English 375, History of the English Language

Research Essay

Goals: This project is a chance for you to explore in more detail some theme, issue, or aspect of language that grows out of the course. It is also a chance for you to learn some strategies for doing historical language research.

Topic: The list of suggested topics below is a guide; you may choose one of those projects, or invent one of your own. I’ll be happy to give you guidance as you decide. Any topic, of course, should require substantial research.

Expectations: As you can see from the topic suggestions, the kind of thinking I’m looking for in this paper is to apply to a particular case what you’ve learned about the history of English and resources for studying it. This will mean something different depending on the particular topic you choose. I’ll be looking for whether you’ve done appropriate research (and, of course, cited and documented your sources appropriately), how illuminating your thesis is, how effective your argument is, and all the things that go into a well-written essay. You should come to an informed conclusion about some dimension of language use, change, history, or variety.

The Proposal: If you choose to do the research paper instead of the final exam, I ask that on Oct. 24 you turn in a proposal of what you plan to do. This should include:

· A statement of the topic. What question(s) are you interested in pursuing?

· Any ideas you have so far about what research will be necessary and how to do this research.

I will give you some feedback on the topic and any suggestions I might have about research. This proposal is not binding—you could change your topic later, but you should write another proposal.

Documentation: All papers must be thoroughly documented. I prefer the MLA style with parenthetical citations in the text that refer to a list of works cited at the end. For directions on how to cite electronic sources, consult The New St. Martin’s Handbook or www.mla.org.

The Oxford English Dictionary will be a major source for many projects, and to refer to the OED you may use parenthetic references with the abbreviation “OED” and, if appropriate, a reference to a numbered sense in the entry, such as (OED, sense 8). If the headword of the entry you’re referring to is not clear from your text, include that too, e.g. (OED, “word,” sense 8). Avoid copying unfamiliar abbreviations from the dictionary into your essay. If you are using the printed OED, consult the lists of abbreviations at the front (for abbreviations used in etymologies and definitions) and the back (for titles of sources of quotations). If you are using the online dictionary, consult the necessary help screens.

Length: Appropriate length will depend somewhat on the nature of the project, but think of a ballpark figure of at least 2000 words.

Due: A complete draft is due on Tuesday, Nov. 21. I will return these after Thanksgiving with comments meant to help you revise your final draft, which is due Thursday, Dec. 7.

I’d be glad talk with you about your essay at any stage, from conception to revision.

Suggested Projects

1. Philological explication: Choose a brief poem, or a brief passage of a longer work in verse or prose, from any period of literature in English, and explicate its sense using the tools of philology you have learned in this course. For example, use the OED to explore all the possible meanings of important words and their etymologies. Pay attention also to form and style. A distinction is often drawn between philology and literary criticism, but this kind of literary analysis is where the two most often meet. Any work of literature is fair game, including those by the Inklings and those written for children or adolescents. For a good example of philological analysis of The Lord of the Rings, see Tom Shippey’s books The Road to Middle Earth and J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. Pages 68-77 of the latter, for instance, contain a brilliant stylistic analysis of the “Council of Elrond” chapter. If you need further guidance on what is involved in literary explication, I have a handout I’d be happy to give you.

2. Literary representation of varieties of English. Analyze the representation of a variety (or varieties) of English within a literary work. Depending on the particular example, you might consider questions such as: Is the variety represented accurately according to what we know from other sources? What methods does the author use to represent it effectively? What does this variety of English signify in the text? What attitudes about the language and its varieties are apparent? If different characters speak in different dialects, for example, what are the social consequences for them? In general, I will be looking for you to make some connections between the example you choose and issues that we are discussing in the course, but the particular direction you go with your essay will depend a lot on the work or works you choose to study. Some examples of works that might lend themselves well to this kind of study: regional and social varieties of English in works by Mark Twain or Toni Morrison, or historical varieties in a work like Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court; regional or cultural varieties in contemporary children’s literature. You could also do something similar with an oral medium such as a film or record album.

3. Lexical snapshot. Examine the new words that were coming into English at a particular time in history. You could look at them from a number of perspectives: How do they reflect the wider history of the time? What patterns are visible in their sources, and why? What patterns are apparent in their grammatical nature (part of speech, inflectional forms)? What segment of society seems to have been responsible for pushing the growth of the lexicon?

American Speech, the journal of the American Dialect Society, contains a new word section in each issue, going back to 1925. Many dictionaries have such lists too. The OED, of course, gives earliest known usages in print for each word. The book English Through the Ages lists words according to when the OED shows them entering the language (I have a copy you may borrow).

4. Fictional new English. Examine a novel in which a new variety of English is invented, such as Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue, Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, or Anthony Burgess’s Clockwork Orange. How does the new language come about? How does it differ from current standard English? How does it compare to patterns of real historical change in English? What cultural functions is it represented as serving?

