Written by Xinyu Zhu (Newcastle University), recipient of a travel and fieldwork bursary from the Philological Society.

On March 6th and 7th, 2025, I attended the Mind Your Manner Adverbials! (MiMA!) workshop held at Utrecht University. This workshop marked the culmination of the Mind Your Manner Adverbials! project, providing a platform to share its findings and bringing together both junior and senior researchers to discuss the grammar of manner adverbials. With the generous support of PhilSoc’s Travel and Fieldwork Bursary, I had the opportunity to give an oral presentation on my ongoing PhD research, which is closely related to the topic of manner adverbials. The topic of my presentation is the syntax of reduplicated AABB pattern manner adverbials in Mandarin.

Adverbial phrases (i.e., zhuàngyǔ) in Mandarin, especially adverbs and some adjectives being used as adverbials, are commonly introduced by an adverbial particle de₁ and occur at the pre-verbal position between the subject and the predicate, as shown in (1).

(1) a.         Zhāngsān        jímáng-de                   pǎo-huí-le                   jiā

Zhangsan      hurriedly-DE₁           run-back-ASP          home

‘Zhangsan ran back home in a hurry.’

b.         Lǐsì                  kāixīn-de                    chàng-zhe                    gē

                Lisi                happy-DE₁                sing-PROG               song

               ‘Lisi is singing happily.’

The adverb jímáng ‘hurriedly’ in (1a) and the adjective kāixīn ‘happy’ in (1b) are followed by the adverbial particle de₁(i.e., jímáng–de₁ ‘hurriedly’ and kāixīn-de₁ ‘happily’). Not only that, but certain adverbials in Mandarin can undergo reduplication. These typically include adverbs, adjectives, and some onomatopoeic expressions. For example, reduplicable adverbials (i.e., the simple form) such as jímáng-de₁ ‘hurriedly’, kāixīn-de₁ ‘happily’, and huālā-de₁‘crashing sound’ can be reduplicated to forms like jíjímángmáng-de₁ ‘hurriedly’ kāikāixīnxīn-de₁ ‘happily’, and huālālā-de₁ ‘crashing sound’ (i.e., the reduplicated form). Typologically, adverbial reduplication has been mainly classified into six patterns based on the reduplication of morphemes in a phrase, namely, AA (e.g., gāng ‘just now’ to gānggāng ‘just now’), ABB (e.g., jímáng ‘hurriedly’ to jímángmáng ‘hurriedly’), AAB (e.g., duànhū ‘definitely’ to duànduànhū‘definitely’), ABA (e.g., yuè ‘more’ to yuèláiyuè ‘more and more’), AABB (e.g., yǒngyuǎn ‘forever’ to yǒngyǒngyuǎnyuǎn ‘forever’), and ABAB (e.g., xiāngdāng ‘quite’ to xiāngdāngxiāngdāng ‘quite’. The reasons and effects of adverbial reduplication have long been a hot topic, with most attributing reduplication to the strengthening of tone and changing of semantics, such as adding and subtracting meanings (Zhang, 2014). Nevertheless, my research mainly focuses on the syntactic implications of reduplication, which have not yet been systematically investigated. That is, reduplicated forms exhibit greater distributional flexibility. More specifically, reduplicated forms can be fronted, postposed, or even used as freestanding phrases, whereas their simple counterparts are typically restricted to an in-situposition, maintaining adjacency to the predicate (Zhou, 2009; Pan, 2014; Zhang, 2014). Consider reduplicated adverbial fronting as an example:

(2) {Cōngcōngmángmáng-de/^*Cōngmáng-de}_adv            Zhāngsān        t_adv       líkāi-le

Hurriedly-DE₁                                                           Zhangsan                   leave-PST

     ‘In such a hurry, Zhangsan left.’

Both the simple form (i.e., cōngmáng–de) and reduplicated form (i.e., cōngcōngmángmáng-de) can occur in-situ (i.e., right before the VP líkāi-le). However, the reduplicated form can also be fronted to the sentence-initial position whereas the simple form cannot. To address the research question of why reduplicable manner adverbials, which in their unreduplicated form can only occur near verbs, gain a more flexible distribution after reduplication, my presentation reported on the following aspects. 

First, I select the AABB pattern reduplicated manner adverbials as the primary subject of my research, as their simple forms (i.e., the AB pattern) are mostly standalone adverbials. Moreover, not like functional adverbials, such as temporal adverbs that already have a freer distribution (Cinque, 1999; Ernst, 2020), manner adverbials in Mandarin generally occur between the subject and predicate, making them more suitable for examining the syntactic differences between simple and reduplicated forms. Other patterns of reduplication, such as AA, ABB, or ABA, are set aside because certain parts of their simple forms cannot be used independently, often requiring a verb as a root morpheme or not existing as standalone words. Then, a total of 33 reduplicated AABB manner adverbials were collected from the reduplicated adverbials corpus that I designed with my co-supervisor (Zhu and Zhang, under review). Using this dataset, I conducted further searches for sentences containing these manner adverbials in the CCL (Zhan et al., 2019) corpus. The findings indicate that, compared to their simple counterparts, reduplicated forms often exhibit six variable syntactic distributions. A summary table is provided below.

Sentence-medial	Adjacent pre-verbal	[subject] > [AABB] > [predicate]
	Pre-adverbial	[subject] > [AABB] > [other adverbials] > [predicate]
Sentence-initial	[AABB] > [subject] > [predicate]
Sentence-final	[subject] > [predicate] > [AABB]
Post-dé	[subject] > [predicate-dé] > [AABB]
Freestanding	[AABB]. [subject] > [predicate]
	[subject] > [predicate]. [AABB]

Generally, I categorise the syntactic distribution of AABB manner adverbials into five main types. The first type is sentence-medial, which refers to the default position, typically adjacent to the verb (pre-verbal), as well as the pre-adverbial position when multiple adverbials appear in a sentence. The second type is sentence-initial, where the adverbials are fronted. The third type is sentence-final, where the adverbials are postposed. The fourth type involves the post-déposition, in which reduplicated adverbials can directly follow the post-verbal particle dé (i.e., 得), whereas their simple forms must co-occur with degree modifiers and are prohibited from appearing with de₁ alone. The fifth type is freestanding, where the adverbials can function as standalone adverbial phrases.

