Language Change and Variation from Old English to Late Modern English

This collection reflects Minoji Akimoto’s concern with studies of change in English that are theoretically-informed, but founded on substantial bodies of data. Some of the contributors focus on individual texts and text-types, among them literature and journalism, others on specific periods, from Old English to the nineteenth century, but the majority trace a linguistic process – such as negation, passivisation, complementation or grammaticalisation – through the history of English. While several papers take a fresh look at manuscript evidence, the harnessing of wideranging electronic corpora is a recurring feature methodologically. The linguistic fields treated include word semantics, stylistics, orthography, word-order, pragmatics and lexicography. The volume also contains a bibliography of Professor Akimoto’s writings and an index of linguistic terms.

The Editors: Merja Kyto is Professor of English Language at Uppsala University. Her areas of interest cover English historical linguistics, corpus linguistics, language variation and change, historical pragmatics, and manuscript studies.
John Scahill holds a doctorate from the University of Sydney for research on Early Middle English manuscripts and literary history, and is a member of the Faculty of Letters at Keio University in Tokyo.
Harumi Tanabe is Professor of English at Seikei University, Tokyo. Her main academic interests are English historical linguistics and Middle English manuscript studies.