The availability of large electronic corpora has caused major shifts in linguistic research, including the ability to analyze much more data than ever before, and to perform micro-analyses of linguistic structures across languages. This has historical linguists to rethink many standard assumptions about language history, and methods and approaches that are relevant to the study of it. The field is now interested in, and attracts, specialists whose fields range from statistical modeling to acoustic phonetics. These changes have even transformed linguists' perceptions of the very processes of language change, particularly in English, the most studied language in historical linguistics due to the size of available data and its status as a global language.The Oxford Handbook of the History of English takes stock of recent advances in the study of the history of English, broadening and deepening the understanding of the field. It seeks to suggest ways to rethink the relationship of English's past with its present, and make transparent the variety of conditions and processes that have been instrumental in shaping that history. Setting a new standard of cross-theoretical collaboration, it covers the field in an innovative way, providing diachronic accounts of major influences such as language contact, and typological processes that have shaped English and its varieties, as well as highlighting recent and ongoing developments of Englishes--celebrating the vitality of language change over the centuries and the many contexts and processes through which language change occurs.

PrefaceContentsContributorsAbbreviationsIntroduction: Rethinking and extending approaches to the history of the English language. (Terttu Nevalainen and Elizabeth Closs Traugott)PART I. RETHINKING EVIDENCEGuide to Part I.Evidence1. Lead Chapter: Evidence for the history of English: Introduction. (Susan Fitzmaurice and Jeremy Smith)2. Evidence from sources prior to 1500. (Carole Hough)3. Coins as evidence. (Philip Shaw)4. Editing early English texts. (Simon Horobin)5. Evidence from sources after 1500. (Joan C. Beal)6. Examples of evidence from phonology6.1 Middle English phonology in the digital age: What written corpora can tell us about sound change. (Nikolaus Ritt)6.2 Evidence for sound-change from Scottish corpora. (Wendy Anderson)6.3 GOAT vowel variants in the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (DECTE). (Karen P. Corrigan)6.4 Analyzing the ONZE data as evidence for sound change. (Jennifer Hay)7. Using dictionaries and thesauruses as evidence. (Julie Coleman)8. Evidence from surveys and atlases in the history of the English language. (William A. Kretzschmar Jr. and Merja Stenroos)9. Evidence from historical corpora up to the twentieth century. (Merja Kyt? and P?ivi Pahta)10. Variability-based Neighbor Clustering: A bottom-up approach to periodization in historical linguistics. (Stefan Th. Gries and Martin Hilpert)11. Data retrieval in a diachronic context: The case of the historical English courtroom (Dawn Archer)Observing recent change through electronic corpora12. Lead Chapter: Some methodological issues related to corpus-based investigations of recent syntactic changes in English. (Mark Davies)13. ?Small is beautiful? - On the value of standard reference corpora for observing recent grammatical change. (Marianne Hundt and Geoffrey Leech)14. Exploring variation and change in New Englishes: Looking into the International Corpus of English (ICE) and beyond. (Joybrato Mukherjee and Marco Schilk)15. Change in the English infinitival perfect construction. (Jill Bowie and Bas Aarts)16. Revisiting the reduplicative copula with corpus-based evidence. (Anne Curzan)17. Exploring aspects of the Great Complement Shift, with evidence from the TIME Corpus and COCA. (Juhani Rudanko)18. Diachronic collostructional analysis meets the noun phrase: Studying many a noun in COHA. (Martin Hilpert)19. From opportunistic to systematic use of the Web as corpus: do-support with got (to) in contemporary American English. (Christian Mair)PART II. ISSUES IN CULTURE AND SOCIETYGuide to Part II.Mass communication and technologies20. Lead Chapter: Technologies of communication. (Thomas Kohnen and Christian Mair)21. Oral practices in the history of English. (Ursula Schaefer)22. Forms of early mass communication: The religious domain. (Tanja R?tten)23. From manuscript to printing: Transformations of genres in the history