Conference selection

SHEL 2024

Madison, October 17-20, 2024

John Benjamins will be virtually present at SHEL 2024. Check out our promotional material and discount order form through the links below. If you wish to talk about our books, your work, and possible publishing projects please get in touch with Anke de Looper at anke.delooperbenjamins.nl.

Discount order form (PDF) for conference participants
JB journals pages, with ToCs, abstracts, sample issues, and submission guidelines
Guidelines for book proposals
Other links: Our homepage, our e-platform, Facebook, Linked In and Twitter

Check out our selection of top titles for this conference!

Showing all 18 titles.

CoLL 60

Constraints on Language Variation and Change in Complex Multilingual Contact Settings

Edited by Bertus van Rooy and Haidee Kotze

Constraints on Language Variation and Change in Complex Multilingual Contact Settings explores an innovative proposal: that linguistic similarities identified in different forms of contact-influenced varieties of language use (including translation, native and non-native varieties of English, and language... full description

June 2024. vi, 293 pp.

SCL 96

Corpora and the Changing Society

Studies in the evolution of English

Edited by Paula Rautionaho, Arja Nurmi and Juhani Klemola

This book showcases eleven studies dealing with corpora and the changing society. The theme of the volume reflects the fact that changes in society lead to changes in language and vice versa. Focusing on the English language, be it from Old English to the present, or a shorter time span in the immediate past, the... full description

April 2020. xii, 305 pp.

CAL 33

Discourse Structuring Markers in English

A historical constructionalist perspective on pragmatics

Elizabeth Closs Traugott

This book is a contribution to the growing field of diachronic construction grammar. Focus is on corpus evidence for the importance of including conventionalized pragmatics within construction grammar and suggestions for how to do so. The empirical domain is the development of Discourse Structuring Markers in English... full description

March 2022. xviii, 274 pp.

VEAW G66

Earlier North American Englishes

Edited by Merja Kytö and Lucia Siebers

Varieties of English in the U.S. and Canada display fascinating developments from colonial times up until the twenty-first century. To throw light on the linguistics of North American Englishes and their socio-historical contexts, this volume brings together research from various traditions, including corpus... full description

July 2022. viii, 261 pp.

CILT 359

English Historical Linguistics

Historical English in contact

Edited by Bettelou Los, Chris Cummins, Lisa Gotthard, Alpo Honkapohja and Benjamin Molineaux

This volume drawn from the 20th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL, Edinburgh 2018) focuses on the role of language contact in the history of English. It showcases a wide variety of historical linguistic approaches, including ‘big data’ analyses of large corpora, dialectological methods,... full description

February 2022. vi, 185 pp.

CILT 358

English Historical Linguistics

Change in structure and meaning

Edited by Bettelou Los, Claire Cowie, Patrick Honeybone and Graeme Trousdale

This volume contains a set of articles based on papers selected from those delivered at the 20th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL, Edinburgh 2018). It focuses on cutting-edge research in the history of English, while reflecting the diversity that exists in the current landscape of... full description

February 2022. viii, 349 pp.

Z 183

A History of the English Language

Revised edition

Elly van Gelderen

The English language in its complex shapes and forms changes fast. This thoroughly revised edition has been refreshed with current examples of change and has been updated regarding archeological research. Most suggestions brought up by users and reviewers have been incorporated, for instance, a family tree for... full description

April 2014. xx, 338 pp.

AHS 10

Keeping in Touch

Emigrant letters across the English-speaking world

Edited by Raymond Hickey

The current volume presents a number of chapters which look at informal vernacular letters, written mostly by emigrants to the former colonies of Britain, who settled at these locations in the past few centuries, with a focus on letters from the nineteenth century. Such documents often show features for varieties of... full description

November 2019. x, 289 pp.

CILT 363

Keys to the History of English

Diachronic linguistic change, morpho-syntax and lexicography

Edited by Thijs Porck, Moragh S. Gordon and Luisella Caon

This volume brings together contributions selected from papers delivered at the 21st International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL, Leiden 2021). The contributions deal with various aspects of English language across time and geographical space, shedding light on both long-term developments and... full description

April 2024. vii, 235 pp.

