English Begins at Jamestown

Narrating the History of a Language
Erscheinungsjahr 2022
ISBN: 978-0-19-884636-9
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 272 Seiten, Format (B × H): 162 mm x 238 mm, Gewicht: 572 g

Any history of English starts with the evidence its narrators select, the historical periods they focus on, and the guiding principles and frameworks they adopt. Even slightly different choices lead to significantly different narratives.

English Begins at Jamestown investigates the factors behind these choices and the effects they have on our understanding of the English language and its history. Tim Machan explores how people tell and have told the story of English, from its Indo-European origins to its present-day status as a global language. He describes how narrative principles are constructed, what kinds of facts and analyses they allow or prevent, and what can be known outside of them. The book's historically and critically wide-ranging arguments center on the themes of social purpose, aesthetics, periodization, and grammatical structure, while the conclusion extends the discussion into the roles of speakers themselves, who have transformed the grammar and pragmatics of English since the colonial period embodied in the Jamestown settlement. English Begins at Jamestown shows that there are better, worse, and wrong ways to narrate the language's history, even if there cannot necessarily be one correct way.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Machan, Tim William

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Soziolinguistik
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Historische & Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft, Sprachtypologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Sprachwissenschaften

Über Autor(innen)

Tim William Machan is Mary Lee Duda Professor of Literature at the University of Notre Dame. He has published widely on historical linguistics, multilingualism, reception, and textual criticism, and on medieval English, Norse, and French literature. His previous books with OUP include Language Anxiety: Conflict and Change in the History of English (2009) and What Is English? And Why Should We Care? (2013; paperback 2016).