This chapter examines two conservative novels written in the 1810s: Harriet Waller Weeks’ Memoirs of the Villars Family, or The Philanthropist and Lady Dunn’s The Benevolent Recluse, both of which are concerned to depict how the upper ranks can remake a moral economy based on a changing notion of benevolence and philanthropy. These novels have a didactic concern to represent philanthropy and benevolence as a particular ideological practice with a moral power to justify the traditional ranks within English society. In so doing, they engage in the period’s debates about the nature of poverty, and the redefinition of the social responsibility of the privileged towards the poor. In the end, both novels fail to produce a conservative ideology to rival the more bourgeois/democratic ideologies we find in other novels of the period that we still read today. However, in that failure is the beginning of a modern concept of philanthropy in the exchange logic of the commodity: a return on the gift invested. Thus, the reciprocity of moral obligations would now unify and justify hierarchical social relations under the guise of benevolence and moral judgement. Understanding philanthropy as acquiring this exchange value at this historical moment provides a framework for the discussion of these conservative novels, revealing their ideological significance to our understanding of this period, as well as why we may have forgotten them.

The dialects of Southwest England subsume the varieties spoken in Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire, plus parts of bordering counties. Traditionally, these dialects were highly distinctive. Cornwall historically presents an interesting case of language shift, with recent attempts at Cornish revival implying a sense of local pride and identity. Data from popular sources indicate that modern Southwest English is enregistering traditional dialect features such as rhoticity or pronoun exchange to serve as markers of indexicality for younger and urban speakers. Dialect levelling has resulted in less pronounced differences between regions being preferred, but local identities within the Southwest remain clearly distinct through the maintenance of vernacular features. Features of urban varieties are often highlighted as salient nowadays, paralleling developments elsewhere in the world, moving away from a more area-based description of dialects. The historical influence of what is still widely known as West Country English beyond the Southwest was noticeable in South-East Ireland and in Newfoundland.

In this chapter, the equations that were defined in Chapters 1–3 are used to solve some problems. In addition, the existing equations are modified to make them more useful for finding various property values. Also, two new thermodynamic properties are very briefly introduced, Gibbs energy (or Gibbs free energy) and Helmholtz energy (or Helmholtz free energy), in order to provide a full set of equations often associated with the laws of thermodynamics.

Moving from Illmatic to Young Stoner Life, this chapter listens closely to rap flow – the complex metrical pulse that runs through its verses. Drawing on lyrical examples from rappers like MC Lyte and Missy Elliott, it lays out a series of core technical effects (such as pauses, overflows, and triplets) before turning to the question of how MCs have grappled with the challenge of recording their flows on the page. Discussing the obstacles that face any attempt to apply traditional print poetic scansion to hip-hop, the chapter moves on to the innovative ways that rappers like Rakim and Young Thug have approached their notepads – making use of 16x4 grids, unorthodox punctuation, and abstract shapes. It closes with a discussion of so-called mumble rap and the ethics of close listening, pointing to the controversial use of rap lyrics in the recent YSL court case.

This chapter considers the recent history of spoken London English, from the latter half of the nineteenth century to the present. Focusing on the variety furthest from the standard, the chapter begins with an overview of the traditional dialect of Cockney, prevalent in London at the beginning of this period and associated with the densely populated, working-class neighbourhoods of the ‘East End’ of London. It then considers important socio-historical and demographic changes that have taken place in London since the mid twentieth century and that have had linguistic consequences. In the final sections, the focus shifts to two large-scale sociolinguistic studies conducted between 2004 and 2010 and describes the emergence and characteristics of Multicultural London English (MLE), arising as a result of language contact and group second language acquisition. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the role that language attitudes may play in the entrenchment of this new urban London English vernacular.

Cyprus has always been a multilingual island and home to a complex mixture of different nationalities and ethnic groups. As the result of British colonisation, English gained ground on the island until the division of the Republic of Cyprus (RoC) in 1974. This division led to a separation of the two major ethnic groups, Greek and Turkish Cypriots. This has drastically changed the sociolinguistic grounds for the development and status of the English language. This chapter is the first to assess the status, roles and functions of English in both parts of Cyprus in a joint fashion. Our account suggests that English in Cyprus is heterogeneous: its use and functions depend on speaker and age groups and differ between the two parts. We trace its complex sociolinguistic development in both parts and discuss the repercussions for the World Englishes paradigm.

This chapter explores the importance of England’s traditional dialects for understanding the history of the English language more generally. These dialects are now largely moribund as a result of dialect levelling, standardisation and dialect death but were recorded in considerable detail by linguists in the late nineteenth and early to mid twentieth centuries, and were represented in literary dialect and, especially, dialect literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The chapter discusses the nature of these dialects, the data we have for them, and gives examples of the kinds of things we can learn about the history of English from their study. The history of English has always been one of dialect variation, and the history of the language cannot be properly understood without an analysis of England’s traditional dialects.

As a background to the disagreements and disputes over meaning in subsequent chapters this book begins with a chapter showing how meanings are created and communicated successfully in the normal case. It breaks down the process of assigning meanings to increasingly larger pieces of language, starting with individual words and issues that arise in defining lexical meanings in dictionaries, then word combinations and compounding, then whole clauses and their phrasal attachments and syntax. It turns next to the general issue of ambiguity and considers how this is normally resolved in context. Literal and conventional meanings are often enriched by various inferential processes such as “implicatures.” and these are summarized. The last content section discusses how words and phrases make reference to, and identify, entities in the outside world. The chapter ends with a reading sampler in linguistics and the language sciences for nonspecialists.

This chapter focuses on the history of English in Gibraltar, its current sociolinguistic landscape and position within theoretical models of analysis, and the attitudes of speakers towards the drastic changes taking place. In recent years English has become dominant among younger generations of speakers, indicating a steady shift in Gibraltar towards monolingualism, a process in which, we argue, globalisation plays an essential role. The chapter also reports on the ongoing and challenging compilation of the Gibraltar component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GBR), and presents a quantitative analysis of morphosyntactic features which occur in the print publications included in ICE-GBR.