written by Hester Groot (Leiden University), recipient of a travel and fieldwork bursary from the Philological Society

With the generous support of the Philological Society’s Fieldwork and Travel Bursary, I was able to travel to Scotland for four weeks in January and February of 2024 to collect data for my PhD research. My research focuses on so-called pauper letters, written by the Scottish poor to request relief, and spans the period of 1750-1900. 

The focus on lower-class writing is one that has come to the forefront of historical sociolinguistic research in recent years. Traditionally, research into historical language focused primarily on the language of the upper classes, those with wealth and power and names in history books. There are various reasons for this, one being that lower-class data simply isn’t as readily available as that of the upper classes. Selective archival practices, as well as low historical literacy levels, have left lower-class populations’ language use and written documents underrepresented in historical linguistic studies. Recent developments in historical sociolinguistics, however, have foregrounded a focus on ‘language from below’, which emphasises underrepresented, often lower-class historical language use in order to form more well-rounded, diverse, and nuanced perspectives on language histories (Elspaβ 2007). In the case of Scotland, looking at lower-class writing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century letters may elucidate the origins and development of Scottish Standard English, as well as help us trace the trajectory and development of Scots. 

This focus relies on the availability of primary sources that can give us insight into the lower classes’ language. One type of source coming under increasing attention is that of the pauper letter. Pauper letters were written in the eighteenth and nineteenth century to request poor relief in countries such as England, Wales, and Germany, and are interesting from a ‘from below’ perspective: they are rooted in a lower-class environments and at times written by the petitioners themselves (though we often encounter petitions written by family, friends, or scribes too). In recent years, large numbers of these pauper letters have surfaced in different countries; these letters were often preserved in bundles as documentation of poor relief, saved by inspectors of the poor and parochial boards. This makes the avaibility of such letters an exciting and unique avenue for investigating the language of the lower classes. Scholars have made increasing use of them as a source over the last few years: among previous work on pauper letters are studies on English pauper letters (Sokoll 2006; Auer and Fairman 2013) and German letters (Gestrich and King 2011). In the case of Scotland, historians Peter Jones and Steven King discovered and wrote on bundles of pauper letters in the Scottish Highlands, and the ScotPP project (Gordon, Prokic, Groot and Strakova 2022) published a number more. These studies indicated the potential existence of large numbers of yet-to-be-discovered pauper letters. A larger set of these letters would allow for more substantial research and substantiated claims, and would increase the regional and diachronic spread of these materials, opening up yet more research possibilities.

With the Philological Society’s support, I was able to travel to Scotland in order to uncover as many pauper letters and related materials from the country’s archives as possible. Together with my supervisor, Dr. Moragh Gordon, I visited archives in, among others, Edinburgh, Perth, Aberdeen, Inverness, and Glasgow. Of course, while a lot of preparatory work can be done beforehand, scouring archive catalogues for hints that they might contain relevant materials (since items are not always described in a lot of detail in these catalogues), it is often when visiting archives themselves and manually going through boxes of old letters that the most useful material tends to show up. And while not every archive ended up holding the pauper letters and other lower-class writing that we were after, many of them did. Over the course of those four weeks, we laid eyes on documents upon documents—ranging from the well-preserved to the near-illegible—and wherever they proved relevant to the study of lower-class Scottish language use, we photographed them, ready for closer study upon return home. We took thousands of photographs in total, documenting more petitions than were previously imagined to survive in Scotland. Written by petitioners themselves, relatives of petitioners, scribes, and other individuals involved in the poor relief process, they offer a varied and fascinating look into the world of poor relief, the lives and voices of these populations, and of course, their language. 

This research trip was not just useful for collecting data: in January, Dr. Gordon and I were also able to visit the University of Glasgow, where we gave a presentation and had the chance to meet with other academics in the field and exchange ideas. This was a very valuable experience to have so early on in my PhD trajectory, and allowed me to gain useful feedback and establish a network beyond Leiden University, where I am doing my PhD.

