English begins at Jamestown : narrating the history of a language

Author / Creator

Machan, Tim William, author

Available as

Online

Physical

Summary

"The history of English is not a ready-made thing - it takes shape only through the critical selection of language forms, usages, and pragmatics and through the deployment of these in narratives. E...

"The history of English is not a ready-made thing - it takes shape only through the critical selection of language forms, usages, and pragmatics and through the deployment of these in narratives. English Begins at Jamestown is the first book to critique the historiography that makes this selection and deployment possible. It seeks to isolate competing narrative principles and to understand how they are constructed, what kinds of facts and analyses their constructions allow or prevent, and what can be known outside of them. The book's focus is thus the general principles that enable the imagining and writing of a history of English, from its Indo-European origins to its present-day status as a global language whose largest group of speakers have learned it as a second language. To this end, the historically and critically wide-ranging argument draws on original research and uniquely applies narrative as well as linguistic theories to a wide range of interconnecting historiographic paradigms: social purpose, aesthetics, periodization, and grammatical structure. Extending an emphasis on alternative narrative options and their consequences, the conclusion examines yet one more (largely untested) organizational principle, and this is by means of speakers, who have significantly redefined the grammar and pragmatics of English since the colonial period, symbolically begun with the Jamestown settlement. English Begins at Jamestown shows that there are better, worse, and wrong ways to relate the language's history, even if there cannot be one necessarily right way"--

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