Publications

Publication details [#59331]

Schreier, Daniel, Marianne Hundt, Olga Timofeeva, Simone E. Pfenninger, Anne-Christine Gardner and Alpo Honkapohja, eds. 2014. Contact, Variation, and Change in the History of English. (Studies in Language Companion Series 159). John Benjamins. vi, 326 pp.
Publication type
Book – edited volume
Publication language
English
Language as a subject

Annotation

The papers in this volume aim at facilitating exchange between three fields of inquiry that are of great importance in historical linguistics: language change, (socio)linguistic research on variation, and contact linguistics. Drawing on a range of recently-developed methodological innovations, such as methods for quantifying the linguistic variation (that is a prerequisite for language change) or new corpus-based methods for investigating text-type variation, the contributors are able to trace linguistic change in different periods and contact situations, demonstrate how variation occurs, and in how far language change results out of this variation. Thus, the chapters go beyond core issues of language variation and change, focusing on the boundary between word and grammar, discourse and ideology in the history of the English language.