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.

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.

This chapter gives an overview of dictionaries, broadly conceived to include monolingual and bilingual wordlists for readers at all levels, in the history of English from the beginnings of Anglo-Saxon literacy to the present day. It argues against a reductive view of dictionaries as primarily agents of standardisation and authority, expressions of the ‘dismal sacred word’. Its arrangement is roughly chronological, beginning with Anglo-Saxon glossography and the lexicography of later medieval English, before turning to the bilingual and monolingual English dictionaries of the early modern period; to the monolingual dictionaries of the eighteenth century; and to the relationship of lexicography to two very important aspects of Late Modern English, namely its pluricentricity and its use as an acquired language. It concludes with a last look at the relationship of English lexicography with the ‘dismal sacred word’.

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. It discusses the various models and methodologies which have been developed to analyse diachronic data concisely and consistently. The new history furthermore examines the trajectories which the language has embarked on during its spread worldwide and presents overviews of the varieties of English found throughout the world today.

The development of English in the past few centuries is highlighted in this volume with the major issues of transmission and change forming the main focus. Different levels of languages are examined in individual chapters and individual case studies throw light on specifically relevant developments. The chronological range of the volume extends to the present with changes in Modern English viewed as continuations of trajectories established over a much longer preceding period. The role of ideology and prescriptivism in shaping the manner in which English was standardised in the Late Modern English period is also a central concern with the nature of networks, coalitions, communities of practice and enregisterment examined in detail.

In English, either the agent or the patient of an event can be topicalised. The active codes the first, unmarked option (A cat broke the vase), the second is achieved by the passive. This chapter discusses the complex history of the second option. While in Old English, passives were primarily adjectival. From Middle English onward, they became increasingly verbal, coding the outcome of a transitive event, and were used as a viewpoint construction, or to structure the discourse. Word order was also changing, restricting initial position more and more to an ever more versatile subject. The passive, catering for this versatile subject position, expanded to cross-linguistically uncommon forms such as the prepositional and recipient passives, and so did the novel mediopassive. The expansion saw its completion with the progressive passive in the eighteenth century. Special attention is devoted to the interconnectedness of these different passives, and their changing relations.

This chapter presents an overview of relative clauses and relativisation processes from Old English to Contemporary English, as well as in varieties of English around the world. It centres on adnominal restrictive relative clauses and addresses the factors determining the distribution of relativisers used to introduce the relative clause. Of particular interest will be the changing frequency of each relativiser over time, and the changing weight of the relevant predictors used, focusing on those of a semantic, morphosyntactic, social or stylistic nature. Also included will be a micro-analysis of recent changes in relation to relative constructions and individual relativisers, especially in less formal language, such as the demise of which in favour of that and the specialisation of who with human antecedents in subject function. Already widely reported in both standard and World Englishes, these innovations are likely to become part of the grammatical core of standard English.

This chapter addresses the history of the English system of clausal complementation. It is organised around four major questions. First, where do complement clauses (or CCs) come from? The history of English indicates that adverbial clauses can turn into CCs (e.g. lest-complements), or phrasal units undergo clausalisation (e.g. the gerund) – or both these mechanisms come into play (e.g. the to-infinitive). Second, what changes can CCs undergo? Changes to CCs may affect their internal syntax. For example, subjectless non-finite clauses have a strong tendency to develop subjects (e.g. ECM constructions, for…to-infinitives, secondary predicates). Often, CCs also undergo distributional change as they spread to new CC-taking predicates. The characteristic pattern is one of lexical diffusion. Third, how does the system change as a whole? English sees an unmistakable trend towards more non-finite complementation – a development known as the ‘Great Complement Shift’. This leads to a great number of variation hotspots, where finite CCs compete with non-finite alternatives, or non-finite alternatives compete among themselves. Fourth, what eventually becomes of CCs? At least two pathways of change appear to be open to CCs. In both cases CCs become more main-clause like. Either the matrix clause develops into an operator (i.e. an auxiliary or parenthetical), or the matrix clause disappears altogether, leading to insubordination.

Social networks are a valuable object of investigation in historical sociolinguistics, as they can contribute both to the onset of change and to the maintenance of linguistic norms. However, their characteristics make them complex to analyse, as their intrinsic variability may hinder the identification of phenomena that span different networks across time and space. This chapter is focused on Late Modern English materials, to present new resources through which network contiguities can be studied; this is the case, for instance, with the exchanges of emigrants, political activists, scholars and business correspondents. After addressing a few methodological issues, the chapter presents an overview of the materials at hand and outlines how networks and coalitions have had an impact, not only on the usage of participants (as shown in recent studies) but also on how language has been perceived, described and codified.