Books in the Oxford Studies in the History of English series

Reference to or quotation from someone''s speech, thoughts, or writing is a key component of narrative. These reports further a narrative, make it more interesting, natural, and vivid, ask the reader to engage with it, and reflect historical cultural understandings of modes of discourse presentation. To a large extent, the way we perceive a story depends on the ways it presents discourse, and along with it, speech, writing, and thought. In this book, Beatrix Busse investigates speech, writing, and thought presentation in a corpus of 19th-century narrative fiction including Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Oliver Twist, and many others. At the intersection between corpus linguistics and stylistics, this book develops a new corpus-stylistic approach for systematically analyzing the different narrative strategies of discourse presentation in key pieces of 19th-century narrativefiction. Speech, Writing, and Thought Presentation in 19th-Century Narrative Fiction identifies diachronic patterns as well as unique authorial styles, and places them within their cultural-historical context. It also suggests ways for automatically identifying forms of discourse presentation, and shows that the presentation of characters''minds reflects an ideological as well as an epistemological concern about what cannot be reported, portrayed, or narrated. Through insightful interdisciplinary analysis, Busse demonstrates that discourse presentation fulfills the function of prospection and encapsulation, marks narrative progression, and shapes readers'' expectations.

This book presents the first serious attempt to set out a functional-semantic definition of diachronic transcategorial shift between the major classes noun/nominal and verb/clause. Lauren Fonteyn shows that the diachronic processes of nominalization and verbalization also involve functional changes by presenting a theoretical model of "functional-semantic categoriality" and applying it to the history of the English gerund.

Motion and the English Verb offers an extensive study of motion encoding in medieval English, including an investigation of the range of verbs occurring in the medieval English intransitive motion construction and an analysis of which verbs and structures are employed most frequently in talking about motion. On this basis, it analyses the various cognitive and contact-linguistic aspects of the integration of "typologically different" French loan verbsexpressing path of motion.

Based on 258 English grammar books, Language Between Description and Prescription investigates nineteenth-century grammar writing relating to actual language change, especially in the verb phrase. Lieselotte Andewald proposes that not all changes were noticed in the first place, and those that were noticed were not necessarily criticized.

This book describes and analyzes various changes in the distribution of copular and passive verb constructions in Old and Middle English, and, by way of these case studies, presents and tests several new theories that have major implications for construction grammar and linguistic change.

The unifying topic of this volume is the role of information structure, broadly conceived, as it interacts with the other levels of linguistic description, syntax, morphology, prosody, semantics and pragmatics.

Examines the emergence and spread of three types of complements from the Middle English period to the present day

The Early English Impersonal Construction aims to demonstrate that an understanding of the functional and semantic aspects of impersonal verbs in Old and Middle English can shed light on questions that remain about these verbs today.