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.

This chapter deals with changes in the history of English as they are informed by the functional approach to language, which starts from the assumption that linguistic structure cannot be analysed independently from the uses to which it is put. Three types of external, functional explanation are distinguished: communication-based (discourse- and information-structural), processing and cognitive explanations. Against this background, I discuss the impact of these external functional factors on the traditional domains of language change: sound change, morphological change, syntactic change and semantic-pragmatic change. In a final section, I address grammaticalisation as a domain combining morphosyntactic and semantic-pragmatic change.

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.

This chapter provides an overview of the history of books and printing in English, in four sections defined by time period. Each section briefly surveys the technological innovations of that period and discusses how the changing print industry influenced and reflected developments of English between 1476 and the present. After an introduction (7.1), Section 7.2 discusses the rise of print in England during the incunabula and early print period (1476–1640). Section 7.3 then follows the continued expansion of print across England and North America during the hand-press period (1641–c. 1800), and Section 7.4 considers the explosion of printed texts during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The final section culminates with an overview of the rise of digital reading platforms and a discussion of how the ongoing evolution of text technologies continues to influence the development of English today.

Adopting a broad understanding of editing, this chapter views medieval and early modern text producers as precursors of present-day scholarly textual editors. The chapter surveys how editors from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century discuss their choices concerning the selection and reproduction of texts when making them available to contemporary audiences. Editors’ awareness of the historical nature of their project makes their work philological. The comments examined in the chapter are obtained from editors’ prefatory materials from three time periods: 1. the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, before the emergence of scholarly editing and the disciplinisation of English studies; 2. the mid nineteenth century – characterised by a more systematised activity in vernacular text editing and societies promoting it; 3. the twenty-first century, dominated by the rise of digital editing. The survey shows that editors of all three periods address textual selection and reproduction in their comments. Although editors in all periods sometimes arrive at similar editorial solutions, for example in favour of the faithful linguistic reproduction of the source, their decisions do not necessarily spring from similar motives. Throughout the three periods, editors convey their ideas of the target audience; readability is identified as a major editorial concern from early on.