Medieval English and its Heritage

The Editors: Nikolaus Ritt, Herbert Schendl, Christiane Dalton-Puffer and Dieter Kastovsky teach at the Department of English at the University of Vienna and have published widely in different areas of English historical linguistics.

The volume features new work in English historical linguistics. It focuses on Medieval Englishes, but also discusses how processes originating there continued to unfold in later stages of linguistic evolution. In language internal terms, it deals with phonological, morphological, lexical and syntactic constituents. At the same time, cognitive, pragmatic and social factors are taken into account. All contributions go back to papers delivered at the 13th International Conference of English Historical Linguistics, held at Vienna in 2004. They address central questions from new perspectives, report empirical findings, point out new directions for research, make new methods relevant for the historical study of English, manage to revise established views, and provide a good survey of issues currently discussed in the community of historical English linguists.

Contents: Jeremy J. Smith: Phonaesthesia, Ablaut and the history of the English demonstratives - Christian Liebl: The A and O of a medieval English sound change: prolegomena to a study of the origins and early geographical diffusion of / / > / / - Julia Schlüter: A small word of great interest: the allomorphy of the indefinite article as a diagnostic of sound change from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries - Philip Durkin: Loanword etymologies in the third edition of the OED: the benefits of the application of a consistent methodology for the scholarly user - Michael Bilynsky: Getting a diachronic view on synonymy: verbs and deverbatives - Ewa Ciszek: -d m in medieval English - Ferdinand von Mengden: The peculiarities of the OE numeral system - Letizia Vezzosi: From agen to own - Ilse Wischer: Grammaticalisation and language contact in the history of English: the evolution of the progressive form - W. Garrett Mitchener: A mathematical model of the loss of verb-second in Middle English - Päivi Pahta/Arja Nurmi: Code-switching in the Helsinki Corpus: a thousand years of multilingual practices - Tamás Eitler: Audience rules: interspeaker accomodation and intraspeaker syntactic variation in Late Middle English.