Studies in the History of the English Language VIII: Boundaries and Boundary-Crossings in the History of English

Description

This volume collects essays that approach notions of creating, maintaining, and crossing boundaries in the history of the English language. The concept of boundaries is variously defined within linguistics depending on the theoretical framework, from formal and theoretical perspectives to specific fields and more empirical, physical, and perceptual angles. The contributions to this volume do not take one particular theoretical or methodological approach but, instead, explore how examining various types of boundaries—linguistic, conceptual, analytical, generic, physical—helps us illuminate and account for historical use, variation, and change in English. In their exploration of various topics in the history of English, contributions ask a range of questions: what does it mean to set up boundaries between time periods? When do language varieties have distinct boundaries and when do they overlap? Where do language users draw up clausal, constructional, semantic, phonetic/phonological boundaries? Thus, the chapters explore not only how boundaries illustrate synchronic and diachronic features in the history of the English language but also what we can discover by questioning perceived or actual boundaries. Acknowledgments Contents Contributor addresses Introduction: Boundaries and boundarycrossings in the history of English Section 1: Conceptual and methodological boundaries 1. Scale and mode in histories of English 2. The blurred boundaries of genres-in-use: Principles and implications from rhetorical genre studies for English historical linguistics 3. Meanderings from early English to World Englishes: A Complex Systems perspective on morphosyntactic changes in wh-pronouns Section 2: Linguistic boundaries 4. First or best, last not least: Domain edges in the history of English 5. Expanding boundaries of a function word: Uses of one in Early Modern and Modern English 6. Non-correlative commas between subjects and verbs in Early and Late Modern English sermons and scientific texts 7. Old English verbs of envy: Class membership and grammatical behaviour Section 3: Language and language variety boundaries 8. Germanic /r/ as an isogloss, rhotacism, and the West Germanic gemination 9. Migration, localities, and discourse: Shifting linguistic boundaries in Swedish-American cookbooks 10. Specimen texts and boundaries in the history of the English language Coda: HEL-bound Index