Overview

This volume includes fifteen papers focussing on three important aspects of the history of English in Britain and overseas since the eighteenth century: the grammatical tradition of prescriptivism, syntactic developments and sociolinguistic factors affecting language variation. Within these areas, methodological approaches include those relating to corpus linguistics, social network theory, the investigation of specialized discourse in a diachronic perspective, and lexicography. The individual sections are highly cohesive with each other, as the ideological considerations on which the prescriptive tradition was founded are underpinned by sociological factors. Theoretical contributions appear alongside 'case studies' in which instances of specific usage are investigated.

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9783039112579

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The Editors: Marina Dossena is Associate Professor of English Language at the University of Bergamo. Her published and current research focuses on English historical dialectology («Like runes upon a standin' stane» The Perception of Scotticisms in Grammar and Vocabulary forthcoming 2003). She is currently compiling a corpus of 19th-century Scottish correspondence. Charles Jones is Forbes Professor of English Language at the University of Edinburgh. Recent publications include A Language Suppressed (1995), an edition of A Treatise on the Provincial Dialect of Scotland, by Sylvester Douglas (1779) (1992) and The Edinburgh History of the Scots Language (1997).

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