Phases of the History of English

Michio Hosaka is Professor of English Linguistics at Nihon University.
Michiko Ogura is Professor of Medieval English at Keio University.
Hironori Suzuki is Professor of English at Daito Bunka University.
Akinobu Tani is Professor of English at the Hyogo University of Education.

This volume is a selection of papers read at the fourth international conference of the Society of Historical English Language and Linguistics (SHELL) held at Keio University, Tokyo, in 2012. The first conference was at Chiba University (Japan) back in 2005, the second at Nagoya University (Japan) in 2007, the third at Hiroshima University (Japan) in 2009. The volume consists of four plenary papers in part one, of six papers read in two symposia in part two, and individual papers on Old, Middle, Modern, American English with some diachronic studies in part three. Papers discuss syntax, lexicology, semantics, paleography, literary criticism, etc., in various historical periods of English, on the basis of both theoretical and philological studies, as the Society has aimed at the reunion of these approaches from its establishment.

This volume contains papers on historical linguistics, historical syntax in Old, Middle, Modern and American English, a survey on medieval manuscripts, semantic and lexical changes, morphological changes, and discussions on medieval literature.

Contents: Jacek Fisiak: Discovering English Historical Linguistics in Japan: A Personal View - Joyce Hill: Naming the Liturgical Year: Reflections on Vernacular Practice - Hans Sauer: Middle English Word-Formation: A Sketch - Liliana Sikorska: Malevolent Visitors: on Hosts and Hostiles in Medieval Romances - John Scahill: Syntagmatic Glossing in the Old English Gloss to the Rule of St Benedict - Tadashi Kotake: Gospel Glosses in Context: with Special Reference to Old English Scratched Glosses in London, BL, Additional 40000 - Tomonori Yamamoto: The Semantic and Syntactic Study of Periphrastic 'Modal verb + Infinitive' Constructions in OE: Comparing the Versions of the OE Gospels - Young-Bae Park: Impersonals in OE Syntax: Data and Explanations - Michiko Ogura: Ambiguity in Old English - Yoshitaka Kozuka: Element Order in Old English Translation - Michio Hosaka: A Diachronic Approach to Cleft Constructions in English - Fuyo Osawa: Impersonal Constructions and the Non-universality of Subject - Hideki Watanabe: Form, hand, and mund in Beowulf Reconsidered: Symbolism and Synecdoche for the hands in Heorot - Hironori Suzuki: Metrical influences on constructions with complex predicates in Old English hypermetric verses - Robert D. Stevick: Much Ado About Nothing, or, Further Thoughts on Null in Early English Writing - Takuto Watanabe: On the transition from ymb to about in Old and Middle English - Fumiko Yoshikawa: How is a Text Classified in Mystical Writing? Typical Vocabulary and Expressions in Middle English Mystical Writing - Akinobu Tani: Revising the Loss of the Verb Wit in Comparison with Know: A Survey into the ICAMET ME Prose Corpus - Akira Okada: An Investigation of English Negative Prefixes Appearing as Doublets - inability, disability, non-ability, unability - Yoko Iyeiri: The Pronoun it and the Dating of Middle English Texts - Fuminori Nakamura: On the Changes in the Clausal Complement of the Copulative Perception Verbs in American English - Kiriko Sato: Whomever in present-Day American English.