Historical Outlines from Sound to Text

This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the history of English, organized by linguistic level, and it explores key questions and debates. Individual chapters are written by recognized experts in the field. The volume begins with a re-evaluation of the concept of periodization in the history of English. This is followed by overviews of changes in the traditional areas of phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics as well as chapters covering areas less often treated in histories of English, including prosody, idioms and fixed expressions, pragmatics and discourse, onomastics, orthography, style/register/text types, and standardization.

Auteur

Laurel Brinton, Vancouver, Canada; Alexander Bergs, Osnabrück, Germany.

Résumé

"Much of this History will indeed be of terrific use to teachers, who may well want to select particular papers to augment classroom discussion. In view of how this account affirms a kind of resolved, untroubled history of the language, teachers may also want to contextualize some of the discussions by addressing how limitations of historical evidence can constrain any conclusions drawn from it, or how methodology can shape data and vice versa.Thiis valuable and useful series would thereby become an opportunity to open up discussion of English-language historiography."
Tim William Machan in: Modern Language Review 114.3 (2019), 538-539