ECEP: historical corpora, historical phonology and historical pronouncing dictionaries

Abstract

This article presents the Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database (ECEP) in the context of historical phonology and historical corpora. The eighteenth century witnessed the proliferation of works on elocution and orthoepy and yet the field lacks searchable digital sources comparable to those available in other disciplines like historical syntax or historical pragmatics. Because of this and for other reasons such as the difficulty in deciphering idiosyncratic notation systems in the original materials, there has been a certain disregard for the study of eighteenth-century phonological evidence. The ECEP database aims to redress this absence of research material by collecting data from eighteenth-century pronouncing dictionaries in the form of IPA transcriptions (c. 1,600 different example words totalling c. 17,600 transcriptions) and supplementary metadata, with a view to facilitating systematic analyses of phonological, chronological and geographic patterns, and also normative attitudes. The richness of the contents in ECEP will thus be of interest to phonologists, dialectologists and language variationists from the historical as well as the synchronic perspective, in that eighteenth-century orthoepists laid the ground for what became ‘Received Pronunciation’. Methodologically, the compilation of the ECEP database aims to contribute to the thriving field of corpus linguistics with a new research tool for the study of the history of English.

En[dj]uring [ʧ]unes or ma[tj]ure [ʤ]ukes? Yod-coalescence and yod-dropping in theEighteenth-Century English Phonology Database

“…As explained in Yañez-Bouza (2020), the phonological data in ECEP consist of transcriptions of the relevant segments of such examples given by Wells (1982) for his keywords as could be found in eleven eighteenth-century pronouncing dictionaries. Since Wells intended his keywords to facilitate comparison of English accents on the basis of their vowel phonology, we supplemented these keywords with five consonantal sets, two of which, deuce and sure , were designed to provide evidence for yod-coalescence of /t d/ and /s z/ before /juː/ respectively, where the /uː/ has not reduced to schwa in Present-day English, whilst feature contains words in which /uː/ has reduced to schwa.…”

“…As explained in Yañez-Bouza (2020), when setting up ECEP, we decided to supplement Wells’ (1982) lexical sets, which relate to vowels, with five consonantal sets: deuce , feature , sure , heir and whale . These were chosen because earlier research on the phonology of eighteenth-century English (Beal 1996, 1999) had identified changes in progress at that time with regard to yod-coalescence of consonants in deuce , feature and sure , and the presence or absence of initial /h/ in heir and whale 1 .…”

Using theEighteenth-Century English Phonology Database(ECEP) as a teaching resource

“…This results in a dataset with considerable diatopic variation, which records the pronunciation recommended in various cities for those in polite society during a period which saw the increasing popularity of grammars, dictionaries and other usage guides among the aspiring middle classes (Beal 2004: 93–4). While there is a wealth of corpora for the study of written English in the Late Modern period, ECEP is the only resource for the study of spoken English (see also Yáñez-Bouza 2020: section 2), and the dictionary entries and metacommentary which make up ECEP are a rich source of such data.…”

Representations of phonological changes ingoatand /r/ in theCollection of Nineteenth-century Grammars(CNG)

“…The lack of research in this area has also been connected to the absence of material in digital form. Since the 1990s this has changed, at least for the eighteenth century, with the compilation of the Eighteenth-Century English Phonology (ECEP 2015) and Eighteenth-Century English Grammars (ECEG 2010) databases and corresponding publications on eighteenth-century phonology (see Beal 2013; Yáñez-Bouza et al 2018; Yáñez-Bouza 2020; Beal et al 2020a). Moreover, several studies have been conducted on recordings of speakers born in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see Trudgill 2004a; Hay & Sudbury 2005; Trudgill & Gordon 2006; Mair 2016; Hickey 2017; Przedlacka & Ashby 2019).…”