Second, since the adverbial particle de₁ in Mandarin has been proposed to inflect the distribution of adverbs (Larson, 2018), I descriptively investigated the co-occurrence of de₁ and reduplicated manner adverbials at their various positions based on the corpus data and drew the following findings.

Co-occurrence	AABB + de1	AB + de1
Adjacent pre-verbal	OPTIONAL	OBLIGATORY
Sentence-initial	OBLIGATORY	N/A
Sentence-final	OBLIGATORY	N/A
Post-dé	OPTIONAL	PROHIBITED
Freestanding	OPTIONAL	N/A
Pre-adverbial	OPTIONAL	N/A

The co-occurrence of de₁ with reduplicated AABB manner adverbials is generally optional, except in two cases, when these adverbials appear in sentence-initial or sentence-final positions, where de₁ is typically required. In contrast, for simple forms, the attachment of de₁ is generally obligatory in the default adjacent pre-verbal position. It is worth noting that a certain number of simple-form manner adverbials can also occur directly in the post-dé position based on the findings from the CCL corpus, but in such cases, the presence of de₁ is strictly prohibited.

Third, degree adverbs in Mandarin (e.g., hěn ‘very’ and fēicháng ‘extremely’) also reflect an interesting phenomenon with reduplication. The simple forms of reduplicated manner adverbials are normally able to co-occur with those degree adverbs while the reduplicated forms cannot, wherever they occur. A similar pattern can also be observed with AABB reduplicated adjectives in relation to degree adverbs.

Given the descriptive overview above, I preliminarily proposed a syntax-phonology-semantics interfaces account to explain the variable positioning of AABB reduplicated manner adverbials. Two hypotheses were put forward: 1) the AB pattern reduplicable manner adverbials get subjective/evaluative semantic features when reduplicated into the AABB pattern, which is henceforth licensed at the periphery (e.g., CP) /functional (e.g., vP) level of Mandarin; 2) variable positioning also demands certain phonological patterns in the occupied elements, which reduplicated forms can fulfil, but not their simple counterparts. More research will be continuously carried out. 

Overall, I was delighted to participate in this workshop and received a great deal of valuable feedback from many attendees. As a second-year PhD student, it was incredibly helpful to have the opportunity to present my current research to fellow scholars with shared research interests. I am sincerely grateful to PhilSoc for awarding me the travel and fieldwork bursary, and I would like to thank the audience at the MiMA workshop for their insightful suggestions and ideas regarding my research. 

References

Cinque, Guglielmo. 1999. Adverbs and functional heads: A cross-linguistic perspective. Oxford University Press.

Ernst, Thomas. 2020. The syntax of adverbials. Annual Review of Linguistics 6(1).89-109.

Larson, Richard. 2018. AP-de Adverbs in Mandarin. Studies in Chinese Linguistics 39(1).1-28.

Pan, Victor Junnan. 2014. Deriving special questions in Mandarin Chinese: a comparative study. In Jong-Un Park & Il-Jae Lee (eds.), Comparative syntax: proceedings of the 16th Seoul international conference on Generative Grammar, 349-368. The Korean Generative Grammar Circle.

Zhan, Weidong, Rui Guo, Baobao Chang, Yirong Chen & Long Chen. 2019. The building of the CCL corpus: its design and implementation. Corpus Linguistics 6(1). 71-86.

Zhang, Yisheng. 2014. Xiandai Hanyu fuci yanjiu [A study on modern Chinese adverbs]. Beijing: The Commercial Press.

Zhou, Jun. 2009. Fuci chongdieshi de leixingxue yanjiu [A typological study on the reduplication of adverbs]. Hunan Normal University MPhil thesis.

Written by Kitty Liu

In January 2025, I attended the annual meeting of the Linguistics Society of America (LSA) through the generous support of PhilSoc’s Martin Burr Fund. The 2025 LSA meeting convened in Philadelphia for four days, where researchers from North America and beyond met to discuss issues in all areas of linguistics. I attended the LSA to give a joint conference presentation with Samuel Andersson, postdoc working on phonology at Yale University. 

Our presentation was on the historical morphophonology of Tibetic verbs, investigating two instances of morphological neutralisation. Old Tibetan had highly complex syllable structure, and different cells in the paradigm are associated with overlapping sets of exponents (e.g. in Table 1 below, where b- is seen in both the past and future stems, g- in both the present and future stems, etc). Modern Tibetic varieties all exhibit erosion of the Old Tibetan syllable structure, and also restructure the verbal paradigm by losing the future stem and shifting from Old Tibetan’s tense-and-mood-based paradigm into an aspect-and-mood-based one (Table 2). 

Table 1. Example verbs from Old Tibetan. 

	Present	Past	Future	Imperative
to revere	‘khur	bkurd	bkur	khurd
to trickle	gtig	btigs	btig	gtigs
to cross a river	rgol	brgald	brgal	rgold
to scatter	‘gyed	bkyes	dgye	khyes

Table 2. Reflexes of Old Tibetan verbs into two modern Amdo varieties, Themchen (data from Haller, 2004) and Labrang (data from Liu, 2024).

	Gloss	Pres > Impf	Past > Pf	Fut > ∅	Ipv > Ipv
Old Tibetan	to beg (for food or money)	slong	bslangs	bslang	slongs
Themchen		/ʂtsuŋ/	/ɸtsaŋ/	––	/ʂtsuŋ/
Old Tibetan	to pour	blug	blugs	blug	blugs
Labrang		/lə/	/lux/	––	/lux/
Old Tibetan	to make descend	‘bebs	phab	dbab	phobs
Labrang		/pʰa/	/pʰu/	––	/pʰu/

The features make the Tibetic verbal system a prime locus for examining diachronic interactions between form and function. The two phenomena we discussed demonstrated different ways in which the two interact. 

