On the Social Diffusion of Comparative Forms in English Historical Correspondence

Abstract

The historical trajectory of English adjective comparison has sparked an interest in historical linguistics through corpus-based research. Nevertheless, this issue has been relatively unexplored through a historical sociolinguistic approach, specifically in terms of social  stratification for this variable, where epistolary documents have proved to be particularly useful in that they contain socio-demographic information about a writer’s social status, gender or age. By means of a corpus-based study of private letters drawn from the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence and the Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension, this study will trace the social diffusion of both comparative forms in England from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, which will allow us to observe language change in real time through several generations of informants at the community level. Thus, the aims of this paper are (i) to explore the existence of social stratification in synthetic and analytic comparative forms and its developmental path in sociolinguistic terms, (ii) to identify the social groups leading the use of one form or another and (iii) to identify whether the factors of etymological origin and syllable length of the adjective may have motivated the selection of comparative strategy among the different social ranks of informants.