This chapter gives an overview of dictionaries, broadly conceived to include monolingual and bilingual wordlists for readers at all levels, in the history of English from the beginnings of Anglo-Saxon literacy to the present day. It argues against a reductive view of dictionaries as primarily agents of standardisation and authority, expressions of the ‘dismal sacred word’. Its arrangement is roughly chronological, beginning with Anglo-Saxon glossography and the lexicography of later medieval English, before turning to the bilingual and monolingual English dictionaries of the early modern period; to the monolingual dictionaries of the eighteenth century; and to the relationship of lexicography to two very important aspects of Late Modern English, namely its pluricentricity and its use as an acquired language. It concludes with a last look at the relationship of English lexicography with the ‘dismal sacred word’.

The chapter argues that the population control movement employed new policy approaches from the late 1970s onward, and that these changes originated from an internal critique of past policies. The emergence of international networks and organizations such as the International Women’s Health Coalition is highlighted, along with the debates at the UN symposium on "Population and Human Rights" in Vienna in 1981. The chapter outlines the diverse feminist perspectives after the Reagan administration stopped funding organizations that supported abortions, which also affected advocates of global population control programs. It argues that feminist organizations struggled whether they should defend these organizations despite the sometimes coercive character of their programs given that they expanded contraceptive choices. The chapter points out that the increased pressure from the conservative right against organizations like the IPPF, together with new approaches in global family planning, led to a muted critique from the political left and the normalization of family planning programs on a global scale.

It is counterintuitive to associate the history of population control programs with human rights given the character of these programs. Not all of them were compulsory, but many accepted individual suffering, particularly of women, for the supposedly greater good of reducing fertility rates. But contemporaries in the 1960s and 1970s were convinced that the framework of human rights was indeed essential for the international acceptance and implementation of population control programs. Rafael M. Salas, for example, who took over as head of the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) in 1969, emphasized that population growth was “no longer the controversial subject” it had been before the UN approached it as a question of human rights.

The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 reshaped US foreign policy and placed Israel in a precarious position. As the Bush administration built an international coalition against Saddam Hussein, it deliberately distanced itself from Israel to secure Arab participation in Operation Desert Shield. This led to Israeli concerns about its strategic value to the US, especially amid debates over arms sales to Saudi Arabia and exclusion from military coordination. Although Israel exercised restraint at Washington’s request, tensions emerged over intelligence sharing, arms procurement, and settlements. US efforts to sideline Israel during the Gulf conflict fuelled fears of estrangement and prompted Israeli efforts to secure military aid and reaffirm its alliance with the US. This chapter examines Israel’s role in the Gulf War’s geopolitical landscape, focusing on its strategic concerns, diplomatic responses, and evolving relationship with the Bush administration. It also explores how American outreach to Arab states reshaped Israel’s perceived standing in US foreign policy.

This chapter situates Dewey’s pragmatic humanism within a culture war in the 1910s and 1920s concerning what human nature is, and whether science should guide our efforts to address social ills and promote human flourishing. It argues that although he agreed with the literary humanists such as Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More that education needed to be reformed, Dewey insisted in Democracy and Education (1916) and Human Nature and Conduct (1922), among other works, that to make real social progress, we must cultivate a scientific disposition, a taste for excellence, and flexible cognitive habits to better equip future generations to meet the challenges of the changing conditions of human experience. The chapter concludes by supplementing Dewey with preliminary thoughts on the role that caring about others ought to play in helping us produce knowledge that can be used to promote the common good.

The New Cambridge History of the English Language is aimed at providing a contemporary and comprehensive overiew of English, tracing its roots in Germanic and investigating the contact scenarios in which the language has been an active participant. It discusses the various models and methodologies which have been developed to analyse diachronic data concisely and consistently. The new history furthermore examines the trajectories which the language has embarked on during its spread worldwide and presents overviews of the varieties of English found throughout the world today.

The development of English in the past few centuries is highlighted in this volume with the major issues of transmission and change forming the main focus. Different levels of languages are examined in individual chapters and individual case studies throw light on specifically relevant developments. The chronological range of the volume extends to the present with changes in Modern English viewed as continuations of trajectories established over a much longer preceding period. The role of ideology and prescriptivism in shaping the manner in which English was standardised in the Late Modern English period is also a central concern with the nature of networks, coalitions, communities of practice and enregisterment examined in detail.

