This chapter provides an overview of the evolution of English morphology, focusing on inflection. Beside a largely synchronic account of the nominal and verbal morphology in the individual historical periods, the chapter explains the underlying mechanisms and motivations behind morphological developments pertinent to individual stages. These include changes such as loss of inflections, transformation of case, number and gender systems, or the restructuring of the formal marking of tense and mood. The typological drift which English experienced over the last 1300 years stays central to the discussion, as does language contact with Celtic, Norse and Norman French, whose role as a potential catalyst for morphological changes will be explored. The discussion emphasises the dynamic nature of the morphological system and the continuity of the processes involved in its gradual transformation over the centuries.

US founders sought to build a republic of citizens who improved themselves and their nation, free of unearned aristocratic entitlements, but that fostered an unfamiliar mobility. Reactions against aristocratic idleness elevated the importance of self-improvement and work for winning cultural esteem as well as for material well-being. Benjamin Franklin led in promoting these values to nurture useful citizens; only after his death did a revised version of his autobiography portray him as having “raised myself.” Although mobility came to be expected of White men, legal and cultural presumptions marginalized most others, who were subject to harsh physical and social penalties if they attempted to claim self-agency or to seek self-improvement and work that brought respect. Georgia’s early history illustrates how self-serving stories about work and initiative both defended enslavement and closed off opportunities for poor White people. The elderly George Washington was among the rare citizens who took seriously Revolutionary-era rhetoric about equality, and he came to appreciate how the work of enslaved people made his self-improvement and prosperity possible.

According to Thomas Aquinas ‘true’ is predicated essentially of things with reference to truth in the intellect. His reflections on the relation between ontic truth and cognitive truth raise questions which in later scolasticism - in connection with difficulties within the doctrine of analogy - give rise to controversies on the structure and ontological meaning of the analogia veri. In the Thomistic tradition Cajetan’s solution had a strong influence, although it reduces ontic truth to a mere extrinsic denomination. Against this position Suárez develops a new interpretation of the order of predication of ‘true’. It confirms both (a) the Aristotelian doctrine according to which the original place of truth is the intellect - and (b) the traditional doctrine of the transcendentals according to which true is not a mere extrinsic denomination, but their inner entity under a certain respect. The study seeks to explain Suárez’s solution against its historical background.

The arc of our story will show how Morgan evolved from being primarily concerned with providing aid to firms who were his customers to providing aid to the whole system, less centered on individual companies.

Anglican missionaries took advantage of the spread of the empire to prosleytise to Native Americans and African Americans. Motivated by a desire to bring the gospel to so-called heathens and halt the spread of Catholicism, Cambridge men travelled to North America, the Caribbean, West Africa, and India to spread Protestantism. If they chose not to head abroad, they instead provided donations to missionary organisations, such as the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, or assisted in the administration of plantations owned by these organisations. As Cambridge missionaries and dergymen encountered enslavement, prominent University figures became increasingly interested in debates concerning and morality the efficacy of Indigenous and African slavery. Some fellows were actively sceptical of the moral grounds for slavery, whilst others believed that enslavement was grounded in Christian belief. Rather than emerging in the era of abolition, scepticism and debate about the moral foundations of enslavement were consistent features of British intellectual life for over a century.

This chapter explores the link between education and linguistic innovation in the early history of English, by looking at the evolution of the school system and the languages of school instruction. Varieties of spoken and written Latin and Latin as a second (and third) language are among the other sociolinguistic anchors of this chapter. The turning points are located at about 650 CE, the spread of Christianity and formal schooling in Latin among the Anglo-Saxons, at 1066, the introduction of French as a second vernacular and language of school instruction, and at 1349, the reversal of the latter situation in the wake of the socio-demographic changes caused by the Black Death. The survey starts on the eve of the Germanic migration to Britain and ends around 1500; it is illustrated with a selection of lexical and structural features introduced into English through contact with Latin.

The study of the history of English has its roots in the work of English scholars who first concerned themselves with the nature of their language about four hundred years ago. Prior to the eighteenth century this work was pre-linguistic, positing a divine origin for language and comparing English (unfavourably) to Classical Greek and Latin. With the advent of modern linguistics in Indo-European research, the history of English became an object of academic interest and the first university positions for its study were established, mainly in Germany and Scandinavia. Simultaneously there arose a tradition of studying English dialects, first as an antiquarian occupation in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, then later as an attempt to capture local history in the vocabulary of specific regions in the twentieth.  This then led to the production of dialect dictionaries and surveys.