Having returned to Leiden, I have begun the long process of cataloguing, transcribing, and digitising the materials collected during our visit. Digitisation will eventually make the materials vastly more searchable, and we hope to be able to publish a corpus of the transcriptions in the future, so that other researchers may benefit from these exciting and eye-opening sources. 

I am grateful to the Philological Society for supporting my PhD research with a travel bursary to collect this dataset of Scottish pauper letters. I hope that these materials will go a long way towards an understanding of Scotland’s historical linguistic development that is well-rounded and representative of all the voices that make up Scotland’s linguistic past. 

References

Elspaβ, Stephen. 2007. A twofold view ‘from below’: New perspectives on language histories and historical grammar. In Stephan Elspaβ, Nils Langer, Joachim Scharloth & Wim Vandenbussche (eds.), Germanic Language Histories ‘from below’ (1700-2000). Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 3–9.

Gestrich, Andreas, & Steven King. 2011. Pauper letters and petitions for poor relief in Germany and Great Britain, 1770–1914. Accessed via: https://www.ghil.ac.uk/research/social_structures_practices_and_experiences/pauper_letters_and_petitions.html.

Sokoll, Thomas. 2006. Essex pauper letters, 1731–1837. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Scottish Poor Petitions Corpus. 2022. Compiled by Moragh Gordon, Jelena Prokic, Hester Groot, and Alma Strakova.

Auer, Anita, & Tony Fairman. 2013. Letters of artisans and the labouring poor (England, c. 1750–1835). In Paul Bennett, Martin Durrell,  Silke Scheible & Richard J. Whitt (eds.), New methods in historical corpora. Tübingen: Narr, pp. 77–91.

written by Tomaž Potočnik (UCL), recipient of a travel and fieldwork bursary from the Philological Society

This year, I travelled to Chicago for the Annual Meeting of the Society of Classical Studies, where I read my paper as part of the Greek and Latin Linguistics panel. While reading a paper in front of academics is the main reason to travel to a conference abroad, it is also a chance to experience a new city. I was just as eager to get a feel of the Windy City, to see whether it really is that windy (it is!) and whether that deep-dish Chicago pizza lives up to the hype (it does!).

After spending four years on my PhD thesis, I was anxious to get some feedback on my brand-new project—the interactional aspects of vagueness in Latin. Contrary to what we have been told in elementary school, vagueness is a desirable feature of human communication. Vagueness is, in fact, a part of the speaker’s communicative competence and knowing how to interpret vague expressions is a central feature of everyday conversation (Jucker et al. 2003: 1738). Since this is to some extent true for every language (case studies are accumulating), then it must have been true in Latin as well. The aim of my project, in the wider sense, is to see to what communicative ends vagueness strategies have been used by Latin authors: by Cicero in his letters, by Petronius in his linguistic depiction of different classes of society, and, of course, Plautus and Terence, in their imitations of conversation in Latin.

For the paper I read in Chicago, I focussed on one specific type of vague expressions: placeholders or dummy phrases—the Latin counterparts of words like stuff, business, thingy, and, in the right context, shit! While it is hard to say what the Latin word for stuff was, I discussed examples such as the following one where Olympio is muttering something to himself. When he sees Chalinus, his rival, following him around, Olympio bursts out:

• non mihi licere meam rem me solum, ut uolo, loqui atque cogitare sine ted arbitro?
  ‘I am not going to be allowed to talk and think about my own thing alone, as I please, without you looking over my shoulder?’ (Plautus, Casina 89–90; my free translation)

The speaker’s motivation to use rem is that he does not know how else to describe it—when you are muttering to yourself, thinking you are alone, and someone catches you, it is very hard to find a succinct way to describe what you were doing—in part because it may be quite embarrassing.

The question I was interested in was: Why do placeholders in conversation not interrupt the flow of conversation, since the speaker, semantically, has so little to go on? Why did Chalinus, for instance, not ask: “What thing?”