of English. (Claudia Claridge)24. The competing demands of popularization vs. economy: Written language in the age of mass literacy. (Douglas Biber and Bethany Gray)25. The impact of electronically-mediated communication on language standards and style. (Naomi S. Baron)26. Old news: Rethinking language change through Australian broadcast speech. (Jenny Price)27. The commodification of language: English as a global commodity. (Deborah Cameron)Socio-cultural processes28. Lead Chapter: Socio-cultural processes and the history of English. (Jonathan Culpeper and Minna Nevala)29. Democratisation. (Michael Farrelly and Elena Seoane)30. Changing attitudes and political correctness. (Geoffrey Hughes)31. Social roles, identities, and networks. (Minna Palander-Collin)32. Changes in politeness cultures. (Andreas H. Jucker)33. The history of English seen as the history of ideas: Cultural change reflected in different translations of the New Testament. (Anna Wierzbicka)34. Attitudes, prescriptivism, and standardisation. (Carol Percy)35. Perceptions of dialects: Changing attitudes and ideologies. (Chris Montgomery)36. English in Ireland: A complex case study. (Tony Crowley)PART III. APPROACHES FROM CONTACT AND TYPOLOGYGuide to Part III.Language contact37. Lead Chapter: Assessing the role of contact in the history of English. (Raymond Hickey)38. Early English and the Celtic hypothesis. (Raymond Hickey)39. Language contact in the Scandinavian period. (Angelika Lutz)40. Language contact and linguistic attitudes in the Later Middle Ages. (Tim William Machan)41. Code-switching in English of the Middle Ages. (P?ivi Pahta)42. Ethnic dialects in North American English. (Charles Boberg)43. Contact in the African area - A Southern African perspective. (Ana Deumert and Rajend Mesthrie)44. Contact in the Asian arena. (Lisa Lim and Umberto Ansaldo)45. Contact-induced change in English world-wide. (Edgar W. Schneider)46. Second language varieties of English. (Devyani Sharma)47. Pidgins and creoles in the history of English. (Donald Winford)Typology and typological change48. Lead Chapter: Typology and typological change in English historical linguistics. (Bernd Kortmann)49. The drift of English towards invariable word order from a typological and Germanic perspective. (John A. Hawkins)50. Typological hierarchies and frequency drifts in the history of English. (Mikko Laitinen)51. Lexical typology and typological changes in the English lexicon. (Alexander Haselow)52. Analyticity and syntheticity in the history of English. (Benedikt Szmrecsanyi)53. Grammaticalization in non-standard varieties of English and English-based pidgins and creoles. (Agnes Schneider)54. Towards an automated classification of Englishes. (S?ren Wichmann and Matthias Urban)PART IV. RETHINKING CATEGORIES AND MODULESGuide to Part IV.Cycles and continua55. Lead Chapter: Cycles and continua: On unidirectionality and gradualness in language change. (Ricardo Berm?dez-Otero and Graeme Trousdale)56. Quantitative evidence for a feature-based account of grammaticalisation in English: Jespersen's Cycle. (Phillip Wallage)57. The syntax-lexicon continuum. (Cristiano Broccias)58. Toward a unified theory of chain shifting. (Aaron J. Dinkin)59. (Non)-rhoticity - Lessons from New Zealand English. (Jennifer Hay and Alhana Clendon)60. Lenition in English. (Patrick Honeybone)61. Continua and clines in the development of New Englishes. (Devyani Sharma and Caroline R. Wiltshire)Interfaces with information structure62. Lead Chapter: The interaction between syntax, information structure, and prosody in word order change. (Roland Hinterh?lzl and Ans van Kemenade)63. Rethinking the loss of Verb Second. (Ans van Kemenade)64. Rethinking the OV/VO alternation in Old English: The effect of complexity, grammatical weight, and information status. (Ann Taylor and Susan Pintzuk)65. The impact of focusing and defocusing on word order in OE and OHG, and on changes at the right periphery in the middle periods. (Svetlana Petrova)66. The loss of local anchoring: From adverbial local anchors to permissive subjects. (Bettelou Los and Gea Dreschler)67. Stress clash and word order changes in the left periphery in Old English and Middle English. (Augustin Speyer)68. Clefts as resolution strategies after the loss of a multifunctional first position. (Bettelou Los and Erwin Komen)GlossaryList of corpora and databasesIndex of languages and language varietiesName indexSubject index