Language Change and Variation from Old English to Late Modern English: A Festschrift for Minoji Akimoto (Linguistic Insights Studies in Language & Communication)

This collection reflects Minoji Akimoto’s concern with studies of change in English that are theoretically-informed, but founded on substantial bodies of data. Some of the contributors focus on individual texts and text-types, among them literature and journalism, others on specific periods, from Old English to the nineteenth century, but the majority trace a linguistic process – such as negation, passivisation, complementation or grammaticalisation – through the history of English. While several papers take a fresh look at manuscript evidence, the harnessing of wideranging electronic corpora is a recurring feature methodologically. The linguistic fields treated include word semantics, stylistics, orthography, word-order, pragmatics and lexicography. The volume also contains a bibliography of Professor Akimoto’s writings and an index of linguistic terms. Contents 9 Preface 11 13 MERJA KYTÖ, JOHN SCAHILL and HARUMI TANABE Introduction 13 15 Syntax and Style 21 UDO FRIES Sentence Length, Sentence Complexity and the Noun Phrase in 18th-Century News Publications 21 23 ELLY VAN GELDEREN Negative Concord and the Negative Cycle in the History of English 35 37 MICHIO HOSAKA The Rise of the Complementizer that in the History of English 59 61 YOKO IYEIRI Negation in Fragments A, B and C of the Hunter Manuscript of The Romaunt of the Rose 79 81 OHKADO MASAYUKI On Stylistic Fronting in Middle English Prose 103 105 FUYO OSAWA Syntactic Passive: Its Rise and Growth in the History of English 117 119 HIRONORI SUZUKI Ordering Main and Modal Verbs in the Production of Old English Poetry 139 141 Words and Semantics 163 DIETER KASTOVSKY Translation Techniques in the Terminology of Ælfric’s Grammar: Semantic Loans, Loan Translations and Word-Formation 163 165 MANFRED MARKUS Features of Spokenness in Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary 175 177 MEIKO MATSUMOTO Semantic Shifts in the Development of Color Terms in English 197 199 FUJIO NAKAMURA Uncovering of Rare or Unknown Usages: A History of seem Meaning ‘to pretend’ 217 219 JOHN SCAHILL Prodigal Early Middle English Orthographies: Minds and Manuscripts 239 241 HARUMI TANABE The Rivalry of give up and its Synonymous Verbs in Modern English 253 255 Discourse and Pragmatics 279 LAUREL J. BRINTON From Performative to Concessive Disjunct: I/you admit and admittedly 279 281 TOMOHIRO KAWABATA On the Rise of but-concessive Constructions: From the Viewpoint of Grammaticalization 303 305 MATTI RISSANEN On the History of unless 327 329 REIJIROU SHIBASAKI On the Transition of Transitivity in English 349 351 SHIHOKO YAMAMOTO The Comment Clause in the Spectator 375 377 A Bibliography of Professor Minoji Akimoto (compiled by Shihoko Yamamoto) 401 403 Index 415 417 Notes on Contributors 417 419