The first phenomenon we examined was the loss of the future stem, which we argued was due to the form of the future stem being the least ‘morphologically informative’ than the other paradigm cells. We quantified the informativity of different verb stems using the measure of ‘conditional entropy’ proposed by Ackerman and Malouf (2013). Conditional entropy is calculated from a morphological paradigm and its possible forms (we used a table of different known verb classes in Old Tibetan), uses information on how many different ways the same paradigm cell can be expressed (e.g. in the verb class summary we used, the Old Tibetan present stem can be expressed in nine different ways, which combine the exponents ‘-, g-, -d, -o-, and [+voice] in different ways), and calculates how difficult it is to correctly guess a verb’s realisation in one paradigm cell, given knowledge of that verb’s realisation in a different paradigm cell (e.g. the Old Tibetan present stem is hard to guess, because it has more possible realisations than the other stems). Our conditional entropy calculations showed that the future stem of an Old Tibetan verb is the most easily guessable when one knows one of the verb’s other stems, and knowing the future stem is the least condusive to guessing the verb’s other stem forms. We suggested that the future stem’s lesser informativity according to conditional entropy may have contributed to its loss. For example, when the verb paradigm restructured from a tense-and-mood-based one to an aspect-and-mood-based one, speakers may have preferred to repurpose the other more morphologically informative stems.  

The second phenomenon we looked at was the causes of paradigm syncretisms in modern varieties of the Amdo subgroup. We found that modern Amdo varieties allow for all patterns of morphological syncretism (i.e. all three stems have the same form, any two of the three stems have the same form to the exclusion of the third stem, all three stems have different forms). Syncretisms occur either through regular sound change (Table 3, Example 1), or through paradigm extention (Table 3, Example 2). Surprisingly, while regular sound change can give rise to all syncretism patterns, levelling never leads to syncretisms between the imperfective and imperative stems at the exclusion of the perfective stem). We hypothesised that this is an instance of semantic dissimilarity constraining the syncretism of paradigm forms. We also linked this to the literature on *ABA constraints, i.e. the idea that three-cell morphological paradigms often have a dispreferred pattern of two-cell syncretisms (e.g. Andersson, 2018), since Amdo verbs provide an instance of a synchronic ABA syncretism that is diachronically dispreferred. 

Table 3. Regular sound change and paradigm extension as causes of verb stem syncretism in modern Amdo varieties. 

	Gloss	Pres > Impf	Past > Pf	Fut > ∅	Ipv > Ipv
Example 1: the imperfective and perfective stems syncretise because -n and -nd are neutralised by regular sound change.
Old Tibetan	to listen (hon)	gsan	gsand	gsan	gsand
Themchen		/çsan/	/çsan/	––	/çson/
Example 2: the imperfective and perfective stems syncretise. This must be through extension of the perfective form /ɖʐaŋ/, since the regular reflex of Old Tibetan present sbyong is */ɖʐoŋ/.
Old Tibetan	to learn	sbyong	sbyangs	sbyang	sbyongs
Labrang		/ɖʐaŋ/	/ɖʐaŋ/	––	/ɖʐoŋ/

We got lots of positive feedback to our presentation (including from Ackerman and Malouf, whose 2013 paper we drew on), as well as comments on additional Tibetic-internal diachronic factors that we should take into account. Since our presentation lay at the intersection of several subfields (Tibetic linguistics, language change, theoretical linguistics), it was a very valuable opportunity to present at the LSA where our audience had a broad range of interests and specialties. 

The material for our presentation came from my research for my MPhil thesis, which I completed at the University of Cambridge in 2024, supported by one of PhilSoc’s Masters bursaries. Samuel had contributed to some of the analyses in my MPhil through many inspiring conversations about morphological paradigms, as well as their superior grasp of Python, so we decided to give a joint presentation on those findings to acknowledge their collaborative nature. On top of giving our presentation and receiving feedback, I also greatly enjoyed attending a wide range of event at the LSA, including Chris Geissler’s presentation on the consonant classification system described by medieval Tibetan grammarians, and LSA President Marlyse Baptista’s plenary on a postcolonial and non-exceptionalist reconceptualisation of creole languages. I also got to attend the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year selection process, which is held at the LSA each year. Nominations for 2024’s Word of the Year included brat (after Charli XCX’s 2024 album), sanewashing (presenting extreme political rhetoric as reasonable), yap (to chatter), and the overall winner rawdog (to undertake an action without customary protection) (Zimmer, 2025). 

I am very grateful to PhilSoc for enabling me to attend the 2025 LSA meeting. I am very happy to have presented my research there and connected with other attendees about our work. 

References

Ackerman, F., & Malouf, R. (2013). Morphological organization: The Low Conditional Entropy Conjecture. Language, 89(3), 429–464. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2013.0054

Andersson, S. (2018). (*)ABA in Germanic verbs. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 3(1). https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.733

Haller, F. (2004). Dialekt und Erzählungen von Themchen: sprachwissenschaftliche Beschreibung eines Nomadendialektes aus Nord-Amdo. Bonn: VGH Wissenschaftsverlag.

Liu, K. W. (2024). Verb paradigms in Tibetic: Morphophonology in diachronic perspective (MPhil thesis). University of Cambridge. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.17605/osf.io/z9sr2

Zimmer, B. (2025, January 11). 2024 Word of the Year. Retrieved from American Dialect Society website: https://americandialect.org/2024-word-of-the-year-is-rawdog/

Written by Beth Beattie (University of Glasgow), recipient of a travel and fieldwork bursary from the Philological Society.

