Suzanne Romaine

Richard M. Hogg

Norman Francis Blake

Roger Lass

R. W. Burchfield

Volume two of this set covers the Middle English Period, approximately 1066-1476, and describes and analyses developments in the language from the Norman Conquest to the introduction of printing.

The Cambridge History of the English Language: 1066-1476

The volumes of The Cambridge history of the English language reflect the spread of English from its beginnings in Anglo-Saxon England to its current role as a multifaceted global language that dominates international communication in the 21st century.

The Cambridge History of the English Language

Richard Hogg

The Cambridge History of the English Language is the first multi-volume work to provide a full account of the history of English. Its authoritative coverage extends from areas of central linguistic interest and concern to more specialised topics such as personal and place names. The volumes dealing with earlier periods are chronologically based, whilst those dealing with more recent periods are geographically based, thus reflecting the spread of English over the last 300 years. Volume 1 deals with the history of English up to the Norman Conquest, and contains chapters on Indo-European and Germanic, phonology and morphology, syntax, semantics and vocabulary, dialectology, onomastics, and literary language. Each chapter, as well as giving a chronologically-oriented presentation of the data, surveys scholarship in the area and takes full account of the impact of developing and current linguistic theory on the interpretation of the data. The chapters have been written with both specialists and non-specialists in mind; they will be essential reading for all those interested in the history of English.

Old English is a companion to Old English studies and to historical studies of early English in general. It is also an introduction to Indo-European studies in the particular sense in which they underpin the history of English. Professor Roger Lass makes accessible in a linguistically up-to-date and readable form the Indo-European and Germanic background to Old English, as well as what can be reconstructed about the resulting state of Old English itself. His book is a bridge between the more elementary Old English grammars and the major philological grammars and recent interpretations of the Old English data.Old English assumes a basic knowledge of phonetics and phonology, the elements of syntactic and morphological theory, and an introduction to historical linguistics. An extensive glossary gives definitions of the major technical terms used.

A Historical Linguistic Companion

Old English

Marina Dossena

Originally presented at the second in the newly-launched series of International Conferences on English Historical Dialectology, held at the University of Bergamo in August 2007, the contributions collected in this volume discuss significant aspects of socio-geo-historical variation in language. In addition to British English, the focus is on Dutch, Scots and varieties of English outside England (in Wales and in the American colonies of the seventeenth century), in a time span ranging from medieval times to the nineteenth century. The aim is to highlight the traits that allow scholars to approach the study of English in a broader European perspective, identifying the patterns that show convergence or divergence, not just in terms of shared linguistic features (morphosyntactic, lexical or pragmatic), but also in terms of methodological approaches. In this respect, great attention is given to the latest developments in corpus and computational linguistics, showing the extent to which such new tools as electronic atlases and tagged corpora may facilitate answers to important research questions. At the same time, perceptual dialectology is awarded new interest on account of its significant role in normative and argumentative language use.

Studies in English and European Historical Dialectology

John Malcolm Anderson

John M. Anderson

Lass

A detailed study of Old English, taking as its point of departure the 'standard theory' of generative phonology as developed by Chomsky and Halle. Dr Lass and Dr Anderson set out all the main phonological processes of Old English and against their larger historical background (including subsequent developments in the history of English). They propose many fresh solutions to long-standing problems in the history and structure of Old English. The result is an extensive and sophisticated treatment of this subject. An important theory is examined against a well-studied body of linguistic knowledge, and is partly validated and partly revised. The book will be important for all linguistics and historians of English and Indo-European.

Old English Phonology

Professor Roger Lass

Roger Lass offers a critical survey of the foundations of the art of historical linguistics.

Historical Linguistics and Language Change

This volume spans Middle English, Early Modern English and the early stages of modern language.

Robert Burchfield

Volume 5 covers the dialects of England since 1776, the historical development of English in the former Celtic-speaking countries, and English other countries.

Roger Lass

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