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Approaches to Teaching the History of the English Language: Pedagogy in Practice consists of commissioned chapters, each of which focuses on an issue relevant to teaching the History of the English Language (HEL) in contemporary colleges and universities. The volume reads as a series of “master classes” taught by experienced instructors who explain the pedagogical challenges that inspired resourceful teaching practices. Although its chapters are authored by seasoned academics, many of whom are preeminent scholars in their individual fields, the book is designed for instructors at any career stage, beginners and veterans alike. In turn, the diverse profile of the book’s contributors suggests how HEL, though a traditional curriculum, in fact serves as a cynosure for innovative and multidisciplinary scholarship.

Are pronunciations such as cawfee and chawklit bad English? Is slang improper? Is it incorrect to mix English and Spanish, as in Yo quiero Taco Bell? Can you write “Who do you trust?” rather than “Whom do you trust?” This book looks at traditional notions of bad language and argues that they are often based in sterile conventionality. Examining grammar and style, cursing, slang, political correctness, regional dialects, ethnic dialects, foreign accents, and language mixing, this book discusses the strong feelings evoked by language variation, from objections to pronunciation, to complaints about bilingual education. It explains the natural desire for uniformity in writing and speaking, and traces the association of mainstream norms to ideas about refinement, intelligence, education, character, national unity, and political values. The book argues that none of these qualities is inherently connected to language. It is tempting but wrong to think of slang, dialects, and nonstandard grammar as simply breaking the rules of good English. Instead, we should view language as made up of alternative forms of orderliness adopted by speakers depending on their purpose. Thus, we can study the structure and context of nonstandard language in order to illuminate and enrich traditional forms of language, and make policy decisions based on an informed engagement.

This book examines the life, language and grammar of Robert Lowth (1710–1787), founder of prescriptivism. Drawing on private documents, it maps his social networks and compares his own language to the grammar's model of correctness. By analysing his role in the establishment of the prescriptive canon, it portrays Lowth as a precursor to usage guides like Fowler's Modern English Usage.

This study presents the first elaborate attempt to set out a functional-semantic definition of diachronic transcategorial shift between the major classes “noun”/“nominal” and “verb”/“clause.” In English, speakers have different options to refer to an event by using “deverbal nominalization” strategies (e.g., Him guessing her size/His guessing of her size (was incredibly lucky)). Interestingly, not only do these strategies each resemble “prototypical” nominals to varying extents, it also has been observed that some of these strategies increasingly resemble clauses and decreasingly resemble prototypical nominals over time, as if they are gradually shifting categories. Thus far, the literature on such cases of diachronic categorial shift has mainly described the processes by focusing on form, leaving the reader with a clear picture of what and how changes have occurred. Yet, the question of why these formal changes have occurred is still shrouded in mystery. This study tackles this mystery by showing that the diachronic processes of nominalization and verbalization can also involve functional-semantic changes. The aim of this study is both theoretical and descriptive. The theoretical aim is to present a model that allows one to study diachronic nominalization and verbalization as not just formal or morpho-syntactic but also functional-semantic processes. The descriptive aim is to offer “workable” definitions of the abstract functional-semantic properties of nominals and verbs/clauses, and subsequently apply them to one of the most intriguing deverbal nominalization systems in the history of English: the English gerund.

In the early years of the BBC under John Reith, its Advisory Committee on Spoken English (1926–39) was established to settle the pronunciation of doubtful words, particularly foreign words. But the Committee, comprising members of Britain’s social elite and leading linguists, took it upon itself to ‘educate the masses’ on how to pronounce ‘properly’ and thus attempted to standardize spoken English on the basis of a fixed variety of Received Pronunciation. Its deliberations and findings were communicated to the public via the Radio Times. Protracted discussions about the pronunciation of various words revealed the elitist and prescriptive nature of the Committee. Linguistically, the Committee as a whole proved incapable of accepting linguistic descriptivism and multiple, equally valid, varieties of pronunciation. Eventually they began using the International Phonetic Alphabet when giving advice, increasingly listened to opinions of the BBC’s audience, and incorporated an ever-expanding circle of foreign language experts into their deliberations. By 1937, however, the BBC had stopped publishing its pronunciation advice in the Radio Times and returned to the original remit of the Committee—to instruct only announcers and newsreaders about its findings. The outbreak of the Second World War provided a welcome opportunity to suspend the Committee. After the war, instead of reactivating the Committee, the BBC established its own in-house professional BBC Pronunciation Unit. The Committee’s activities over time contributed to the emergence of what was perceived to be an objective ‘broadcast English’ variety, and succeeded in raising awareness of language issues among the general population.

