Fries

ICAME Journal No. 34Given the choices made by the editors, the Brown corpus provides us with apoor tool to examine how the language of these two text portions differ.12. A more careful and extensive account of Fries’s work on the EMED can befound in Bailey (1985a).13. Fries (1945: 55–56) also addresses the issue of lexical sets although withoutusing that term.14. xghwylc prn. indef. ‘each’, ymbsittendra gen. pl. ‘neighbouring people’.The construction means 'each of the neighbours'. Of course the post-positivegenitive construction cannot be illustrated using Modern English sinceit has gone out of use. Michael Cummings provided this example from OE.15. The particular data summarized in Table 4 do not support the 100 year timelinementioned in this quotation; however most of the other changes that hestudied were accomplished in the roughly 100 year period mentioned here.In addition to the 100 year timeline for individual changes, he also notedthat many of the individual changes seemed to achieve the same sort of end(e.g. the reduction of the inflectional endings) in different parts of the language.He used the term ‘slope’ to describe these sets of related changes.16. It is useful to notice that he was not simply addressing dialect differenceshere, nor ‘dialect mixture’.17. An interesting feature of this example is that, technically speaking, only thelast data sample, from 1300, actually illustrates a true two-term system. Allthe others contain evidence of a third option. But in four of the five sampleperiods the third option (whichever it is) accounts at most for 1.2 percent ofthe data, and so it is reasonable to treat these systems as two term systems.The only exception is the data set from 1200, where the two options usedleast frequently are 11.8 percent and 6.3 percent compared to the dominantoption that is used 81.9 percent.18. Notice that my discussion here largely ignores the difference in forminvolved in the evolving system. The issue is that there is, in some stratum,a system which has two terms, the realizations of the terms may differ astime passes but the system itself is relatively steady.19. See Sinclair and Mauranen (2006) for a recent account of a principled wayto address some of the dysfluencies mentioned above.20. One corpus gathered by Fries has been omitted from this table. At about thetime when he was completing his American English grammar, Friesbecame interested in exploring variation in grammar that correlated withgeographical dialects. He purchased a number of local newspapers fromaround the United States published in a particular week. Unfortunately hefound that the stories printed in those papers contained few regionalisms.As a result he abandoned that project.116