Anglistentag 1995 Greifswald

The two volumes of Englishes around the World present high-quality original research papers written in honour of Manfred Görlach, founder and editor of the journal English World-Wide and the book series Varieties of English Around the World. The papers thematically focus on the field that Manfred Görlach has helped to build and shape. Volume 1 contains articles on general topics and studies of what might be termed “Old” Englishes, varieties of English that have been rooted in their respective regions for a long time and have been traditional focal points of scholarly study. The first section contains eight general and comparative papers (dealing with terminological matters or definitions of core concepts, historical issues, structural comparisons across a wide range of varieties); the second one has nine papers on dialects of English as used in the British Isles (covering England, Scotland, Ulster and Ireland); and finally, there are four contributions on North American varieties of English (including Southern English, African American Vernacular English, Newfoundland Vernacular English, and American English in a historical perspective). The thematic scope comprises the levels of lexis, phonology, morphology, syntax, pragmatics, and orthography, as well as sociohistorical issues, the question of the evolution and transmission of dialects, various sources of evidence including literary dialect.

The two volumes of Englishes around the World present high-quality original research papers written in honour of Manfred Görlach, founder and editor of the journal English World-Wide and the book series Varieties of English Around the World. The papers thematically focus on the field that Manfred Görlach has helped to build and shape. Volume 1 contains articles on general topics and studies of what might be termed “Old” Englishes, varieties of English that have been rooted in their respective regions for a long time and have been traditional focal points of scholarly study. The first section contains eight general and comparative papers (dealing with terminological matters or definitions of core concepts, historical issues, structural comparisons across a wide range of varieties); the second one has nine papers on dialects of English as used in the British Isles (covering England, Scotland, Ulster and Ireland); and finally, there are four contributions on North American varieties of English (including Southern English, African American Vernacular English, Newfoundland Vernacular English, and American English in a historical perspective). The thematic scope comprises the levels of lexis, phonology, morphology, syntax, pragmatics, and orthography, as well as sociohistorical issues, the question of the evolution and transmission of dialects, various sources of evidence including literary dialect.

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.

Uncovering the meaning of individual words or entire texts is a complex process that needs to take into consideration the multiple interactions of linguistic organization including orthography, morphology, syntax and, ultimately, pragmatics. The papers in this volume pay close attention to these interactions and assess both the details of the texts and entire texts within their relevant contexts. All the papers deal with data from the history of English, and they cover a wide range from Old English manuscripts to Early Modern English letters and medical texts to Late Modern English cant vocabulary.

The contributions in this book discuss letter-writing from 1400 to 1800, and the material studied ranges from the late medieval Paston Letters and the correspondence between Sweden and the German Hanse to Early Modern English family letters and correspondence in natural history between England and North America in the eighteenth century. By bringing a set of corpus linguistic, discourse analytic, pragmatic and sociolinguistic approaches to bear on historical letter-writing activity, the articles both extend and complement the traditional letter-writing research in the history of European languages, which approaches the topic from a largely rhetorical perspective. The articles in this book were first published as a Special Issue of the Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5:2 (2004), share a contextualised view of letters: whether approached from the perspective of language contact, social and discursive practices, intertextuality, audience design or linguistic politeness, letters are analysed as part of their specific familial, business or scientific network. Writing letters thus emerges as highly context-sensitive social interaction.