Chapter 2 offers a case study centered on the island of Hachijō, where life with the current gave rise to unique economic practices and social organization. It centers on the seasonal rhythm of castaway arrivals and repatriation that, by the mid-eighteenth century, had become an important branch of the local economy. Numbers of castaways were significant because sailors used winds and the eastward current to propel their voyage, even though their crafts were unfit for offshore sailing. In the peak year of 1850 alone, 300 sailors arrived on twenty-seven vessels from western Japan. Historical arrivals of foreign castaways and flotsam have created a virtual geography and local identity that connected the remote island to India, whence the “river” Kuroshio was believed to flow, and China, whence the current was believed to have brought important cultural achievements.

In English, either the agent or the patient of an event can be topicalised. The active codes the first, unmarked option (A cat broke the vase), the second is achieved by the passive. This chapter discusses the complex history of the second option. While in Old English, passives were primarily adjectival. From Middle English onward, they became increasingly verbal, coding the outcome of a transitive event, and were used as a viewpoint construction, or to structure the discourse. Word order was also changing, restricting initial position more and more to an ever more versatile subject. The passive, catering for this versatile subject position, expanded to cross-linguistically uncommon forms such as the prepositional and recipient passives, and so did the novel mediopassive. The expansion saw its completion with the progressive passive in the eighteenth century. Special attention is devoted to the interconnectedness of these different passives, and their changing relations.

The chapter explores contrasting approaches to population policy and family planning in Yugoslavia, the Republic of Ireland, the United States, and India, focusing on the period from the 1950s to the 1980s. It discusses how Yugoslavia shifted toward supporting global population control policies in stark contrast to other Communist countries, while Ireland, a predominantly Catholic country, maintained strict anti-contraception laws. The United States evolved from reluctance to active involvement in global birth control programs to widespread financial support, and India transitioned to coercive sterilization policies during the state of emergency that was declared by Indira Gandhi in the mid-1970s. The chapter argues that UN resolutions around family planning and human rights played a key role for these policies despite the fact that these resolutions were not binding. How the resolutions were interpreted depended strongly on regional and local power configurations. The relationship among human rights frameworks, political decisions, and societal attitudes shaped the divergent paths taken by these countries in addressing demographic and family planning issues.

This chapter presents an overview of relative clauses and relativisation processes from Old English to Contemporary English, as well as in varieties of English around the world. It centres on adnominal restrictive relative clauses and addresses the factors determining the distribution of relativisers used to introduce the relative clause. Of particular interest will be the changing frequency of each relativiser over time, and the changing weight of the relevant predictors used, focusing on those of a semantic, morphosyntactic, social or stylistic nature. Also included will be a micro-analysis of recent changes in relation to relative constructions and individual relativisers, especially in less formal language, such as the demise of which in favour of that and the specialisation of who with human antecedents in subject function. Already widely reported in both standard and World Englishes, these innovations are likely to become part of the grammatical core of standard English.

This chapter addresses the history of the English system of clausal complementation. It is organised around four major questions. First, where do complement clauses (or CCs) come from? The history of English indicates that adverbial clauses can turn into CCs (e.g. lest-complements), or phrasal units undergo clausalisation (e.g. the gerund) – or both these mechanisms come into play (e.g. the to-infinitive). Second, what changes can CCs undergo? Changes to CCs may affect their internal syntax. For example, subjectless non-finite clauses have a strong tendency to develop subjects (e.g. ECM constructions, for…to-infinitives, secondary predicates). Often, CCs also undergo distributional change as they spread to new CC-taking predicates. The characteristic pattern is one of lexical diffusion. Third, how does the system change as a whole? English sees an unmistakable trend towards more non-finite complementation – a development known as the ‘Great Complement Shift’. This leads to a great number of variation hotspots, where finite CCs compete with non-finite alternatives, or non-finite alternatives compete among themselves. Fourth, what eventually becomes of CCs? At least two pathways of change appear to be open to CCs. In both cases CCs become more main-clause like. Either the matrix clause develops into an operator (i.e. an auxiliary or parenthetical), or the matrix clause disappears altogether, leading to insubordination.