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Special issue on cognitive approaches to the history of English: introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2017

ALEXANDER BERGS  and
THOMAS HOFFMANN
ALEXANDER BERGS
Affiliation:
Institute of English and American Studies, Fachbereich 7 – Universität Osnabrück, Neuer Graben 40, D-49069 Osnabrück, [email protected]
THOMAS HOFFMANN
Affiliation:
Department of English and American Studies, Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Universitätsallee 1, D-85072 Eichstätt, [email protected]
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What do we know about the past? For at least some languages, we have textual (or archaeological) evidence from various periods – beyond that, there is only reconstruction. But even when we have some textual evidence, what does it tell us? The answer to this question crucially depends on the way we approach the question: we can treat texts as decontextualized, linguistic evidence, as Neogrammarian or Structuralist studies have done (see McMahon 1994: 17–32). Such an approach already allows us to discover important generalizations about the linguistic state of affairs of a particular language or historical period. Using decontextualized historical evidence, for example, we can already ascertain with a high degree of certainty that in Old English voiced and voiceless fricatives were allophones, rather than phonemes, that there was no do-periphrasis in Middle English, and that in Early Modern English there was some variability between third-person singular present tense {-s} and {-th} – just as we know that present-day Japanese and Korean use postpositions, rather than prepositions.

Type
Introduction
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 21 , Special Issue 2: Cognitive approaches to the history of English , July 2017 , pp. 193 - 202
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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