The Old English poem Beowulf is a particularly valuable source of information about early features of the English language. In its present form the poem is recorded in a manuscript of unknown provenance made, in all probability, shortly after the millennium. Yet it evinces linguistic features that are highly conservative, suggesting that the extant text was copied, perhaps directly, from a much older exemplar, and that the poem was composed in a more northerly dialect than the Late West Saxon one in which it is preserved. Some of the poem’s conservative linguistic features are detectable only on the basis of poetic meter. Other of the poem’s archaic features include some that are orthographic in nature: phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical and metrical. Beowulf is not the only linguistically conservative poem preserved in Old English, but in many ways it reveals, more than any other poem, a great deal about what the language was like at a much earlier time than that at which all but a minuscule portion of the total extant corpus of Old English was recorded. It is thus an invaluable window on the prehistory of the English language.

In this chapter, we address some ways in which the use of corpora has revolutionised the study of the history of English. We first account for the development of historical corpora of English and discuss advantages and drawbacks associated with different corpus sizes. We also address types of language use that are not well represented in existing corpora, potential clashes between comparability and representativity, and features such as tagging and spelling normalisation. We then consider contributions that historical corpora have made to specific linguistic fields, notably in variationist studies, historical sociolinguistics and historical pragmatics, and illustrate historical corpus methodology by presenting a case study on sentence-initial and in Late Modern English based on the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). We conclude the chapter with a list of desiderata for future corpus-based research on the history of the English language.

This chapter examines courtroom documents, focusing on trials and depositions, which offer glimpses of spoken language of the past. Trials written in English, often in the form of questions and answers, are rare before the late sixteenth century. Depositions, the oral testimony of a witness recorded by a scribe prior to trial and used as evidence, become more available in English from the mid sixteenth century. Trials and depositions exist as manuscripts, contemporaneous printed texts and later printed editions, and have recently become accessible through corpora and modern linguistic editions. Manuscripts (already one step beyond the original speech event) are less susceptible to interference by editors, printers and so on, but even these texts should not be treated as verbatim records. Nevertheless, the texts supply valuable data for researchers taking historical pragmatic and sociolinguistic approaches and/or examining linguistic variation and change, and in a wide range of other areas.

In this chapter, I argue for the importance of two models in explorations of orality in the history of English: communicative immediacy and ‘oral/conversational diagnostics’, within the framework of oral vs. literate/production styles. Based on the two models, I identify certain (sub)registers and genres as reference points for assessing the nature of orality reflected in historical linguistic data. In addition, I use the major conclusions of the ‘bad’ data debate, foundational for historical pragmatics, as a springboard for a selective survey of research focused on interjections, speech acts, and specific discourse domains and genres such as wills, courtroom discourse and letters. Potential directions for future research and new data sources are also provided to indicate gaps in the coverage of historical oralities in English.

The chapter considers the nature of lexical borrowing and the challenges of identifying the contribution that it has made to the lexicon of English. It looks at the major sources of data, especially historical dictionaries. It considers the importance of identifying by whom a word is used, and in which contexts. It also examines phenomena of discontinuity and multiple inputs in the histories of words, and the challenges that these present for constructing linear histories of English words, and larger-scale narratives of the history of the lexicon.

This chapter examines key features of the language of print newspapers in Britain from the founding of the London Gazette in 1665 up until the present day. It describes significant milestones in the history of English newspapers, outlining major socio-historical, economic, cultural and technological developments which have had an impact on the emergence, diversification and professionalisation of this important mass medium. After an overview of the major subgenres found in these multi-text conglomerates – news, opinion and advertising – the focus is on news reports. The chapter outlines how the chronological mode of reporting news preferred in the first two hundred years of newspapers gave way to the inverted pyramid style of news narration, subsequently abandoned for more flexible models like the package approach in modern news discourse. Furthermore, this chapter provides insights into contemporary journalistic ideals and practices employed in positioning the paper and balancing information density and readership appeal.

Practices of literacy have changed over the centuries, these changes all relating – in Richard Hoggart’s famous formulation (1957) – to the ‘uses of literacy’. As a result, the written texts surviving from the medieval period demand careful qualitative analysis of the linguistic data they supply so that they can be appropriately assessed. In this chapter, the focus is on a key set of early witnesses for the history of English: the ‘documentary’ texts that survive in large numbers from the Old and Middle English periods. Such texts survive in various formats and contexts, and in each case close examination of the modes of presentation adopted reveals not only the sociocultural functions these texts were intended to perform, but also their validity as witnesses for the history of the language. A broad view is taken of what is meant by a ‘documentary’ text, including not only such artefacts as letters, charters and wills but also glosses and inscriptions. Witnesses examined in this chapter include vernacular inscriptions on stone, metal or bone, Old English glosses and late medieval English letters. These texts were all created within complex discourse communities, and that complexity requires deep engagement with the particular circumstances of individual textual production.

The Introduction to Volume II begins by situating the volume within the New Cambridge History of the English Language. The topics of documentation, sources of data and modelling are then introduced. Part I addresses aspects of the textual record and its documentation, from inscriptions via manuscripts and prints to computerised corpora; special attention is paid to the relationship between speech and writing and to diachronic aspects of the English lexicon. Part II focuses on three key works or authors that have been central sources of data in historical studies: Beowulf, Chaucer and Shakespeare. Part III provides detailed accounts of a selection of text categories and their value as sources of data, including a chapter dedicated to texts by women, who are underrepresented in the historical record. Part IV, finally, discusses several important theoretical and methodological approaches to modelling historical language data, including generative, functional, cognitive and psycholinguistic approaches as well as construction grammar, grammaticalisation and advanced statistical treatments. Connections between aspects of the documented historical record, the data scholars can retrieve from it, and the models they apply to their data are highlighted.