In the early 1900s, the language of America was becoming colloquial English — the language of the businessman, manager, and professional. Since college and high school education were far from universal, many people turned to correspondence education — that era's distance learning — to learn the art of speaking and writing. By the 1920s and 1930s, thousands were ordering Sherwin Cody's 100% Self‐correcting Course in the English Language, a patented mail‐order course in English that was taken by over 150,000 people. This book tells the story of Sherwin Cody and his famous English course, situating both the man and the course in early 20th century cultural history. The book recounts how Cody became a businessman — a writer, grammatical entrepreneur, and mass‐marketer whose ads proclaimed “Good Money in Good English” and asked “Is Good English Worth 25 Cents to You?” and “Do You Make These Mistakes in English?” Sherwin Cody's home‐study approach was perhaps the most widely‐advertised English education program in history, and it provides a unique window into popular views of language and culture and their connection to ideas of success. Cody's work was also part of a larger shift of attitudes about self‐improvement and success. Using Cody's course as a reference point, this book examines the self‐improvement ethic reflected in such products as the Harvard Classics, The Book of Etiquette, the Book‐of‐the‐Month Club, the U.S. School of Music, and the Charles Atlas and Dale Carnegie courses to illustrate how culture became popular and how self‐reliance evolved into self‐improvement.

This book aims to demonstrate that an understanding of the functional and semantic aspects of impersonal verbs in Old and Middle English can shed light on questions that remain about these verbs today. The impersonal construction has been a topic of extensive research for over a hundred years. But three quandaries—their seemingly unsystematic development, the gradual loss of impersonal uses, and the difficulty of aligning this with structural changes in early English—have made explanations for their development unsatisfactory. The book offers a detailed analysis of impersonal verbs within the framework of cognitive and constructional grammar. It focuses on the loss of the impersonal construction as a consequence of a redefinition of the grammatical categories of subject and object, and describes the diachronic development of impersonal verbs as a result of the complex interaction of verbal and constructional meaning. The research carried out for this project comprises all verbs which are recorded in impersonal use in Old and Middle English, and takes account of their full range of syntactic uses.

English is the most widely-spoken language in the world, and it is rapidly becoming a global lingua franca. But it is not culturally neutral: like any other language, it carries with it a cultural baggage. There are many varieties of English, but there is also “Anglo” English (or what the Indian American linguist Braj Kachru has called the “English of the inner circle”). This book argues that rather than denying the existence and continued relevance of the cultural “baggage” embedded in English (“Anglo” English), it is important to explore the contents of that baggage — important for practical, as well as intellectual, reasons: for language teaching, “cultural literacy” teaching, cross-cultural training, international communication, and so on. It is important to “denaturalize” English and to identify and acknowledge the historically shaped cultural meanings embedded in it, if only so that they are no longer taken for granted as the voice of “reason” itself. To be able to reveal the cultural meanings embedded in the English language we need a suitable methodology. This book shows that such a methodology is available in the so-called “Natural Semantic Metalanguage” (NSM) approach, inaugurated by the author in her 1972 book Semantic Primitives and subsequently developed in collaboration with her Australian colleague Cliff Goddard. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) is a unique system of meaning description which uses simple words of ordinary language, instead of technical formalisms, used in other linguistic approaches. Thus, this book seeks to launch a new, meaning-based approach to the study of the English language. Its aim is to investigate English as a historically shaped universe of meaning and to reveal English's cultural underpinnings and their implications for the modern world.

This book charts the English invasion of Europe since 1945. Sixteen contributors report on the English words and phrases that have become integral parts of their languages. Each describes the effect of English on the host language, and shows how the process of incorporation often modifies pronunciation and spelling and frequently transforms meaning and use. The languages surveyed are Icelandic, Dutch, French, Spanish, Norwegian, German, Italian, Romanian, Polish, Croatian, Finnish, Albanian, Russian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, and Greek. This book provides a systematic survey of a phenomenon that is fascinating, alarming, and apparently unstoppable.

This book suggests that many linguistic, literary, and historical considerations of medieval statements on language have significantly failed to take into account the social and linguistic contexts of their production. The book explores not only medieval ideas about language but also the discursive traditions which generated them. The book draws upon a wide range of documentary evidence, including most notably the royal letters issued in 1258 prior to the Barons' War. The book also analyses the language spoken by Chaucer's pilgrims, the conversations in ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, and many other chronicles, poems, and commentaries. The book concludes with a consideration of the post-medieval history of the status of English in law, literature, and education.

