This book provides new insights on different aspects of Old and Middle Eng-lish language and literature, presenting state-of-the-art analyses of linguistic phenomena and literary developments in those periods and opening up new directions for future work in the field. The volume tackles aspects of English diachronic linguistics such as the development of binominals and collective nouns in Old and Middle English, the early history of the intensifiers 'deadly' and 'mortally', the articulatory-acoustic characteristics of approximants in English, Old English metrics, some aspects of the methodology of corpus research with paleography in focus, studies of the interplay language-register, and a chapter discussing the periodology of Older Scots. The last section of the book ad-dresses literary and translatorial issues such as the impact of Latin 'quis' on the Middle English interrogative 'who of', the problems that may arise when trans-lating Beowulf into Galician, a reinterpretation of Chaucer's Knight's Tale, and a discussion of the structure of medieval manuscripts containing miscellanea.

Providing a detailed and comprehensive account of the development of phrasal verbs from early modern to present-day English, this study covers almost 400 years in the history of English, and provides both a diachronic and synchronic account based on over 12,000 examples extracted from stratified electronic corpora. The corpus analysis provides evidence of how registers can inform us about the history of English, as it traces and compares the usage and stylistic drifts of phrasal verbs across ten different genres - drama, fiction, journals, diaries, letters, medicine, news, science, sermons, and trial proceedings. The study also sheds new light on the morpho-syntactic and semantic features of phrasal verbs, proposing a new approach to the category, considering not only on their grammatical features, but also their historical development, by discussing the category in terms of a number of central mechanisms of language change.