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The <quh->–<wh-> switch: an empirical account of the anglicisation of a Scots variant in Scotland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 April 2019

SARAH VAN EYNDHOVEN  and
LYNN CLARK
SARAH VAN EYNDHOVEN*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch 8140, New [email protected], [email protected]
LYNN CLARK*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch 8140, New [email protected], [email protected]
*
*[email protected], [email protected]
*[email protected], [email protected]
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Abstract

This article explores the anglicisation of the Scots language between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, focusing on the variation between the orthographic clusters <quh-> and <wh-> found in relative and interrogative clause markers. Using modern statistical techniques, we provide the most comprehensive empirical analysis of this variation so far in the Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots (Meurman-Solin 1995). By combining the techniques of Variability-Based Neighbour Clustering (Gries & Hilpert 2008, 2010, 2012) with mixed-effects logistic regression modelling (Baayen et al.2008), we uncover a different trajectory of change than that which has previously been reported for this feature (Meurman-Solin 1993, 1997). We argue that by using modern methods of data reduction and statistical modelling, we can present a picture of language change in Scots that is more fine-grained than previous studies which use only descriptive statistics.

Keywords

historical Scotsanglicisationquantitative corpus analysisstatistical modelling
Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , March 2020 , pp. 211 - 236
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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Footnotes

This article has benefited considerably from the comments made by two anonymous ELL reviewers and by the editor Patrick Honeybone. We are very grateful to them for their time and positive feedback, which has improved this article considerably. We also received useful feedback from the presentation at the 2015 New Zealand Linguistics Society Conference in Dunedin, New Zealand. Furthermore, we would like to thank Vicky Watson and Liam Walsh for their feedback, helpful comments and support. All remaining errors and shortcomings are very much our own.

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