1. Metaphors, myths, ideologies and archives 1. Defining myths 2. Conceptual metaphors and myths 3. Language myths and conceptual metaphors 4. Foucault's understanding of discourse 5. Discourse archives 6. Myths are the "stuff that ideologies are made on" 7. The structure of the book
2. Establishing a linguistic pedigree 1. The fire at Ashburnham House 2. The myth of the longewty of English 3. Tracing the growth of interest in the Beowu/[manuscript 4. The dating of Beowulf 5. Kiernan's arguments 6. Sociolinguistic arguments in favour of a Danelaw provenance for Beowulf 7. Switching discourse archives
3. Breaking the unbroken tradition 1. Linking two myths 2. Metapragmatic and metadiscursive linguistic expressions and their significance in inscribed ora:lity 3. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles and the archive they instantiated 4. The breakdown of the archive and inscribed orality 5. The disappearance of the ASC: The end of a discourse archive
4. The construction of a modern myth:Middle English as a creole 1. The creolisation hypothesis 2. The discussion thread "Is English a creole?" 3, The "Middle English is a creole" debate in the academicliterature 4. All language is language in contact 5. Simplification processes not resulting in a creole 6. Creolisation or no creolisation?
5. Barbarians and others 1. The nation-state and the notion of Kultursprache 2. Language versus a language versus the language 3. The"'other" chronicle tradition 4. Myths in the Polychronicon 5. Linking up and extending the myths 6. The central nexus of language myths
6. The myth of "greatness" 1. Introduction 2. Dating the GVS 3. A reappraisal of research work on an elusivephenomenon 4. GVS disputes 5. Challenging the GVS 6. Sociolinguistic aspects of the GVS 7. The myth of greatness reconsidered
7. Reinterpreting Swift's A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue: Challenging an embryonic modern myth 1. Potential new myths 2. The "ideology of the standard language" and the complaint tradition 3. Swift's Proposalas the beginning of a complaint tradition 4. Contcxtualising the Proposa/sociohistorically 5. Alternative readings of Swift's Proposal 6. Swift and after 8. Polishing the myths: The commercial side ofpoliteness 9. Challenging the hegemony of standard English 10. Transforming a myth to save an archive: When polite becomes educated 11. Commodifying English and constructing a new myth 12. Myths, ideologies of English and the funnel view of the history of English
References Index
精彩书摘
《牛津社会语言学丛书·语言神话与英语历史》: A further "linguistic test" for the conjectured long manuscript history of Beowulf is phonetic/metrical. The argument runs as follows: certain half lines do not appear to scan well because they contain contractions. Hence in the "original" text they must have appeared with uncontracted forms; for example, gepeeon is said to appear in place of a reconstructed original *gel:ihan. The argument is spurious, however, since, in accordance with syllable theory in phonology (Roca & Johnson 1999, chap. 9; Zec 2007), both words are trisyllabic, and we can surely expect both performers and listeners (readers) to have had a good sense of the rhythmic and metrical conventions of their own poetry. In addition, if scribes were sensible enough to change *genihan to gebeon from one older manuscript to another, why did they fail to insert definite determiners into a large percentage of determiner less noun phrases in Beowulf ? I will not run through the story of the hypothetical "early" form wundini, which resulted from a blind reliance on Zupitza's facsimile, except to say that it remains the only argument left to those who wish to use linguistic evidence to prove their hypothesis of the long manuscript history of Beowulf. Kiernan makes the eminently commonsense point that if one were to carry out a detailed study of the manuscript rather than the text, the hypothesised word wundini disappears, and the word that can be suggested (and only suggested because of the damage to the vellum at this point in the manuscript) is ,vunden, which would be perfectly normal for the poetry of the early eleventh century. How can we account for the variation of forms that occur in the Beowulf manuscript? First, we should remember that sociolinguists know very little indeed about dialectal variation in pre-Conquest times. The estimated population of England at the tum of the eleventh century was between 1.5 million and 1.8 million. With relatively poor means of transportation overland, goods were more easily carried by boat around the coasts and up the navigable rivers, which led to population clusters in coastal areas and along the courses of such rivers as the Thames, the Severn, the Humber, the Trent, the Yorkshire Ouse and the Avon. So although population in those areas was not necessarily scattered, communication between them was not always easy. We would therefore expect a reasonably broad range of spoken dialects to have evolved from the fifth to the eleventh century, but we have little to go on apart from the written documents that have survived. There are notorious difficulties in extrapolating from written documents to hypothesised oral usage, which I will not go into here. Suffice it to say that we can very broadly accept a range of dialects reaching from the northern limits of "English"-speaking territory (present-day Northumberland and the southeastern counties of lowland Scotland) down to the River Humber. These have traditionally been called "Northumbrian", although even within this large area there must have been degrees of variation. A second area stretched from the east coast south of the Humber across to the Welsh borders and as far south as the Thames valley, constituting the varieties that have tradition- ally been called "Anglian". Here, however, a language contact situation existed roughly to the east of the Roman road called Watling Street and created by widespread Danish settlement in those areas. We can assume that speakers of Danish in what was called the Danelaw area would have lost their mother tongue within roughly three generations if they were in frequent contact with speakers of Anglo-Saxon, but not before Danish had exerted a considerable lexical and morphological influence on eastern Anglian forms of Anglo- Saxon. The Danish (or it might be more appropriate to talk of "Norse") influence also extended into the Northumbrian area, and there is evidence that Danish (or Norse) was still spoken in York in the tenth century. The two remaining dialect areas were Kentish south of the River Thames in the southeastern part of the country as far as the coast, and West Saxon roughly south of the Thames to the coast and stretching west as far as the Bristol Channel coast, Cornwall and the River Severn. The struggle for the control of England after the Danish incursions of the late eighth and ninth centuries led to the hegemony of the West Saxon royal house and, from the time of King Alfred on, the imposition of a proto-standard written variety of West Saxon. ……