Markku FILPPULA, Joensuu (Finland)

The Celtic Hypothesis hasnt gone away: New Perspectives on Old Debates

The extent of Celtic influences in English has been a matter of debate for over a century now. Ever since the
authoritative statements by scholars like Otto Jespersen (see, esp. Jespersen 1905), the majority of scholarly opinion has
been content to endorse the Received View, which holds that the Celtic impact upon English has been minimal on all
levels of language, despite the close coexistence of the speakers of these two (groups of) languages for some 1500
years. Jespersen himself put this down to the socially and politically inferior status of the Celts vis--vis their Anglo-
Saxon conquerors in the centuries following the Germanic invasions of Britain. This view was subsequently cemented
by Max Frsters seminal study of the Celtic loanwords in English (Frster 1921).
Despite the dominance of the Received View, dissident voices emerged at regular intervals throughout the 20
th

century, and instead of fading away, they have become even more vocal in the most recent research on this question
(see, e.g. Hickey 1995, Tristram 1999, Vennemann 2000, van der Auwera / Genee 2002, and the papers contained in
Filppula et al. [eds] 2002). The latest example is the plenary lecture given by John McWhorter at the DELS conference
in Manchester in April, 2006. Focusing on comparative syntactic evidence, he argued for a significant input from Celtic
to the emergence of periphrastic DO in English.
The approach adopted in the present lecture differs from most previous works in that an attempt will be made to
embrace both the linguistic and extra-linguistic evidence pertaining to the issue. It has become evident by now that no
significant progress can be made anymore by concentrating on just one linguistic feature at a time, without regard to the
overall sociohistorical picture of the contact situation and its linguistic outcomes across a wider range of linguistic
features and levels of language. The former aspect includes the demographic and other historical evidence relating to
the relationships between the Celts and the Anglo-Saxons, while the latter entails putting the putative linguistic
influences from Celtic into a general contact-linguistic as well as an areal-typological perspective.
It will be argued, first, that the sociohistorical circumstances surrounding the English-Celtic interface were such
that linguistic influences from Celtic upon English were not just possible, but a natural consequence of the language
shift situation. Secondly, the claimed paucity of Celtic loanwords in English does not constitute evidence against
contact effects at the other levels of language; on the contrary, it is exactly what can be expected on the basis of general
contact-linguistic theory. Thirdly, many features of English grammar have characteristics that cannot be satisfactorily
explained as independent developments or as results of contacts with any other than the Celtic languages. Fourthly, the
linguistic characteristics of the so-called Celtic Englishes that have emerged in the modern period provide yet another
important source of indirect evidence supporting the Celtic Hypothesis with regard to the medieval contacts.

References
Filppula, M. / Klemola, J. / Pitknen, H. (eds) 2002. The Celtic Roots of English. Joensuu: Joensuu UP.
Frster, M. 1921. Keltisches Wortgut im Englischen: Eine Sprachliche Untersuchung. Halle: Niemeyer.
Hickey, R. 1995. Early Contact and Parallels between English and Celtic. VIEW[Z] (Vienna English Working Papers) 4/2: 87-119.
Jespersen, O. 1905. Growth and Structure of the English Language. Leipzig: B.G. Teubner.
McWhorter, J. 2006. What else happened to English?: A brief for the Celtic Hypothesis. Plenary lecture, DELS, Manchester , 6-8 April, 2006.
Tristram, H.L.C. 1999. How Celtic is Standard English?. St. Petersburg: Nauka.
Van der Auwera, J. / Genee, I. 2002. English do: On the Convergence of Languages and Linguists. English Language and Linguistics 6/2: 283-307.
Vennemann, T. 2000. English as a Celtic language: Atlantic influences from above and from below. In Tristram, H.L.C. (ed.), The Celtic Englishes
II. Heidelberg: Winter, 399-406.