The Forum for the Regional Languages of Scotland and Ulster (FRLSU) is an organisation dedicated to researching and promoting the languages used across Scotland and Ulster. It has a broad scope, covering historical and contemporary language, as well as spoken, written, and signed forms of communication. The primary languages which FRLSU works with are Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Scots, and these languages receive a generous portion of FRLSU’s advocacy efforts. The FRLSU conference held at Ulster University from 29^th to 30^th November 2024 was the first conference held since the pandemic, and it was dedicated to the memory of the Belfast poet and critic John Hewitt with the aim of highlighting work that shines a spotlight on Scotland and Ulster’s minority languages. This is one of the aims of my own research on Older Scots, so I applied, and was accepted, to present my research at this conference and contribute towards improving the standing of Scots in academic research.

My presentation was based on a subset of my PhD research, titled ‘Establishing a Scottish Reformation Discourse: A corpus-based approach.’ There has been next to no research using corpus methods on Scottish Reformation discourse; existing research either explores the different uses of Scots and English in texts (Gribben, 2006), or focuses on the language of specific individuals (Mullen, 2021). Corpus methods are beginning to be applied to English religious discourse, but after having first been touched on over forty years ago, this methodology is only now beginning to be more thoroughly explored (Hudson, 1981; Smith, 2020; 2021; forthcoming). This paper aimed to build on this developing area of research to establish the extent to which the lexical choices of Scottish Reformation writers were different to those in England. 

To answer this question, I created a 260,000-word corpus of sixteenth-century Scottish religious polemic texts and compared it with an equivalent corpus of English texts from the same period. The creation of the Scots corpus was of particular relevance to the FRLSU conference attendees because I had to contend with technical and ideological challenges presented by the multilingual nature of sixteenth-century Scotland. Aside from those written in Latin, the surviving texts from this period are written in Older Scots and Early Modern English. These two languages have many linguistic similarities, due to both deriving from different dialects of Old English, but they are different enough to present challenges when features in the same corpus. 

There are no corpus tools that are compatible with both Scots and English. One option was to translate the Scots texts into English, which would make the entire corpus compatible with existing English-trained software. However, as is a problem with all translation, meanings of English words do not map perfectly onto Scots words. This is a significant challenge when exploring word choice. Furthermore, you have the ideological issue of effectively ‘erasing’ Scots to make way for English. The growth in Scots language awareness and activism meant that this option is not suitable within the current landscape of Scots scholarship, so I instead chose to keep the Scots texts in Scots and customise or develop software trained on Scots for pre-processing. I created a custom spelling normalisation training for VARD2 trained on Older Scots (Baron and Rayson, 2008), and I also presented preliminary information on the Older Scots part-of-speech tagger I am currently building. After this, I then grouped Scots and English together manually, which worked well because this was a short study, but I am exploring ways to do this automatically for my PhD thesis.

Scottish Keyword	Scottish rel. freq.	English rel. freq.	Log ratio	English Keyword	Scottish rel. freq.	English rel. freq.	Log ratio
Melchizedek	315.02	24.03	3.71	signify	40.39	431.01	-3.42
vocation	226.17	17.62	3.68	English	56.54	551.18	-3.29
Reformation	201.94	17.62	3.52	sense	48.46	424.6	-3.13
Calvin	452.34	43.26	3.39	believed	64.62	480.68	-2.9
debate	193.86	19.23	3.33	proved	44.43	323.66	-2.86
justly	274.63	28.84	3.25	justified	44.43	323.66	-2.86
ministry	197.9	24.03	3.04	another	76.74	546.37	-2.83
verity	553.3	78.51	2.82	works	133.28	938.92	-2.82
latter	218.09	32.05	2.77	among	96.93	578.41	-2.58
woman	791.59	121.77	2.7	Jews	72.7	434.21	-2.58
command	379.64	59.28	2.68	comes	44.43	259.57	-2.55
expressly	214.05	33.65	2.67	often	44.43	257.96	-2.54
universal	335.21	52.87	2.66	image	68.66	395.76	-2.53
punishment	234.25	40.06	2.55	needs	72.7	413.38	-2.51
Satan	266.55	46.47	2.52	saints	84.81	469.46	-2.47

Table 1: Comparison of top fifteen keywords in Scottish and English subcorpora

For exploring the lexical choices of the corpora, I identified the most frequent and statistically significant words and phrases in each corpus. The results of the lexical keyness analysis are shown in Table 1, which shows the relative frequencies and log ratio (binary log of the ratio of relative frequencies) of the keywords of each subcorpus. The Scottish texts feature higher frequencies of explicitly religious words than the English, such as religious figures like Melchizedek and Satan. Contemporary issues are also present in the Scottish corpus, demonstrated by the overuse of ‘Reformation’ and ‘Calvin.’ There are explicitly religious terms in the English corpus as well, like ‘image’ and ‘saint.’ These words play key roles in discussions surrounding the veneration of saints and their images in the Church of England. Despite both corpora having the same proportion of Catholic- and Protestant-aligned texts, Protestant-coded words like ‘Calvin’ and ‘godly’ appear more frequently in the Scottish corpus, and Catholic-coded words like ‘sacrament’ and ‘saints’ in the English. These patterns are also found in the two- and three-word phrases, indicating that there are fundamental differences in religious discourse in Scotland and England at the national level.

I received encouraging feedback on my presentation at the FRLSU conference and I was able to discuss potential avenues for further research. These include adding a qualitative angle to my research, as a mixed-method approach to this topic would help to bring together existing research and corroborate my findings so far. I was also able to discuss my research more broadly with experts in the field, and through the FRLSU network I have found a mentor for a postdoctoral research project following my PhD. Thanks to the PhilSoc travel grant, I was able to gain so much from attending this conference, and I am incredibly grateful for PhilSoc’s assistance.

References

Baron, A. and Rayson, P. (2008) VARD 2: A tool for dealing with spelling variation in historical corpora. In: Proceedings of the Postgraduate Conference in Corpus Linguistics. Aston University, Birmingham.

