Hans Sauer

Robert Mailhammer

Ursula Lenker

Judith Huber

Gaby Waxenberger

The fifteen papers selected for Volume II of English Historical Linguistics 2008 have a different emphasis than those in Volume I (CILT 314, Lenker et al. 2010). Nine concentrate on the development of the English vocabulary and six on historical text linguistics, including the development of text-types and of politeness strategies. Of those in the former group, three have their emphasis on etymology, three on semantic fields, and three on word-formation, although some cover more than one of these areas. The topics include: the treatment of etymological problems in the OED; deverbal derivations formed from native verbs and from loan-verbs; the role of metaphor and metonymy in the evolution of word-fields. The field of historical text linguistics is introduced by a general survey, which is followed by more specific studies focussing on 15th-century legal and administrative texts from Scotland, on early 15th-century women's mystical writings, on medical recipes from the 16th to the 18th centuries and on pauper letters from 18th-century Essex. The book should appeal to scholars interested in English etymology, the history of semantic fields and of word-formation, as well as in historical text linguistics, politeness strategies and standardization. It provides not only theoretical considerations but also a wealth of case studies.

English Historical Linguistics 2008: Words, texts and genres

Anneli Meurman-Solin

Clausal connection is one of the key building blocks of language and thus a field where a wide range of syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and cognitive phenomena meet. The availability of large databases as well as considerable advances in corpus-linguistic methods have strengthened the interest in the history of features linking clauses or larger chunks of text. The papers in this volume combine a thorough corpus-based analysis of the history of individual connectives, their co-occurrence patterns, and patterns of variation and change from both intra- and inter-systemic perspectives with a variety of methodological tools, ranging from sophisticated methods of grammatical analysis to pragmatics, text linguistics and discourse analysis. Drawing on quantitatively and qualitatively improved data, the studies reconstruct the history of a wide range of connectives in English from various new theoretical perspectives.

Ursula Lenker

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