VEAW G68

New Englishes, New Methods

Edited by Guyanne Wilson and Michael Westphal

There is an ever-growing body of work on New Englishes, and the time has come to take stock of how research on varieties of English is carried out. The contributions in this volume critically explore the gamut of familiar and unfamiliar methods applied in data collection and analysis in order to improve upon old... full description

April 2023. viii, 276 pp.

SCL 114

The Present Perfect and the Preterite in Late Modern and Contemporary English

A corpus-based study of grammatical change

Xinyue Yao

This book examines developments in the use of the present perfect and the preterite in Late Modern and contemporary English, with a focus on American and British English. Drawing on neo-Gricean pragmatics, it proposes a novel and principled analysis of the verb forms’ context-independent meanings and context-dependent... full description

March 2024. xvii, 235 pp.

AHS 11

Records of Real People

Linguistic variation in Middle English local documents

Edited by Merja Stenroos and Kjetil V. Thengs

English local documents – leases, wills, accounts, letters and the like – provide a unique resource for historical sociolinguistics. Abundant from the early fifteenth century, they represent the language and concerns of people from a wide range of social, institutional and geographical backgrounds. However, as... full description

December 2020. ix, 310 pp.

AHS 13

Sociolinguistic Variation in Old English

Records of communities and people

Olga Timofeeva

This is the first extensive study of Old English to utilise the insights and methodologies of sociolinguistics. Building on previous philological and historical work, it takes into account the sociology and social dialectology of Old English and offers a description of its speech communities informed by the theory of... full description

July 2022. xv, 204 pp.

SILV 30

The Sociophonetics of Dublin English

Phonetic realisation and sociopragmatic variation

Marion Schulte

The Sociophonetics of Dublin English shows how social inequalities and language are connected by the stances speakers take in interaction. It is based on an instrumental phonetic analysis of recorded interviews and broadcasting data and a detailed qualitative account of the same data as well as the socio-cultural... full description

September 2023. xii, 172 pp.

CILT 364

Unlocking the History of English

Pragmatics, prescriptivism and text types

Edited by Luisella Caon, Moragh S. Gordon and Thijs Porck

This volume brings together contributions selected from papers delivered at the 21st International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL, Leiden 2021). The chapters deal with aspects of language use throughout the history of English, including efforts to prescribe and regulate language in texts that... full description

April 2024. viii, 253 pp.

CoLL 59

Variation Rolls the Dice

A worldwide collage in honour of Salikoko S. Mufwene

Edited by Enoch O. Aboh and Cécile B. Vigouroux

Variation Rolls the Dice: A worldwide collage in honour of Salikoko S. Mufwene aims to celebrate Mufwene’s ground-breaking contribution to linguistics in the past four decades. The title also encapsulates his approach to language as both systemic and socio-cultural practices, and the role of variation in determining... full description

October 2021. xiv, 330 pp.

SCL 97

Voices Past and Present - Studies of Involved, Speech-related and Spoken Texts

In honor of Merja Kytö

Edited by Ewa Jonsson and Tove Larsson

This volume provides a diachronic and synchronic overview of linguistic variability and change in involved, speech-related and spoken texts in English. While previous works on the topic have focused on more limited time periods, this book covers data from the 16th century up to the present day. The studies offer new... full description

October 2020. xiii, 348 pp.

Z 237

“All families and genera”

Exploring the Corpus of English Life Sciences Texts

Edited by Isabel Moskowich, Inés Lareo and Gonzalo Camiña

“All families and genera”: Exploring the Corpus of English Life Sciences Texts aims at exploring scientific writing in late Modern English. This volume is the fourth of its kind devoted to the analysis of the relations between language and different scientific disciplines from 1700 to 1900. Here, forty texts on... full description

September 2021. xv, 310 pp.