Collinson, P. (1983) Godly People: Essays On English Protestantism and Puritanism. History Series. London, The Hambledon Press.

Gribben, C. (2006) John Knox, Reformation History and National Self-fashioning. Reformation & Renaissance Review, 8 (1), pp. 48–66.

Hudson, A. (1981) A Lollard sect vocabulary? In: Benskin, M. and Samuels, M.L. eds. So Meny People Longages and Tonges: Philological Essays in Scots and Mediaeval English Presented to Angus McIntosh. Edinburgh, Middle English Dialect Project, pp. 15–30.

Mullan, D.G. (2021) Scottish Catholic Responses to Reformation Teachings after 1558. In: A Companion to the Reformation in Scotland, c. 1525-1638. Leiden, Brill, pp. 177–203.

Smith, J.J. (2020) Godly vocabulary in Early Modern English religious debate. In: Jonsson, E. and Larsson, T. eds. Voices past and present – Studies of involved, speech-related and spoken texts: In honor of Merja Kytö, Studies in Corpus Linguistics. Amsterdam, John Benjamins Publishing, pp. 95–112.

Smith, J.J. (2021) Lexical choices in Early Modern English devotional prose. Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 22 (2), pp. 263–281.

Yadomi, H. (2019) Language, identity and community: A sociolinguistic analysis of language practice of early modern English preachers. PhD Thesis, University of Glasgow. Available from https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/75164.

Written by Rhiannon Smith – Recipient of a Philological Society bursary.

This September, I had the opportunity to travel to Munich for the 15^th International Colloquium on Late and Vulgar Latin thanks to the generous support of the PhilSoc Travel and Fieldwork Bursary. This conference was my final opportunity to present my research in front of an audience of academics before handing in my PhD. 

My research focuses on the creation and use of Greek-influenced paradigms on Greek and Latin women’s names in Latin inscriptions. I presented a paper entitled ‘How should women’s names decline in Latin inscriptions?’ There are three possible grammatical paradigms which can be used in Latin with Greek female names in ‑e. 

Nominative	-e	-e	-e
Accusative	-en / -em	-enem	-etem
Genitive	-es	-enis	-etis
Dative	-e	-eni	-eti
Ablative	-e	-ene	-ete

The first of these is the transliterated Greek first declension and the second two are created in Rome. Although all these paradigms should only be used with names that have nominatives in ‑e, I have found 278 unique Latin cognomina (which should have nominatives in -a) in these three paradigms. The nine most popular Latin cognomina are Iuliana, Marciana, Aeliana, Rufina, Aproniana, Claudiana, Clementiana, Feliciana and Sabiniana. My data showed that names suffixed in ‑iana were most popular in the paradigms ‑e, ‑enis and ‑e, ‑etis whereas names not suffixed in ‑iana were mostly found in ‑e, ‑es. There is something about Latin cognomina in ‑iana which was specifically drawing them to nominative ‑e, ‑e, ‑enis and ‑e, ‑etis. For example, almost 20% of epigraphic attestations of Marciana are found with a non-standard/Greek-influenced ending (Smith 2024:31-48). However, the same patterns are not visible in the data for genitive ‑es. The most popular names in genitive ‑es match the most popular overall Latin cognomina and it appears that only genitive ‑es has transplanted to Latin cognomina, rather than the full paradigm. I argue that this is almost certainly related to another ending, genitive ‑aes which I analyse in more detail in my thesis.

The second half of my paper focused on Greek female cognomina found in the three paradigms given above. One of the only theories on the alternation between ‑e, ‑enis and ‑e, ‑etis is given by Adams: “when the ending of the nominative is -ne, -eti(s) is preferred, whereas when the nominative has any consonant other than n before the final eta, it is -eniswhich is overwhelmingly in the majority”.  This is a very plausible suggestion; a form with stem-final n would be more awkward to pronounce with ‑e, ‑enis (for example Irenenis, Ireneni).

The table below lists the 10 most popular Greek cognomina in ‑e found in the paradigms ‑e, ‑enis and ‑e, ‑etis

	-e, -enis	-e, -etis
1.	Nice	Cyriace
2.	Tyche	Irene
3.	Agape	Eutychiane
4.	Auge	Hermione
5.	Chreste	Zosime, Philumene
6.	Zosime
7.	Calliste	Eutyche
8.	Philete	Semne
9.	Trophime	Phile
10.	Syntyche	Cale, Euphrosyne, Hedone

The ‑e, ‑etis paradigm does appear to have more cognomina with stem-final n which does appear to support Adams’ theory. However, he fails to take into account the time periods in which ‑e, ‑enis and ‑e, ‑etis were used. In my paper I showed that ‑e, ‑enis was most strongly used from 0-200 CE whereas ‑e, ‑etis was most prominent in 300-400 CE.

Using my data from Greek cognomina in genitive ‑es as a control group, I compared the proportion of different stem-final consonants in each paradigm. I concluded therefore, that in the Christian period where all three paradigms were attested, stem-final consonant does appear to have an effect on paradigm choice, although this appears to be a tendency rather than a rule. Names with stem-final n are very rare in ‑e, ‑enis but equally common in ‑e, ‑etis and genitive ‑es, whereas names with stem-final t are only found in -e, -enis. Stem-final p is also most common in -e, -enis in this time period. There are some Greek cognomina suffixed in ‑iane in the ‑e, ‑etis dataset. Greek names suggested in ‑iane are more likely to decline in -e, -etis than to take any other endings. Other cognomina with stem-final n but not suffixed in ­‑iane can choose fairly freely between genitive ‑es and -e, -etis, although they avoid -e, -enis for phonological reasons. Cognomina with stem-final p and t avoid -e, -etis due to phonological similarities.

