The Handbook of the History of English is a collection of articles written by leading specialists in the field that focus on the theoretical issues behind the facts of the changing English language.
- organizes the theoretical issues behind the facts of the changing English language innovatively and applies recent insights to old problems
- surveys the history of English from the perspective of structural developments in areas such as phonology, prosody, morphology, syntax, semantics, language variation, and dialectology
- offers readers a comprehensive overview of the various theoretical perspectives available to the study of the history of English and sets new objectives for further research
Editors' Introduction.
Notes on Contributors.
Part I: Approaches and issues.
1. Change for the Better? Optimality Theory versus History: April McMahon (University of Sheffield).
2. Cueing a New Grammar: David Lightfoot (Georgetown University).
3. Variation and the Interpretation of Change in periphrastic DO: Anthony Warner (University of York).
4. Evolutionary Models and Functional-Typological Theories of Language Change: William Croft (University of New Mexico).
Part II: Words: derivation and prosody.
5. Old and Middle English Prosody: Donka Minkova (UCLA).
6. Prosodic Preferences: From Old English to Early Modern English: Paula Fikkert (Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands), Elan Dresher (University of Toronto, Canada) and Aditi Lahiri (University of Konstanz, Germany).
7. Typological Changes in Derivational Morphology: Dieter Kastovsky (University of Vienna).
8. Competition in l³a
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