From the Middle English period grammatical relations that used to be coded by case-marked forms in Old English were increasingly expressed by prepositional constructions, without however completely replacing the former. Two prominent syntactic alternations arose as a result of this development, that is the dative and genitive variations: (1) Dative variation: John gave Mary a book vs. John gave a book to Mary. (2) Genitive variation: the king’s horse vs. the horse of the king. This chapter brings together research on these alternations, tracing their emergence and development, and focusing on the role of harmonic alignment (in particular, animacy). Although they are separate alternations, one operating on the VP level (datives) and the other on the NP level (genitives), their development shows some parallels, which are attributed to analogy based on functional overlap across the two alternations.

R-sounds (rhotics) have been a part of English phonology throughout its history. Although there is no agreement on the precise articulatory characteristics of these sounds, they have played a central phonological role in the language since the earliest times. The possible nature of rhotics in Old English, and hence in later periods of the language, is considered in detail. Various phonological processes, vowel breaking, vowel mergers, metathesis, a number of sandhi phenomena, have been triggered by R and many of these processes are still productive in Present-Day English. The scope of R sounds can be restricted by syllable position for some varieties of English which do not license any rhotics outside of a syllable-initial prevocalic position. The dynamics of R in varieties of English today are considered, with normative pronunciation models varying in their allowing non-prevocalic R or not.

When and why did English grammars first start to be written, and by whom? Who else were involved in the grammar-writing process apart from the grammarians? And what was the grammarians’ expertise based on to begin with? This chapter will address these questions by discussing the rise of the English grammar-writing tradition during the late sixteenth century down to the end of the eighteenth century. Focusing on the linguistic climate of the period, it will show how grammars were written at a time when only Latin grammar was available as a descriptive model, and that grammarians gradually developed an eye for features specific to the English language. Contextualising research on the subject by discussing traditional and state-of-the-art research tools, it will show that writing grammars for English was increasingly professionalised, and that female grammarians played an important role in the process.

This chapter presents one of the most recent additions to the historical sociolinguistic toolkit, a community of practice (CoP). The discussion of definitions and delimitations of this concept places it in the ‘three waves’ of sociolinguistic research and builds comparisons and contrasts with two neighbouring frameworks: social networks and discourse communities. The focus moves on to the applications of CoPs in historical sociolinguistics. The dimensions of practice – joint enterprise (or domain), mutual engagement, and shared repertoire – are redefined for the purpose of historical sociolinguistics and illustrated with examples from studies which engage with the sociohistorical and cultural context of communication. We show how language change – or, indeed, resistance to change – may be observed through a CoP lens. Prolific contexts where the concept of a CoP has been fruitfully employed include letter writing, the production of manuscripts and early prints, professional discourse, trial proceedings, multilingual practices and online blogging.

Often regarded as comprehensive, impartial and authoritative works, monolingual dictionaries of the standard variety of English have never been neutral repositories of vocabulary. Instead, they have acted as vehicles for ideologies of one sort or another, transmitting societal values as well as linguistic information. All dictionary-makers make decisions on whose and which words to include and to exclude; equally all gather and process these words in ways that influence their presentation to the dictionary-user, employing editorial methods and technological means that have varied from one period to another. This chapter focuses on Johnson’s Dictionary and successive versions of the Oxford English Dictionary in an historically organised account of dictionaries to the present day, noting the under-representation in these two works of women as language-producers. It also discusses editions of the Webster dictionaries, of twentieth-century desk dictionaries before and after the introduction of corpus-based lexicography, and online dictionaries.

The notion of original pronunciation (OP) has arisen because of interest from people who are not themselves phonologists, but who want to know how an earlier period of English sounded to add a fresh dimension to spoken or sung performance. After a discussion of the evidence available at different periods, the paper focuses on Early Modern English, reviewing five constituencies: early music, Bible translations and liturgy, heritage projects, non-dramatic poetry and (especially Shakespearean) theatre. The ways OP has been used by practitioners are described with particular reference to rhyme, wordplay, phonaesthetics and characterisation. A brief review of the history of the OP movement is followed by an illustration of the challenges of working with OP, using a case study of the options surrounding the phonetic character of /r/. Two recent projects, on Keats and Richard III, are summarised. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the extent to which OP projects can achieve authenticity.

The standardisation of English spelling is a complex process which started in late Middle English and extended throughout the early modern period. This chapter focuses on the initial stages in the fifteenth century. After an overview of the linguistic and socio-historical contexts, the models and approaches prevailing from the mid twentieth century are examined. Special attention is given to the adoption of key sociolinguistic conceps in recent research projects ―focusing, levelling, koineisation and supralocalisation― and to the application of the historical sociolinguistic methodology as a clear way forward in the analysis and interpretation of this issue.

