Re: Richard Milne Hogg 1944-2007

On Sun, 9 Dec 2007 20:46:04 -0800 (PST), Jane Margaret Laight
<jml27515@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Professor Richard Hogg:
Historian of the English language

The Independent

10 December 2007

David Denison

Richard Hogg, a world-renowned specialist in the linguistic history of
English, died suddenly midway through the sabbatical year which should
have allowed him to bring important projects on dialectology and on
Old English to completion. His best-known achievement is the six-
volume
Cambridge History of the English Language (CHEL, 1992-2001), of which
he was General Editor.

Hogg's roots were in Edinburgh, where he was born, in 1944, grew up
and studied. After nearly 40 years away, he was still wholly a Scot in
speech and sympathies. His postgraduate career in Edinburgh had begun
with two contrasting academic preoccupations: the Chomskyan analysis
of present-day English syntax on the one hand (his PhD topic), and
Middle English dialects on the other (his research post). In their
very different ways, both represented state-of-the-art linguistics of
the time.

At 26 he took up a lectureship in Amsterdam, and four years later he
moved to Lancaster University. In 1980 he arrived at Manchester
University as the surprisingly young Smith
Professor of English Language and Medieval Literature. Not that I
recall him ever teaching literature: it was rarely possible to get him
to do anything that he didn't want to.

His early publications are mostly on the syntax of words like "both"
and "none", including the book (English Quantifier Systems, 1977)
derived from his PhD. Increasingly he started to focus on the sounds
and forms of historical English, especially Old English, the period up
to about
1100, on which he became an authority. He tackled linguistic change
generally, and an interest in analogy led to one paper called simply
"Snuck" - an explanation for that common variant of "sneaked". He also
worked in phonological theory, publishing the influential textbook
Metrical Phonology (1987) with his colleague and former student, Chris
McCully.

The historical strand led to the multi-author Cambridge History of the
English Language (CHEL), a big project which took many years of
planning and good management to bring to successful completion. It has
become a standard work in the field. Hogg himself edited the first
volume on the earliest period of English and wrote the chapter on
phonology and morphology. Last year, we jointly edited a new one-
volume History of the English Language, and Hogg was still working
on his own Grammar of Old English (volume 1 published in 1992, volume
2 nearly complete at his death).

He ranged widely. Interests included English dialectology - both the
facts of variation in historical and present-day English and the ways
in which scholars have approached these facts. Likewise he followed
the history of English grammar writing and attitudes to language. His
main current project, three-quarters finished, was a history of
English dialectology that combined those themes of language variation
and of intellectual and cultural history. He was planning a joint
monograph with his newest colleague, Nuria Yáñez-Bouza, on the history
of prescriptivism in England.

In the mid-1990s Hogg became one of the founding editors (together
with Bas Aarts and me) of a new academic journal published by
Cambridge University Press, English Language and Linguistics. It would
look for the best in English language scholarship, but with a constant
eye to its relation with linguistic theory. In addition to his
scholarly expertise, Richard Hogg brought to the project a shrewd
understanding of the academic world and of academic publishing.

Throughout his career he strongly promoted the importance of English
Language studies. Philologists pay close attention to textual
evidence; linguists build theories. Hogg did both.

Although he wore it lightly, Hogg was always a thinker, and time and
again his judgement was proved sound. He came up with imaginative,
often ingenious, suggestions both as a theorist and as an organiser.
In meetings he could talk his way through the twists and turns of a
complicated sequence of ideas with a body language to match. He had
acted as Dean of the Faculty of Arts in Manchester (1990-93), and was
influential nationally and internationally, often called on as adviser
or consultant. In 1994 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy,
and a decade later of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Hogg was fun to have around, always ready for conversation and gossip.
His enthusiasm for the English language was infectious, and in breaks
he could chat with students about football, film or country music.
Indeed, the lectures themselves were often studded with anecdotes. He
started a
blog in 2006 in an "attempt to expose some of the many fallacies about
English".

Richard Milne Hogg, historian of the English language: born Edinburgh
20 May 1944; Lecturer in English Language, University of Amsterdam
1969-73; Lecturer in English Language, Lancaster University 1973-80;
Smith Professor of English Language and Medieval Literature,
Manchester
University 1980-2007; General Editor, Cambridge History of the English
Language 1992-2001; FBA 1994; married 1969 Margaret White (two sons);
died Manchester 6 September 2007.



We have lost one of the greats.

We weren't related (as far as I have traced our family back), but by a
curious coincidence I too played a very small part in one volume of
the Cambridge History of the English Language.

James
.

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