This chapter provides an overview of the language of religious texts in Old, Middle and Early Modern English. We divide religious language into three spheres: Bible language, the language of prayers and the language of texts of religious instruction and discussion. We then discuss the language of religious texts against the background of the impact of the language of the vernacular Bible, particularly before 1500. We argue that, prior to the publication of the King James Bible, there was no specific ‘religious register’ in Old and Middle English, and even in Early Modern English a typically ‘religious style’ is found only as an additional layer in religious texts, which, by and large, follow the general standardising tendencies of the language at the time.

This chapter discusses how analyses of historical developments in the English language can be informed by Construction Grammar, which models linguistic knowledge as a network of interconnected form–meaning pairs. Adopting this view of language, a growing body of constructional research addresses questions of how new form–meaning pairs come into being, how their interconnections change in the network and how the entire network develops over time. Engagement with these questions provides new perspectives on familiar phenomena, and it directs our attention to issues that have not been studied before. This chapter surveys theoretical proposals that apply notions from Construction Grammar to the study of language change, and by reviewing empirical studies of historical change from a constructional perspective across different domains in English grammar.

This chapter surveys the role of quantitative methods in diachronic studies which investigate the past and present stages of English. We begin with simple bivariate analyses, such as tracing frequency developments, discuss inferential models and explain the advantages of multifactorial (including hierarchical) modelling. Moreover, we trace changing productivity, association strengths, lexical biases and collocational preferences within constructions. We also discuss methods for exploratory analysis of multidimensional data and provide a brief overview of methods drawing from machine learning and other scientific disciplines (e.g. word embeddings and agent-based modeling). To illustrate our methodological points, we include small-scale hands-on analyses on the variation between will and be going to constructions as markers of future-time reference from the ARCHER and COHA corpora.

The vernacular historiographical tradition has evolved since the ninth century through merging core genres like annals, chronicles and historical narrative with empirical antiquarian treatises. It became clearly distinguished from religious and fictional writing only in post-medieval times, thus also adapting its concept of truth and its methods. While its earlier history is best described by way of a discourse tradition (Koch), a Wengerian community of practice emerges in the late modern period. Starting off as a purely narrative text-type, historiographical writing developed into a typical narrative–expository–argumentative conglomerate over the early and late modern periods. The heteroglossia so typical of historiography becomes less literary or dramatic and more evidential in nature, also evolving citation styles and footnotes. The evaluative and ideological potential of historiography is present from the start and realised by such means as group/person labels, evaluative lexis and superlatives.

To study the history of spoken English is to study its extant vestiges in written texts. This chapter draws upon work that connects speech and writing in historical English to present a framework for contextualising written documents and the particularities of their relationships to spoken language. It examines how written English represents spoken English through different styles and genres of text and across different chronological periods. A late medieval deposition might provide certain clues to the English spoken at the time owing to the non-standard orthography and the regional morphosyntax. By contrast, a contemporary poem might provide different clues to the twentieth-century English spoken in the Caribbean owing to the representation of local English through lexical, syntactic and orthographic means. Neither of these is a perfectly faithful record of speech, however, and each reflects different constraints of genre, style, writing practices and pragmatic pressures in the Englishes that they depict.

Generative approaches to synchronic linguistics attempt to describe what is part of a language in a mathematically precise way, and generative approaches to the history of English and other languages model diachronic changes as a sequence of stages of the language with differing formal properties. Formalising the grammars of these stages makes falsifiable predictions about what was grammatical in each stage. Generative accounts include phonological analysis, but this chapter focuses on accounts of morphosyntactic changes. Generativists take child language acquisition to be the locus of language change, which is assumed to occur when children are exposed to different Primary Linguistic Data from what older generations encountered, due to factors like phonological change and language contact. Syntactic changes that have been studied extensively within generative frameworks include the development of modal and other auxiliary verbs, clausal negation and changes in word order, particularly in the positioning of the tensed verb.

Historical thesauri are indispensable tools for understanding the historical lexicon of English. The arrangement of historical lexis by semantic field reveals patterns in vocabulary which cannot be seen in an alphabetical ordering, and so historical thesauri are essential for the investigation of cultural development and the history of ideas as well as charting the evolution of the lexicon. This chapter gives examples from the Historical Thesaurus of English and its related projects, including A Thesaurus of Old English, The Bilingual Thesaurus of Everyday Life in Medieval England and Love, Sex, and Marriage: A Historical Thesaurus. It enumerates the key principles of a historical thesaurus, discusses sources of lexical data as well as the organisational principles by which historical thesauri arrange words, and overviews research projects in the history of English which have been made possible by historical thesauri.

This chapter deals with changes in the history of English as they are informed by the functional approach to language, which starts from the assumption that linguistic structure cannot be analysed independently from the uses to which it is put. Three types of external, functional explanation are distinguished: communication-based (discourse- and information-structural), processing and cognitive explanations. Against this background, I discuss the impact of these external functional factors on the traditional domains of language change: sound change, morphological change, syntactic change and semantic-pragmatic change. In a final section, I address grammaticalisation as a domain combining morphosyntactic and semantic-pragmatic change.

The New Cambridge History of the English Language is aimed at providing a contemporary and comprehensive overiew of English, tracing its roots in Germanic and investigating the contact scenarios in which the language has been an active participant.