{"title":"Variation and change in pronominal address in 19th and early 20th-century German private letters.","authors":"Markus Schiegg, Stephan Elspaß","doi":"10.1515/jhsl-2023-0036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jhsl-2023-0036","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>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 <i>Sie</i> ('Siezen') and informal <i>Du</i> ('Duzen') originates in the 18th century; <i>Sie</i> mainly replaced formal forms of address with <i>Ihr</i> ('Ihrzen') or <i>Er</i>/<i>Sie</i> ('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 <i>Sie</i> 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 <i>Sie</i> to informal <i>Du</i> in addressing parents. Overall, the observed change in pronominal address can be interpreted as a prototypical invisible-hand process.</p>","PeriodicalId":29883,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics","volume":"11 2","pages":"331-362"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2025-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12619654/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145542761","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Orality and overtness: effects on Spanish subject use.","authors":"Gemma McCarley","doi":"10.1515/jhsl-2024-0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jhsl-2024-0017","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>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 <i>Corpus Diacrónico del Español Latinoamericano: Edición de Sujetos</i> (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.</p>","PeriodicalId":29883,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics","volume":"11 2","pages":"363-395"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2025-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12619655/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145542771","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Megumi Sato: <i>Sprachvariation und Sprachwandel im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. Untersuchungen zur Kasusrektion der Präpositionen</i> wegen<i>,</i> statt<i>,</i> während <i>und</i> trotz","authors":"Konstantin Niehaus","doi":"10.1515/jhsl-2022-0045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jhsl-2022-0045","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":29883,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136055240","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Kai Witzlack-Makarevich: <i>Sprachpurismus im Polnischen. Ausrichtung, Diskurs, Metaphorik, Motive und Verlauf. Von den Teilungen Polens bis zur Gegenwart</i>","authors":"Artur Dariusz Kubacki","doi":"10.1515/jhsl-2022-0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jhsl-2022-0011","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":29883,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136054406","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Locating the ‘Age of Prescriptivism’ in Late Modern periodical reviews: a corpus-assisted discourse analytic approach","authors":"Beth Malory","doi":"10.1515/jhsl-2022-0035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jhsl-2022-0035","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper reports the findings of a corpus-based study of prescriptive and normative discourses in Late Modern English review periodicals, using a purpose-built diachronic corpus of review articles published during the period 1750–1899. Drawing on established protocols from Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies and systematic comparison of 15 sub-corpora, it identifies decades during which prescriptive discourses were most frequent. This distributional pattern provides empirical evidence of an ‘Age of Prescriptivism’ in periodical reviewing, during which prescriptive discourses reached their zenith. Whilst the label ‘Age of Prescriptivism’ has been applied to a number of periods of English in recent decades, the findings reported here show clearly that the eighteenth century was the locus of prescriptive activity in the review periodical genre. The innovative application of corpus-based discourse-analytic methodologies for the identification of normative trends reported in this paper also has potential implications for studying prescriptivism as a sociohistorical linguistic phenomenon in other diachronic contexts.","PeriodicalId":29883,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics","volume":"121 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136055243","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Out of the mouths of babes: children and the formation of the Río de la Plata Spanish address system","authors":"María Irene Moyna, Israel Sanz-Sánchez","doi":"10.1515/jhsl-2022-0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jhsl-2022-0017","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper analyzes the effects of child language acquisition as a critical factor in a morphological change, namely, the replacement of the etymologically singular second person paradigm ( tuteo ) by its plural counterpart ( voseo ) in 19th century Río de la Plata Spanish. The account applies a sociohistorical model which proposes that young children can function as language change agents in environments characterized by unpredictable input variation, lack of normative mechanisms, and the emergence of peer networks among young learners. The model is then applied to explain the rapid generalization of voseo in the late 1800s, a well-documented but poorly understood process. This change was nestled in an environment characterized by the rapid breakdown and reshaping of social networks through country-to-city migration and massive immigration, and by the resulting contact between L1 and L2 speakers of Iberian and non-Iberian varieties. Our account hypothesizes that successive cohorts of children actuated the various stages of this change, by relying on child language acquisition biases in the learning of verbal morphology observed across Romance varieties. This study combines archival evidence and sociohistorical information with present-day acquisitional data. The latter offers a piece often missing in sociohistorical accounts of language change.","PeriodicalId":29883,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics","volume":"121 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136055250","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"<i>‘The seas was like mountains’:</i> intra-writer variation and social mobility in Irish emigrant letters","authors":"Nancy E. Ávila-Ledesma, Carolina P. Amador-Moreno","doi":"10.1515/jhsl-2022-0042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jhsl-2022-0042","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper presents a case study based on the writing of James Horner, one of the many Irish emigrants who crossed the Atlantic between the late 1700s and early 1800s. Communication between Horner and his family back in Ireland was kept through personal correspondence. His letters, which contain about 14,000 words in total, are part of the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR), and they provide detailed accounts of his experiences and impressions of the recently adopted country. They also show progressive standardisation, which makes them an interesting site for historical sociolinguistic analysis: shifting from vernacular Irish English towards a more standardised type of English to some degree. Our study focuses on the use of subject-verb agreement and addresses the following research questions: does geographical and social mobility condition Horner’s speech? If so, how does an individual’s social status affect language? The findings reported below show that social mobility as well as dialect contact seem to have contributed to general standardisation and the subsequent blurring of identity markers in language use. The paper, thus, offers new perspectives on the analysis of intra-speaker variation using historical data and contributes to the discussion of the need for this type of micro-analysis in the area of historical sociolinguistics.","PeriodicalId":29883,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136055238","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Olga Timofeeva: <i>Sociolinguistic variation in Old English: Records of communities of people</i> (Advances in historical sociolinguistics 13)","authors":"Christine Wallis","doi":"10.1515/jhsl-2022-0026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jhsl-2022-0026","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":29883,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics","volume":"136 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136055252","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}