Practices of literacy have changed over the centuries, these changes all relating – in Richard Hoggart’s famous formulation (1957) – to the ‘uses of literacy’. As a result, the written texts surviving from the medieval period demand careful qualitative analysis of the linguistic data they supply so that they can be appropriately assessed. In this chapter, the focus is on a key set of early witnesses for the history of English: the ‘documentary’ texts that survive in large numbers from the Old and Middle English periods. Such texts survive in various formats and contexts, and in each case close examination of the modes of presentation adopted reveals not only the sociocultural functions these texts were intended to perform, but also their validity as witnesses for the history of the language. A broad view is taken of what is meant by a ‘documentary’ text, including not only such artefacts as letters, charters and wills but also glosses and inscriptions. Witnesses examined in this chapter include vernacular inscriptions on stone, metal or bone, Old English glosses and late medieval English letters. These texts were all created within complex discourse communities, and that complexity requires deep engagement with the particular circumstances of individual textual production.

The Introduction to Volume II begins by situating the volume within the New Cambridge History of the English Language. The topics of documentation, sources of data and modelling are then introduced. Part I addresses aspects of the textual record and its documentation, from inscriptions via manuscripts and prints to computerised corpora; special attention is paid to the relationship between speech and writing and to diachronic aspects of the English lexicon. Part II focuses on three key works or authors that have been central sources of data in historical studies: Beowulf, Chaucer and Shakespeare. Part III provides detailed accounts of a selection of text categories and their value as sources of data, including a chapter dedicated to texts by women, who are underrepresented in the historical record. Part IV, finally, discusses several important theoretical and methodological approaches to modelling historical language data, including generative, functional, cognitive and psycholinguistic approaches as well as construction grammar, grammaticalisation and advanced statistical treatments. Connections between aspects of the documented historical record, the data scholars can retrieve from it, and the models they apply to their data are highlighted.

This chapter provides an overview of the language of religious texts in Old, Middle and Early Modern English. We divide religious language into three spheres: Bible language, the language of prayers and the language of texts of religious instruction and discussion. We then discuss the language of religious texts against the background of the impact of the language of the vernacular Bible, particularly before 1500. We argue that, prior to the publication of the King James Bible, there was no specific ‘religious register’ in Old and Middle English, and even in Early Modern English a typically ‘religious style’ is found only as an additional layer in religious texts, which, by and large, follow the general standardising tendencies of the language at the time.

This chapter discusses how analyses of historical developments in the English language can be informed by Construction Grammar, which models linguistic knowledge as a network of interconnected form–meaning pairs. Adopting this view of language, a growing body of constructional research addresses questions of how new form–meaning pairs come into being, how their interconnections change in the network and how the entire network develops over time. Engagement with these questions provides new perspectives on familiar phenomena, and it directs our attention to issues that have not been studied before. This chapter surveys theoretical proposals that apply notions from Construction Grammar to the study of language change, and by reviewing empirical studies of historical change from a constructional perspective across different domains in English grammar.

This chapter surveys the role of quantitative methods in diachronic studies which investigate the past and present stages of English. We begin with simple bivariate analyses, such as tracing frequency developments, discuss inferential models and explain the advantages of multifactorial (including hierarchical) modelling. Moreover, we trace changing productivity, association strengths, lexical biases and collocational preferences within constructions. We also discuss methods for exploratory analysis of multidimensional data and provide a brief overview of methods drawing from machine learning and other scientific disciplines (e.g. word embeddings and agent-based modeling). To illustrate our methodological points, we include small-scale hands-on analyses on the variation between will and be going to constructions as markers of future-time reference from the ARCHER and COHA corpora.

This conversation between Ilan Stavans and Marie-Hélène Drivaud with Peter Sokolowski is about how the emergence of dictionaries of European vernacular languages mirrors the increased literary and bureaucratic use of those languages, starting in Italy. Italian literary production, the founding of the Accademia della Crusca, and the comprehensive dictionary of classical Latin by the Italian monk Ambrogino Calepino provided examples for writers and scholars in France. The Latin, Latin-French, and French-Latin dictionaries by Robert Estienne became the foundation of French lexicography, and Jean Nicot’s Thresor de la langue françoyse continued this tradition in 1606, using both Latin and French in definitions. The Académie française, founded in 1634, was given a mandate to oversee the “purification” of grammar and vocabulary, but their dictionary was preceded by those of Pierre Richelet and Antoine Furetière. The traditions of the literary dictionary by Littré and the encyclopedic dictionary of Larousse began in the mid nineteenth century. A modern descriptive approach followed in the 1960s with Le Petit Robert and continues with digital and online editions.

History is not just a recounting of events; it is shaped by narrative style, cognitive frameworks, and the selection of time frames, all of which influence how events are understood. The chapter delves into the ‘linguistic turn’ in history, where language plays a crucial role in expressing and interpreting the past. Key elements of historical discourse, including narration, voice, time, and causation, are examined in depth.

The chapter also addresses the challenges of teaching history in a second language (L2), emphasizing the need for specialized instructional tools and rhetorical models. With references to a comprehensive chart of integrated descriptors for history across the curriculum and a genre map for bilingual history teaching, it underscores how controlling historical discourse through language can influence societies. Thus, this work also highlights the intersection of history, language, and ideology, especially in multilingual contexts.

