Prescriptive discourse basically evaluates linguistic variants and sometimes gives reasons for preferring one variant over another. It is most readily found in metalinguistic texts, like dictionaries and grammars. Several basic assumptions in prescriptive discourse that have endured to the present were already present in early centuries and set the stage for the flourishing of prescriptive discourse in the eighteenth century. Prescriptive discourse continued to flourish and became more widespread and naturalised in subsequent centuries. It remains a robust tradition and has adapted to new modes of communication and new cultural forces. Key features of prescriptive discourse examined in this chapter include the degree of specificity with which the discourse was formulated, the venues that published prescriptive discourse, the kinds of linguistic variants that were included in prescriptive discourse, and the justifications for the prescriptive judgements.

Indexicality and enregisterment are terms introduced by Silverstein (1976, 2003) and Agha (2003, 2007) as part of an ideological approach to linguistic variation and change. This chapter explains these terms, discusses how they have been used in research into the historical sociolinguistics of English, and evaluates the potential of this approach for further research in the history of English. The chapter begins with an explanation of the terminology and the research contexts in which it has been used. It then goes on to note the difficulties of applying an approach which was first used in ethnographic research to historical contexts. Three types of historical evidence are identified as providing evidence for historical indexicality and enregisterment: metalinguistic and metapragmatic comments; dialect literature and literary dialect; and ego-documents. For each of these, a review of research in English historical linguistics using such data is provided.

Examines effects of comprehension, conflict, social status, loneliness, complexity, assertiveness, control, introversion–extroversion, competence, goals, working memory capacity, and first impressions on conversation memory.

This chapter surveys the field of recent grammatical change in English. We focus on the period since 1900 but also discuss how certain recent changes relate to longer-term trends. Many of our examples involve the verb phrase or verbal complementation, but changes in other areas such as the noun phrase are also noted. We address methodological issues that arise in researching recent change, considering the various kinds of corpora available and the complexities involved in tracking grammatical change over time. We then discuss how patterns of change vary between spoken and written language and across different genres. Finally, we consider a range of possible explanations or motivations for change, including grammaticalisation, economy and social influences.

Examines a variety of content domains involved in conversational remembering, including topic selection, case studies, source memory, storytelling, planning, repair, time duration, personal content, requests, lectures, inferences, surnames, interference effects, common ground, marital interactions, and mood.

Registers have proved to be powerful proxies for language variation and stylistic change in historical research. This chapter investigates five sub-registers within the domain of scientific discourse: philosophy (humanities), history (social sciences), life sciences and astronomy (natural sciences) and medical texts. With data from the Coruña Corpus of Scientific Writing and the corpus of Late Modern English Medical Texts, we carry out a Multi-dimensional analysis of one million words of eighteenth-century scientific English, this leading to the scaling of the five sub-registers along two main dimensions of variation: ‘Involved/Interpersonal versus Narrative/Abstract’ and ‘Complex/Elaborate versus Non-elaborate’ discourse. The analysis confirms, first, that there are substantial differences among sub-registers in terms of the distribution and pervasiveness of distinctive linguistic features, and, second, that fluctuation in prose discourse is a general characteristic of Late Modern English scientific writing.

This chapter surveys stability, variation, and change in the mechanisms, functions and frequency of speech representation across the history of English. Attention is paid to speech representation expressions (e.g. they said) and ‘speech descriptors’ (they said confidently), speech representation cues (e.g. quotation marks and ‘perspective shifters’ such as discourse markers), speech representation categories (e.g. direct speech They said ‘We will come!’ versus indirect speech They said that they will come), and generic and sociopragmatic functions of speech representation (e.g. dramatisation). The chapter also explores the development of the speech representation verbs murmur, mutter and whisper in Late Modern English as an illustration of the gradual development and integration of an increasing number of speech representation resources over time.

Our focus on digital interaction in the history of English foregrounds the mutually transformative relationship between language and society, with technological affordances enabling (new) forms of social interaction, whilst impeding or remediating (older) communication practices. Early internet forum users maximised meaning-making with available linguistic resources, including pre-digital typographical and respelling practices. Today, within the diversity of digital Englishes, strategies typical of early digital interaction remain, reconfigured for users’ local language ideologies and community norms and expanded to incorporate multilingual practices and new semiotic modes. This chapter explores the sociopragmatic practices of identity and belonging across the digital age, from Usenet in the 1980s and SMS in the 2000s to Twitter in the 2020s, detailing a complex interplay between new communicative opportunities and long-established sociopragmatic practices originating offline. Our analysis points to a diversification of English-using internet users and an expansion of multilingual, multimodal repertoires which prompt a revisiting of traditional sociolinguistic conceptions of English.

