Readers of TMR may know Manfred Goerlach from his work on the South English Legendary. Those medievalists who double as teachers of the history of the Engl ish language will certainly know his many books on varieties and periods of English, and especially his contribution to the Cambridge History of the English Language, vol. III, 1476-1776, "Regional and Social Variation." In the present work, Goerlach assembles five critical essays. All have previously appeared in various print venues; here they appear in revised form and with a cumulative updated bibliography. They include the following:
(1) "Functional Selection and Variation in Early Modern E nglish," an examination of various linguistic parameters of Renaissance English--spelling, morphology, syntax and so on, with particular attention to the comparative influence of the native and Latin traditions on the emerging standard;
(2) "On Writing the History of a Syntactic Construction," an analysis of the Modern English construction "'than which/whom' with a negative comparison" (e.g., "then whom there is nothyng more deare"), with evidence from twenty computer-searchable text corpora (more than fifty pages of examples dated 1340 to 1968);
(3) "Towards a Historical Dialectology of English" (for which, see below);
(4) "Social Class and Linguistic Correctness in 19th-Century England," a detailed look at the rise of "proper" English in the context of an emerging industrial state with an increasingly educated populace, a time when "propriety in linguistic conduct was more relevant for social success . . . than possibly at any other period"; and
(5) "French in 19th Century Britain," a study of t he state of the French language in England in the 19th century and the changes wrought by social, educational and political factors; a particular focus is the influence of French on the lexicon, an area which the author analyzes via the electronic second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).
As shown by the titles, no overarching theme unites the papers, which appear here in roughly chronological order. Of most interest to medievalists will be the general essay "Towards a Historical Dialectology of English," which addresses the dialectology of Old and Middle as well as of Modern English. Even here, however, the pickings are decidedly slim. Only two of 68 pages are devoted to English before 1450, and those two pages have mainly negative findings. "The scarcity of the OE written evidence and its preservation largely in West Saxon manuscript copies is such that no dialectology in the modern sense can possibly be based on it" (96). The situation for Middle English is little better: "The sheer amount of ME linguistic forms is overwhelming, but their interpretability often severely restricted," the problem being the lack of "datable and localizable" manuscripts, and especially of autographs (97).
While acknowledging Middle English dialectology as a potentially promising research field, Goerlach minimizes the evidence of the Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English because of its restricted historical range (1350-1450), and because of its scanting of phonological information: "ME variation has been thoroughly analysed only on the level of spelling--a level that is not used in modern dialectology" (97). Such partial coverage, of course, invites more detailed analysis aiming to bridge this gap. One supposes that researchers will find such an enterprise greatly facilitated by the Dictionary of Old English corpus, the now complete Middle English Dictionary, the Middle English Compendium (the corpus of Middle English texts on which the MED is based) and the newly assembled (or now assembling) corpora of Modern English.
For such practitioners of corpus linguistics, several of Goerlach's studies (e.g., Chapters 2 and 5) may be viewed as examples of historical linguistic work based on corpus searches--lessons illustrating what sorts of questions may be asked and how textual corpora may be tweaked into providing suitable answers. The value of such a model should not be minimized, given the very recent emergence of corpus linguistics as a field of study and the even more recent availability of Old and Middle English corpora with which to work. Not all of the findings are revolutionary: Goerlach reaffirms the limitations of the OED database, and, concerning newer and presumably sounder corpora, his attitude is similarly cautionary.
And researchers on early English, whether dissertation writers or practicing linguists, might do worse than to follow the lead which Goerlach presents throughout the volume. Previous literature on any given topic receives careful attention, nor is only recent scholarship cited. It is quite clear, for example, that Goerlach has closely studied early metalinguistic texts such as those in the series "English Linguistics, 1500-1800" (ed. R. Alston), and they sometimes offer him a fresh historical perspective on linguistic phenomena. In one such interesting aside, Goerlach cites Nowell's sixteenth-century Vocabularium Saxonicum as a witness to the dialect lexis of Old English as well as of Early Modern English--a telling instance of how the study of Modern English may be advanced by reference to earlier forms of the language.
To sum up with a general evaluation: although Aspects of the History of English has limited relevance for a strictly medievalist audience, it offers five interesting essays that will appeal to students of the history of the language. Throughout, it presents an admirable model for those seeking to do linguistic research in medieval texts, and for the relatively new area of corpus linguistics, readers receive the benefit of a master linguist's experience. Particularly deserving of mention is the author's constant critical evaluation of the linguistic evidence which he brings to bear, and the careful limiting statements concerning the validity of his conclusions. A necessary caution: the studies are detailed and somewhat technical, and more suitable for those with some degree of specialized linguistic interest.
Many positive reviews save negative comments till the end, and this one is no exception. The auth or touts his Chapter 3 "Towards a Historical Dialectology . . ." as a major updating of his chapter in the Cambridge History, written in 1989 and submitted in final form in 1991. I am happy to receive the essay as such, but to the editor and publisher one would like to say how disconcerting it is to find such an expensive and so recently arrived volume as the CHEL III rendered so quickly obsolete. Of course, every major publishing venture has its story (and I note that the volume III of CHEL appeared out of sequence), but a lapse of ten years from manuscript to print is so prodigious that merely to point it out is sufficient chiding.