A historical sociolinguistic approach to the development of adjective comparison in Englishsynthetic and analytic patterns from 1418 to 1800

Resumen

The current study explores developmental processes of synthetic and analytic mechanisms in English for the construction of the adjective comparison from a historical-sociolinguistic perspective. The main aim is to account for the evolution of adjective comparison in English from 1418 to 1800 in private letters collected from the tagged version of the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence (henceforth PCEEC) (Nurmi et al. 2006) and the Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension (henceforth CEECE) (Nevalainen et al. 2000¿). For this aim, the evolution of the comparative system has been analysed according to socio-extralinguistic factors, such as social status of the informant and recipient, gender and age in order to trace the development of the use between the inflected, periphrastic and double forms from this historical-sociolinguistic perspective. The historical correspondence used for this study covers the periods from 1418 to 1800 and they have proved to be particularly useful since they yield information on events of a particular period as well as personal information on the informants and addressees, providing us with the possibility of tracing socio-linguistic variation and studying language change from a historical sociolinguistic perspective. In exploring the sociolinguistic behaviour of informants over prolonged periods of time, private letters, written by members of several generations from the same community of practice, social rank or family, have been considered as one of the closest genres to oral registers (Romaine, 1998: 18). Furthermore, private letters are enormously useful as a linguistic resource for tracing linguistic variation and reconstructing socio-linguistic behaviour of speakers at the macro-level to explore how changes in progress spread cross-sectionally and longitudinally (paying attention to macro-sociological aspects such as social rank, age, gender, etc.) and at the micro-level by studying the linguistic behaviour of individual speakers. In consonance with these claims, a further analysis has also been carried out to explore intra-speaker variation by applying current sociolinguistic theories such as Bell¿s models of Audience Design (1984, 2001) so as to find out possible addressee-based patterns and motivations for style-shifting in the communicative interaction of our informants, regarding the social status of the addresser and the addressee during Early/Late Middle English. Results suggest that there is gender and social-status variation in the use of the periphrastic form along the centuries, showing higher rates of use in letters by members from uppers social orders, which indicates a generational change from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Furthermore, the observation of intra-speaker variation to our data from historical written correspondence has allowed us to detect addressee-based patterns of style-shifting in the communicative interaction of our informants. This reflects language choice for the transmission of social meaning in epistolary communication, exhibiting upward accommodation in letters by members from lower ranks when addressed to upper-rank recipients by showing higher rates of the periphrastic comparative form. This point to the fact that the periphrastic form could have been introduced into the English language through upper social ranks, which leads us to think that this form could have been considered as more prestigious than the inflectional one.