Empirical and Analytical Advances in the Study of English Language Change continues the project of initiating and energizing the conversations among historians of the English language fostered by the series of conferences on studying the history of the English language (SHEL), begun in 2000 at UCLA. It follows in the footsteps of three high-profile SHEL-based collections of peer-reviewed research papers and point-counterpoint commentaries. In the current volume, the editors invited contributors to reflect upon their approaches and practices in undertaking historical studies, focusing particularly on the methods deployed in selecting and analyzing data. The essays in this volume represent interests in the study of linguistic change in English that range across different periods, genres, and aspects of the language and show different approaches and use of evidence to deal with the subject. They also represent the current state of research in the field and the nature of the debates in which scholars and historians engage as regards the nature of the evidence adduced in the explanation of change and the robustness of heuristics. The editors share a strong interest in examining the evidence that informs and grounds research in their fields at the same time as interrogating the heuristics employed by their colleagues for the histories they present. The contributions to the volume give expression to these interests. Contributors are: Richard Hogg (to whose memory the volume is dedicated), William Labov, Elizabeth Traugott, Rob Fulk, Thomas Cable, Jennifer Tran-Smith, Charles Li, Christina Fitzgerald, David Denison, Christopher Palmer, Don Chapman, Graeme Trousdale, Joan Beal, Connie Eble, Stefan Dollinger and Raymond Hickey. The volume is of interest to scholars and postgraduate and research students in the history of English, English philology, and (English) historical linguistics.

This volume represents a timely collective review and assessment of what it is we do when we do English historical pragmatics or historical discourse analysis. The context for the volume is a critical assessment of the assumptions and practices defining the body of research conducted on the history of the English language from the perspective of historical pragmatics, broadly construed. The aim of the volume is to engage with matters of approach and method from different perspectives; accordingly, the contributions offer insights into earlier communicative practices, registers, and linguistic functions as gleaned from historical discourse. The essays are grouped according to their orientations within the scope of the study of language and meaning in historical texts, both literary and non-literary. The structure of the volume thus represents a critical convergence of traditions of reading texts and analyzing discourse and this in turn exposes key questions about the methods and the outcomes of such readings or analyses. The volume contributes to the growing maturity of historical pragmatic research approaches as it exemplifies and extends the range of approaches and methods that dominate the research enterprise. Contributors are prominent international scholars in the fields of linguistics, literature, and philology: Dawn Archer, Birte Boes, Laurel Brinton, Gabriella Del Lungo Camiciotti, James Fitzmaurice, Susan Fitzmaurice, Monika Fludernik, Andreas Jucker, Thomas Kohnen, Ursula Lenker, Lynne Magnusson, and Irma Taavitsainen.

This volume focuses on the nature of official correspondence produced m the period after 1500, from Early Modern to nineteenth-century English. The contributions reflect the extent to which the genre is somewhat plastic in this period, gradually acquiring distinguishing conventions and protocols as the situations in which the letters themselves are encoded acquire more distinctiveness. Although correspondence has long been the object of diachronic studies, very little seems to be available as far as specialized usage is concerned, hence the specific interest in letters exchanged within scientific, diplomatic, and business networks. In addition, the study of business and official correspondence offered here profits from a multi-disciplinary and multi-methodological approach, as it relies on a rich array of databases and corpora of correspondence, ranging from highly specialized collections to more broadly constructed diagnostic corpora, in which correspondence is just one register or text-type. While specific attention is paid to phenomena relating to the expression of positive and negative politeness through the investigation of authentic (rather than constructed) texts, methodological issues are also taken into consideration.