The Handbook Of The History Of English

by van Kemenade, Ans; Los, Bettelou

• ISBN13: 9780631233442
• ISBN10: 063123344X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-05-19
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

The Handbook of the History of English is a collection of articles written by leading specialists in the field that focus on the theoretical issues behind the facts of the changing English language. The innovative organization of this volume applies recent insights to old problems and surveys the history of English from the perspective of structural developments in areas such as phonology, prosody, morphology, syntax, semantics, language variation, and dialectology. This unique handbook offers readers a comprehensive overview of the various theoretical perspectives available to the study of the history of English and sets new objectives for further research.

Author Biography

Ans van Kemenade is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Nijmegen, and is author of Syntactic Case and Morphological Case in the History of English (1987), and The Syntax of Early English (2000; with O. Fischer, W. Koopman, and W. van der Wurff).

Bettelou Los is a lecturer in the Department of English at the Radboud University Nijmegen. She is author of Infinitival Complementation in Old and Middle English (1999) and The Rise of the to-infinitive (2005).

Table of Contents

Editors' Introduction

Notes on Contributors

Approaches and issues

Change for the Better? Optimality Theory versus History

Cueing a New Grammar

Variation and the Interpretation of Change in periphrastic DO

Evolutionary Models and Functional-Typological Theories of Language Change

Words: derivation and prosody

Old and Middle English Prosody

Prosodic Preferences: From Old English to Early Modern English

Typological Changes in Derivational Morphology

Competition in English Word Formation

Inflectional morphology and syntax

Case Syncretism and Word Order Change

Discourse Adverbs and Clausal Syntax in Old and Middle English

The loss of OV Order in the History of English

Category Change and Gradience in the Determiner System

Pragmatics

Pathways in the development of pragmatic markers in English

The Semantic Development of Scalar Focus Modifiers

Information Structure and Word Order Change: The Passive as an Information Rearranging Strategy in the History of English

Pre- and postcolonial varieties

Old English Dialectology

Early Middle English Dialectology: Problems and Prospects

How English became African American English

Historical Change in Synchronic Perspective: The Legacy of British Dialects

The making of Hiberno-English and other 'Celtic Englishes'

Standardisation and globalization

Eighteenth-century Prescriptivism and the Norm of Correctness

Historical Sociolinguistics and Language Change

Global English: From Island Tongue to World Language

Appendix: Useful Corpora for Research in English Historical Linguistics

Index

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