500 Years of Past Be in East Anglia: A Variationist Investigation

Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy; David Britain

doi:10.18290/rh237106.5s

Published : 2023-07-24

Vol. 71 No. 6sp (2023)

500 Years of Past Be in East Anglia: A Variationist Investigation

Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2282-7565

David Britain

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4228-0242

DOI: https://doi.org/10.18290/rh237106.5s

Abstract

As it is widely known, the verb to be, in its different tense, person and number forms, is the most frequently used verb in both written and oral English. Additionally, at least in Standard English, it is the most irregular verb, with many different forms. However, this degree of irregularity is not universal across the English-speaking world—more regularised patterns are found in a number of non-standard varieties. Despite much empirical investigation in the variationist literature on past BE, and despite the considerable corpus of work examining East Anglian English, especially by Peter Trudgill (e.g. 2021), there has, as yet, been no variationist investigations of past BE from the core heartland of linguistic East Anglia. In this paper, we try to address this by examining datasets from East Anglia that are half a millennium apart. We begin with a historical sociolinguistic study of past BE forms in the Late Middle English stages of the history of English by observing, detecting, quantifying and analysing their presence in one of the most important linguistic corpora of the period: the Internet electronic edition of the (East Anglian) Paston Letters from the Virginia University Electronic Text Center. We then, much nearer to the present-day, scrutinise a more contemporary corpus of East Anglian English for variable patterns of past BE, namely Peter Trudgill’s own corpus of sociolinguistic interviews from Norwich in the 1960s (see Trudgill, 1974). While the data are (understandably) of very different kinds, our analysis enables us to broaden our understanding of past BE variability, both diachronically and synchronically, by adding East Anglia to the map.

Keywords:

historical sociolinguistics, past BE, levelling, language variation and change, Paston Letters, Norwich, East Anglia, Northern Subject Rule, polarity

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Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy

jmcampoy@um.es
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2282-7565

Affiliation:

University of Murcia Spain

Bio Statement (e.g., department and rank)

Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy is Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of Murcia in Spain, where he teaches Sociolinguistics, Varieties of English, History of English, and sociolinguistic research methods. His research areas include sociolinguistics, dialectology, and socio-stylistics, with special interest in language variation and change, where he has published books such as Sociolinguistic Styles (2016), Style-Shifting in Public (with J. A. Cutillas-Espinosa, 2012), The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics (with J. C. Conde-Silvestre, 2012), Diccionario de Sociolingüística (with P. Trudgill, 2007), Metodología de la Investigación Sociolingüística (with M. Almeida, 2005), Sociolinguistics and the History of English (with J. C. Conde-Silvestre, 2005), Geolingüística (1999), Variation and Linguistic Change in English (with J. C. Conde-Silvestre, 1999), and Sociolingüística Británica (1993), as well as numerous articles in leading journals.

David Britain

david.britain@unibe.ch
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4228-0242

Affiliation:

University of Bern Switzerland

Bio Statement (e.g., department and rank)

David Britain has been Professor of Modern English Linguistics at the University of Bern in Switzerland since 2010. His research interests embrace language variation and change, varieties of English (especially in Southern and Eastern England, the Southern Hemisphere, especially New Zealand, Australia and the Falkland Islands, and the Pacific, especially Micronesia), dialect contact and attrition, new dialect formation, second dialect acquisition, dialect ideologies and the use of new technologies, such as smartphone applications, in collecting dialect data. He is also actively engaged in research at the dialectology-human geography interface, especially with respect to space/place, urban/rural and the role of mobilities. He is co-author (with Laura Rupp) of Linguistic perspectives on a variable English morpheme: Let’s talk about -s (2019), editor of Language in the British Isles (2007), co-editor (with Jenny Cheshire) of Social Dialectology (2003), and co-author of Linguistics: An Introduction (with Andrew Radford, Martin Atkinson, Harald Clahsen and Andrew Spencer) (2nd ed., 2009). He was Associate Editor of the Journal of Sociolinguistics between 2008 and 2017.