Standardizing Written English: the Influence of Genre, Audience, and Medium on Scots-English Usage, 1520 to 1659.

Linguistic standardization has received much implicit attention in the sub-domains of linguistics, but unlike linguistic variation it has been neglected as an explicit topic of inquiry. In particular, standards in written English have been the subject of recent investigations, but few of these studies have considered directly the process from which such written standards derive. This study examines the process by which written standards spread across time and through different types of texts, using the anglicization of Scots-English as a case study. The adoption of Anglo-English usage in five spelling and morphological features was examined in 121 Scots-English texts. The proportion of Anglo-English forms in each feature was tabulated, statistically analyzed, and compared across texts with different genres, audiences, and media. Chronologically, anglicization increased slowly at first but later accelerated rapidly at a time when socio-political forces were uniting England and Scotland. The Anglo-English standard diffused at different rates in different contexts, however. Genre markedly influenced anglicization, whereas audience appeared to have little independent influence. Characteristics of the five non-literary genres which were studied combined uniquely in each genre to produce different effects, with a strong generic tradition or nationalistic association most effectively inhibiting anglicization. The medium of printing exaggerated the effects of the generic factors which promoted standardization, such as relative permanence or distance between writer and reader, so that the most highly standardized texts were those most commonly printed.PhDModern languageUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/159171/1/8304479.pd