Spelling Variation Trends in Early English Printed Texts

• Thesis title in Czech: Trendy v ortografické variaci ran‎‎ě anglických tištěných textů
• Thesis title in English: Spelling Variation Trends in Early English Printed Texts
• Key words: ortografie|variace|raná moderní angličtina|tištěné texty|standardizace
• English key words: spelling|variation|Early Modern English|printed texts|standardisation
• Academic year of topic announcement: 2022/2023
• Thesis type: diploma thesis
• Thesis language: angličtina
• Department: Department of the English Language and ELT Methodology (21-UAJD)
• Supervisor: Mgr. Ondřej Tichý, Ph.D.
• Author: hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept.
• Date of registration: 19.10.2022
• Date of assignment: 19.10.2022
• Administrator's approval: approved
• Confirmed by Study dept. on: 29.04.2023
• Date and time of defence: 07.09.2023 09:00
• Date of electronic submission: 10.08.2023
• Date of proceeded defence: 07.09.2023
• Submitted/finalized: committed by student and finalized
• Opponents: Mgr. Alena Novotná

Guidelines

The introduction of the printing press to England by William Caxton is often mentioned as the main cause of spelling standardisation in Early Modern English. This claim, however, seems to lack sufficient quantitative grounds and is often contradicted by research focusing on examining the consistency of spelling in texts printed by individual publishers. The texts published by Caxton himself appear to be highly inconsistent in terms of spelling (Blake, 1969). On the contrary, texts printed by other publishers, such as Wynkyn de Worde (Aronoff, 1989), show much higher degree of spelling consistency. The aim of this thesis is to investigate spelling variation trends in printed texts from the introduction of the printing press to England in 1476 to the end of 17^th century by examining the degree of spelling consistency within texts published by individual printing houses and comparing the results to the overall spelling trends. The material used for the analysis will be taken from Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (PPCEME) and analysed with the help of the VARD 2 software to detect spelling variants.
Práce bude vypracována v anglickém jazyce.

References

Aronoff, Mark. ‘The Orthographic System of an Early English Printer: Wynkyn de Worde’. Folia Linguistica Historica 21, no. Historica vol. 8,1-2 (1989).
Baddeley, Susan, and Anja Voeste, eds. Orthographies in Early Modern Europe. Berlin ; Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2012.
———, eds. ‘Variable Focusing in English Spelling between 1400 and 1600’. In Orthographies in Early Modern Europe, 127–66. De Gruyter Mouton, 2012.
Baron, Alistair. ‘Dealing with Spelling Variation in Early Modern English Texts’. Lancaster University, 2011.
Blake, N. F. Caxton and his World. London: Andre Deutsch, 1969.
Brengelman, F. H. ‘Orthoepists, Printers, and the Rationalization of English Spelling’. The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 79, no. 3 (1980): 332–54.
Görlach, Manfred. Introduction to Early Modern English. 1st ed. Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Howard-Hill, T. H. ‘Early Modern Printers and the Standardization of English Spelling’. The Modern Language Review 101, no. 1 (2006): 16–29.
Milroy, James, and Lesley Milroy. Authority in Language: Investigating Standard English. Routledge Linguistics Classics. Abingdon, Oxon ; New York: Routledge, 2012.
Nevalainen, Terttu. An Introduction to Early Modern English. Edinburgh University Press, 2006.
Rutkowska, Hanna. ‘Orthographic Regularization in Early Modern English Printed Books: Grapheme Distribution and Vowel Length Indication’. In Current Trends in Historical Sociolinguistics, by Cinzia Russi, 165–93. De Gruyter Open, 2016.
Rutkowska, Hanna, and Paul Rössler. ‘Orthographic Variables’. In The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics, edited by Juan Manuel Hernández‐Campoy and Juan Camilo Conde‐Silvestre, 1st ed., 211–36. Wiley, 2012.
Tichý, Ondřej. ‘Kvantitativní Analýza Ortografické Variability v Korpusu Rané Anglické Korespondence’. Studie z Aplikované Lingvistiky 9 (2018): 27–41.