Part of the answer is that in natural communication, the precise referent assignment—knowing what is meant by each single word—is not a priority; in accordance with the principle of minimising collaborative effort (Clark 1986), both co-interactants exercise a certain degree of tolerance and are willing to sacrifice precise understanding for a higher ideal: that the conversation proceed to the next move as soon as possible—to maintain the flow of the conversation. If it turns out that precise understanding is essential, a speaker always has the option to ask for clarification. This suggests that placeholders, rather than hindering the flow of conversation, actually help to maintain it. This is made possible by rules on conversation structure which all (or most) speakers are implicitly familiar with. It is, ultimately, a manifestation of the fact that conversation is the primordial building block of society (Schegloff 1996: 54)—it is a socially motivated act, whose aim is rarely, if ever, limited to exchange of information.

As I continue working on the project on vagueness, I am grateful to the Philological Society’s Travel and Fieldwork Bursaries program, which enabled me to travel to Chicago and share this work with colleagues from the States—and, after the conference, to enjoy the blues scene that Chicago has to offer and to recreate that iconic scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), where Ferris, Sloane, and Cameron head up to the Sears Tower and lean on the glass panes to get a bird’s view of the city…

References

Clark, Herbert H., Wilkes-Gibbs, Deanna, 1986. Referring as a collaborative process. In: Clark, Herbert H. (Ed.), Arenas of Language Use. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp. 107–143.

Jucker, A., S. Smith and T. Lüdge. 2003. ‘Interactive aspects of vagueness in conversation.’ Journal of Pragmatics 35: 1737–1769.

Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1996. Turn organization: one intersection of grammar and interaction. In: Ochs et al., eds. Interaction and Grammar. Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics. Cambridge University Press. 52-133.

PhilSoc meeting of 17^th February 2023 (online)

The recording of a past meeting of PhilSoc is now available to view on the Society’s YouTube channel. This meeting was held online and the speaker was Professor Michelle Sheehan (Newcastle).

Causative and perception verbs are highly promiscuous in Romance languages, often permitting many different kinds of reduced non-finite complements. A cross-linguistic comparison reveals that there are nonetheless robust patterns here, with agentive perception verbs permitting only larger Exceptional Case Marking complements and causative verbs tending to permit only smaller clause union complements, and permissive and non-agentive perception verbs sandwiched between these two extremes (see Davies 1995, Soares da Silva 2005). A consideration of long passivisation of these verbs further shows, however, that even complements which appear alike on the surface can behave differently with respect to passivisation both within and across languages. I offer an overview of long passivisation in French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese and argue that we can nonetheless find patterns in this apparent chaos. Long passives are permitted either where the complements of these verbs are very small (VPs) or where they are large enough to contain a grammatical subject position (TP). Passivisation is blocked where the complements are phasal VoicePs and this follows for principled reasons if we adopt the analysis developed by Sheehan & Cyrino (2022) based on Chomsky’s (2001) Phase Theory. 

PhilSoc meeting of 5^th May 2023 (online)

The recording of a past meeting of PhilSoc is now available to view on the Society’s YouTube channel. This meeting was held in London, at UCL, and the speaker was Professor Amalia Arvaniti, Professor of English Linguistics at Radboud University.

Despite intonation’s relevance for understanding speech, language, and communication, its study is often neglected or reduced to atheoretical phonetic measurements. In the first part of the talk, I will briefly cover the nature and functions of intonation and discuss the reasons why it is often seen as challenging and difficult to study, leading to the aforementioned reductionist approaches. In the second part, I will showcase the ways in which in my research, I try to address these challenges by presenting two complementary studies on the phonological status of high and rising accents (H* and L+H* respectively, in AM terms) in the intonation system of Southern British English. The presence of distinct high and rising accents has been disputed in treatises of English intonation for at least a century, while recent empirical studies provide equally inconclusive evidence. Here, I will present findings on the phonetic nature and information-related function of these accents in spontaneous speech, and present experimental results showing that individual cognitive styles affect how high and rising accents are processed by native speakers. Finally, I will discuss how the combined evidence from production and perception can shed light on this long disputed accentual contrast.

PhilSoc meeting of Friday 16^th February 2024 (online)

The recording of PhilSoc’s most recent meeting is now available to view on the Society’s YouTube channel. This meeting was held online and the speakers were Sarah Holmstrom, Joseph Salmons and Charlotte Vanhecke (University of Wisconsin – Madison).

Iambic metrical systems, which have weak-strong feet in contrast to trochaic strong-weak ones, are rare. They represent under 10% of the World Atlas of Language Structures sample and are concentrated in the Americas (Goedemans & van der Hulst 2013). They are generally under-described, and little diachronic research has been conducted on
iambic systems. Algonquian, a family of languages stretching over much of northern North America, is one of very few families with a large number of iambic daughters. We provide evidence from this family that can refine our typology of iambic languages. After arguing that Proto-Algonquian was iambic, we investigate how Algonquian languages behave in ways at odds with typological claims about iambic systems. First, iambic lengthening is claimed to be characteristic of iambic systems, but few Algonquian languages have it, while diametrically opposed processes like iambic shortening and change toward typologically dispreferred foot structures are widespread. Second, iambic systems are associated with duration as a cue to prominence while pitch and intensity are typically associated with trochaic systems. However, in Algonquian pitch is a common cue to prominence, which helps motivate the fact that numerous daughters have undergone tonogenesis. Algonquian metrical phonology, diachronic and synchronic, can sharpen our typology of iambic languages in general.

written by Runyi Yao (University of Oxford), recipient of a travel and fieldwork bursary from the Philological Society

With support from the Philological Society’s Travel Bursary, I presented my poster at Sinn und Bedeutung 28 (SuB 28, https://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/sub28/) at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany from 5^th–8^thSeptember 2023. SuB is a world-leading conference in semantics. The Travel Bursary allowed me to attend this conference, share and discuss my research with other linguists.

In my poster, I presented our study on clause-internal coherence (in collaboration with Prof Matt Husband & Prof Daniel Altshuler). Most studies of discourse coherence focus on relations like Result (cause-effect) and Explanation (effect-cause) that are established between two discourse units whose size is at least a single clause. Such relationships may, however, also be clause internal. We investigate clause-internal coherence triggered by resultative adjectives in examples like The broken window got struck with a stone ⇝ ‘the window was broken because of the stone.’ Based on the results of two comprehension tasks, we propose that topichood, signaled by definiteness and subjecthood, permits and constrains plausible causal inferences clause-internally. This analysis suggests a tighter relationship between (morpho)syntax and coherence than is currently assumed. The full version of this study will appear in Proceedings of Sinn & Bedeutung 28, with a preprint available on LingBuzz: https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/007850.

Presenting at SuB 28 was a great opportunity for me to receive feedback and comments on this coherence study, an integral part of my DPhil project. The insights that I gained from the conference contribute significantly to the advancement of my DPhil studies. This opportunity also enables me to learn about others’ work, network with colleagues from around the world and receive general advice on career development.

I am grateful to the Philological Society for providing me with a travel bursary to participate in SuB 28, a wonderful conference.

written by Khouloud Benassar (Hassan II University of Casablanca, khouloud.benassar-etu@etu.univh2c.ma), recipient of a travel and fieldwork bursary from the Philological Society

With support from the Philological Society’s Travel Bursary, I attended the 52^nd Colloquium on African Languages and Linguistics (CALL 2023), which took place at Leiden University, Netherlands, from 28^th–30^th August 2023. The colloquium had sixty-three presentations, studied various African Languages, and covered broad topics in linguistics, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics.

