Janne Skaffari

Some of these windows were opened by historical linguists who have acquired discourse perspectives, some by pragmaticians with historical interests, and others by literary scholars drawing from linguistic pragmatics."--BOOK JACKET.

Opening Windows on Texts and Discourses of the Past

Laura Wright

Päivi Pahta

Texts of the past were often not monolingual but were produced by and for people with bi- or multilingual repertoires; the communicative practices witnessed in them therefore reflect ongoing and earlier language contact situations. However, textbooks and earlier research tend to display a monolingual bias. This collected volume on multilingual practices in historical materials, including code-switching, highlights the importance of a multilingual approach. The authors explore multilingualism in hitherto neglected genres, periods and areas, introduce new methods of locating and analysing multiple languages in various sources, and review terminology, theories and tools. The studies also revisit some of the issues already introduced in previous research, such as Latin interacting with European vernaculars and the complex relationship between code-switching and lexical borrowing. Collectively, the contributors show that multilingual practices share many of the same features regardless of time and place, and that one way or the other, all historical texts are multilingual. This book takes the next step in historical multilingualism studies by establishing the relevance of the multilingual approach to understanding language history.

English and Beyond

Multilingual Practices in Language History

Aleksi Makilahde

Matti Peikola

Hanna Salmi

Mari-Liisa Varila

When reading a text our understanding of its meaning is influenced by the visual form and material features of the page. The chapters in this volume investigate how visual and material features of early English books, documents, and other artefacts support - or potentially contradict - the linguistic features in communicating the message. In addition to investigating how such communication varies between different media and genres, our contributors propose novel methods for analysing these features, including new digital applications. They map the use of visual and material features - such as layout design or choice of script/typeface - against linguistic features - such as code-switching, lexical variation, or textual labels - to consider how these choices reflect the communicative purposes of the text, for example guiding readers to navigate the text in a certain way or persuading them to arrive at a certain interpretation. The chapters explore texts from the medieval and the early modern periods, including saints' lives, medical treatises, dictionaries, personal letters, and inscriptions on objects. The thematic threads running through the volume serve to integrate book studies with discourse linguistics, the medieval with the early modern, manuscript with print, and the verbal with the visual.

Janne Skaffari

Books

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