The English Language Volume 2 Essays By Linguistics And Men Of Letters 1858 1964

A collection of statements by literary men and others about the nature and use of the language, its resources, potentialities and development. Volume I covered the period 1490-1839. Volume II starts in 1858 and runs to the 1960s and therefore records the rise first of philology, then of modern linguistic study. Accordingly this volume contains a number of excerpts from the writings of great European and American language-scholars (Sweet, Sapir and Bloomfield among others) as well as by important writers. The volume provides a readable and often entertaining introduction to thought about English, and language generally, during the period and also illustrates the overall development of attitudes. The editors provide an introduction and study questions for those readers who use the book for formal class-study. Distinctive features of the original writings are preserved as examples of variety of style, spelling, punctuation and general presentation. Footnotes explain difficulties.

This influential and widely used book has been extensively revised and includes a new chapter on linguistic discrimination on the basis of class, race and ethnicity.

The native speaker is one of the central but at the same time most controversial concepts of modern linguistics. With regard to English, it became especially controversial with the rise of the so-called "New Englishes," where reality is much more complex than the neat distinction into native and non-native speakers would make us believe. This volume reconstructs the coming-into-being of the English native speaker in the second half of the nineteenth century in order to probe into the origins of the problems surrounding the concept today. A corpus of texts which includes not only the classics of the nineteenth-century linguistic literature but also numerous lesser-known articles from periodical journals of the time is investigated by means of historical discourse analysis in order to retrace the production and reproduction of this particularly important linguistic ideology.

When and why did 'thou' disappear from Standard English? Would a Victorian Cockney have said 'observation' or 'hobservation'? Was Jane Austen making a mistake when she wrote 'Jenny and James are walked to Charmonth this afternoon'? This superbly well-informed - and also wonderfully entertaining - history of the English language answers all these questions, showing how the many strands of English (Standard English, dialect and slang among them) developed to create the richly-varied language of today.

Frederik Theodor Visser's An Historical Syntax of the English Language, published in four massive volumes between 1963 and 1973, is certainly one of the cornerstones of research in English linguistics. Visser's achievements can hardly be overestimated. Before the advent of modern corpus linguistics, he compiled a remarkable wealth of detailed philological data from all periods of English and combined this with current grammatical analyses of his time. This has made this publications an indispensable resource for anyone investigating the history of English syntax. This reproduction of Visser's volumes is more than welcome, and timely, as the volumes have been out of print for quite some time and were sometimes a little bit difficult to navigate. Having a searchable and easy-to- use online version, although maybe not perfect, available now means a revival for scholarship that celebrates its fiftieth birthday without losing any of its relevance.