Abstract
This issue marks the close of our first term as editors, and we take this occasion to gratefully acknowledge the support we have received from our editorial board and the many other scholars who have served as peer reviewers. We also thank the authors who have looked to JEngL as a venue for their research. We have learned a lot over the past three years about the process of shepherding innovative research from manuscript to publication. We have also gained a richer perspective on the range of scholarship undertaken in English linguistics by engaging with work outside the specializations we were trained in. The contributions to this issue represent well the diversity of work JEngL features.
Miranda Wilkerson, Mark Livengood, and Joe Salmons take an innovative approach to the study of language shift through a case study of a Wisconsin town. Through a detailed analysis of census records, the authors track the shift from German to English in the early twentieth century. Their research opens up new perspectives on this process at the level of individual households and provides a useful sociolinguistic backdrop for understanding the language-contact effects found today.
In the second paper, Xinyue Yao offers a diachronic examination of the present perfect verbal construction. The choice between the present perfect (e.g., have seen) and simple past (e.g., saw) is shaped by a number of semantic and grammatical factors. Drawing on corpus data representing Late Modern English (1750-1799) and Contemporary English (1950-1999), Yao shows how the relative influence of various conditioning factors has changed in the past two centuries in both British and American English. The results help to chart an important section of the path of grammaticalization that the present perfect has been following since Old English.
In the third research article, Julia Fernández Cuesta opens another window on the history of English by investigating a collection of sixteenth-century wills from Yorkshire. This material provides an opportunity to assess the spread of Standard English beyond the southeast of England, and Fernández Cuesta documents how the incoming standard forms compete with their northern counterparts. She examines several orthographic/phonological and grammatical variables, resulting in a study that contributes valuable insights into why some local forms persist while others are more readily replaced.
As is the journal’s custom, this final issue of the year features an interview with a leading scholar in the study of English. We are very pleased to present an interview with Robert D. Fulk carried out by Colin J. Grant. Best known for his research on the history of English, Fulk reflects on his career and more broadly on the relationship between linguistics and philology in recent decades.