Andreas H. JUCKER, Zurich (Switzerland)
Politeness in the History of English

Present Day British English has been claimed to tend towards negative politeness and to favour off-record strategies and
non-conventional indirectness (e.g. Brown / Levinson 1987: 245; Stewart 2005, 118, 128).
But the British have not always been a negative politeness culture. In fact, many researchers have claimed that in
the history of the English language a clear move from a positive politeness culture to a negative politeness culture can
be discerned (e.g. Kopytko 1995). Jucker / Taavitsainen (forthc.) in their analysis of apologies in the history of English
argue that EModE focused on addressee based requests for forgiveness and understanding, such as excuse me or pardon
me, while PDE focuses on the speakers own feelings of remorse (I am sorry) without imposing any request on the
addressee to forgive or understand. However, if we extend our perspective further back, several scholars have provided
evidence for an increase in positive politeness from ME to EModE, e.g. Nevalainen / Raumolin-Brunberg (1995) and
Nevala (2004), who analyzed address terms and subscription formulae in English family correspondence from the LME
to the seventeenth century.
In this paper I will pull together a number of case studies that provide relevant evidence in the history of
politeness in English. I shall first look at pronominal terms of address in the history of English (thou and ye). The
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second case study will draw on some recent research on the politeness in Shakespeares plays. And finally, I will
present some studies that have been carried out on directives and apologies in the history of English. Both these speech
acts are particularly relevant in terms of politeness because directives constitute face threats to the addressees negative
face, while apologies threaten the speakers own positive face.

References
Brown, P. / Levinson, S.C. 1987. Politeness. Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: CUP.
Jucker, A.H. (ed.) 1995. Historical Pragmatics. Pragmatic Developments in the History of English. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Jucker, A.H. / Taavitsainen, I. (forthc.) Apologies in the History of English: Routinized and Lexicalized Expressions of Responsibility and Regret. In
Kastovsky, D. / Mettinger, A. (eds) Proceedings of the Conference on Lexical Change and the Genesis of the English Vocabulary (LECH).
Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Koptytko, R. 1995. Linguistic Politeness Strategies in Shakespeares Plays. In Jucker (ed.), 515-540.
Nevala, M. 2004. Accessing Politeness Axes: Forms of Address and Terms of Reference in Early English Correspondence. Journal of Pragmatics 36,
2125-2160.
Nevalainen, T. / Raumolin-Brunberg, H. 1995. Constraints on Politeness: The Pragmatics of Address Formulae in Early English Correspondence. In
Jucker (ed.), 541-601.
Stewart, M. 2005. Politeness in Britain: Its only a suggestion.... In Hickey, L. / Stewart, M. (eds) Politeness in Europe. Clevedon: Multilingual
Matters, 116-129.


Ans VAN KEMENADE, Nijmegen (The Netherlands)
The Balance between Discourse and Syntax in Old and Middle English

In this paper, I will present an in-depth discussion of Old and Middle English word order. The three main points of the
paper will be the following:
OE clause structure is organised in terms of discourse domains, some of which are clearly marked off by a class
of elements that function as discourse particles. It will be argued that the prime function of these particles (e.g.
a, onne, nu, eac, la) is to signal the separation between discourse-anaphoric elements in the clause and other
elements (e.g. scrambled and focussed elements). Discourse anaphoric elements include all pronouns, in
particular also demonstrative pronouns, which, beside marking definiteness in the Noun Phrase, can ensure
specific reference to a NP in the discourse. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evidence will be presented,
based on the York Corpus of Old English and the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English2, to show the
intra-clausal and inter-clausal relationships as signalled in this discourse organization. In the transition to ME,
the discourse system as presented for OE undergoes profound changes, and it will be argued that the result of
these changes is a more clearly syntactic organization of the clause. I will address the question of how and why
this may have happened.
Some detailed evidence for ME will be presented. My hypothesis is that a number of the relics of OE discoursy
word orders are reinterpreted as being more purely syntactically defined. Relic OV word orders of various types
show interesting regional variations that are more readily definable in syntactic terms than in discourse terms.
The upshot of the discussion of the first two points is that the transition from OE to ME is quite a drastic one
(pace the emphasis on its gradualness in the literature on the loss of OV word order). The data and analysis
presented here do justice to what gradualness there is in the transition from OE to ME word order patterns (by
showing how the surface patterns are related), yet make it clear that there is a fundamental underlying shift from
a more discourse-driven organization to a more syntax-driven organization.


Margaret LAING, Edinburgh (Scotland)
The Early Middle English Scribe: sprach er wie er schrieb?

Background

(a) [...] Old English manuscripts were as far as possible faithfully transcribed [...]. On the other hand, there appear, in the first half of
the 12
th
century, records that break with the old tradition. This direction prevailed and one wrote as one spoke [man schrieb wie man
sprach]: from then on till well into the 14
th
century all English written works progress in local dialects (Luick 1921: 27).

(b) We have now reached the end of the thirteenth century, and we can say that, in English, scribes never wrote as they spoke: man
schrieb nie wie man sprach (Stanley 1988: 328).

(c) [...] to an accomplished reader it does not [...] matter a jot whether his native language is phonetically spelt or not; what is
important to him is that the group of letters before him shall be that which habit has led him to associate with a certain word. [...]


