京都大学 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(文学) / 甲第24276号 / 文博第901号 / 新制||文||723(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院文学研究科文献文化学専攻 / (主査)教授 家入 葉子, 教授 廣田 篤彦, 教授 河﨑 靖 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Letters / Kyoto University / DGAM

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This study is intended to unveil whether the culinary vocabulary of British English and American English are likely to converge or diverge in the future, as a way of contributing to understanding the evolution of the English language and its varieties. The topic itself was founded in travels to America which were paired with nearly fifteen years of interaction with British English, leading to understanding that some (food) words come to have different meanings even in similar languages, and possibly also within the same language.  Understanding this led to the thesis question: Are the culinary vocabularies of British English and American English likely to converge or diverge? This is an area of study which has seemingly been left untreated so far under the umbrella of Linguistics. As such, the research in this essay focuses on determining a future convergence or divergence between the language varieties from a language historical aspect as well as taking sociolinguistic aspects of language change into account. These aspects are fashion, foreign influence and social need. In addition to the research, a survey involving 15 British and 15 American students between the ages of 18 and 30 which helps determining the current interaction between the two language varieties. Through the research and analysis of these areas of interest, it is found that the culinary vocabularies of the two language varieties are unlikely to converge completely, but are in a state both of constant partial convergence and divergence.

This thesis takes as its object of study a certain strand of Early Modern English writing characterised by its cornucopian invention, immethodical structure, and creatively exuberant, often chaotic, means of expression. It takes as its point of departure the Erasmian theory of ‘copia' (rhetorical abundance), expanding upon it freely in order to formulate new and independent notions of copious vernacular writing as it is practised in 16th- and 17th-century contexts. Throughout I argue for the continuity and pervasiveness of the pursuit of linguistic plenitude, in contrast to a prevailing belief that the outpouring of 'words' and 'things' started to dissipate in the transition from one century (16th) to the next (17th). The writers to be discussed are Thomas Nashe, Robert Burton, John Taylor the ‘Water-Poet', and Sir Thomas Urquhart. Each of the genres in which these writers operate–prose-poetry, the essay, the pamphlet, and the universal language–emerge either toward the end of the 16th century or during the course of the 17th century, and so can be said to take copious writing in new and experimental directions not fully accounted for in the current scholarship. My contribution to the literature lies principally in its focus on the emergence of these literary forms in an Early Modern English context, with an emphasis on the role played by copiousness of expression in their stylistic development and how they in turn develop the practice of copia.