This volume contains a selection of papers presented at the First International Conference on English Historical Dialectology (ICEHD), organized at the University of Bergamo in September 2003. It includes papers on fundamental aspects of English historical dialectology, from Old English to Late Modern English. The papers discuss points in two thematically distinct but related sections, 'Methods' and 'Data'. The volume also includes the transcript of a debate on methodological issues, in which the main themes are the principles of historical investigation of geographical varieties, the new approaches provided by corpus linguistics and computer technology, and the need for greater awareness of textual reliability.

A detailed study of Old English, taking as its point of departure the 'standard theory' of generative phonology as developed by Chomsky and Halle. Dr Lass and Dr Anderson set out all the main phonological processes of Old English and against their larger historical background (including subsequent developments in the history of English). They propose many fresh solutions to long-standing problems in the history and structure of Old English. The result is an extensive and sophisticated treatment of this subject. An important theory is examined against a well-studied body of linguistic knowledge, and is partly validated and partly revised. The book will be important for all linguistics and historians of English and Indo-European.

Dr Lass examines certain crucial issues in phonological and general linguistic theory through detailed studies of English phonetics, dialectology and language-history. He argues that contemporary 'standard' phonological theory is inhibited and misled by the related disadvantages of an artificially constrained formalism and a restricted database. He confronts theories of English phonology with a much wider range of material than is usual, drawing for example on Scots, Northern and North-Midland English, East Coast American dialects, and many others. Dr Lass offers solutions to many outstanding problems in the history of English. All the detailed discussions are informed by an overriding concern for the methodological and philosophical issues suggested by such problems. What kind of discipline is linguistics? What kinds of knowledge do its procedures yield and how are they validated?

This volume of the Cambridge History of the English Language encompasses three centuries of immense cultural change, from Caxton in the late Middle Ages to the American Declaration of Independence and the beginnings of Romanticism. During this period, Middle English became Early Modern English and then developed into the early stages of indisputably "modern" English. This book traces developments in orthography and punctuation, phonology and morphology, syntax, lexis and semantics, regional and social variation, and the literary language. It also contains a glossary of linguistic terms and an extensive bibliography.

Language change happens in the spatio-temporal world. Historical linguistics is the craft linguists exercise upon its results, in order to tell coherent stories about it. In a series of linked essays Roger Lass offers a critical survey of the foundations of the art of historical linguistics, and its interaction with its subject matter, language change, taking as his background some of the major philosophical issues that arise from these considerations. The paradoxical conclusion is that our historiographical methods are often better than the data they have to work with.

Old English is a companion to Old English studies and to historical studies of early English in general. It is also an introduction to Indo-European studies in the particular sense in which they underpin the history of English. Professor Roger Lass makes accessible in a linguistically up-to-date and readable form the Indo-European and Germanic background to Old English, as well as what can be reconstructed about the resulting state of Old English itself. His book is a bridge between the more elementary Old English grammars and the major philological grammars and recent interpretations of the Old English data.Old English assumes a basic knowledge of phonetics and phonology, the elements of syntactic and morphological theory, and an introduction to historical linguistics. An extensive glossary gives definitions of the major technical terms used.

A broad range of competing theories, analytical strategies and notational systems are surveyed in a comprehensive introduction to the fundamentals of sound structure.