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The 19 papers in this volume are a selection from a UCLA conference intended to take stock of the state of the field at the beginning of the new millenium and to stimulate research in English Historical Linguistics.

The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies, which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics. For further publications in English linguistics see also our Dialects of English book series. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Natalie Fecher.

The book presents an analysis of selected domains of morphosyntactic variation in a 250,000 word collection of the Middle English Paston Letters (1421-1503) from a historical sociolinguistic point of view. In the three case studies, two nominal and one verbal variable are described and discussed in detail: the replacement of Old English h-> pronouns by borrowed th-> pronouns, the introduction and spread of the wh-> relativizers, and the spread and routinization of light verb constructions (take, make, give, have, do plus deverbal noun). </P> While the study aims at a balanced integration of theories and methods from a number of different approaches in sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, typology, and language change, its main focus is social network theory and the role of the linguistic individual in the formation and change of language structures. Questions of individual language use and of deliberate versus unmonitored changes in the (individual) system take center stage and are discussed in the light of social network analysis. Traditional empirical social network analysis is carefully revised. Despite its many merits in present-day sociolinguistics, it often needs to be supplemented by hermeneutic-biographical analyses of the individual speakers' lives when applied to historical data. With this background, common theories and models of language change, such as grammaticalization, paradigmatic pressure, typological alignment, and generational shifts, are illustrated and evaluated from the point of view of single speakers and social groups, and their particular embedding in the speech community through various network structures.</P> The book is of interest to advanced students and researchers in English and general linguistics, Middle English, historical linguistics and language change, corpus linguistics, as well as sociolinguistics.</P> </body> </html>

The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics.

The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics.

The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics.

This volume focuses on the present state of English historical linguistics as a discipline. In particular, the selection of papers challenges the idea that the community of linguists working on the history of English stands united by subject matter, but divided by method and theoretical outlook.

The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies, which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics. For further publications in English linguistics see also our Dialects of English book series. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Natalie Fecher.

This book explores the usage-based claim that high usage frequency leads to the entrenchment of complex words in the minds of language users. To probe the correlation between corpus-extracted usage data and mental entrenchment, the author operationalises entrenchment in Gestalt psychological terms and conducts a series of behavioural and neuroimaging experiments.

The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies, which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics. For further publications in English linguistics see also our Dialects of English book series. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Natalie Fecher.

This work is essentially based on grammaticalization theory - a branch of linguistics which has gained prominence since the 1980s. It focuses on the interaction between diachrony and synchrony, langue and parole or, for that matter, competence and performance, I-language and I -language. It does not see these levels as distinct linguistic domains, as much structurally oriented work does. It is important for the present purposes that such an interactionist view entails that performance effects may over time cause new grammatical code relations. Hence the importance of statistical empirical research, which led the author to adopt a predominantly corpus-based approach.

The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies, which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics. For further publications in English linguistics see also our Dialects of English book series. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Natalie Fecher.

The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies, which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics. For further publications in English linguistics see also our Dialects of English book series. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Natalie Fecher.

This is the second volume of the multi-volume set A Contemporary Grammar of British English Dialects. The book again offers qualitative as well as corpus-based quantitative studies on grammatical variation in the British Isles. The three parts investigate complement clauses (Daniela Kolbe), personal pronouns (Nuria Hernandez) and modals (Monika Edith Schulz). The volume is of interest to dialectologists, sociolinguists, typologists, historical linguists, grammarians, and anyone working on the structure of spontaneous spoken English.

Explores the interplay of syntactic variation and genre. This title contains articles that include both overviews of theoretical approaches to the concept of genre in linguistics and data-based analyses of specific syntactic phenomena in English, German, and Romance.