In the pre-Christian Imperial period, it is not accurate to describe an alternation of –e, -enis and ‑e, ‑etis, as Adams does. In the -e, -etis dataset, there are only 17 Greek cognomina attested before 300 CE. Therefore, there is simply not enough use of this paradigm to suppose that speakers were actively choosing between -e, -enis and -e, -etis in this time period. We are thus seeing only alternation between -e, -es and -e, -enis. The distributions for ‑e, ‑es and ‑e, ‑enis are mostly similar; the main difference is that names with stem-final n rarely use ‑e, ‑enis.

It was incredibly fulfilling to me to be able to present the culmination of my research to eminent academics and to share my findings with the wider research community. I had a lovely week exploring Munich, swimming in the river and walking the city, especially enjoying the last of the summer sun before returning to England. Conferences have always been an important way to develop my own research and learn about interesting projects in other areas that I might not have been otherwise aware of, and again, I am grateful to the Philological Society for providing the funding to allow me to take part in LVLT 2024.

Bibliography

Adams, J. N. (2003). Bilingualism and the Latin Language. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press.

Nuorluoto, T. (2023). Latin Female Cognomina. A Study on the Personal Names of Roman Women. Helsinki; Societas Scientiarum Fennica.

Smith, R. K. (2024). Marciana: A Case Study in Greek-Influenced Endings. In Exploring Latin: Structures, Functions, Meaning. De Gruyter.

Solin, H. (1982) Die griechischen Personennamen in Rom: ein Namenbuch. Berlin; De Gruyter.

written by Kitty Liu (University of Cambridge), recipient of the Philological Society’s Anna Morpurgo Davies Masters’ Bursary.

I am grateful to the Philological Society for their generous award of the Anna Morpurgo Davies Masters’ Bursary for the year 2023–24, which allowed me to research morphophonological change in Tibetic languages during my MPhil at the University of Cambridge. This report gives an overview of my research and presents some of my findings.

Tibetic languages are varied, fascinating, and understudied. Diversity within the modern Tibetic family is comparable to that of Romance (Tournadre & Suzuki 2023: 44) and the rich textual traditions and historical status of Old and Classical Tibetan roughly parallel those of Old and Classical Latin. I explored changes affecting the complex syllable structure and verb stem alternations of Old/Classical Tibetan, focusing on the conservative modern Amdo varieties (spoken in and around China’s Qinghai Province). All modern Tibetic varieties show syllable structutre reduction compared to Old/Classical Tibetan. For example, reflexes of bsgrubs ‘complete-PFV’ include /ɣɖʐəp/ (very conservative; Amdo Tibetan) and /˨ʈup/ (very innovative; Central Tibetan) (Bielmeier et al 2018). Old/Classical Tibetan verbs had up to four monosyllabic stem alternants, primarily expressing tense and mood, while modern varieties have up to three, expressing aspect and mood (Zeisler 2004). One stem has thus been lost and the remaining stems’ functions have been restructured during the development of verb paradigms. My thesis explored the intersections between these changes, demonstrating that phonological and morphological developments are often closely interwoven, with the study of one necessitating an understanding of the other.

Investigating these changes led me to incorporate different methodologies, including different approaches to sound change, paradigm-focused approaches in theoretical morphology, computational corpus research and computational corpus linguistics, as well as eliciation sessions over Zoom with a Tibetic speaker from the Amdo region. I really enjoyed getting to work with this wide array of methodologies, and my range of analytical approaches was reflected in the breadth of my findings.

Some aspects of my findings were specific to Tibetic linguistics (e.g. estimating the number of Classical Tibetan verbs in each verb class; developing a hypothesis for contrastive voicing for Old Tibetan nasals), but I also made a number of observations that are of interest for linguistics more generally. I briefly describe two of them here.

1. Amdo verb paradigms, both in pre-existing and my new data, demonstrate syncretism between any two of the three slots (imperfective, perfective, imperative) at the exclusion of the third. This means that Amdo verbs contravene the *ABA constraint in morphology, which postulates that in three-slot paradigms, there is one two-slot syncretism that is disallowed/-preferred (cf. Andersson 2018). All three combinations of two-slot syncretisms are synchronically prevalent in Amdo verbs, but analysis of sound changes and paradigm levelling show that imperfective-imperative syncretisms are derived from a more restricted set of diachronic processes than imperfective-perfective and perfective-imperative syncretisms. Imperfective-imperative syncretisms (where the perfective is not syncretic with them) appear to only arise due to phonological mergers, and never from the extension of the imperfective form to express an imperative meaning or vice versa. I hypothesise that this is due to the extent of semantic differences between imperfective and imperative stems. This finding adds nuance to existing discussions on *ABA in the morphology literature. 

• Old/Classical Tibetan verb paradigms are interesting for discussions of calculating paradigm complexity. The Old/Classical Tibetan verb paradigm is considered impossible under older measures of complexity such as Carstairs-McCarthy’s (1994) ‘No Blur Principle’, which involves counting the number of possible realisations for each paradigm slot, as, in Old/Classical Tibetan, each verb paradigm slot has many possible realisations and the realisations for different slots often overlap. However, under Ackerman and Malouf’s (2013) predictability-based quantification of paradigm complexity (‘conditional entropy’), Old/Classical Tibetan achieves an average score on par with paradigms that are possible under the No Blur Principle. Thus, Old/Classical Tibetan verbs lend support to the utility of predictability-based conceptualisations of paradigm complexity including conditional entropy.

Weaving together the topics and methodologies discussed above, my research process showed me the value of interdisciplinarity between different linguistic subfields in diachronic research. My thesis achieved a ‘Pass without corrections’, which is the highest grade for my course. I plan to prepare parts of it for conference presentations and for publication. I am currently a research assistant for the AHRC-funded ‘Emergence of Egophoricity’ project, assisting the construction of part-of-speech-tagged historical Tibetan corpora. I am also planning to apply for a PhD in the upcoming admissions cycle, to further pursue topics in historical Tibetic linguistics and develop the skills I gained in my MPhil.

