The book deals with the development of descriptive models of English grammar writing during the Early Modern English period. For the first time, morphology and syntax as presented in Early Modern English grammars are systematically investigated as a whole. The statements of the contemporary grammarians are compared to hypotheses made in modern descriptions of Early Modern English and, where necessary, checked against the Early Modern English part of the Helsinki Corpus. Thus, a comprehensive overview of the characteristic features of Early Modern English is complemented by conclusions about the descriptive adequacy of Early Modern English grammars.
The volume contains selected papers from the SHEL-2 conference held at the University of Washington in Spring 2002. Scholars from North America and Europe address a broad spectrum of research topics in historical English linguistics, including new theories/methods such as Optimality Theory and corpus linguistics, and traditional fields such as phonology and syntax. In each of the four sections - Philology and linguistics; Corpus- and text-based studies; Constraint-based studies; and Dialectology - leading scholars respond directly to each other's arguments within the volume.
The relationships among data, evidence, and methodology in English historical linguistics are perennially vexed. This volume—which ranges chronologically from Old to Present-Day English and from manuscripts to corpora—challenges a wide variety of assumptions and practices and illustrates how diverse methods and approaches construct evidence for historical linguistic arguments from an increasingly large and diverse body of linguistic data.
The author analyzes, from a historical sociolinguistic point of view, selected domains of morphosyntactic variation in a 250,000 word collection of the Middle English Paston Letters (1421-1503). In three case studies, two nominal and one verbal variable are described and discussed in detail: the replacement of Old English pronouns by borrowed pronouns, the introduction and spread of >wh-relativizers, and the spread and routinization of light verb constructions (take, make, give, have, do plus deverbal noun).
