Description
Oxford The Oxford Handbook of the History of English 2016 Edition by Terttu Nevalainen, Elizabeth Closs Traugott
The availability of large electronic corpora has caused major shifts in linguistic research, including the ability to analyze much more data than ever before, and to perform micro-analyses of linguistic structures across languages. This has historical linguists to rethink many standard assumptions about language history, and methods and approaches that are relevant to the study of it. The field is now interested in, and attracts, specialists whose fields range fromstatistical modeling to acoustic phonetics. These changes have even transformed linguists' perceptions of the very processes of language change, particularly in English, the most studied language in historical linguistics due to the size of available data and its status as a global language.The Oxford Handbook of the History of English takes stock of recent advances in the study of the history of English, broadening and deepening the understanding of the field. It seeks to suggest ways to rethink the relationship of English's past with its present, and make transparent the variety of conditions and processes that have been instrumental in shaping that history. Setting a new standard of cross-theoretical collaboration, it covers the field in an innovative way, providingdiachronic accounts of major influences such as language contact, and typological processes that have shaped English and its varieties, as well as highlighting recent and ongoing developments of Englishes-celebrating the vitality of language change over the centuries and the many contexts and processes throughwhich language change occurs. Table of contents : - PrefaceContentsContributorsAbbreviationsIntroduction: Rethinking and extending approaches to the history of the English language. (Terttu Nevalainen and Elizabeth Closs Traugott) --PART I. RETHINKING EVIDENCE--Guide to Part I. --Evidence1. Lead Chapter: Evidence for the history of English: Introduction. (Susan Fitzmaurice and Jeremy Smith) 2. Evidence from sources prior to 1500. (Carole Hough)3. Coins as evidence. (Philip Shaw)4. Editing early English texts. (Simon Horobin)5. Evidence from sources after 1500. (Joan C. Beal)6. Examples of evidence from phonology6.1 Middle English phonology in the digital age: What written corpora can tell us about sound change. (Nikolaus Ritt)6.2 Evidence for sound-change from Scottish corpora. (Wendy Anderson)6.3 GOAT vowel variants in the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (DECTE). (Karen P. Corrigan)6.4 Analyzing the ONZE data as evidence for sound change. (Jennifer Hay)7. Using dictionaries and thesauruses as evidence. (Julie Coleman)8. Evidence from surveys and atlases in the history of the English language. (William A. Kretzschmar Jr. and Merja Stenroos)9. Evidence from historical corpora up to the twentieth century. (Merja Kytoe and Paivi Pahta)10. Variability-based Neighbor Clustering: A bottom-up approach to periodization in historical linguistics. (Stefan Th. Gries and Martin Hilpert)11. Data retrieval in a diachronic context: The case of the historical English courtroom (Dawn Archer)--Observing recent change through electronic corpora 12. Lead Chapter: Some methodological issues related to corpus-based investigations of recent syntactic changes in English. (Mark Davies) 13.