Usage guides, or language advice manuals, are being published in large numbers, both in Britain and the US. The first titles that usually spring to mind are Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1926) or Sir Ernest Gowers’s Complete Plain Words (1954). Yet as a phenomenon, they are much older than that: the first English usage guide was published in 1770, and the first American one in 1847. Today, new titles come out almost every year, while old works are revised and reissued. At the same time, usage advice can be readily found on the internet: Grammar Girl, for instance, is a good example of what is in effect an online usage guide, and there are many others about. Remarkably, however, the kind of usage problems that have been treated over the years are very much the same, and attitudes towards them, by usage guide writers and the general public alike, are slow to change. Remarkably also, usage guides continue to be published despite easy online access to usage advice: there is clearly a market for them, and especially the more controversial ones sell well. How are usage guides compiled and revised? Who writes them? How do they do they differ from, say, grammars and dictionaries? How do attitudes to usage problems change? Why does the BBC need its own style guide, and why are usage guides published to begin with? These are central topics in the book.

This book examines the history of adnominal genitive phrases from Old to Early Modern English, focusing on the evidence provided by a systematic corpus study and the role of linguistic typology in diachronic syntax. It is argued that arguments based on typology should not outweigh the evidence presented by the texts. Particular attention is paid to the nature of the possessive marker in Middle English, since previous studies, which have concluded that the marker was a clitic at an early stage, suffer from an inadequate empirical base. Two chapters are devoted to establishing that the ‘his genitive’ found in many early texts is not to be equated with the possessor doubling construction found in many Germanic languages. The relationship between possessives and determiners in earlier English is also examined.

This book presents an illustrated history of English as told through all the things that are weird about it. Maybe you have been speaking English all your life, or maybe you learned it later on. But whether you use it just well enough to get your daily business done, or you are an expert who never omits a comma or misplaces a modifier, you must have noticed that there are some things about this language that are just weird. Why are there so many silent letters? Why do we have irregular verbs? The book answers these questions and many more. Along the way, it tells the story of the many influences—from invading French armies to stubborn Flemish printers—that made the English language the way it is today. Both an entertaining send-up of linguistic oddities and a deeply researched history of English, the book is essential reading for anyone who has paused to wonder about this marvelous mess of a language.

Imprisoned in English is intended for educated readers in general, as well as scholars across a broad range of disciplines. The main idea, reflected in the title, is that in the present English-dominated world, social sciences and the humanities are locked in a conceptual framework grounded in English and that most scholars in these fields are not aware of the need to break away from this framework to reach a more universal, culture-independent perspective on things human. Indeed, they are typically not aware that any problem exists, and resistant to its being pointed out. The book engages with current debates across a range of disciplines, including philosophy, anthropology, sociology, evolutionary science, psychology, and cognitive science, as well as linguistics. The topics include values, emotions, social cognition, intercultural communication, endangered languages, human universals vs. human diversity, the evolution of consciousness, and so on. It is a book dedicated to one central idea: the blind spot in contemporary social sciences and the prevailing global discourse on values, the human condition, human relations, and so on, which results from the “invisibility” of English as an increasingly globalized way of thinking and talking.

This book applies information structure as it relates to language change to a corpus-based analysis of a wide range of features in the evolution of English syntax and grammars of prose in long diachrony. Its unifying topic is the role of information structure, broadly conceived, as it interacts with the other levels of linguistic description, syntax, morphology, prosody, semantics, and pragmatics. The volume comprises twelve chapters by leading scholars who take a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches. Their work affirms, among other things, that motivations for selecting a particular syntactic option vary from information structure in the strict sense to discourse organization, or a particular style or register, and can also be associated with external forces such as the development of a literary culture.

This book is an empirical, quantitative, and qualitative study of nineteenth-century English grammar writing, and of nineteenth-century language change. Based on 258 grammar books from Britain and North America, it investigates whether grammar writers of the time noticed the language changing around them, and how they reacted. In particular, this book shows that not all features undergoing change were noticed in the first place, and those that were noticed were not necessarily criticized. The features investigated include variable past tense forms, where variation was often simply acknowledged; the decline of the BE-perfect, where the older form was criticized emphatically; the rise of the progressive, which was embraced enthusiastically; the rise of the progressive passive, which was one of the most violently hated constructions of the time; and the rise of the GET-passive, which was only rarely commented on. Throughout the book, nineteenth-century grammarians are given a voice, and the discussions in grammar books of the time are portrayed. The book’s quantitative approach for the first time makes it possible to investigate majority and minority positions in the discourse community of nineteenth-century grammar writers, and the changes in accepted opinion over time. Although grammar writing in the nineteenth century was very openly prescriptivist, the studies in this book can show that many prescriptive dicta contained interesting grains of descriptive detail, and that eventually prescriptivism had only a small-scale, short-term effect on the actual language used.

