The Late Modern period is the first in the history of English for which an unprecedented wealth of textual material exists. Using increasingly sophisticated databases, the contributions in this volume explore grammatical usage from the period, specifically morphological and syntactic change, in a broad context. Some chapters explore the socio-historical background of the period while others provide information on prescriptivism, newspaper language, language contact, and regional variation in British and American English. Internal processes of change are discussed against grammaticalisation theory and construction grammar and the rich body of textual evidence is used to draw inferences on the precise nature of historical change. Exposing readers to a wealth of data that informs the description of a broad range of syntactic phenomena, this book is ideal for graduate students and researchers interested in historical linguistics, corpus linguistics and language development.

‘A very timely and strong collection of fine-grained qualitative analyses investigating morphological and syntactic change in Late Modern English.’

Ursula Lenker - Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

‘For a long time the Late Modern English period seemed to be a time when little happened to the grammar of the language, but at last justice is being done to the interesting changes that were taking place. This well-edited volume shows how newly available resources of corpora and databases of the period, together with more refined techniques of analysis, are bringing such changes into the spotlight.’

Geoffrey Leech - Emeritus Professor of English Linguistics, Lancaster University

‘This impressive volume with contributions by leading scholars on the main areas of Late Modern English syntax is an indispensable guide to a fascinating period in the history of the English language.’

Bas Aarts - University College London

'The book itself as a finished product is a remarkable achievement: all the topics under discussion are intrinsically worthy of in-depth investigation, and some of them build on earlier findings concerning similar issues, or rely on corpora already used in previous studies, in order to provide new perspectives on specific themes … It will be of interest to scholars and advanced students also specializing in methodological issues, as the quantitative investigations offered in the contributions help to shed more light on what best practices ought to be followed in studies of this kind.'

Marina Dossena Source: English Language and Linguistics