The English language is generally discussed publicly with reference to an ideologically constructed correct form. Such discourses first emerged in the eighteenth century forming part of a long process of language standardisation, a process associated with major political imperatives. Standard language ideologies, articulated and maintained by powerful social groups, vary in different nations. Distinctive British and American ideologies are associated with critical points in national histories, and have the effect of disadvantaging specific social groups by disparaging their language varieties. Rather than being dismissed as examples of ill-informed misunderstanding of the nature of language promoted by powerful speakers for their own purposes, such ideologies can be considered more broadly as part of a larger set of perspectives on language articulated by language users, intimately connected not only with vested social and political interests but with explaining connections between language and the social world or describing its structure systematically.

This chapter explores the language of dialect writing in the history of English. It surveys the complexities underlying the social and linguistic interactions between (non-)standard varieties with examples of literary dialect and dialect literature written between 1500 and 1900 that are now available in the Salamanca Corpus. It is shown that such evidence provides useful insight into the history of forms that remain underexplored, while it vividly reflects changing ideologies about dialect variation. In this regard, this chapter draws on third-wave sociolinguistic models to illustrate that the combination of frameworks such as enregisterment and indexicality with quantitative analysis of dialect writing can prove beneficial in reconstructing linguistic ideas about dialects and ascertaining shifting indexicalities, while it informs our understanding of the social meaning of dialect variation in the past.

Chaucer’s works were written during the late fourteenth century, a period which saw considerable changes in the functions of the English language as it came to replace French and Latin as the languages of written record. As well as being an important source for the scholarly understanding of late Middle English, Chaucer’s works shed light on the status of English and its variety of registers and dialects, enabling scholars to gain a deeper awareness of the sociolinguistic connotations of its different forms and usages. The Canterbury Tales, with its array of pilgrims drawn from a variety of professions, social classes and geographical regions narrating a series of tales reflecting a wide range of genres, is a valuable source of evidence for historical pragmatics. This chapter shows the way in which Chaucer’s text offers insights into the conventions of social interaction, including forms of address, politeness and verbal aggression, and the use of discourse markers.

This chapter explores the role of central aspects of cognition in historical linguistics. After describing and discussing the cognitive commitment and its theoretical background, this chapter highlights the relation to cognitive archaeology as well as historical psychology and explores the methodological prerequisites for cognitive approaches to the history of English, particularly the quantitative turn in cognitive linguistics. Case studies from different periods of English illustrate how cognitive factors can shed light on synchronic historical language stages and diachronic developments, and how these in turn can help us to further explore the cognitive commitment. Finally, we argue for a feedback loop, where modern cognitive linguistic theories feed into and guide historical enquiries, but are also checked and modified, if necessary, on the basis of historical findings.

This chapter takes a perspective on Shakespeare’s language that is more in tune with linguistics than literary criticism. Hence, it covers areas of language typically and traditionally discussed within linguistics, including phonology, grammar, lexis and semantics, but also includes pragmatics and, briefly, Conversation Analysis. It begins with a consideration of the label ‘Shakespeare’s language’ and what exactly that might encompass; the role of Shakespeare’s language in the study of the history of English; and popular myths that have arisen around Shakespeare’s language. It concludes with a reflection on methods of study, especially digital methods. It strives not only to acknowledge key research, but also to give the flavour of some of the findings of that research.

This chapter focuses on phraseological units in the development of English. In the past years, an increasing number of studies have dealt with this topic, partly within different theoretical frameworks, such as lexicalisation, grammaticalisation or constructionalisation. On the basis of a selection of case studies mostly with a focus on corpus linguistics, this chapter aims to highlight selected findings on phraseological units in the history of English, emphasising questions such as the relationship between phraseological and non-phraseological language development, structural variation vs fixedness, and the role of style. The discussion of the case studies proceeds from one of the smallest units (phrasal verb) in ascending structural complexity to the largest, sentence-length unit (proverb), and finally to units with variable slots. The chapter finishes with considerations of the phraseological force in language development and the place of phraseologicalisation in theories of language change.

The chapter is concerned with ego documents, that is sources like autobiographies, diaries and letters, as a data source for historians of the English language. First, the term ego documents is defined and its merits for historical sociolinguistic research are outlined. Thereafter, literacy and education opportunities, and the availability of and approaches to ego documents, are traced from the later Middle Ages to the Modern English period, followed by an illustration of language use across social layers, and a comparison to another contemporary text type. A particular focus is put on ego documents as a source of vernacular speech, for example as data for varieties of English for which there is no other contemporary documentation. The examples given illustrate the sometimes more speech-like and informal nature of ego documents and highlight the value of the text category for historical linguistics.