This book provides an introduction to the theory and methods of historical semantics. It gives a survey of the most important types of semantic innovation (metaphor, metonymy etc.), it describes typical paths and results of semantic change (polysemy, competition of lexical units, shifts of prototypical meaning), and it presents historical case studies on various fields of German vocabulary (from speech act verbs to forms of address). The book is designed for readers with no background knowledge of semantics and can be used for seminar discussion or self-study. It contains extensive exercises and suggestions for further reading.

The year 1609 saw the first appearance of a weekly newspaper in German. The new medium caught on so quickly that almost every urban centre soon had a newspaper of its own. The newspapers' main readership was made up of court representatives, aldermen, theologicans and scholars but the 'common man' also took a lively interest. Given their widespread dissemination, these newspapers were a major factor in the emergence of a uniform national language. The articles in the present volume examine the textual structures, syntactic patterns and the vocabulary employed in these newspapers. The central issue is the emergence and development of an idiom typical of newspaper style in the 17th century. Further topics are how up-to-the-minute, accurate and comprehensible the reporting was and the contemporary critical response to these newspapers and the language they employed.

The history of forms of communication is a new branch of Historical Pragmatics. The contributions to this volume study continuity and innovation in forms of communication in the Middle Ages, the 17th and 20th century, extending from narrative forms to information and infotainment, advertising, and language teaching. There is a focus on developments in various media, such as 17th century German newspapers and English street ballads, German television commentaries since the 1960s, the use of Spanish in the Internet, and new dimensions in academic teaching with the introduction of modern digital media.

The articles collected in this volume deal with theoretical and empirical issues in the historical semantics of German modals. The topics presented in these articles include types of semantic change, the semantics/pragmatics interface, the structure and development of polysemy, epistemic and non-epistemic uses, variation of use in different types of text, aspects of quantitative corpus analysis. As for empirical data there is a particular emphasis of Old High German and Early Modern German materials.