The Dialectic of Love in Sir Charles Grandison

ECEP: historical corpora, historical phonology and historical pronouncing dictionaries

“…This is not to say that historical phonology has been totally neglected. Alongside landmark monographs such as Beal (1999) and Jones (2006), both of which focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pronouncing dictionaries, we find monographs on phonology such as Jones (1989, 1995) and Mugglestone (1995/2003), and two substantial chapters in The Cambridge History of the English Language for the period 1476–1776 (Lass 1999) and after 1776 (MacMahon 1998). There has been something of a ‘phonological turn’ since the early 2010s running in parallel with the compilation of the ECEP database, with thematic journal issues such as Beal & Sturiale (2012) and Beal & Iamartino (2016); reference book chapters like Hickey (2009), Beal (2012b), Jones (2012) and Mugglestone's (2017) work on ‘Received Pronunciation’; doctoral theses such as Trapateau (2015), based on a fully computerised edition of a historical pronouncing dictionary; 3 volumes covering historical phonology in general, like The Oxford Handbook of Historical Phonology (Honeybone & Salmons 2015); the Edinburgh Symposium on Historical Phonology series (2015–); and the online journal Papers in Historical Phonology (2016–, ).…”

“…Beal identified the need for ‘a comprehensive survey’ of the many works on pronunciation published in the heyday of the British elocution movement – including pronouncing dictionaries – which, if taken together, would afford ‘a complete picture of the true extent of variation in eighteenth-century pronunciation’ (1996: 379). Her own monograph English Pronunciation in the Eighteenth Century: Thomas Spence's Grand Repository of the English Language (1775) , published in 1999, remains one of the most exhaustive works on pronouncing dictionaries, and yet she considers that her own studies here ‘barely scratch the surface in terms of the wealth of phonological evidence available in eighteenth-century pronouncing dictionaries’ (1999: 184). Around the same time, Michael K. C. MacMahon made a similar appeal in his lengthy chapter on phonology in The Cambridge History of the English Language (1998: 373–535), having taken the same journey through a range of obscure pronouncing dictionaries, rhetorical grammars and orthoepist works (1998: 433).…”