The present work takes a sociolinguistic perspective on language variation and change in Late Modern English. Its main objective is to offer new, empirically informed insights into the complexity of morphosyntactic variation in the 18th and 19th centuries. It also seeks to advance ongoing discussions on key theoretical and methodological issues in the field of historical sociolinguistics, e.g. on how to interpret and compare results based on (corpora of) texts from different genres or how to adequately accommodate the limitation to written records when analysing the language of the past.Adopting a variationist, corpus-linguistic approach, four selected morphosyntactic variables are analysed under consideration of both linguistic and social factors that could influence their distribution: 1. modal verb MUST and semi-modal HAVE TO, 2. the auxiliaries BE and HAVE in combination with past participles of mutative intransitive verbs, 3. variation between ´I says´ und ´I said´ in discourse introducers, 4. ´you was´ / ´you were´ alternation. The use of these variables in Late Modern English is traced and analysed based on corpora containing speech-based texts (Culpeper &
Kytö 2010: 17). The Old Bailey Corpus (OBC, Huber et al. 2012) represents the most important source of data for this purpose. It consists exclusively of trial proceedings from the Old Bailey, London s central criminal court in the Late Modern period. With a size of 14 million words and detailed sociobiographical annotation on the level of the individual speakers, the OBC allows for quantitative sociolinguistic analyses on an unprecedented scale. To compare the OBC results with the diachronic developments in other genres, the subcorpora ´drama´ und ´narrative fiction´ of the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts 3.0 (Diller et al. 2011) are used.The interpretation of the results systematically integrates aspects beyond the modelled independent variables (such as social class, gender, time, linguistic context) that could affect speakers´ choices and their representations in print. In particular, the analysis takes into account the potential impact of language prescription and the effects of genre conventions. For the trial transcripts in the OBC, the impact of the courtroom situation and of scribal practice are also assessed. Against this background, the study offers an in-depth discussion of the advantages and drawbacks of using trial proceedings in historical sociolinguistics. The present work is therefore relevant to readers interested in sociolinguistics, historical linguistics and/or corpus linguistics.
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