Topics in English Linguistics -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Introduction: Evidence and method in the historical study of English -- 1 Introduction -- 2 The plan of this book -- 2.1 Corpora, evidence, method -- 2.2 Reconfiguring history: Overlooked evidence of English -- 2.3 Emerging paradigms: New methods, new evidence -- 3 Conclusion -- References -- Part I Corpora, Evidence, Method -- The development of free adjuncts in English and Dutch -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Data and methodology -- 3 Data analysis -- 4 Historical development: Strolling along the same path -- 4.1 Semantic change -- 4.2 Syntactic change -- 5 The nineteenth century: Going their separate ways -- 5.1 Language-external factors: Prescriptivism -- 5.2 Language-internal factors influencing the use of the free adjunct -- 5.2.1 The Dutch progressive -- 5.2.2 The role of the gerund -- 5.3 Explaining the divergence of the development of English and Dutch free adjuncts -- 6 Conclusion -- Acknowledgments -- Corpora and primary texts -- References -- Semantic dependencies and the history of ellipsis alternation -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Constituent ordering and ellipsis alternation: The effect of semantic dependencies -- 3 The history of English prepositional verbs -- 4 The history of ellipsis alternation -- 5 Discussion -- 6 Conclusion -- Acknowledgments -- Sources -- References -- The phrasal verb in American English: Using corpora to track down historical trends in particle distribution, register variation, and noun collocations -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Diachronic studies of the growth of phrasal verbs in English -- 3 Phrasal verbs and register variation in Present-Day English and the history of American English -- 4 Variation of particles in the history of American English -- 5 A case study of pick up and its noun collocates -- 5.1 pick up + telephone/phone.

5.2 pick up + speed -- 5.3 pick up + hat -- 6 Conclusion -- References -- On the grammaticalization of the thing is and related issues in the history of American English -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Background -- 2.1 The definition of the thing is in this study -- 2.2 The frequency of the thing is in conversational discourse -- 2.3 Discourse-syntactic functions of the thing is in conversational discourse -- 3 A short history of the thing is -- 3.1 The origin and development of the thing is -- 3.2 A note on punctuation -- 4 Ongoing and emerging changes to the thing is -- 4.1 Types of modifiers in the pragmatic marker usage of the thing is -- 4.2 Syntactic reflection of (inter)subjectivity in the recent past -- 4.3 Signs of further grammaticalization -- 4.4 Grammaticalization -- 5 Concluding remarks -- Acknowledgments -- Sources -- References -- Alfredian īo ~ ēo, reluctant function words, and Schriftbilder -- 1 Random vs. ordered variation -- 2 Methodology and results -- 3 Discussion -- 3.1 Pattern of the merger -- 3.2 Schriftbilder -- 3.3 Borrowing -- 4 Conclusion -- References -- Part II Reconfiguring History: Overlooked Evidence of English -- Metrical resolution, spelling, and the reconstruction of Old English syllabification -- 1 Some preliminaries -- 2 Was there ambisyllabicity in Old English? -- 3 Resolution in Old English meter -- 3.1 Resolution and the variable weight contribution of intervocalic consonants -- 3.2 Syllabification and the paraphonological component of meter -- 4 Orthographic tests for Old English syllable structure -- 4.1 Word-division in Old English manuscripts -- 4.2 Orthographic gemination in Old English -- 5 Summary -- Acknowledgments -- References -- The shortest history of vowel lengthening in English -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Some basic concepts -- 2.1 Length and mora counting -- 2.2 Positional and compensatory change.

2.3 Accent, stress, and syllabification -- 2.4 Living speech and diachrony -- 2.5 Theory and practice -- 3 Lengthening before consonant groups -- 4 Vowel lengthening in open syllables (so called) -- 4.1 Lengthening and syllabification -- 4.2 The causes of lengthening. Lengthening and breaking. "Degrees of lengthening" -- 4.3 The history of close vowels: An attempt at a reconstruction -- 4.4 The ghost of Hesselman's Law -- 5 Lengthening in words like ask, fast, cloth -- 6 Conclusions -- References -- Vowel system restructuring in the West Midlands of England -- 1 Introduction -- 1.1 The role of contact in inducing change: The scenario -- 1.2 Implications for historical reconstruction -- 2 Birmingham: A locality in a medieval transition zone -- 2.1 The geographical and regional setting -- 2.2 Characterizing medieval West Midlands dialect: The LALME evidence -- 3 The growth of Birmingham and the first koineization -- 3.1 The economic and historical background -- 3.2 The first koineization -- 4 The Industrial Revolution and the second koineization -- 4.1 Birmingham in the nineteenth century -- 4.2 The second koineization and the "fine-tuning" -- 5 Conclusion -- References -- Style and politics in The Battle of Brunanburhand The Battle of Maldon -- 1 Introduction -- 2 The Battle of Brunanburh -- 2.1 Pragmatic aims -- 2.2 Method and syntactic style -- 3 The Battle of Maldon -- 3.1 Interpreting the poet's pragmatic aims -- 3.2 Syntactic and prosodic correlates of style -- 4 Conclusion -- References -- Trinitarian terminology in Old English liturgical creeds -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Sources for investigation -- 2.1 Creed translations and glosses -- 2.2 Trinitarian passages in prose -- 2.3 Other glosses -- 2.4 Other prose -- 3 Degrees of uniformity in the English terms -- 3.1 High uniformity in the English terms: Terms with mainly specialized senses.

3.2 High uniformity in the English terms: Terms with both specialized and general senses -- 3.3 Less uniformity, patterned variation of English terms -- 4 Degrees of agreement between Ælfric and the Lambeth glossator -- 4.1 Substantia -- 4.2 Conversio -- 4.3 Assumptio -- 4.4 Separantes -- 4.5 Procedens -- 4.6 Genitus -- 4.7 Dominus -- 5 Discussion and conclusions -- Appendices: Sources of Old English Trinitarian vocabulary -- Acknowledgments -- References -- Part III Emerging Paradigms: New Methods, New Evidence -- Ælc þara þe þas min word gehierþ and þa wyrcþ ... : Psycholinguistic perspectives on early Englishes -- 1 Introduction -- 2 A theory of historical psycholinguistics -- 2.1 What is historical psycholinguistics? -- 2.2 Relative clauses in Middle and Old English: A case study -- 3 The basis: The uniformitarian principle -- 4 What are processing strategies? -- 5 Strategies for the processing of relative clauses in Present-Day English -- 6 Middle English -- 7 Old English -- 8 Conclusion -- References -- Complex systems and the history of the English language -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Complex systems -- 2.1 The nature of complex systems -- 2.2 Speech as a complex system -- 2.3 The emergence of complex systems of speech -- 3 Corpus evidence -- 4 Complex systems and change -- 4.1 Grammaticalization and change -- 4.2 The S-curve and the A-curve -- 4.3 The 80/20 Rule and estimates of change -- 5 Language evolution -- 5.1 Punctuated equilibrium and the evolution of language -- 5.2 The Great Vowel Shift as a complex system -- 5.2 The Great Vowel Shift and scale -- References -- An ideological history of the English term onomatopoeia -- 1 The prehistory of onomatopoeia -- 2 Early modern introduction -- 3 Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century linguistics -- 4 Analysis: Register shifts -- 5 Conclusion -- Dictionaries and databases -- References -- Name index.