scots projects

Scots corpora projects

Differentation and
standardization processes
in the history of Scottish English

Linguistic variation and change in women's writings in Scottish English (1540-1800)

Differentiation and standardization processes in the history of Scottish English

The Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots (1450-1700) has been internationally available since 1995. Together with its supplement, a corpus of sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century letters by writers representing different dialect areas of Scotland, and the Edinburgh corpus of fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century administrative and legal documents, it provides data for the reconstruction of the Scottish English Standard and the various local and regional norms, and patterns of variation and change in them from the earliest prose documents up to 1800. In co-operation with Dr. Keith Williamson, Institute for Historical Dialectology, University of Edinburgh, at least the most important texts will be grammatically tagged; these will be used for producing text profiles that allow a detailed analysis of differentiation and standardisation processes in the history of Scots. The cooperation will lead to the publication of a monograph.

The following studies have been published in 1997:

Meurman-Solin, Anneli

1997a. 'Text profiles in the study of language variation and change' in Raymond Hickey, Merja Kytö, Ian Lancashire and Matti Rissanen (eds.), Tracing the trail of time. Proceedings from the Diachronic Corpora Workshop, Toronto, May 1995, 199-214;

1997b. 'On Differentiation and Standardization in Early Scots' in Jones, Charles (ed.), The Edinburgh History of the Scots Language. Chapter 1. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 3-23;

1997c. 'A Corpus-Based Study on t/d deletion and insertion in Late Medieval and Renaissance Scottish English' in Terttu Nevalainen and Leena Kahlas-Tarkka (eds.), To Explain the Present: Studies in the Changing English Language in Honour of Matti Rissanen. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique, 111-124.

The following studies are in press:

'The Centre and the Periphery. Competing Norms on the Dialect Map of Renaissance Scotland' in the Proceedings of the Conference on Language and Power in Santa Margherita, Liguria, Italy, May 1997;

'Change from above or from below? Mapping the Loci of Linguistic Change in the History of Scottish English', in the proceedings of the International Conference on the Standardization of English, Cambridge, July 1997.

Linguistic variation and change in women's writings in Scottish English (1540-1800)

Studies based on the relatively small sample of letters in the Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots (1450-1700) have shown that texts of an informal nature, or texts written by linguistically and stylistically less competent or less experienced writers, are a valuable source of evidence for the reconstruction of diachronic developments that may reflect practices of the spoken idiom. Findings of this kind have led to the compilation of a corpus of Scottish women's writings dating from the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The main focus is on informal texts, private records such as letters, diaries and autobiographies. The high frequency of phonetic spellings and reduced variant forms in the language of less skilled writers such as women allows us to study the chronology and diffusion of phonological variants that usually remain undetected because of the established, and thus conservative, spelling practices of well-trained writers. Meurman-Solin has been able to antedate the conditioning effect of Aitken's Law by finding evidence of an earlier shortening of long vowels and an earlier monophthongization of diphthongs in specific environments in Scots.

The following studies prepared within the project in 1997 are in press:

Meurman-Solin, Anneli, forthcoming:

'Women's Scots: Gender-Based Variation in Renaissance Letters' in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Scottish Literature and Language, Oxford;

'Letters as a Source of Data for Reconstructing Early Spoken Scots' in Irma Taavitsainen, Gunnel Melchers and Päivi Pahta (eds.) Dimensions of Writing in Non-Standard English.

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