This chapter surveys stability, variation, and change in the mechanisms, functions and frequency of speech representation across the history of English. Attention is paid to speech representation expressions (e.g. they said) and ‘speech descriptors’ (they said confidently), speech representation cues (e.g. quotation marks and ‘perspective shifters’ such as discourse markers), speech representation categories (e.g. direct speech They said ‘We will come!’ versus indirect speech They said that they will come), and generic and sociopragmatic functions of speech representation (e.g. dramatisation). The chapter also explores the development of the speech representation verbs murmur, mutter and whisper in Late Modern English as an illustration of the gradual development and integration of an increasing number of speech representation resources over time.

Our focus on digital interaction in the history of English foregrounds the mutually transformative relationship between language and society, with technological affordances enabling (new) forms of social interaction, whilst impeding or remediating (older) communication practices. Early internet forum users maximised meaning-making with available linguistic resources, including pre-digital typographical and respelling practices. Today, within the diversity of digital Englishes, strategies typical of early digital interaction remain, reconfigured for users’ local language ideologies and community norms and expanded to incorporate multilingual practices and new semiotic modes. This chapter explores the sociopragmatic practices of identity and belonging across the digital age, from Usenet in the 1980s and SMS in the 2000s to Twitter in the 2020s, detailing a complex interplay between new communicative opportunities and long-established sociopragmatic practices originating offline. Our analysis points to a diversification of English-using internet users and an expansion of multilingual, multimodal repertoires which prompt a revisiting of traditional sociolinguistic conceptions of English.

We need the help of the sciences now more than ever, what with the various coronavirus pandemics and other global diseases; repeated economic downturns; environmental pollution and global warming; racial, ethnic, and other sources of social unrest; and much, much more. And yet, the sciences these days are suffering from their own set of problems and have even contributed in significant measure to many of these problems that now beset us. Are the sciences, therefore, up to the job we need done right now, or can they be helped to be up to that job, and if so, how? These are serious issues that a socially relevant science studies should take up. What might be philosophy of science’s role in that endeavor? This chapter focuses on three problems that are especially prominent in US science: the “war on science” waged for decades by influential Republicans, corporate interests, fundamentalist Christians, and even some scientists; the “perverse incentives” and nonincentives also infecting U.S. science; and the racial and ethnic biases widespread there as well. The role the chapter sees for philosophy of science to deal with these problems involves three projects – a prevention project, a rectification project, and a celebration project.

Industrial stagnation sparked new discussions about the relationship between the state and the economy. The economic slump compelled Henry Clay, a professor of economics at the University of Manchester, to develop theories on unemployment and wages. Alongside leading academics, including Edwin Cannan, Arthur Pigou, and John Maynard Keynes, Clay reconceptualized the role of the central bank in industrial affairs. His ideas attracted the attention of Bank officials, who subsequently employed him to lead new initiatives, such as Securities Management Trust. The closure of unproductive firms and the provision of loans to failing businesses represented the Bank’s concerted efforts to revitalize Britain’s industrial sector.

This chapter examines the complex diplomacy between the United States and Israel during the administration of President George H. W. Bush and Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, with a particular focus on the road to the Madrid Peace Conference in 1991. It argues that US Secretary of State James Baker ultimately played a pivotal role in shaping the negotiations. Drawing on newly available archival materials from the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library, the Israel State Archives, and the American Jewish Archives, the chapter presents a detailed account of the tensions that characterized the period. It explores how emotions - alongside interests and strategy - shaped diplomatic behavior, particularly over the peace process and the request for US loan guarantees to support the absorption of Soviet Jewish immigrants in Israel. The chapter also investigates the parallel strains in US relations with American Jewish organizations. In contrast to accounts that treat this period as an aberration in the U.S.-Israel "special relationship," the chapter shows how it encapsulated the recurring frictions and deep-rooted affinities that have long defined the alliance. It also reflects on the broader historiographical and methodological implications of using newly declassified sources to reassess well-known diplomatic episodes.1

Otto Niemeyer imposed the British model of central banking across the “formal” and “informal” parts of the empire. In the 1930s, he conducted a series of overseas advisory missions, during which he promoted the principles of economic orthodoxy, such as balanced budgets, free trade, and fixed-exchange rates. Through his negotiations, he persuaded foreign governments to accept his policy prescriptions by demonstrating how they aligned with prevailing national interests. While Australia and New Zealand both aimed to secure their financial independence, Brazil and Argentina sought to establish their authority after political revolutions. It was a combination of factors related to state legitimacy, economic stagnation, and interwar expertise that shaped the outcome of the Niemeyer missions.

The verbal system of Proto-Indo-European was primarily based not on distinctions of tense, but rather on distinctions of aspect. The shift from the three aspect system (imperfective, perfective, retrospective) of late Proto-Indo-European to the binary tense system (past vs. non-past) of Germanic explains why the older forms of Germanic lack aspectual forms completely, and also why in historical times the various Germanic languages have developed analytic aspectual patterns of various kinds. In the case of English, these include two perfects to mark past events relevant to the present (I have seen her twice; The warm sea wind was risen and blew over them now), a fully grammaticalised be progressive (She is reading a book) and a second, partly grammaticalised progressive periphrasis formed on a deictic motion verb (Bill went whistling down the street). Also examined in the chapter are changes pertaining to the domain of modality.

