Reviewed by Martina Häcker, University of Paderborn

This volume highlights the considerable changes that occurred within the English language throughout the nineteenth century. It consists of an introduction by the editors (1–16) and ten papers, followed by an appendix, a bibliography, and an index.

Gender issues and the use of adjectives are the topics of the contributions by Ingegerd Bäcklund, ‘Modifiers describing women and men in nineteenth-century English’ (17–55), and Merja Kytö and Suzanne Romaine, ‘Adjective comparison in nineteenth-century English’ (194–214). Questions of grammatical change are treated by Christian Mair, ‘Nonfinite complement clauses in the nineteenth century: The case of remember’ (215–28), and Juhani Rudanko, ‘The in –ing construction in British English, 1800-2000’ (229–41). The use of constructions across one or more genres is the focus of Peter Grund and Terry Walker, ‘The subjunctive in adverbial clauses in nineteenth-century English’ (110–35); Christine Johansson, ‘Relativizers in nineteenth-century English’ (136–82); and Mark Kaunisto, ‘Anaphoric reference in the nineteenth century: That/those + of constructions’ (183–93). Finally, Tony Fairman, ‘Words in English Record Office documents of the early 1800s’ (56–88), investigates variant spellings and spelling strategies used by people with different degrees of schooling.

The papers illustrate both the potential and the dangers of corpus research. One of the dangers lies in failing to conduct a detailed analysis. Carefully avoiding this trap, Kytö and Romaine show how the frequency of a single word (e.g. dearest) is responsible for the observed rise in inflectional superlatives. Another danger is that parameters not built into the corpus may be neglected. That is, unlike the parameters of genre and gender, which are inherent categories, the parameters of social and regional variation often receive little attention (with the notable exception of Fairman, for whom social variation is central). Yet these parameters are important, and, in the cases of Bäcklund and Johansson, disregarding them diminishes the value of the investigation. The strength of the majority of the papers lies in highlighting differences between genres and showing the presence or absence of linguistic change.

The volume is carefully edited, with the exception of the paper by Kaunisto, whose reference to a ‘previous research chapter’ (189) and the ‘present chapter’ (189) indicates that his contribution is an unrevised chapter of a thesis. In their introduction, the editors state their aim ‘to provide an overview of nineteenth-century English’, but this somewhat ambitious goal is certainly beyond the scope of ten papers. What they have done instead, and quite successfully, is show how corpus research can complement other research of nineteenth-century English.