Abstract for Linguistics Meets Book History: Seeking New Approaches (A Pragmatics on the Page Symposium), 24-25 October 2014, Turku, Finland.
Samuli Kaislaniemi
University of Helsinki
Code-switching in historical texts has been gaining attention from scholars over the last few years (e.g. Schendl & Wright 2011). At the same time, researchers working on code-switching in contemporary texts have started to investigate the visual and multimodal aspects involved (e.g. Sebba 2013). This turn to the visual has also been seen in work on historical texts (e.g. Kendall et al. 2013), but research on visual aspects of code-switching in historical texts remains in its infancy.
That said, there has been little work even on such common contemporary conventions as typographic flagging (cf. Grant-Russell 1998: 479-480). Although we still commonly use italics to mark foreign words or phrases, it is not generally known that this convention derives from historical typographical practices for textual emphasis. These practices in printed texts in turn ultimately stem from medieval scribal traditions of associating scripts with languages. Just as Tudor books printed in blackletter use Roman typeface to emphasise or flag words and phrases, Early Modern English manuscripts written in Secretary script use Roman or italic script for emphasis.
In analogy of the term code-switching, I call this practice script-switching.
The practice of script-switching correlating with code-switching has not gone completely unnoticed (see esp. Machan 2011). But we have yet to see even pilot studies of script-switching in Early Modern English, and its linguistic aspects remain uninvestigated. For instance, script-switching can be used to determine code boundaries: does the absence of script-switching indicate (fully) integrated borrowings? Script-switching also reveals information about scribal practices and linguistic competence: there were distinct ‘national’ scripts, such as English Secretary, French Secretary, and Spanish italic, so being able to write a ‘foreign’ script implies knowledge of the language it indicates.
This pilot study has two parts. First, I will chart and analyse the use of code-switching and script-switching in a corpus of about one hundred letters written by an English merchant living in France 1603-1608. Then I will investigate a small corpus of comparable contemporary printed material extracted from EEBO, looking at code-switching and font-switching. The discussion of results will focus on the correlation of script-/font- and code-switching and its implications, both from a linguistic and a palaeographical perspective.
References
Grant-Russell, Pamela. 1998. “The influence of French on Quebec English: Motivation for lexical borrowing and integration of loanwords”. LACUS Forum 25: 473-486.
Kendall, Judy, Manuel Portela & Glyn White (eds.). 2013. European Journal of English Studies 17(1), special issue on Visual Text.
Machan, Tim William. 2011. “The visual pragmatics of code-switching in late Middle English literature”. In Schendl, Herbert & Laura Wright (eds.), 303-333.
Schendl, Herbert & Laura Wright (eds.). 2011. Code-Switching in Early English. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter.
Sebba, Mark. 2013. “Multilingualism in written discourse. An approach to the analysis of multilingual texts”. International Journal of Bilingualism 17(1): 97-118.