Designed for students at both postgraduate and undergraduate level, this series aims to provide a broad view of the subject which is difficult to obtain exclusively from scholarly journals and monographs. Coverage of this series will be extended to all main aspects of linguistic study, and will include work on major language families, on English and on other important languages.

This volume offers a selection of papers from the Eleventh International Conference on English Historical Linguistics held at the University of Santiago de Compostela. From the rich programme (over 130 papers were given during the conference), the present twelve papers were carefully selected to reflect the state of current research in the fields of English historical syntax and morphology. Some of the issues discussed are the emergence of viewpoint adverbials in English and German, changes in noun phrase structure from 1650 to the present, the development of the progressive in Scots, the passivization of composite predicates, the loss of V2 and its effects on the information structure of English, the acquisition of modal syntax and semantics by the English verb WANT, or the use of temporal adverbs as attributive adjectives in the Early Modern period. Many of the articles tackle questions of change through the use of methodological tools like computerized corpora. The theoretical frameworks adopted include, among others, grammaticalization theory, Dik's model of functional grammar, construction grammar and Government & Binding Theory.

The papers selected for this volume were first presented at the 14th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (Bergamo, 2006). At that important event, alongside studies of phonology, lexis, semantics and dialectology (presented in two companion volumes in this series), many innovative contributions focused on syntax and morphology. A carefully peer-reviewed selection, including one of the plenary lectures, appears here in print for the first time, bearing 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. State-of-the-art tools, such as electronic corpora and concordancing software, are employed consistently, ensuring a methodological homogeneity of the contributions.

This book discusses a number of approaches to charting the major developments in the syntax of English, addressing key issues of interpretation and focus for the benefit of students of the topic.

This is the first of two volumes of papers selected from those given at the 12th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics. The second is New Perspectives on English Historical Linguistics (2): Lexis and Transmission. Together the volumes provide an overview of many of the issues that are currently engaging practitioners in the field. In this volume, the primary concern is with the historical grammar of English. Some papers take a broad overview of the subject, positioning it within current advances in linguistic theory, while others deal with specific points of syntax and morphology in a historical context. There is a recurrent emphasis on data collection and analysis, with a chronological range from Old to Present Day English, and a geographical spread from Scotland to Newfoundland. Contributions from scholars around the world remind us that not only English itself but the history of English is now an international possession.

This volume offers a selection of papers from the Eleventh International Conference on English Historical Linguistics held at the University of Santiago de Compostela. From the rich programme (over 130 papers were given during the conference), the present twelve papers were carefully selected to reflect the state of current research in the fields of English historical syntax and morphology. Some of the issues discussed are the emergence of viewpoint adverbials in English and German, changes in noun phrase structure from 1650 to the present, the development of the progressive in Scots, the passivization of composite predicates, the loss of V2 and its effects on the information structure of English, the acquisition of modal syntax and semantics by the English verb WANT, or the use of temporal adverbs as attributive adjectives in the Early Modern period. Many of the articles tackle questions of change through the use of methodological tools like computerized corpora. The theoretical frameworks adopted include, among others, grammaticalization theory, Dik’s model of functional grammar, construction grammar and Government & Binding Theory.

Information Structure and Syntactic Change in the History of English is the first book to apply 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.