As part of the Wednesday morning session of the colloquium, I gave a 20-minute presentation entitled ‘Sensory Metaphors in Moroccan Arabic: A Cognitive Approach’, followed by 10 minutes of discussion. In this presentation, I investigated how our senses—vision, hearing, touch, smell, and taste—give rise to abstract concepts in Moroccan Arabic, leading to what is called sensory or perception metaphors, such as KNOWING IS SEEING, which have previously been studied by cognitive linguists such as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980, 1999), Eve E. Sweetser (1990) and Christopher Johnson (1999). 

The presentation also discussed whether sensory metaphors are universal, since they are based on our biological propensities, or if there is a place for cross-linguistic and cross-cultural variation and diversity. Based on data analysis, I argued that Moroccan Arabic shares many sensory metaphors with other languages, supporting the universality hypothesis. However, a comparison of sensory metaphors in Moroccan Arabic with those in other languages, as studied by various scholars, reveals significant variation. Therefore, it is important to consider both cognitive and cultural dimensions when studying sensory metaphors.

My participation in the colloquium enabled me to get valuable feedback on my research from various researchers in the field including Professor Maarten Mous and Professor Maarten Kossmann. Other researchers additionally mentioned that some metaphors discussed in Moroccan Arabic are also used in other languages; for example, the OBEYING IS HEARING metaphor is also used in German.

I am grateful to the Philological Society for supporting my PhD research with a travel bursary to participate in person in the 52^nd Colloquium on African Languages and Linguistics. This opportunity has allowed me to meet and be inspired by a community of linguists from outside my home country.

More information on the colloquium can be found on the website: https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/events/2023/08/52th-colloquium-on-african-languages-and-linguistics

References

Johnson, Christopher. 1999. ‘Metaphor vs. conflation in the acquisition of polysemy: the case of see’. In Cultural, Psychological and Typological Issues in Cognitive Linguistics, edited by Masako K. Hiraga, Chris Sinha, and Sherman Wilcox. Vol. 152. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, IV. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.

Sweetser, Eve E. 1990. From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

An event supported by PhilSoc: 17th November 2023, Weston Library, Oxford, 3-6 p.m.

It has been Henry Bradley’s fate to be remembered as ‘only’ the second Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, always overshadowed by James Murray. This event aims both to celebrate and recontextualize his achievements – not just as a lexicographer, but as a writer, historian, and scholar in a variety of contexts. When he died in 1923, his former OED assistant J. R. R. Tolkien paid tribute to him, in Old English, as a sméaþoncol mon (a ‘man of subtle thought’). One hundred years after his death we offer a long-overdue reappraisal of his life and scholarship in a series of papers.

The event, supported by the Philological Society, will be chaired by Professor Simon Horobin. It will be followed by a reception in Blackwell Hall.  To register and for more information, go to: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/henry-bradley-1845-1923-a-celebration-of-his-life-and-scholarship-tickets-692432723917?aff=oddtdtcreator

Speakers include:

Charlotte Brewer, Professor of English, Hertford College, Oxford.

Simon Horobin, Professor of English, Magdalen College, Oxford. 

Dr. Peter Gilliver, Executive Editor, Oxford English Dictionary. 

Lynda Mugglestone, Professor of the History of English, Pembroke College, Oxford. 

Tania Styles, Senior Editor, Oxford English Dictionary.

Programme:

• 2.30-3 pm – Registration at Blackwell Hall.
• 3 pm – ‘Henry Bradley: a lexicographer and more’ (Peter Gilliver)
• 3.30 pm – ‘Henry Bradley from his Letters’ (Charlotte Brewer and Stephen Turton)
• 4 pm – ‘“The Making of English”: Bradley, the OED, and the Text Behind the Text’ (Lynda Mugglestone)
• 4.30 pm – ‘Henry Bradley: Greatest of English Place-Name Scholars’ (Tania Styles)
• 5 pm – Q and A
• 5. 15 pm – Drinks reception, Blackwell Hall.
• 6 pm – The event ends

written by Frances Dowle (University of Oxford), recipient of a travel and fieldwork bursary from the Philological Society

With the generous support of the Philological Society’s Travel Bursary, I was able to attend the 28^th International Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) Conference, which took place this year at the University of Rochester, NY from 21^st to 24^th July this year.

