In order to bring some minimal amount of order to the chaos that almost inevitably attends the use of the word ‘existential’ in a linguistic investigation, the author reserved the term existential sentence (ES) to designate all and only those English sentences in which there appears an occurrence of the unstressed, non-deictic, ‘existential’ there.

The origin of language, favored topic of the siicie des iumieres, has in the past decade begun to reemerge from a century and a half of neglect and even of interdiction. To examine the reasons for this fluctuation would be to go beyond the scope of the present work, although not beyond that of the historical reevaluation it suggests. Let it suffice to say that the anthropological naivete of the pbilosophes' constructions instilled in the minds of linguists and others a skepticism that still casts its shadow over recent discussions of the subject. This would be all for the best, of course, if the rigor of these discussions effected a genuine "sublation" of this not unjustified skepticism.

This book, the second volume in A Linguistic History of English, describes the development of Old English from Proto-Germanic. Like Volume I, it is an internal history of the structure of English that combines traditional historical linguistics, modern syntactic theory, the study of languages in contact, and the variationist approach to language change.

This book presents an investigation of lexical bundles in native and non-nativescientific writing in English, whose aim is to produce a frequency-derived, statistically- and qualitatively-refined list of the most pedagogically useful lexical bundles in scientific prose: one that can be sorted and filtered by frequency, key word, structure and function, and includes contextual information such as variations, authentic examples and usage notes. The first part of the volumediscusses the creation of this list based on a multimillion-word corpus of biomedical research writing and reveals the structure and functions of lexical bundles and their role in effective scientific communication.

The issue of permanence and change of word-order patterns has long been debated in both historical linguistics and structural theories. The interest in this theme has been revamped by contemporary research in typology with its emphasis on correlation or ‘harmonies’ of structures of word-order as explicative principles of both synchronic and diachronic processes.