You could also look at a work that invents many new terms, such as Tolkien’s fiction or Orwell’s 1984. How do the new terms relate to the existing language? How are they important to the literary aims and effects of the work as a whole?

5. Usage issues. Examine the history of a rule devised in response to a perceived usage problem, as David Crystal does with the prohibition of split infinitives on CEEL p. 195. Use an assortment of handbooks, grammar books, and perhaps dictionaries to get a variety of viewpoints. For a good current perspective consult Barbara Wallraff’s Word Court (I have a copy). Choose one or two issues and examine the historical roots of the rules, guidelines, or prescriptions. How do they reflect the wider history of attitudes toward English?

6. Group English. Examine the English used by a particular group or region. How does it change over time? How does it bind the group together and set it apart from others? How do individual users shift between that variety of English and other, more standard varieties? How does this variety compare to patterns of social variation that linguists have found elsewhere?

7. English style. Examine the style of a particular kind of writing, such as newspaper writing (e.g. The Anchor) or writing for children, using the same source over a period of time. Analyze shifts of vocabulary, grammar, tone, punctuation, etc. How might these reflect larger trends in the history of English?

8. Dictionaries. Analyze closely the approaches to English taken by two or three recent dictionaries. How do they approach change, variety, and usage? What attitudes toward language does each embody? What are the historical roots of those attitudes? What audience is each aimed at? What kinds of users would be likely to find each one appealing, or dangerous? What aims set them apart from each other? How well does each succeed?

9. Teaching English. Choose an issue in the teaching of English and examine it from a historical perspective. What is the history of the issue? How can the history of English be brought to bear on thinking about this particular issue? Or, what are some instructional applications (as the Michigan Dept. of Education puts it) of the history of English? Or, look at some aspect of the teaching of English and how it has changed over the years. The Joint Archives in the bottom floor of Van Wylen could be a good resource for looking at the history the teaching of English at Hope.

10. Word Biography. Choose a word, or a group of related words, and write an essay discussing its etymology. I’ll be looking for connections to the larger history of English as we’ve discussed it in the course. Meanings of words are clues to the history of how people at different times have thought, so this is also an opportunity to make connections between language and larger intellectual and cultural history. Our reading, especially from History in English Words by Owen Barfield, will give you more of an idea of what kind of connections are possible. C. S. Lewis’s Studies in Words offers another example of the kind of thing I have in mind. In one way or another, your essay should address the roots of the word in other languages (if any), what path the word you pick took from its first use in English to its modern usage, and how it exemplifies typical patterns of semantic change. Etymologies are often speculative, especially when they touch on larger historical connections, so I encourage you to engage in some reasonable speculation. Your essay should present a thesis about the word you have chosen and develop it by telling the word’s story. In other words, your essay should tell a story that answers the question “What is interesting about this word?” In addition to the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary, you should consult the following because their etymologies for most words reflect more recent scholarship (all in the reference section of Van Wylen): American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition (reference desk), Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (PE1580 O5 1969), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology (PE1580 .B35 1988), Origins by Eric Partridge (PE1580 P3), Webster’s Word Histories (PE1580 W35). You may also find good etymological material in specialized dictionaries that include the word you choose, both in print and on the web (e.g. dictionary of feminist thought for “gender,” a dictionary of literary terms for “romance”). For recent patterns of usage, the Worldwide Web and Lexis/Nexis can each provide quick access to a large sample for analysis. For literary use since the sixteenth century or so, the Literature Online (LION) database can let you search a lot of stuff at once. One way to choose a word might be to choose a word that is important to a particular literary work and focus your essay on explaining the full meaning of the word for a modern reader of that work. A couple of words that have occurred to me recently as potentially interesting topics for this kind of a paper are “hope,” “naughty,” “liquidate,” “astronomy/astrology,” and “cute.”

11. Owen Barfield’s theories of poetic diction and the evolution of consciousness. Topic 1: How does Barfield apply his ideas about meaning in language to poetry in Poetic Diction? How would you apply them to poetry that you know and love? Topic 2: Barfield articulates a large theory of the evolution of consciousness in Saving the Appearances and the essays collected in The Rediscovery of Meaning. How might this theory help us understand a work of literature, drama, or film? Further suggestion: I think Barfield is especially valuable for understanding aspects of what has come to be called postmodernism.

12. Set of lesson plans. Prepare a detailed series of lesson plans for a course (e.g. a high school English course) based on the philological study of language and literature. For this I would expect something longer than 2000 words in order to reflect an equal amount of effort to what would go into a regular essay. Also, you would still need to do research beyond our course texts; your bibliography might become a list of resources for yourself, a fellow teacher, or your students.