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The Oxford Handbook of the History of English

Online ISBN:
9780199971237
Print ISBN:
9780199922765
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

The Oxford Handbook of the History of English

Terttu Nevalainen (ed.),
Terttu Nevalainen
(ed.)
VARIENG, University of Helsinki
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Terttu Nevalainen is professor of English philology and Academy Professor at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her research interests are historical sociolinguistics, variation studies, and corpus linguistics. She is one of the designers and compilers of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts and the Corpus of Early English Correspondence. Her publications include more than 100 scholarly articles, An Introduction to Early Modern English (2006; EUP/OUP) and Historical Sociolinguistics (with H. Raumolin-Brunberg, 2003; Pearson), and she has coedited volumes on historical sociolinguistics, linguistic variation, and letter writing. She is the English editor of Neuphilologische Mitteilungen and the editor in chief of the e-series Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English and of the Oxford Studies in the History of English. terttu.nevalainen@helsinki.fi

Elizabeth Closs Traugott (ed.)
Elizabeth Closs Traugott
(ed.)
Linguistics and English, Emerita, Stanford University
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Elizabeth Closs Traugott is professor emerita of linguistics and English at Stanford University, California. She has done research in English historical syntax, semantics, pragmatics, lexicalization, and linguistics and literature. She has contributed to the Cambridge History of English, vol. 1 (R. Hogg, ed., 1992) and the Blackwell Handbook of the History of English (A. van Kemenade and B. Los, eds., 2006). Her books include Grammaticalization (with P. Hopper, 2nd edn., 2003), Regularity in Semantic Change (with R. Dasher, 2002), and Gradience, Gradualness and Grammaticalization (co-edited with G. Trousdale, Benjamins 2010). Her latest book is Constructionalization and Constructional Changes (with G. Trousdale, OUP, in press). She is coeditor with B. Kortmann of the series Topics in English Linguistics (De Gruyter Mouton). traugott@stanford.edu

Published online:
6 November 2012
Published in print:
1 November 2012
Online ISBN:
9780199971237
Print ISBN:
9780199922765
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

This handbook takes stock of recent advances in the history of English, the most studied language in the field of diachronic linguistics. Not only does ample and invaluable data exist due to English’s status as a global language, but the availability of large electronic corpora has also allowed historical linguists to analyze more of this data than ever before, and to rethink standard assumptions about language history and the methods and approaches to its study. In 68 chapters from specialists whose fields range from statistical modeling to acoustic phonetics, this handbook presents the field in an innovative way, setting a new standard of cross-theoretical collaboration, and rethinking the evidence of language change in English over the centuries. It considers issues of the development of Englishes, including creole and pidgin varieties. It presents various approaches from language contact and typology and rethinks the categorization of language, including interfaces with information structure. The book highlights the recent and ongoing developments of Englishes in Africa, Asia, and Australia, and celebrates the vitality of language change over time, in various contexts, cultures, and societies, and through many different processes.

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