English is the common denominator that unites the work presented in this volume; it provides a focal point to illustrate the ways in which a political economic approach can account for a range of phenomena in diverse settings in which a “global” language has attained a special status as (an often perceived) tool for socioeconomic mobility. The findings reveal the complex ways in which government leaders and policymakers, as well as communities and individuals in those communities, make decisions within a global economy about the languages that will be taught as subjects or used as media of instruction in schools. English is often promoted by its advocates as a social “good” with unquestioned instrumental value; yet the introduction of English in the elementary school curriculum in low-income countries very often leads to limited literacy both in English and the national language. Synchronic contextual analyses of English in various countries and regions are snapshots of a moving target with fuzzy boundaries; this is even more so the case when the object of analysis is “lingua franca English,” a fluid, contextually realized “practice” that may be described in situ which is not stable and likely never will be. The degree to which English serves effectively as a lingua franca depends on who the interlocutors are, the situation, and the extent to which interlocutors’ interests and goals are mutually compatible and understood.

The book offers an innovative, corpus-driven approach to historical legal discourse. It is the first monograph to examine textual standardization patterns in legal and administrative texts on the basis of lexical bundles, drawn from a comprehensive corpus of medieval and early modern legal texts. The focus is on Scotland, where Scots law, with its own nomenclature and its own repertoire of discourse features, was being shaped and marked by the concomitant standardizing of the vernacular language, Scots, a sister language to the English of the day. The study offers a unique combination of two methodological frameworks: a rigorous corpus-driven data analysis, and a pragmaphilological, context-sensitive qualitative interpretation of the findings. Providing the reader with a rich socio-historical background of legal discourse in medieval and early modern Scottish burghs, this monograph traces the links between orality, literacy, and law, which are reflected in discourse features and linguistic standardization of legal and administrative texts. In this context, the book also revisits important ingredients of legal language, such as binomials. The study is grounded in the functional approach to language and pays attention to referential, interpersonal and textual functions of lexical bundles in the texts. It also establishes a connection between the structure and function of the recurrent patterns and paves the way for the employment of new methodologies in historical discourse analysis.

This book is about the name “Guy” and its slow, mostly unnoticed development over four centuries since it began on November 5, 1605, with the suddenly famous Guy Fawkes, who was arrested just in time just before he could light the fuse on 36 barrels of gunpowder to blow up the House of Lords. During those four centuries, “Guy” became “guy,” the name for an effigy of Guy Fawkes burned at bonfires every November 5 since. The effigy was called a “guy,” so that more than one effigy would be “guys,” Then, slowly, “guy” extended its signification into a name for a ragged, lower-class male, then any strangely dressed male, then a neutral everyday word for just any male, a “guy.” To top it off, the 20th century extended the plural “guys” or “you guys” to include all human beings, even women speaking to groups of women. None of these developments were made deliberately; the word just quietly slipped by, except for opposition from some Southerners and feminists who objected to it on the grounds that it wasn’t “y’all” and it wasn’t gender neutral. It has become all the more entrenched because now it’s the standard second-person plural pronoun for most of us who speak English.

Making New Words provides a detailed study of roughly 200 prefixes and suffixes which create new words in today’s English. Alongside a systematic discussion of these forms, Professor Dixon explores and explains the hundreds of conundrums that seem to be exceptions to general rules: why do we say un-distinguished (with prefix un-) but in-distinguishable (with in-); why un-ceasing but in-cesssant? Why, alongside gold-en, do we say silver-y (not silver-en)? Why is it wood-en (not wood-ic) but metall-ic (not metall-en)? After short preliminary chapters, which outline the criteria employed, there are accounts of the derivation of negative words, of derivations which do not change word class, on making new verbs, new adjectives, new nouns, and new adverbs. The final chapter deals with combinations of suffixes, of prefixes, and of the two together. Within each chapter, derivational affixes are arranged in semantic groups and contrasted with respect to meaning and function; for example, child-less and child-free. For each affix there is an account of its genetic origin, its phonological form and implications for stress placement, the roots it can be attached to (and why), and how its range of meanings has developed. The book is clear and well-organized, with easy-to-understand explanations. The examples range from Shakespeare and W. S. Gilbert to modern novels and contemporary radio. It will be invaluable for scholars and students of the English language and of general linguistics, from undergraduate level upwards and also appeal to the general reader interested in picking to pieces the English language to see how it works.