"The present volume brings together leading scholars studying language change from a variety of sociolinguistic perspectives, complementing and enriching the existing literature by providing readers with a kaleidoscopic perspective of aspects of change in English from around 1700 until the present day. The volume presents a collection of in-depth studies on a broad spectrum of phonetic, lexical, grammatical and discourse variation, drawing on historical corpora, dictionaries, metalinguistic commentary, ego-documents, spoken language and survey data. Apart from advancing our knowledge of processes of language change in varieties of English, including British English, Irish English, Australian English, South African English, American English and Canadian English, the individual chapters contribute to the theoretical debates on variation and change in Late Modern as well as Present-day English"--.

• Processes of Change
• Editorial page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Table of contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1. Introduction
  • References
• Part I. Processes of change in Late Modern English
• Chapter 2. Enregisterment and historical sociolinguistics
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Indexicality and enregisterment
  • 3. Historical discourse about language
  • 4. Conclusion
  • References
• Chapter 3. The obelisk and the asterisk: Early to Late Modern views on language and change
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. A brief introduction to the dictionaries
    • 2.1 The flourishing of “hard words”
  • 3. The dictionary makers and their linguistic outlook
    • 3.1 Notations of correctness or something else
    • 3.2 The real linguistic bêtes noires of these dictionary makers
  • 4. The murky ground between prescription and description
  • 5. Concluding remarks – “a marriage of contraries”
  • Acknowledgments
  • References
• Chapter 4. A (great) deal of: Developments in 19th-century British and Australian English
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. A deal (of): Forms and functions
  • 3. Variation across time, space, and contexts
  • 4. Data and methodology
  • 5. Deal in OBC and COOEE
    • 5.1 Regional and diachronic variation
    • 5.2 Forms, variants and frequencies
    • 5.3 Functions: Quantification vs degree
    • 5.4 Register variation
  • 6. Conclusion
  • References
    • Electronic resources
    • Primary data sources
    • Other
    • Secondary sources
• Chapter 5. ‘but a[h] Hellen d[ea]r sure you have it more in your power in every respect than I have’ – Discourse marker sure in Irish English
  • 1. Not just an emphatic opener: sure in Irish English
  • 2. A peculiarly Irish English phenomenon?
  • 3. Previous accounts of IrE sure
  • 4. sure in the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence
  • 5. sure in CORIECOR
  • 6. Conclusions and further directions
  • References
• Chapter 6. Scotland’s contribution to English vocabulary in Late Modern times
  • 1. Introduction
    • 1.1 Late modern Scotland between antiquity and innovation
  • 2. The Scottish roots of the OED
  • 3. Scottish sources in the OED
    • 3.1 Literary voices
    • 3.2 Scottish lexicographers in the OED
    • 3.3 Scottish periodicals in the OED
  • 4. Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgments
  • References
    • Primary sources
    • Secondary sources
• Chapter 7. Early immigrant English: Midwestern English before the dust settled
  • 0. Introduction
  • 1. Context
  • 2. The twisted path of one innovation and the possible role of education
  • 3. The broader picture: English dialect features in immigrant letters
    • 3.1 The Asbach letters
    • 3.2 Sophia Goth’s English letter: Excerpts
    • 3.3 Fred Volkmann English letter: Excerpts
  • 4. Feature analysis
    • 4.1 Transitional nonnative features
    • 4.2 Enduring but less directly structural features
    • 4.3 Ambiguous features
    • 4.4 Possible dialectal American English-origin patterns
  • 5. Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • References
• Chapter 8. African American English in nineteenth-century Liberia: Processes of change in a transported dialect
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Previous studies on African American English in Liberia
  • 3. Data: The Corpus of Older African American English
    • 3.1 The Skipwith letters
  • 4. The sociohistorical context: Emigration to Liberia
    • 4.1 The American Colonization Society
    • 4.2 The first settlements in Liberia
  • 5. Methodology and data analysis
    • 5.1 Past be
    • 5.2 Present be
  • 6. Conclusion
  • References
• Part II. Processes of change in Present Day English
• Chapter 9. Attitudes to flat adverbs and English usage advice
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. The survey
  • 3. Usage of slow/slowly and quicker/more quickly, and of thusly
    • 3.1 Slow/slowly and quicker/more quickly
    • 3.2 Thusly
  • 4. Survey results
    • 4.1 The respondents
    • 4.2 Acceptability ratings for quicker, go slow and thusly
    • 4.3 Acceptability ranking for go slow, quicker and thusly across sociolinguistic groups
  • 5. Go slow/slowly, quicker/more quickly and thusly in the usage guides
  • 6. The usage guides and the informants
  • 7. Conclusion
  • Acknowledgment
  • References
    • Primary sources
    • Secondary sources
• Chapter 10. The modal auxiliary verb may and change in Irish English
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Research questions
    • 2.1 Corpus data
    • 2.2 ICE-Ireland
    • 2.3 ICE-GB
    • 2.4 London-Lund Corpus of Spoken British English (LLC)
    • 2.5 Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR)
    • 2.6 Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen Corpus (LOB)
    • 2.7 Freiburg Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen Corpus (FLOB)
    • 2.8 The British National Corpus (BNC)
  • 3. Background
    • 3.1 Modal verb system of Irish
    • 3.2 Development of may in the History of English
    • 3.3 Descriptive model of may
  • 4. May in nineteenth-century Ireland
    • 4.1 May in late twentieth-century Irish and British English
    • 4.2 Irish uses of may
    • 4.3 Merger/blend/borderline cases
    • 4.4 May and prosody
  • 5. Discussion
  • References
• Chapter 11. Levelling processes and social changes in a peripheral community: Prevocalic /r/ in West Cumbria
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Sociolinguistic background of Maryport
  • 3. Methodology
    • 3.1 Statistical analysis
  • 4. Results
  • 5. Discussion
  • 6. Conclusion
  • References
• Chapter 12. The goose vowel in South African English with special reference to Coloured communities in 5 cities
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. goose-fronting in post 1994 sociolinguistics
  • 3. Coloured identities
  • 4. Sample and methodology
  • 5. Findings
    • 5.1 goose means in relation to other monophthongs
    • 5.2 goose distribution by environment
    • 5.3 Overall differences by city and sub-factors
  • 6. Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • References
• Chapter 13. Borders and language
  • 1. Continua and dis-continua
  • 2. Borders interrupted and continuous
  • 3. Borders as bastions
  • 4. When is the border permeable?
  • 5. Fences and neighbors
  • References
• Index