Examines gender and race/ethnicity related to conversation memory.

The verbal system of Proto-Indo-European was primarily based not on distinctions of tense, but rather on distinctions of aspect. The shift from the three aspect system (imperfective, perfective, retrospective) of late Proto-Indo-European to the binary tense system (past vs. non-past) of Germanic explains why the older forms of Germanic lack aspectual forms completely, and also why in historical times the various Germanic languages have developed analytic aspectual patterns of various kinds. In the case of English, these include two perfects to mark past events relevant to the present (I have seen her twice; The warm sea wind was risen and blew over them now), a fully grammaticalised be progressive (She is reading a book) and a second, partly grammaticalised progressive periphrasis formed on a deictic motion verb (Bill went whistling down the street). Also examined in the chapter are changes pertaining to the domain of modality.

This chapter provides an overview of web-based resources for the study of the history of English and varieties of English around the world which have been developed in the two decades since the completion of The Cambridge History of the English Language (Hogg 1992–2001) as well as materials in preparation now. Topics cover online versions of reference works like manuscripts and facsimiles, editions, dictionaries/concordances and maps; corpora and databases which can be searched on the web; multimedia learning tools which supplement traditional classroom teaching, for example companion websites for textbooks, TED and YouTube; and communication platforms which help develop the field beyond academia, such as blogs, podcasts, Twitter and Facebook. The chapter also discusses some desiderata in the currently available resources.

Pragmatic markers, extra-sentential forms occurring preferentially at the clause boundary, have procedural meaning and serve a variety of ‘pragmatic’ functions. They can be traced back to the earliest English, for example the much-discussed hwæt of Old English. After discussing difficulties involved in the historical study of these characteristically oral forms, this chapter presents an overview of pragmatic forms found in the history of English. Pragmatic markers are shown to arise from a variety of sources, including adverbials, declarative and imperative main clauses, and adverbial/relative subordinate clauses. The syntactic pathways from these sources to target pragmatic markers are explored. The remainder of the chapter focuses on the diachronic processes responsible for the development of pragmatic markers, including lexicalisation, grammaticalisation, pragmaticalisation, and cooptation. If a broad view of ‘grammar’ is adopted, grammaticalisation most adequately accounts for the development of pragmatic markers.

This chapter examines the consolidation of attitudes and praxis in relation to the emergence of a supraregional accent of English. Engaging in detail with phonological history, it documents the increased salience of delocalisation in representations of speech from the mid eighteenth century onwards while exploring the intersection between formal prescription and private practice. An abundance of primary texts on the need for a normative model of speech was in existence by the late nineteenth century while popular culture, and an emerging national system, also addressed desiderata of this kind. The advent of the pronouncing dictionary, an influential sub-genre in the history of lexicography, is a further important strand in the attempted dissemination of one accent for all, though broadcast English brought other avenues by which paradigms of ‘received’ English were both implemented and encouraged. If the social, cultural and linguistic hegemonies of a ‘standard’ accent were originally embedded in formally democratic models, the chapter also provides a critical examination of both the rhetoric and praxis of ‘received’ English in this respect, alongside its legacies in Present-Day English.

Even after many decades of incessant research, the system of negation in English still has a story to tell, especially as concerns its diachronic development. This chapter will try to tell this story by reviewing a few of the main strands and occasionally delving into details. The chapter will follow a thematic, rather than a chronological, progression, and will mostly focus on sentential negation, which is still being discussed in its diachronic development more than a century after Jespersen’s hypothesised ‘negative cycle’. Formal approaches will be mentioned, but the chapter will give greater prominence to sociolinguistic and socio-pragmatic angles of research on English negation from a diachronic point of view. Some space is devoted to recent research on phenomena such as multiple negation, as well as to the influence of pragmatic factors on negation patterns and to lexicalised forms of negation.

The chapter is grounded in the idea that semantic change is rooted in pragmatic meaning and discursive context. The principle underpinning this idea is that meaning is both cognitive and communicative in nature, such that we understand semantics as meaning and pragmatics as use. In this chapter, we trace this approach from nineteenth- and twentieth- century philological theories of meaning change, through the formalisation of the relationship of pragmatic and semantic domains of meaning in the invited inference theory of semantic change as developed by Traugott and her collaborators. The chapter explores the implications for a theory of semantic change of a new approach that begins not with the lexical item (semasiology) or the concept (onomasiology) but with discourse. We draw upon innovative digital methods for studying meaning change in the history of English to explore patterns and processes of semantic change in very large text corpora that invite distant rather than close reading, afforded by computational methodologies. In the process, we elaborate how linguistic concept modelling permits the structure of a pragmatic discursive theory of semantic change.