English Language Studies

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/06/books/review/the-wake-by-paul-kingsnorth.html?_r=0

A Stanford scholar has discovered that the version of the Magna Carta in Salisbury was in fact not written — as previously assumed — in the Chancery in London, but by a local scribe. This finding has consequences for how we understand the distribution of documents in medieval England:
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/september/magna-carta-scribe-090115.html

http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/08/new-words-update-manspreading-mic-drop/

The Yale Grammatical Diversity Project is studying a number of syntactic phenomena in North American English, such as “done my homework”, “so don’t I”, double is, positive “anymore”, “have yet to”, double comparatives, and so on. You can read about the phenomenon and see where they have found it used in North America. Go to:

http://microsyntax.sites.yale.edu/phenomena

Linguist Asya Pereltsvaig and geographer/historian Martin Lewis have a new book entitled The Indo-European Controversy: Facts and Fallacies in Historical Linguistics (Cambridge University Press, 2015). In it they argue against the evolutionary biologists Gray and Aitkinson, whose article in Science in 2012 gained wide attention, especially in the popular press (see earlier post, August 23, 2012).

Here the authors discuss their criticism of the Gray-Aitkinson model in this interview:
http://newbooksinlanguage.com/2015/07/21/the-indo-european-controversy-facts-and-fallacies-in-historical-linguistics-cambridge-university-press-2015/

Pereltsvaig and Lewis argue that any theory of the Indo-Europeans must be based on linguistic evidence. They argue that the Gray-Aitkinson model is based solely on words, which linguists recognize as – in some ways – the least important part of language; they are also skeptical that borrowings have been eliminated from the Gray-Aitkinson model. They point out that this model assumes that language can spread only via demic diffusion, thus rejecting the possibility of migration, language contact, and rapid spread (all of which we know has happened). Overall, they find the Gray-Aitkinson model simplistic and clearly in conflict with many of the known linguistic facts.

We have long known from studies of contemporary English that language change begins with young women. We now have “real-time”, historical evidence (from Early Modern letters) that young women are language innovators:

http://qz.com/474671/move-over-shakespeare-teen-girls-are-the-real-language-disruptors/

Read about the work of historical sociolinguists Terttu Nevalainen and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg:

http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~cpercy/courses/6362-gregoire.htm

This short article from Maclean’s describes the Canadian Shift:

http://www.macleans.ca/society/life/in-the-midst-of-the-canadian-vowel-shift/

More details can be found in the Wikipedia entry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Shift

or in this article:

http://www.meredithtamminga.com/documents/CLA2008_Sadlier-Brown_Tamminga.pdf

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/22/opinion/is-this-a-selfie.html?_r=0

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/16/science/dna-deciphers-roots-of-modern-europeans.html?_r=0

From NYT:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/09/science/study-finds-literary-mood-reflects-previous-decades-economy.html?_r=0