References

Ackerman, F. & R. Malouf (2013). Morphological organization: The Low Conditional Entropy Conjecture. Language 89(3): 429–464. doi: https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2013.0054

Andersson, S. (2018). (*)ABA in Germanic verbs. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 3(1): 119. doi: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.733

Bielmeier, R., G. L. van Driem & M. Volkart (2018). Comparative Dictionary of Tibetan Dialects (CDTD). Volume 2: Verbs. De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110554076

Carstairs-McCarthy, A. (1987). Allomorphy in inflexion. Croom Helm.

Tournadre, N. & H. Suzuki (2023). The Tibetic Languages: An introduction to the family of languages derived from Old Tibetan. LACITO-Publications. https://lacito.cnrs.fr/the-tibetic-languages/

written by William Thurlwell (University of Oxford), recipient of a travel and fieldwork bursary from the Philological Society.

With the generous support of the PhilSoc Travel and Fieldwork Bursary, I had the opportunity to attend the 30^th Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference (GLAC) at Indiana University, Bloomington, IN in April 2024.

The conference is amongst the best attended and most prestigious in the annual calendar for Germanic linguists. Having previously attended the 28^thand 29^th GLACs in Athens, GA, and Banff, AB, I knew how enriching and engaging it can be to hear about the work undertaken by others in the field and to receive feedback about my own research. This year was no different: my experience at 2024’s GLAC, on both a professional and personal level, was extremely rewarding.

I presented two papers at this year’s conference.

The first paper pertained to a philological aspect of my DPhil research, titled ‘Remnant Case Forms and Patterns of Syncretism in Early West Germanic’. In this paper, I examine the form and distribution minor morphological elements (-i and -u suffixes) which are used to convey remnant instrumental and locative functions in the a/ō-stem nouns of certain old West Germanic (WGmc) languages. Early Old English (OE) generalises its locative and instrumental functions under its ‘instrumental’ ­-i suffix (which later reduces to -e, the formally autonomous morpheme found in the strong inflection of masculine and neuter adjectives in later OE). By contrast, the continental WGmc languages (i.e. Old High German, Old Saxon, and Runic Frisian) generalise instrumental functions under the suffix -u, although some locative functions survive in a small number of tokens with an -i suffix. I propose that the divergent generalisations of the functions of the different instrumental morphemes are what motivate the dichotomy in the patterns of syncretism in the feminine ō-stems of continental WGmc and OE respectively. 

The bridging factor between the instrumental case and the ō-stem paradigms is the -u morpheme. In Proto-WGmc, the nominative and instrumental are reconstructed as being syncretic in the feminine ō-stems under the suffix *-u (< Proto-Gmc *-ō):

Table 1. Development of ō-stems from Proto Germanic to Proto West Germanic.

	Proto-Gmc	Proto-WGmc
nom	*geb-ō	*geb-u
acc	*geb-ǭ	*geb-ā
gen	*geb-ōz	*geb-ā
dat	*geb-ōi	*geb-ē
ins	*geb-ō	*geb-u

There was a divergence in the salience of the -u morpheme across WGmc, since the historical -u is maintained as a marker for different cases in different parts of WGmc. OE favours the nominative function (at least in light-stemmed nouns) and continental WGmc favours the instrumental function. This can be seen in how the instrumental form was replaced in OE with -i, but not in continental WGmc, where the prominence of the -u morpheme persists and even proliferates, since the dative also merges under this ending.

Table 2. Paradigms of light-stemmed ō-stems in the West Germanic languages.

All of WGmc was subject to the apocope of high vowels after heavy stems (Fulk 2018: 82-3), which would have led to the retention of *-u in light-stemmed ō-stems only. This suffix only survives in the nominative in OE, but would have also been expected to survive as the light-stemmed instrumental, based on reconstructions, but there is no evidence that an instrumental *geƀ-u form survives (hence the *? in the cell in the above table).Ringe and Taylor (2014) propose that OE generalises an instrumental -i in this cell from the interrogative pronoun, whereas continental WGmc clearly maintains the inherited -u.

The generalisation of -i and replacement of -u in OE suggests that the salience of -u—at the time when it would have likely still been a syncretic morpheme in pre-OE—was analysed as nominative over instrumental. In continental WGmc, the converse was true: -u was lost as a nominative marker (and the nominative becomes syncretic under the accusative and the genitive form), but spreads as the instrumental and dative marker. This demonstrates how changes to the instrumental case in these two separate subgroups of WGmc sit at the heart of the developments in the syncretism patterns of the feminine ō-stems. The divergent salience of the historically syncretic -u morpheme is the primary motivator for why the ō-stems syncretise differently in different parts of WGmc.

The second paper I presented was a joint submission with my supervisor, Howard Jones, and recent Oxford DPhil student, Luise Morawetz, to present our progress about the book we are writing together under contract with Oxford University Press: The Oxford Guide to Old High German and Old Saxon. The purpose of the talk was to show what we have done so far, explain the rationale for the grammar and reader sections of the book, and to get feedback from peers in the field to ensure that the remainder of the project will best fit the needs of our intended audience: students and researchers of Old High German (OHG) and Old Saxon (OS).

I was very pleased with the feedback and questions I received to both of my talks. I received constructive suggestions about how to refine the approach to my personal research. Several fellow students and scholars offered motivating words about the book project and made useful suggestions as to how we might make the OHG/OS volume maximally useful both to those new to old Germanic languages and those who already have considerable experience with them.

Connecting with colleagues both old and new, having the chance to discuss new research ideas, and getting informal career advice was invaluable for me as I conclude my DPhil and plan the next steps in my academic journey. After three days of busy conferencing, I also took some time to explore parts of the Midwest and beyond, enjoying the rich cultural offerings of Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Illinois: I saw grand natural wonders, such as Mammoth Cave, the bustling metropoles of Indianapolis, Nashville, and Chicago, and the downright weird and wonderful, such as the World’s Largest Rocking Chair in Casey, IL. A personal highlight was being able to take my newfound hobby of running to American pastures, taking first place at the Cornerstone Lakes parkrun, a timed 5k which takes place on a weekly basis in the outskirts of Chicago.