This chapter provides an overview of web-based resources for the study of the history of English and varieties of English around the world which have been developed in the two decades since the completion of The Cambridge History of the English Language (Hogg 1992–2001) as well as materials in preparation now. Topics cover online versions of reference works like manuscripts and facsimiles, editions, dictionaries/concordances and maps; corpora and databases which can be searched on the web; multimedia learning tools which supplement traditional classroom teaching, for example companion websites for textbooks, TED and YouTube; and communication platforms which help develop the field beyond academia, such as blogs, podcasts, Twitter and Facebook. The chapter also discusses some desiderata in the currently available resources.

Pragmatic markers, extra-sentential forms occurring preferentially at the clause boundary, have procedural meaning and serve a variety of ‘pragmatic’ functions. They can be traced back to the earliest English, for example the much-discussed hwæt of Old English. After discussing difficulties involved in the historical study of these characteristically oral forms, this chapter presents an overview of pragmatic forms found in the history of English. Pragmatic markers are shown to arise from a variety of sources, including adverbials, declarative and imperative main clauses, and adverbial/relative subordinate clauses. The syntactic pathways from these sources to target pragmatic markers are explored. The remainder of the chapter focuses on the diachronic processes responsible for the development of pragmatic markers, including lexicalisation, grammaticalisation, pragmaticalisation, and cooptation. If a broad view of ‘grammar’ is adopted, grammaticalisation most adequately accounts for the development of pragmatic markers.

This chapter examines the consolidation of attitudes and praxis in relation to the emergence of a supraregional accent of English. Engaging in detail with phonological history, it documents the increased salience of delocalisation in representations of speech from the mid eighteenth century onwards while exploring the intersection between formal prescription and private practice. An abundance of primary texts on the need for a normative model of speech was in existence by the late nineteenth century while popular culture, and an emerging national system, also addressed desiderata of this kind. The advent of the pronouncing dictionary, an influential sub-genre in the history of lexicography, is a further important strand in the attempted dissemination of one accent for all, though broadcast English brought other avenues by which paradigms of ‘received’ English were both implemented and encouraged. If the social, cultural and linguistic hegemonies of a ‘standard’ accent were originally embedded in formally democratic models, the chapter also provides a critical examination of both the rhetoric and praxis of ‘received’ English in this respect, alongside its legacies in Present-Day English.

Even after many decades of incessant research, the system of negation in English still has a story to tell, especially as concerns its diachronic development. This chapter will try to tell this story by reviewing a few of the main strands and occasionally delving into details. The chapter will follow a thematic, rather than a chronological, progression, and will mostly focus on sentential negation, which is still being discussed in its diachronic development more than a century after Jespersen’s hypothesised ‘negative cycle’. Formal approaches will be mentioned, but the chapter will give greater prominence to sociolinguistic and socio-pragmatic angles of research on English negation from a diachronic point of view. Some space is devoted to recent research on phenomena such as multiple negation, as well as to the influence of pragmatic factors on negation patterns and to lexicalised forms of negation.

The chapter is grounded in the idea that semantic change is rooted in pragmatic meaning and discursive context. The principle underpinning this idea is that meaning is both cognitive and communicative in nature, such that we understand semantics as meaning and pragmatics as use. In this chapter, we trace this approach from nineteenth- and twentieth- century philological theories of meaning change, through the formalisation of the relationship of pragmatic and semantic domains of meaning in the invited inference theory of semantic change as developed by Traugott and her collaborators. The chapter explores the implications for a theory of semantic change of a new approach that begins not with the lexical item (semasiology) or the concept (onomasiology) but with discourse. We draw upon innovative digital methods for studying meaning change in the history of English to explore patterns and processes of semantic change in very large text corpora that invite distant rather than close reading, afforded by computational methodologies. In the process, we elaborate how linguistic concept modelling permits the structure of a pragmatic discursive theory of semantic change.

The cataclysm of World War I shook European academic culture: How could European culture have produced such barbarity? The greatest scientific culture the world had ever seen had used science and technology for catastrophically inhumane purposes. Cultural pessimism and nihilism were options that many took. Other academically inclined Europeans responded by rethinking the place of history and philosophy of science in academic and social life. Some of these new projects, such as George Sarton’s New Humanism, explicitly linked them to humanism. In others, such as the logical empiricism that developed in Vienna and Berlin, the connections to humanism were more implicit but no less real. This chapter considers some of the main themes of Sarton’s New Humanist history of science and Rudolf Carnap’s and Hans Reichenbach’s logical empiricism as they relate to questions of the unity of knowledge, the unity of humanity, and the responsible use of scientific knowledge.

The year 1992 marked political shifts in both Israel and the US, as the loan guarantee dispute deepened tensions in US-Israel relations. The Bush administration continued to tie financial aid for absorbing Soviet Jewish immigrants to a freeze on Israeli settlement construction - a condition Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir firmly rejected. The dispute became central in both countries’ political discourse, shaping the June Israeli elections and the US presidential race in November. Shamir’s defeat by Yitzhak Rabin signaled a policy shift, as Labour leaders were more open to US cooperation on the peace process. Meanwhile, President Bush’s failure to gain substantial Jewish support contributed to his loss to Bill Clinton. This chapter explores how the loan guarantee debate reflected deeper ideological and strategic divides, and how the Bush administration tried to balance security ties with political pressure. It also examines the role of American Jewish organizations in shaping public discourse and considers the long-term effects of this turbulent period on US-Israel relations.