Studies in the History of the English Language

Donka Minkova is Professor Emeritus at UCLA, USA. Robert Stockwell is Professor Emeritus at UCLA, USA.

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.

I. MILLENNIAL PERSPECTIVES

From etymological to historical pragmatics
Elizabeth Closs Traugott

Mixed-language texts as data and evidence in English historical linguistics
Herbert Schendl

Dialectology and the history of the English language
William Kretzchmar

Origin unknown
Anatoly Liberman

Issues for a new history of English prosody
Thomas Cable

Chaucer: Folk poet or littérateur?
Gilbert Youmans / Xingzhong Li

A rejoinder to Youmans and Li
Thomas Cable

II. PHONOLOGY AND METRICS

On the development of English r
Blaine Erickson

Vowel variation in English rhyme
Kristin Hanson

Lexical diffusion and competing analyses of sound change
Betty Phillips

Dating criteria for Old English poems
Geoffrey Russom

How much shifting actually occured in the historical English vowel shift?
Robert Stockwell

Restoration of /a/ revisited
David White

III. MORPHOSYNTAX / SEMANTICS

Pragmatic uses of SHALL future constructions in Early Modern English
Maurizio Gotti

Explaining the creation of reflexive pronouns in English
Edward Keenan

Word order in Old English prose and poetry: The position of finite verb and adverbs
Ans van Kemenade

The "have" perfect in Old English: How close was it to the Modern English perfect?
Jeong-Hoon Lee

Reporting direct speech in Early Modern slander depositions
Colette Moore

The emergence of the verb-verb compound in twentieth century English and twentieth century linguistics
Benji Wald and Lawrence Besserman

IV. ENVOY

A thousand years of the history of English
Richard Bailey