Professor of English; Associate Director, M.A.; Graduate Faculty; Undergraduate Instructor.

https://www.english.utoronto.ca/people/directories/all-faculty/carol-percy

https://cpercy.artsci.utoronto.ca/research.htm

ABSTRACT

PERIODICALS AND PHILOLOGY

For Hernández-Campoy and Conde-Silvestre’s Handbook of Historical Linguistics in 2012, I contributed a handbook chapter on “Early Advertising and Newspapers as Sources of Sociolinguistic Investigation.” And for UCM’s English Linguistics Research Seminar in 2023, I propose to reflect on the roles that periodicals have played in my own work, and to invite discussion of how we can all draw on periodicals in our future research and teaching – whether to identify linguistic issues or to illustrate linguistic usage. Since many of us might teach courses on contemporary English, I will relate how my undergraduates use newspapers to identify issues arising from the use of English internationally. In a recent talk for HiSoN in Murcia, I drew on newspapers to understand debates about Indigenous orthographies and onomastics in contemporary Canada. But I will begin and likely end with the ways in which eighteenth-century book reviews enriched my understanding of eighteenth-century prescriptivism. In the late 1990s, I learned that complaints made by book reviewers identified many more salient linguistic variables than were codified in contemporary grammar books. In the current age of big data, how can periodicals further serve English historical linguists?

Percy, Carol. “Early Advertising and Newspapers as Sources of Sociolinguistic Investigation.” The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics , edited by Juan M. Hernández-Campoy and J. Camilo Conde-Silvestre. Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 191-210.