This chapter explores the rich heritage of Portuguese lexicography, highlighting the evolution of dictionaries from early efforts to more recent developments. The discussion addresses linguistic standardization and the influences of the various Portuguese language varieties spoken in different regions of the world. Special attention is given to Aurélio Buarque de Holanda Ferreira’s Novo Dicionário da Língua Portuguesa, known as the Dicionário Aurélio, and Antônio Houaiss’s Dicionário Houaiss da Língua Portuguesa. The chapter also details the MORDigital project, which aims to digitize António de Morais Silva’s Diccionario da Lingua Portugueza, reflecting the importance of digitization and accessibility in modern lexicographic resources. The Lisbon Academy of Sciences’ role in promoting and standardizing the Portuguese language through its lexicographic projects is also highlighted, underscoring its historical and ongoing contributions to the field. The conversation covers the inclusion of words from former colonies in Portuguese dictionaries and the challenges and benefits of this integration.

A meditation on the “artifacts” (ABCs, manifestos, books, recordings, catalogue cards, etc.) that have defined the history of English-language lexicography and a conversation on the possibility of creating a Quixotic “total” dictionary that would include all the words ever created by humans from ancient history to the present.

This chapter explores the role of syntax in language development, showing how sentence structure evolves in bilinguals. Early L2 learners rely on L1 syntax or imitation, gradually forming independent L2 structures. Over time, L1 and L2 syntax merge, creating shared language nodes. Research confirms that both grammar systems remain active during language use.

Syntactic complexity is key to proficiency, measured through indices like clause structure and subordination. Advances in computational tools, such as Coh-Metrix and L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer, allow automated analysis of syntax. Studies show that bilinguals develop longer sentences, longer and more complex noun phrases, and more subordinate clauses over time.

Children worldwide follow a natural syntax progression – juxtaposition first, subordination later, and nominalization at higher levels. Bilinguals display unique patterns, with advanced L2 learners favouring longer sentences, relative clauses, and passive structures. This chapter highlights syntax’s role in bilingual growth and its impact on proficiency assessment.

The vernacular historiographical tradition has evolved since the ninth century through merging core genres like annals, chronicles and historical narrative with empirical antiquarian treatises. It became clearly distinguished from religious and fictional writing only in post-medieval times, thus also adapting its concept of truth and its methods. While its earlier history is best described by way of a discourse tradition (Koch), a Wengerian community of practice emerges in the late modern period. Starting off as a purely narrative text-type, historiographical writing developed into a typical narrative–expository–argumentative conglomerate over the early and late modern periods. The heteroglossia so typical of historiography becomes less literary or dramatic and more evidential in nature, also evolving citation styles and footnotes. The evaluative and ideological potential of historiography is present from the start and realised by such means as group/person labels, evaluative lexis and superlatives.

To study the history of spoken English is to study its extant vestiges in written texts. This chapter draws upon work that connects speech and writing in historical English to present a framework for contextualising written documents and the particularities of their relationships to spoken language. It examines how written English represents spoken English through different styles and genres of text and across different chronological periods. A late medieval deposition might provide certain clues to the English spoken at the time owing to the non-standard orthography and the regional morphosyntax. By contrast, a contemporary poem might provide different clues to the twentieth-century English spoken in the Caribbean owing to the representation of local English through lexical, syntactic and orthographic means. Neither of these is a perfectly faithful record of speech, however, and each reflects different constraints of genre, style, writing practices and pragmatic pressures in the Englishes that they depict.

This conversation between Ilan Stavans and Margaret Boyle explores the concept of “hybrid” languages (e.g. languages in contact) through the prism of code-switching, border zones, ELL, and second-language acquisition. Engaging with both linguistic landscapes and language heritage, it applies the concept to historical cases where hybrid languages have become full-fledged standardized languages, creoles, and others. It focuses in the development of Spanglish by Ilan Stavans, analyzing the changes of this language from 1846 to the present. The authors discuss the relationships between language and identity and how structures of languages reflect and challenge social, cultural and political beliefs. The conversation also explores immigration patterns and linguistic change, considering how and when hybrid languages move with their speakers.

Generative approaches to synchronic linguistics attempt to describe what is part of a language in a mathematically precise way, and generative approaches to the history of English and other languages model diachronic changes as a sequence of stages of the language with differing formal properties. Formalising the grammars of these stages makes falsifiable predictions about what was grammatical in each stage. Generative accounts include phonological analysis, but this chapter focuses on accounts of morphosyntactic changes. Generativists take child language acquisition to be the locus of language change, which is assumed to occur when children are exposed to different Primary Linguistic Data from what older generations encountered, due to factors like phonological change and language contact. Syntactic changes that have been studied extensively within generative frameworks include the development of modal and other auxiliary verbs, clausal negation and changes in word order, particularly in the positioning of the tensed verb.

Historical thesauri are indispensable tools for understanding the historical lexicon of English. The arrangement of historical lexis by semantic field reveals patterns in vocabulary which cannot be seen in an alphabetical ordering, and so historical thesauri are essential for the investigation of cultural development and the history of ideas as well as charting the evolution of the lexicon. This chapter gives examples from the Historical Thesaurus of English and its related projects, including A Thesaurus of Old English, The Bilingual Thesaurus of Everyday Life in Medieval England and Love, Sex, and Marriage: A Historical Thesaurus. It enumerates the key principles of a historical thesaurus, discusses sources of lexical data as well as the organisational principles by which historical thesauri arrange words, and overviews research projects in the history of English which have been made possible by historical thesauri.