The funding from the Philological Society allowed me to travel in person to present my poster on complementizer-verb interactions in Welsh.

My poster sought to provide an explanation for why the modern day main clause complementizers /mi/ and /vɛ/ cannot occur with certain forms of the verb ‘be’ in Welsh (Borsley et al., 2007: 35). I argued that the behaviour of the forms in question could be explained with reference to their diachronic development (Jones, unpublished). In south Welsh dialects, the forms excluded from occurring with a main clause complementizer have clearly developed as a result of the phonological erosion of the old affirmative complementizer /ə(r)/. The erosion leads to the complementizer surviving only as the onset consonant of the   vowel-initial finite ‘be’ verb forms:     

(1)   ər + ɔɪð > (*vɛ) rɔɪð

       C.AFF + be.IMPERFECT.3SG > (*C.AFF) AFF.be.IMPERFECT.3SG

A similar process of erosion took place with the negative complementizer:

(2)   nɪd + ɔɪð > dɔɪð

       C.NEG + be.IMPERFECT.3SG > NEG.be.IMPERFECT.3SG

These phonological changes resulted in the development of specialised forms of the verb ‘be’: the affirmative ‘r-be’ forms and the negative ‘d-be’ forms. The old, vowel-initial forms of ‘be’ were retained only after other types of complementizer, such as os ‘if’.  When new affirmative complementizers emerged in Welsh, speakers did not begin to use these complementizers with the ‘r-be’ form, even though the origin of these forms is opaque to modern speakers of the language. I argued that because forms like /rɔɪð/ occupy the same position in a clause as sequences of overt complementizers like os ‘if’ and a vowel-initial verb form, speakers can acquire the knowledge that forms like /rɔɪð/ function as both complementizer and verb. In other words, the ‘r-be’ forms like /rɔɪð/ are assigned two categories in the c-structure (tree structure in LFG): both C (complementizer) and I (inflected verb). In LFG, this dual category status of a single word can be modelled using Lexical Sharing (Wescoat 2002). Familiar principles of category assignment and complementary distribution then explain why this ‘r-be’ form cannot co-occur with either a complementizer or a finite verb (since words of the same category generally cannot cooccur outside of coordination structures). Further details can be found on the 28^th International LFG Conference website (https://sas.rochester.edu/cls/lfg23/program/), where a .pdf version of my poster is available.

As well as having the opportunity to present my work, I also gained a lot from being able hear about others’ work, and from the many follow-up conversations that resulted from the huge range of interesting talks. I was particularly interested to hear about Elaine Ui Dhonnchadha’s work on implementing a computational grammar of Irish in XLE (a computational implementation of LFG). I was particularly interested to hear her proposals for modelling mutations in Irish, as this is an aspect of computational grammar development that presents unique challenges, and is also pertinent to Welsh. I left her talk feeling inspired and I hope to start exploring this aspect of LFG work more in the future. There was also a special session at the conference on the theme of lexical integrity, which is particularly relevant to my doctoral research and the poster that I presented, since Lexical Sharing is one of several recent challenges to the idea of lexical integrity that has surfaced within LFG.

I am very grateful to the ever welcoming and supportive LFG community for sharing their time, energy and expertise with me across this fantastic week. I had so many wonderful discussions, ranging from detailed theoretical topics to general advice on career development. This is truly a very special academic community.

I am incredibly grateful to the Philological Society for their generous travel bursary, without which I would not have been able to attend this wonderful conference.

References

Borsley, R., Tallerman, M. & Willis, D. (2007) The Syntax of Welsh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jones B.M. (Unpublished) The Complementizer System in Informal Welsh. URL:https://users.aber.ac.uk/bmj/Ymchwil/complementizer_phrase3.pdf

Wescoat, M.T. (2002) On Lexical Sharing. PhD Thesis. Standford University.