Studies in the History of the English Language: A Millennial Perspective (Topics in English Linguistics [TiEL], 39)

The 19 papers in this volume are a selection from a UCLA conference intended to take stock of the state of the field at the beginning of the new millenium and to stimulate research in English Historical Linguistics. The authors are predominantly U.S. scholars. The fields represented include morphosyntax and semantics, grammaticalization, discourse analysis, dialectology, lexicography, the diachronic study of code-switching, phonology and metrics. Two sample articles can be downloaded for free from our website. Front Cover 1 Title Page 4 Copyright Page 5 Table of Contents 6 Foreword 8 Millennial perspectives 26 From etymology to historical pragmatics 26 Mixed-language texts as data and evidence in English historical linguistics 58 Dialectology and the history of the English language 86 Origin unknown 116 Issues for a new history of English prosody 132 Chaucer: Folk poet or littérateur? 160 A rejoinder to Youmans and Li 184 Phonology and metrics 190 On the development of English r 190 Vowel variation in English rhyme 214 Lexical diffusion and competing analyses of sound change 238 Dating criteria for Old English poems 252 How much shifting actually occurred in the historical English vowel shift? 274 Restoration of /a/ revisited 290 Morphosyntax/Semantics 308 Pragmatic uses of SHALL future constructions in Early Modern English 308 Explaining the creation of reflexive pronouns in English 332 Word order in Old English prose and poetry: The position of finite verb and adverbs 362 The “have” perfect in Old English: How close was it to the Modern English perfect? 380 Reporting direct speech in Early Modern slander depositions 406 The emergence of the verb-verb compound in twentieth century English and twentieth century linguistics 424 Envoy 456 A thousand years of the history of English 456 Name index 480 Subject index 490 The 19 papers in this volume are a selection from a UCLA conference intended to take stock of the state of the field at the beginning of the new millennium and to stimulate research in English Historical Linguistics. The authors are predominantly U.S. scholars. The fields represented include morphosyntax and semantics, grammaticalization, discourse analysis, dialectology, lexicography, the diachronic study of code-switching, phonology and metrics. One of the much-discussed themes of linguistic work in the last hundred years has been how to think about the relationships between synchrony and diachrony, between structure and use, between arbitrariness and motivatedness, between what Roberts has called "a random 'walk' through the space defined by the set of possible parameter values" (Roberts 1993: 252) and observed directionalities of change.