The book embeds a description and an analysis of the Old English numeral system into a broader, cross-linguistic discussion. It provides a theoretical framework for the study of numerals and numeral systems of natural languages, bridging the gap between recent findings in the cognitive sciences on numeracy and the known typological generalisations on cardinal numerals. The Old English numeral system shows a number of peculiarities not found in the present-day languages of Europe. Its detailed description is therefore an ideal locus for studying the features of linguistic number expressions in terms of their morpho-syntactic properties and of the structure of numeral systems.The approach is innovative in that it combines a detailed analysis of the numeral system with the analysis of the grammatical properties of cardinal numerals. For the description of Old English, the study focuses on aspects of information structure and of referent identification in quantificational constructions. This leads to a novel perspective on the language-internal variation in the agreement patterns between numerals and quantified nouns, allowing the author to test and refine some long standing tenets in the study of numerals and to offer alternative explanations. Rather than seeing numerals as a hybrid word class, the author argues that this variation in the morpho-syntactic behaviour follows identifiable patterns specific to the word class numeral. He accounts for these patterns by positing different, cross-linguistically uniform stages in the emergence of numeral systems, as well as varying degrees of discreteness of the quantified noun. Moreover, the author demonstrates that the constraints determining this variation in Old English have obvious parallels across languages.

The book is concerned with the interaction of syntax, information structure and prosody in the history of English, demonstrating this with a case study of object topicalization. The approach is data-oriented, using material from syntactically parsed digital corpora of Old, Middle and Early Modern English, which serve as a solid foundation for conclusions. The use of object topicalization underwent a sharp decline from Old English until today. In the present volume, a basic prosodic well-formedness condition, the Clash Avoidance Requirement, is identified as the main factor for this change. With the loss of V2-syntax, object topicalization led more easily to cases in which two focalized phrases, the topicalized object and the subject, are adjacent. The two focal accents on these phrases would produce a clash, thus violating the Clash Avoidance Requirement. In order to circumvent this, the use of topicalization in critical cases is avoided. The Clash Avoidance Requirement is highly relevant also today, as experimental data on English and German show. Further, the Clash Avoidance Requirement helps to explain the well-known syntactic structure of the left periphery in Old English. An analysis positing two subject positions is defended in the study. The variation of these subject positions is shown to depend not on pronominal vs. lexical status of the subject but on information structural properties.

The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics.

The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics.

The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics.

This is the first study of the typological change of English from a synthetic towards an analytic language that focuses exclusively on the lexical domain of the language. It presents an innovative approach to linguistic typology by focusing on the different encoding techniques used in the lexicon, providing a theoretical framework for the description of structural types (synthetic, analytic) and encoding techniques (fusional, isolating, agglutinative, incorporating) found in the lexicon of a language. It is argued that, in the case of English, the change from syntheticity to analyticity did not only affect its inflectional system and the encoding of grammatical information, but also the derivational component. Based on a cognitive approach to derivation, the book provides empirical evidence for a considerable decline in the use of synthetic structures and a trend towards higher degrees of analyticity in a specific lexical domain of English, the formation of nouns by means of derivation. The full extent of this change surfaced during the transition from Old English to early Middle English, but it was later partly reversed though influence from French. The typological shift was thus the result of a global structural reorganization of the language that resulted in a fundamental change of the structure of words. The book also presents a comprehensive account of the historical development of nominal derivation from the beginnings of Old English until the end of the early Middle English period. Based on empirical data from written sources the study documents the frequency of use of all Germanic-based derivational morphemes for nominalizations over different subperiods and discusses their origin as well as important changes of their semantic and morphological properties.

The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies, which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics. For further publications in English linguistics see also our Dialects of English book series. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Natalie Fecher.

Code-Switching in Early English

Presents new issues and areas of work in Modality and Evidentiality in English(es), and in relation to other languages.

This text explores a range of factors that have a bearing on the choice of grammatical variants, but are generally overlooked. These include: phonological influences; frequency; and pervasive semantic and pragmatic aspects.

In this collection of original and innovative papers, new light is thrown on the nature and the expression of the four probably most-researched coherence relations.

The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics.

The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics.

The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics.

The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics.