In this chapter, we address some ways in which the use of corpora has revolutionised the study of the history of English. We first account for the development of historical corpora of English and discuss advantages and drawbacks associated with different corpus sizes. We also address types of language use that are not well represented in existing corpora, potential clashes between comparability and representativity, and features such as tagging and spelling normalisation. We then consider contributions that historical corpora have made to specific linguistic fields, notably in variationist studies, historical sociolinguistics and historical pragmatics, and illustrate historical corpus methodology by presenting a case study on sentence-initial and in Late Modern English based on the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). We conclude the chapter with a list of desiderata for future corpus-based research on the history of the English language.

The wide-ranging conversation in this chapter between Ilan Stavans and Mark Turin terminological and definitional questions – such as what and who is Indigenous – the status and importance of linguistic diversity in North America and South Asia, and the role of missionaries in early dictionary work. Turin and Stavans discuss complex questions of colonialism, migration and settlement, Indigenous sovereignty in language work, and the powerful space that dictionaries occupy in language reclamation and revitalization projects. Turin offers ethnographic examples and cultural vignettes from his three decades of collaborative work with the Thangmi-speaking community of eastern Nepal, whose Indigenous Tibeto-Burman language he documented and for which he helped develop an orthography.

This chapter examines courtroom documents, focusing on trials and depositions, which offer glimpses of spoken language of the past. Trials written in English, often in the form of questions and answers, are rare before the late sixteenth century. Depositions, the oral testimony of a witness recorded by a scribe prior to trial and used as evidence, become more available in English from the mid sixteenth century. Trials and depositions exist as manuscripts, contemporaneous printed texts and later printed editions, and have recently become accessible through corpora and modern linguistic editions. Manuscripts (already one step beyond the original speech event) are less susceptible to interference by editors, printers and so on, but even these texts should not be treated as verbatim records. Nevertheless, the texts supply valuable data for researchers taking historical pragmatic and sociolinguistic approaches and/or examining linguistic variation and change, and in a wide range of other areas.

In this chapter, I argue for the importance of two models in explorations of orality in the history of English: communicative immediacy and ‘oral/conversational diagnostics’, within the framework of oral vs. literate/production styles. Based on the two models, I identify certain (sub)registers and genres as reference points for assessing the nature of orality reflected in historical linguistic data. In addition, I use the major conclusions of the ‘bad’ data debate, foundational for historical pragmatics, as a springboard for a selective survey of research focused on interjections, speech acts, and specific discourse domains and genres such as wills, courtroom discourse and letters. Potential directions for future research and new data sources are also provided to indicate gaps in the coverage of historical oralities in English.

The chapter considers the nature of lexical borrowing and the challenges of identifying the contribution that it has made to the lexicon of English. It looks at the major sources of data, especially historical dictionaries. It considers the importance of identifying by whom a word is used, and in which contexts. It also examines phenomena of discontinuity and multiple inputs in the histories of words, and the challenges that these present for constructing linear histories of English words, and larger-scale narratives of the history of the lexicon.

This chapter examines key features of the language of print newspapers in Britain from the founding of the London Gazette in 1665 up until the present day. It describes significant milestones in the history of English newspapers, outlining major socio-historical, economic, cultural and technological developments which have had an impact on the emergence, diversification and professionalisation of this important mass medium. After an overview of the major subgenres found in these multi-text conglomerates – news, opinion and advertising – the focus is on news reports. The chapter outlines how the chronological mode of reporting news preferred in the first two hundred years of newspapers gave way to the inverted pyramid style of news narration, subsequently abandoned for more flexible models like the package approach in modern news discourse. Furthermore, this chapter provides insights into contemporary journalistic ideals and practices employed in positioning the paper and balancing information density and readership appeal.

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.