Historical pragmatics studies the use of language in earlier periods and the developments of usage patterns over time. Recent research in this area has increased our understanding of how usage patterns develop, and we have gained insights into a range of pragmatic phenomena at specific times in the history of English. This chapter provides exploratory accounts for each of the traditional periods in the history of English, from Old English up to Present-day English by focusing on those areas within historical pragmatics that have already received sufficient scholarly attention, in particular the use of pragmatic markers, speech acts and the use of politeness. These overview sketches of the individual periods will be linked through an analysis of specific development patterns.

This chapter provides an overview of the developments in syntax in the history of English. There is a long–term typological drift, with the language moving from synthetic to analytic, with functions that were earlier expressed in the morphology increasingly coming to be expressed by free morphemes. The main word order developments are the loss of Object–Verb orders in Early Middle English, and the loss of V2/V3 word order in the fifteenth century, leading to strict SVO order in which information–structural status was mapped onto syntactic function, with subjects as the only unmarked way to express ‘given’ information and objects as the only unmarked way for ‘new’ information. A number of ‘escape hatches’ develop to compensate for the loss of options for the flow of information in the clause: word order alternations such as the dative alternation or the particle alternation in phrasal verbs, cross-linguistically rare passives, ‘stretched verb’ constructions and clefts.

This chapter provides an overview of sound inventories and analysis of some segmental changes from Old English (OE) to Present-Day English (PDE). The topic selection is based on relevance to the PDE phonological structure and to the way specific processes are elucidated by current models of language change. The empirical data are treated in terms of the changes’ mechanism and causation in relation to phonetic and system-internal triggers, and in the context of language contacts and sociocultural pressures. Updating the results of existing accounts, the chapter includes many familiar processes, highlighting areas that are either missing or under-represented in the canon. The notorious letter-sound discrepancy for vowels in PDE is prioritised, while space limitations require a less nuanced survey and analysis of consonantal and prosodic changes.

This chapter demonstrates how the definition of Anglo-Norman has evolved over the last fifty years, and how this has led to a better understanding of the pervasiveness and longevity of the impact of insular French on British culture. It demonstrates the Anglo-Norman Dictionary’s response to this development in its inclusion and treatment of different types of ‘new’ sources, and discusses the problematic nature of some of these. As a digital platform, the Anglo-Norman Dictionary has introduced a range of additional dictionary-wide features and search tools that highlight the growing awareness of the multilingual context of Anglo-Norman lexis. This chapter shows how these tools provide new data for etymological research, while emphasising the implications of how the term Anglo-Norman language should be interpreted.

After a brief discussion of the nature of names and naming in general, the central sections of this chapter chart the history of given names (personal names), surnames and place-names from the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain to the present day. Names formed in English and the naming practices of English society are foregrounded, but attention is necessarily paid to names and practices adopted from speakers of other languages. Matters of significance include the near-total loss of English-language given names, the rise of surnaming as a new practice, and the intimate link between place-naming and changes in land-use practices. English is now a global language, but discussion is mostly confined to naming practices in England.

This chapter addresses the study of the geographical aspects of English linguistic variation in England, from the beginnings to the sixteenth century. The major challenge in the study of early periods of English is the scarcity of sources, which are often not easy to localise. Only in the fifteenth century does the production of administrative materials in English, in a highly variable writing system, allow for a systematic study of geographical variation covering the entire country; for earlier periods materials are much scantier, and many studies have therefore made use of reconstructive methods. This chapter discusses and problematises the different approaches used by earlier scholars; finally, using the newly compiled Corpus of Middle English Local Documents (MELD), it addresses the possibilities of studying early geographical variation directly, with focus on individual items, rather than through the reconstruction of dialect areas or continua.

Shifts in the perception of the role of language users in the history of standardisation in the early periods of the language are evident as the scholarly narrative develops across time. This chapter begins with the notions of standardisation in Old English. The main focus is on the Middle English period, and Samuels’s (1989 [1963]: 66) suggestion that the Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English could be used to classify the less obviously dialectal forms of language, and thus might offer a way to discover the sources of the emerging standard language in fifteenth century English writing. This chapter notes the long shadow cast by this aperçu. It then examines more recent work spearheaded by Wright (1994, 1996, 2000, 2005, 2013, 2017, 2020), which has re-evaluated the narrative of standardisation in early English, focusing on multilingualism and the rejection of a single ancestor of Standard English.

The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English vocabulary witnessed a sort of revolution due to the massive influx of new words and coinages primarily from classical languages. They were largely introduced by scholars to supply English with an appropriate terminology for fields traditionally dominated by Latin, but also to provide the richness of vocabulary (copia verborum) considered the hallmark of a literary language and Renaissance rhetoric as well as a sign of education or social superiority. Their ‘artificiality’ and ‘abstruseness’ provoked a fierce debate among purists and innovators, and made necessary the production of dictionaries that explain such ‘hard words’, and often attest them for the first time. A sign of the creativity of these centuries, most of them remained in the language and contributed to shaping the structure vocabulary, thanks also to the role played by monolingual dictionaries. A text-corpus analysis of new coinages derived from ‘hard words‘ dictionaries in a so-far neglected genre – namely early modern street literature texts (pamphlets, broadsheets and ballads) devoted to monstrous births – will shed light on the mechanisms of their diffusion.

Old English differs from Present-Day English in two main respects. The first is that Old English has relatively rich inflectional morphology, most of which is no longer present in Present-Day English. The second is that Old English word order is relatively free compared to that of Present-Day English, particularly when it comes to the position of finite verbs. These differences are the result of a number of changes that can be observed in the recorded history of English and that are commonly understood as representing a typological shift towards a more analytic type. The key changes include the loss of inflection, the shift from OV to VO and the development towards a fixed position of the lexical verb, which have also resulted in a divergence from the continental West Germanic languages.

This chapter discusses the extent to which language contact between the indigenous inhabitants of England and the Germanic migrants (fifth to sixth centuries) may have influenced the evolution of English in its earliest stages. It then considers the possible consequences of contact with Norse in the Danelaw (eighth to eleventh centuries), the so-called Viking/Norse hypothesis. It furthermore addresses theories concerning the emergence of the first literary forms of language, associated with the Kingdom of Mercia and the School of Winchester and the tenth-century Benedictine Reform. Theories about the possible influence of the Mercian and West Saxon proto-standards on other dialects are also reviewed, since they may have obscured, at a vernacular level, the results of language contact with Scandinavian in the Old English period.

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.