Books in the Studies in English Language series

Using the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560-1760, in this book Culpeper and Kytoe offer a unique account of the linguistic features in speech-related genres of writing. Through this, they are able to provide a fascinating insight into what spoken interaction in Early Modern English might have been like.

This book documents the linguistic properties of lesser-known varieties of English from the Pacific, South America and the South Atlantic to West Africa and the Caribbean, exploring their social histories and showing their relevance for language spread and change.

This 2003 volume, written by a team of experts, many of them internationally known, provides a broad overview of the foundations of and research on language variation in the southern United States. Central themes, issues and topics of scholarly investigation and debate figure prominently throughout the volume.

The late Middle Ages in England saw a flowering of scientific writing in the vernacular, taking English discourse in new directions and establishing new textual genres. This 2004 book examines the sociolinguistic causes and effects of that process, and offers insights into vernacularisation for linguists and historians of science alike.

The eighteenth century was a key period in the development of the English language, in which the modern standard emerged and many dictionaries and grammars first appeared. The novel insights offered in this book extend our knowledge of the English language at the onset of the modern period.

This volume focuses on British-American differences in the structure of words and sentences. The first full-length treatment of the topic, it will be of interest to scholars working within the fields of English historical linguistics, language variation and change, and dialectology.

How did grammatical gender in English get replaced by a system dependent on natural gender? How is this related to 'irregular agreement' (she for ships) and 'sexist' language use (generic he) in Modern English? This study, based on extensive corpus data, offers an important historical perspective on these controversial questions.

This volume examines English during the nineteenth century, a period of both stability and change for the language. Considering both structural aspects and sociolinguistics issues, it compares nineteenth-century English with both earlier and later periods, making an important contribution to our overall understanding of the history of the English language.