Being able to attend conferences during my time as a DPhil student has been nothing short of formative in developing my research methodology and—pardon the pun—‘instrumental’ in furthering my academic confidence. Most importantly, I have forged new professional relationships and personal friendships across disciplines and continental boundaries. I would like to thank the Society again for their incredibly generous support in facilitating my attendance at GLAC in 2024. 

References

Braune, Wilhelm & Heidermanns, Frank, 2023. Althochdeutsche Grammatik I, Berlin: De Gruyter.

Fulk, R. D., 2018. A Comparative Grammar of the Early Germanic Languages, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Gallée, Johan Hendrik, Lochner, Johannes & Tiefenbach, Heinrich, 1993. Altsächsische Grammatik, Tübingen: M. Niemeyer.

Goering, Nelson, 2023. Prosody in Medieval English and Norse, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ringe, Don, 2017. From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ringe, Donald A. & Taylor, Ann A., 2014. The Development of Old English, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Versloot, Arjen 2016a. ‘The Development of Old Frisian Unstressed –U in the Ns of Feminine Ō-Stems’. In: Bannink, A. & Honselaar, W. (eds.) From Variation to Iconicity: Festschrift for Olga Fischer on the Occasion of Her 65th Birthday, Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Pegasus.

Versloot, Arjen 2016b. ‘Unstressed Vowels in Runic Frisian. The History of Frisian in the Light of the Germanic ‘Auslautgesetze’’, Us Wurk, 65, 1-39.

written by Vanessa Fung (University of Manchester), recipient of funding from the Philological Society’s Public Events and Outreach fund.

The Manchester Forum in Linguistics (MFiL) is an annual two-day conference held at the University of Manchester. This year we celebrated the ten year anniversary of MFiL, which took place on 20^th and 21^st of April 2023, and marked a return to a fully in-person format following the pandemic. Each year, we invite talks from early career researchers and students from all areas of linguistics, with the aim of sharing current theoretical and methodological work within the field. The conference is especially interested in talks that employ novel empirical methods, and research that has wider implications for linguistic theory generally. MFiL is an opportunity for those at early stages of their careers to share their work and connect with other linguists. 

The organising committee is entirely made up of volunteers, all postgraduate research students from the Department of Linguistics and English Language. Without financial support, it would not be possible to run MFiL. We gratefully acknowledge the Philological Society for their generous contribution to our event through the Public Events and Outreach fund. As a result, and in spite of the rising costs associated with organising the conference, we were able to avoid increasing the registration fee, therefore, keeping MFiL financially accessible to anyone with an interest in linguistics and the study of language generally. This year, we welcomed talks from four plenary speakers and twenty one presenters from a range of institutions, both in the UK and abroad. The areas covered by the conference included: sociolinguistics, semantic fieldwork, typology, historical syntax, and pragmatics (amongst others). In addition to the presentations, each year MFiL also includes a careers panel, which provides an open forum for conference attendees to ask the plenary speakers about career opportunities and gain insights into working in academia.

MFiL 2023 was a great success, achieving our goals of connecting linguists across a variety of disciplines, and prompting interesting discussions. We would like, again, warmly to thank the Philological Society for their financial support.

written by Iris Kamil (University of Edinburgh), recipient of a travel and fieldwork bursary from the Philological Society

The workshop on the Afroasiatic Middle t-Morpheme was held over two days, from the 8–9 of May 2024 at the University of Edinburgh’s Department of Linguistics and English Language. 

Across Afroasiatic, middle morphology (i.e. the expression of reflexives, passives and anticausatives) appears to be expressed by a uniform set of morphemes, n– and t-. However, no studies or joint efforts had previously been undertaken with the aim of compiling the different contexts and rules with which these morphemes may be used, nor of mapping out the morphemes’ diachronic development. Although these morphemes had received some past treatment (though mostly only in Semitic and Berber), the precise scope and function of the morphemes remained obscure and ambiguous. 

The goal of this workshop was thus a first attempt at compiling the patterns of middles across Afroasiatic, starting with the t-morpheme, bringing together scholars working in different methodologies and different fields of study. It was hoped that (a) the exchange of different approaches and (b) the exploration of various patterns across languages could help us to workshop the function and scope of the morpheme and better understand its diachronic development.

Our workshop featured a wide range of methodological frameworks, including generative grammar, diachronic typology, frameworks at the syntax-phonology interface, philology and the historical-comparative method. We had talks on Semitic, Berber, Cushitic and Egyptian, featuring over twenty different languages within these four families. The data presented ranged from corpora attestations as early as 2,500 BCE to recently-collected fieldwork data (some even collected within the last year). Among the participants were PhD students, post-doctoral researchers, lecturers and assistant and tenured professors. In regard to the exchange of information, the workshop was thus highly successful. It was held in hybrid format, in order to increase accessibility and enable participation from a global audience. Indeed, we drew an audience from five continents, with fourteen in-person participants and around 35 online attendees.

The final day concluded with a lengthy discussion (of around one and a half hours) concerning the recurring patterns explored throughout the two days, as well as hypotheses and approaches to how one might treat the morpheme both synchronically and diachronically.

Not only has the workshop been immensely useful to my own research and thesis, but it has hopefully also had an impact on Afroasiatic, theoretical and typological linguistics. We hope that this workshop improved our general understanding, not only of the t-morpheme in Afroasiatic, but also of Afroasiatic middle morphology in general. The workshop will have proceedings, likely in the form of a special edition journal, and will hopefully return for a second instalment in the future, again with the premise of special focus on only one grammatical form.

The workshop would not have been possible if not for the kind support of the Philological Society, which allowed us to cover the hospitality needed to welcome our speakers. The experience of organising an event of this magnitude, with the support of so many helpful hands, was furthermore immensely beneficial to my academic skills training, and an opportunity I am well aware not every PhD student gets.

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.