Contact, Variation, and Change in the History of English

Download or read book Contact, Variation, and Change in the History of English written by Simone E. Pfenninger and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2014-09-11 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The papers in this volume aim at facilitating exchange between three fields of inquiry that are of great importance in historical linguistics: language change, (socio)linguistic research on variation, and contact linguistics. Drawing on a range of recently-developed methodological innovations, such as methods for quantifying the linguistic variation (that is a prerequisite for language change) or new corpus-based methods for investigating text-type variation, the contributors are able to trace linguistic change in different periods and contact situations, demonstrate how variation occurs, and in how far language change results out of this variation. Thus, the chapters go beyond core issues of language variation and change, focusing on the boundary between word and grammar, discourse and ideology in the history of the English language.