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many written words have become direct symbols of their meanings (Bradley 1919: 7).

(d) In ways that speech is not, writing is subject to design: [...] The evolved orthographies of the later middle ages, moreover, may
have extensive grammars of interchange, the cumulative and partly systematised legacies of sound-change and calligraphic
development (Benskin 1991: 226).

(e) The complexity displayed by some early Middle English writing systems arises from the availability, to a text community of
multilingual writers, of large numbers of orthographic variants to realize certain sounds. [...] these litteral substitution sets may lead
to writing systems of rich prodigality in the mapping of littera to potestas. But [...] the recognition of potestatic substitution sets
derived from the litteral ones can reduce the appearance of complexity [...] and reveal in some part the continuum we believe to have
existed for early Middle English dialects
(Laing / Lass 2003: 268).

The relations between spoken and written language
Luicks dictum man schrieb wie man sprach has been an important generalisation for the historical study of English.
That is not to say that all spelling variation in ME is phonologically conditioned: it would be hard to interpret the
writing of <-full> vs <-ful> in this way, while the use of <y> for is ultimately a calligraphic innovation. Since
Luicks day it has been shown that regional spelling variation in some of its features may be independent of
phonological variation in other words, written ME is not a simple mapping of all and only the features of the spoken
language. None of this alters the fact that ME spelling overall is inescapably a nexus of sound and symbol. (Attempts at
purely graphemic analysis of ME variation are not enlightening: see Michael Benskins critique at this conference). The
nexus, however, itself has a historical dimension. The dynamics of the written language and its corresponding spoken
language are seldom the same: a consistent phonetic or even phonemic mapping is not to be expected except in writing
systems that are new. Stanleys rebuttal of Luick is therefore hardly more than a truism. But the relationship between
sound and symbol in the EME period is unusually complex, and my titles reversal of Luicks dictum seeks to draw
attention to its importance and subtlety.

The early Middle English scribe
Bradleys remarks (written in the context of the debate about spelling reform) may well be true for modern readers. But
the situation for EME scribes was very different:
1. they were by necessity spelling re-formers because the only models they had for writing English were over a
hundred years old and did not reflect the contemporary language or its dialectal variation;
2. they were familiar with other models of mapping sound to symbol Anglo-Latin and Anglo-French;
3. there was no standard written language and little evidence that many would have regarded such a thing as desirable;
4. as copyists of texts, they were not just reading their exemplars, but also recreating them a process that might
involve dialectal translation;
5. when reading a text in an unfamiliar dialect, it is quite likely that they would have sounded out (whether aloud or
silently) what they were reading as part of the decoding and recoding process.

What were they saying?
The process of remapping sounds to symbol in the EME period gives rise to a number of highly profligate systems that
have been written about elsewhere (Laing 1999, Laing / Lass 2003, Lass / Laing 2005, and see also Roger Lasss paper
in this conference). Here I will use examples from EME scribes whose writing systems are not especially complex
(including comparison with the French usage of some that also write texts in that language). I will illustrate how, in
different parts of the country, there is variability in what parts of the system show stability and what parts seem to
indicate processes of variation and change, and I will attempt to extrapolate some sound substance from the written
variety.

References
Benskin, M. 1991. In Reply to Dr Burton. Leeds Studies in English N.S. 22, 209-262.
Bradley, H. 1919. On the Relations between Spoken and Written Language with Special Reference to English. Oxford: Clarendon.
Kastovsky, D. / Bauer, G. (eds) 1988. Luick Revisited: Papers Read at the Luick-Symposium at Schloss Liechtenstein, 15.18.9.1985. Tbingen. Narr.
Laing, M. 1999. Confusion wrs Confounded: Litteral Substitution Sets in Early Middle English Writing Systems. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 100,
251-270.
Laing, M. / Lass, R. 2003. Tales of the 1001 nists: the Phonological Implications of Litteral Substitution Sets in Some Thirteenth-Century South-West
Midland Texts. English Language and Linguistics 7/2, 257-278.
Lass, R. / Laing, M. 2005. Are Front Rounded Vowels Retained in West Midland Middle English? In Ritt / Schendl (eds), 280-290.
Luick, K. 1921. Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache, vol. 1, part 1. Leipzig: Tauchnitz.
Ritt, N. / Schendl, H. (eds) 2005. Rethinking Middle English: Linguistic and Literary Approaches. Frankfurt / Main, etc.: Peter Lang.
Stanley, E.G. 1988. Karl Luicks Man schrieb wie man sprach and English Historical Philology. In Kastovsky / Bauer (eds), 311-334.