Topics covered in this volume include: the system of Czech bound address forms until 1700; Spanish forms of address in the 16th century; and pronominal usage in Shakespeare.

This Festschrift comprises a series of papers written in honour of the philologist Andreas Fischer, on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday. As in Andreas Fischer's own research, the main focus of the volume is on words: words in modern varieties, such as emergent conjunctions in Australian, American and British English, words in their cultural and historical context, such as English keywords in Old Norse literature, and words in a diachronic perspective, such as Romance suffixation in the history of English. Many contributions are anchored in the philological tradition that has informed much of Andreas Fischer's own scholarship, such as the study of verbal duelling in the late thirteenth-century romance Kyng Alisaunder. Others examine the construction ofdiscourses, such as those surrounding the Black Death. The volume, with its innovative studies,offers fascinating insights into words, discourses,and their contexts, both past and present.

The twenty-first century has seen a surge in cross-linguistic research on forms of address from increasingly diverse and complementary perspectives. The present edited collection is the inaugural volume of Topics in Address Research, a series that aims to reflect that growing interest. The volume includes an overview, followed by seventeen chapters organized in five sections covering new methodological and theoretical approaches, variation and change, address in digital and audiovisual media, nominal address, and self- and third-person reference. This collection includes work on Cameroonian French, Czech, Dutch, English (from the US, UK, Australia, and Canada), Finnish, Italian, Mongolian, Palenquero Creole, Portuguese, Slovak, and Spanish (in its Peninsular and American varieties). By presenting the work in English, the book offers a bridge among researchers in different language families. It will be of interest to pragmatists, sociolinguists, typologists, and anyone focused on the emergence and evolution of this central aspect of verbal communication.

This book examines the various patterns of nominal and pronominal address used in Jamaica and Trinidad, the two most populous islands of the English-speaking Caribbean. Given that the Anglo-Caribbean context has so far been largely neglected in address research, this study aims to provide an in-depth analysis of the linguistic means Jamaicans and Trinidadians have at their disposal and make use of to address each other. A particular focus will be on variation in the speakers’ address behaviour with regard to their sex, age, social class, ethnicity, and regional background. The study draws both on data from a self-compiled corpus of postcolonial Jamaican and Trinidadian literary works, and on questionnaire and interview data collected during fieldwork. This book contributes to the ever-growing body of research in the field of nominal and pronominal address, and will be relevant to researchers interested in the fields of sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and World Englishes.

The Whirlwind of Passion: New Critical Perspectives on William Shakespeare is a combination of critical, linguistic, stylistic, translation and performance interpretations, providing a fresh insight into Shakespearean studies. It encompasses many different aspects of the Bard’s oeuvre, and thus explores various interpretative possibilities of the texts under scrutiny. The freshness of this book also lies in the fact that it deals with comparative analyses of both Shakespeare and his contemporaries, as well as in the fact that it emphasises the playwright’s relevance today. All the contributors to this volume are distinguished scholars and academicians with extensive experience of teaching and writing on Shakespeare.

The papers collected in this volume were first presented at the 14th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (Bergamo, 2006). Alongside studies of syntax, morphology, and dialectology, published in two sister volumes, many innovative contributions focused on semantics, pragmatics and register variation. A rich variety of state-of-the-art studies and plenary lectures by acknowledged world experts in the field bears witness to the quality of the scholarly interest in this field of research. In all the contributions, well-established methods combine with new theoretical approaches, in an attempt to shed more light on phenomena that have hitherto remained unexplored, or have only just begun to be investigated. The accurate peer-reviewed selection ensures the methodological homogeneity of the papers.