Language in context seminar

Speaker: Nora Dörnbrack (University of Oslo)

Title: ‘he neither eat nor sleeped but watched my sleepless hours’ - Verbal inflection patterns in the private writings of Mary AnnWodrow Archbald (1762-1841)

Abstract: This presentation explores longitudinal intra-writer variation in verbal inflections in the letters, letter books and journals of the Scottish migrant Mary Ann Wodrow Archbald (1762-1841). The study employs a qualitative analysis of the private writings at hand and is placed within the wider framework of a language history ‘from below’.

Archbald spent her childhood, adolescence and early adulthood on Little Cumbrae, a small island in the Firth of Clyde, before emigrating with her husband and four young children to America in 1807, where they settled on a farm in New York State. The data for this study are Archbald’s journals, letter books and original letters which cover more than 40 consecutive years of her life in addition to five years towards the end of her lifetime. Her writings detail her thoughts and everyday activities, prior to and after emigration, making them a valuable source for a longitudinal study on variation over the course of a writer’s lifetime.

In the focus of this presentation are features of Modern Scots verbal inflection, such as the syncretism of preterite and past participle forms in words like wrote/written, irregular preterite forms like catched, eat, keept, the past tense marker -’d in examples like employ’d, awaken’d and the use of present tense -s for all persons. Most of these features decrease in frequency, and several different factors might have contributed to this change, for example, contemporary prescriptive tendencies, the new speech community which surrounded Archbald after emigration, and her interest in contemporary literature.

Speaker bio: Nora is a Doctoral Research Fellow in English historical linguistics at the University of Oslo. She has a bachelor’s degree in Scandinavian studies and English and American studies from the University of Greifswald, Germany, and a master’s degree in Scandinavian linguistics from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. In her master’s thesis, she examined the multilingual practices of the Schleswigian immigrant Herman Hoe and his family in Trondheim, Norway, during the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Nora's dissertation project explores the linguistic practices in the private writings of a Scottish emigrant to America, Mary Ann Wodrow Archbald (1762-1841). Her journals, letter books and a handful of original letters that document her language use for over 40 years, both prior to and after emigration, form the starting point for an investigation of longitudinal intra-writer variation within the framework of a language history ’from below’.