Phonology is concerned with the system of distinctive sounds (phonemes) in a language, and how these phonemes may be combined (phonotactics). Phonological changes may thus be defined as innovations that bring about a change in phoneme inventories and phonotactics. This chapter examines in detail one such type of phonological change, that is shifts, in order to illustrate the challenges posed by historical sound-change to phonological theory. It addresses questions regarding the ontology of change, as well as the relationship between phonetics and phonology, realisations and systems. It looks specifically at the shift known as the ‘Great Vowel Shift’ or more recently as the ‘Long Vowel Shift’, to see how well different phonological theories are able to account for and to explain this shift.

Adverbs are the ‘mixed bag’ among the word classes, today comprising such diverse items as time, space or manner adverbs (PDE now, here, quickly), intensifiers (PDE very, terribly) or stance (PDE surely, frankly) and linking adverbs (PDE however, therefore). After a rough sketch of the formal developments in adverbs, in particular the emergence and establishment of the adverbial suffix –ly by re-analysis, this chapter will show that the functional heterogeneity within today’s English adverbs is a rather recent development. Overall, we see semantic and functional diversification in the category ‘adverb’, gradually becoming more varied in signalling epistemic, evidential and textual speaker attitudes. This diversification is here seen to have been supported by the new distinct mark of adverbial status, the adverbial suffix –ly.

Covers the following theoretical perspectives as they pertain to conversation memory: speech acts, sociolinguistic/conversation analysis, discursive psychology, communication theory, cognitive theory, and collective memory theory.

Offers some conclusions and future research suggestions.

Prescriptive discourse basically evaluates linguistic variants and sometimes gives reasons for preferring one variant over another. It is most readily found in metalinguistic texts, like dictionaries and grammars. Several basic assumptions in prescriptive discourse that have endured to the present were already present in early centuries and set the stage for the flourishing of prescriptive discourse in the eighteenth century. Prescriptive discourse continued to flourish and became more widespread and naturalised in subsequent centuries. It remains a robust tradition and has adapted to new modes of communication and new cultural forces. Key features of prescriptive discourse examined in this chapter include the degree of specificity with which the discourse was formulated, the venues that published prescriptive discourse, the kinds of linguistic variants that were included in prescriptive discourse, and the justifications for the prescriptive judgements.

Indexicality and enregisterment are terms introduced by Silverstein (1976, 2003) and Agha (2003, 2007) as part of an ideological approach to linguistic variation and change. This chapter explains these terms, discusses how they have been used in research into the historical sociolinguistics of English, and evaluates the potential of this approach for further research in the history of English. The chapter begins with an explanation of the terminology and the research contexts in which it has been used. It then goes on to note the difficulties of applying an approach which was first used in ethnographic research to historical contexts. Three types of historical evidence are identified as providing evidence for historical indexicality and enregisterment: metalinguistic and metapragmatic comments; dialect literature and literary dialect; and ego-documents. For each of these, a review of research in English historical linguistics using such data is provided.

Examines effects of comprehension, conflict, social status, loneliness, complexity, assertiveness, control, introversion–extroversion, competence, goals, working memory capacity, and first impressions on conversation memory.

This chapter surveys the field of recent grammatical change in English. We focus on the period since 1900 but also discuss how certain recent changes relate to longer-term trends. Many of our examples involve the verb phrase or verbal complementation, but changes in other areas such as the noun phrase are also noted. We address methodological issues that arise in researching recent change, considering the various kinds of corpora available and the complexities involved in tracking grammatical change over time. We then discuss how patterns of change vary between spoken and written language and across different genres. Finally, we consider a range of possible explanations or motivations for change, including grammaticalisation, economy and social influences.

Examines a variety of content domains involved in conversational remembering, including topic selection, case studies, source memory, storytelling, planning, repair, time duration, personal content, requests, lectures, inferences, surnames, interference effects, common ground, marital interactions, and mood.

Registers have proved to be powerful proxies for language variation and stylistic change in historical research. This chapter investigates five sub-registers within the domain of scientific discourse: philosophy (humanities), history (social sciences), life sciences and astronomy (natural sciences) and medical texts. With data from the Coruña Corpus of Scientific Writing and the corpus of Late Modern English Medical Texts, we carry out a Multi-dimensional analysis of one million words of eighteenth-century scientific English, this leading to the scaling of the five sub-registers along two main dimensions of variation: ‘Involved/Interpersonal versus Narrative/Abstract’ and ‘Complex/Elaborate versus Non-elaborate’ discourse. The analysis confirms, first, that there are substantial differences among sub-registers in terms of the distribution and pervasiveness of distinctive linguistic features, and, second, that fluctuation in prose discourse is a general characteristic of Late Modern English scientific writing.

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.