Cloutier Robert A., Hamilton-Brehm Anne Marie, Kretzschmar Jr. William A. (eds.) Studies in the History of the English Language V. Variation and Change in English Grammar and Lexicon: Contemporary Approaches

De Gruyter Mouton, 2010. — viii, 329 p. — (Topics in English Linguistics [TiEL] 69). — ISBN 978-3-11-022033-9.The historical linguistics and cultural studies that have marked traditional research on history of the English language are alive and well, but they have been improved now by methods from corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics. This collection shows how historical studies of English are increasingly engaged with these contemporary trends in linguistics, and the volume demonstrates how empirical and other methods can bring classical philology fully into the sphere of contemporary linguistics without abandoning its traditional concerns.This volume has two sections, the first on grammar and syntax and the following section on word-based studies. Of course grammar and lexicon cannot be entirely segregated. Both sections highlight the contributions that strong empirical research can make to our knowledge of the development of English grammar, especially as realized in lexical development. And both sections pay serious attention to the frequencies and discourse characteristics with which particular words have been used at different times. Each essay will be followed immediately by commentary from another of the authors in the cluster of papers, and then the author will have the opportunity for a response to the commentary. In this way the collection will show the kind of discussion currently obtaining in the field, and more specifically in the section of the field in which the pairs of authors find themselves. The essays in this volume thus portray current research in history of the English language in the sort of conversations that in fact actually characterize the field today.English Grammar
Dialogic Contexts as Motivations for Syntactic Change
Whatever Happened to English Sluicing
Notion of Direction and Old English Prepositional Phrases
Survival of the Strongest: Strong Verb Inflection from Old to Modern English.
Subject Compounding and a Functional Change of the Derivational Suffix -ing in the History of English
Bad Ideas in the History of English Usage
English Lexicon
The State of English Etymology (A Few Personal Observations)
From Germanic ‘fence’ to ‘urban settlement’: On the Semantic Development of English town
Celtic Influence on English: A Re-Evaluation
When arīven Came to England: Tracing Lexical Re-Structuring by Borrowing in Middle and Early Modern English. A Case Study
Reexamining Orthographic Practice in the Auchinleck Manuscript Through Study of Complete Scribal Corpora
How Medium Shapes Language Development: The Emergence of Quotative Re Online