have an opportunity to examine primary material and discuss the potential of genre-based studies as well as limitations of historical material. A reading list will be distributed to participants ahead of time.

References

Biber, Douglas, and Finegan, Edward. 1997. “Diachronic Relations among Speech-Based and Written Registers in English”. In Nevalainen, Terttu, and Kahlas-Tarkka, Leena (eds.), To Explain the Present: Studies in the Changing English Language in Honour of Matti Rissanen. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique, 253–275.

Biber, Douglas, and Gray, Bethany. 2012. “The Competing Demands of Popularization vs. Economy: Written Language in the Age of Mass Literacy”. In Nevalainen, Terttu, and Traugott, Elizabeth Closs (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of English. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 314–328.

Claridge, Claudia. 2012. “Linguistic Levels: Styles, Registers, Genres, Text Types”. In Bergs, Alexander, and Brinton, Laurel J. (eds.), English Historical Linguistics: An International Handbook. Vol. 1. Berlin and Boston: Mouton de Gruyter, 237–253.

Culpeper, Jonathan, and Kytö, Merja. 2010. Early Modern English Dialogues: Spoken Interaction as Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hundt, Marianne, and Mair, Christian. 1999. “‘Agile’ and ‘Uptight’ Genres: The Corpus-Based Approach to Language Change in Progress”. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 4(2), 221–42.

Labov, William. 1972. “Some Principles of Linguistic Methodology”. Language in Society 1(1), 97–120.

Nevalainen, Terttu, and Raumolin-Brunberg, Helena. 2017. Historical Sociolinguistics: Language Change in Tudor and Stuart England. 2nd ed. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.

Weinreich, Uriel, Labov, William, and Herzog, Marvin I. 1968. “Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change”. In Lehmann, W. P., and Malkiel, Yakov (eds.), Directions for Historical Linguistics: A Symposium. Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 95–188.

Course description

This workshop will provide a hands-on introduction to using richly annotated historical corpora for the study of grammatical change in English. Participants will need to bring their own laptop. After an overview of the available corpora and the sorts of research questions that can be asked and answered using the Penn-York-Helsinki parsed corpora family, we’ll use parsed texts to formulate and run some queries using CorpusSearch 2. The course will close with some case studies of grammatical change and stability in the history of English, including the diachrony of clausal embedding and of null subjects. After the course, participants should be able to use this software to carry out their own research into the historical morphology and syntax of English using the corpora.

References

For Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English

Course description

In this course, we explore the challenges and rewards of studying language variation and change in handwritten texts from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries. With the advent of print in late fifteenth-century England, much text production shifted from manual copying to print publication. Yet, in certain domains of writing, texts continued to be manually produced and disseminated, including correspondence, legal texts, recipes, and even scientific writing (among many others). What can such texts tell us about language variation and change that is different from what printed texts afford? What peculiar challenges do handwritten texts present for historical linguistic research?

In three sessions, we discuss various aspects of these questions. We first look at the types of handwritten historical texts available to us, the formats in which such texts have been made available to modern users, and the advantages and drawbacks of such formats for linguists (from published editions to electronic editions and corpora). We discuss theoretical issues that underpin making handwritten text available and how scholars have solved these issues in practice.

Our second session focuses on a central question of working with many handwritten sources: the role of a scribe or recorder in representing language and giving shape to a text. We will discuss how scribes influence what they record and copy, and how their work offers challenges as well as opportunities in the study of language.

In the third session, we home in on orthography as an area where studying handwritten sources and the mechanics of such sources provide special insights into linguistic variation and change in English. We discuss existing research on orthography as well as conduct our own investigations using handwritten texts.

Course description

The aim of this course is to introduce participants to some core concepts in psycholinguistics that are often discussed as factors in language change. It is relatively difficult (but not impossible) to use historical corpus data to investigate such factors. A possible alternative to testing whether a psycholinguistic factor might have been at work in change is to collect experimental data from speakers of Present-Day English. The assumption then is that the same principles underlying the processing of the experimental materials by contemporary informants would also have applied in the past.

Thursday morning: Psycholinguistics and language change: A close-up on frequency, priming and analogy. We will look at background literature (see references) and work towards an integrated view of the role that frequency, priming and analogy may play in language change.

Thursday afternoon: Towards designing psycholinguistic experiments. Taking Abbuhl, Gass and Mackey (2013) as our starting point, we will look into different types of experiments and the factors that should be considered in designing experiments that allow us to investigate potential psycholinguistic factors in language change. The session will conclude with an illustration of how a research question can be ‘translated’ into an experimental design and a discussion of participants’ projects (RQs and possible ‘translations’).

Friday morning: Moving from design to implementation. On the basis of a case study, participants will get the opportunity for a hands-on approach to the implementation of an experimental design via the platform Gorilla (https://gorilla.sc).

References

Abbuhl, Rebekha, Susan Gass and Alison Mackey. 2013. Experimental research design. In R.J. Podesva and Devjani Sharma, eds. Research Methods in Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 116-133.

Hilpert, Martin. 2017. Frequencies in diachronic corpora and knowledge of language. In Marianne Hundt, Sandra Mollin and Simone Pfenninger, eds. The Changing English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 49-68.

Hilpert, Martin. 2025. Frequency. In Mirjam Fried and Kiki Nikiforidou, eds. The Cambridge Handbook of Construction Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 149-170.

Hundt, Marianne, Simone E. Pfenninger and Sandra Mollin. 2025. Psycholinguistic perspectives on language change. In Merja Kytö and Erik Smitterberg, eds. The New Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 820-845.

Kootstra, Gerrit Jan and Pieter Muysken. 2019. Structural priming, levels of awareness, and agency in contact induced language change. Languages 4(3), 65. (https://www.mdpi.com/2226-471X/4/3/65)

Smet, Hendrik de and Olga Fischer. 2017. The role of analogy in language change: supporting constructions. In Marianne Hundt, Sandra Mollin and Simone Pfenninger, eds. The Changing English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 240-268.