This collection of papers draws upon material first presented at the 20th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (Edinburgh, 2018). The (usually) biennial conference has attracted researchers with highly varied interests in the broad field of English historical linguistics since the conference's inception in 1979; the appearance of this volume attests to the continued attraction of the conference in terms of variety in both topic and approach to the history of the English language (HEL).

This slim volume consists of an introduction and eight chapters. The papers discuss a wide array of relevant topics in HEL, stretching from Old English (OE) to nineteenth- and twentieth-century American English, as well as discussions of Cornish English (CE) and the development of Older Scots. In the Introduction (pp. 1–4), Chris Cummins outlines the following chapters and emphasises the volume's diverse discussions on English's major contact languages: Old Norse (ON), Old French/Norman French, Latin and Celtic. The varying methodologies in the volume also allow for novel considerations of the topics covered as well as new examinations of ‘long-held assumptions’ about English in contact (p. 1).

In the first content chapter, Michael Percillier explores the contact situation between Middle English (ME) and Anglo-Norman (AN) in ‘Adapting the Dynamic Model to historical linguistics’ (pp. 5–34). He presents findings from applying Schneider's Dynamic Model of Postcolonial Englishes (DM) to three cases: the AN verbal prefixes a-, en- and es-; prepositional secondary predicate constructions; and of-objects. Through the lens of the DM, Percillier investigates the eventual adoption or rejection of these features in English. To do so, he uses data from the Penn–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English with a supplementary annotation layer classifying lexical verbs as French or non-French in origin (previously developed by the author). The results lead Percillier to argue that the application of the DM may explain the features’ development, including, for example, the rejection of the verbal prefixes a- and es- in English. He thus suggests that placing the historical contact situation within the DM framework could provide fresh insights into ME and the development of the AN variety in Britain (pp. 27–8). In addition, the author concludes that successfully using Schneider's model on ME/AN may have additional implications for the languages for which the DM was developed; however, further investigation is necessary to determine the model's general applicability to historical contact situations (p. 28).

In chapter 3, ‘An account of the use of fronting and clefting in Cornish English’ (pp. 35–56), Avelino Corral Esteban delineates some distinctive CE features. He presents a comparative study of CE and other Celtic varieties of English on the one hand, and of CE and Standard English on the other. The study uses data from close reading of forty-seven Cornish stories written during the period 1846–1979 by sixteen authors representing West, Mid and East Cornwall. Corral Esteban's analysis indicates that fronting is significantly more common in CE than in Standard English, while it-clefts occur more frequently in other Celtic varieties. The findings suggest that the triggers for fronting differ between Cornish and Standard English, a conclusion that may support the hypothesis of a Celtic substratum for CE (p. 48). However, the syntactic devices studied appear to occur most commonly in materials from West Cornwall (pp. 48–9); the results may therefore have been influenced by the division of authors included in the material, as eight of the sixteen authors appear to hail from West Cornwall (pp. 55–6). As Corral Esteban previously establishes a distinction between the use of English in the west and more eastern areas of Cornwall (p. 37), the present reader feels that a more balanced division of authors in the material might reveal further details about fronting and its triggers in CE.

In the next chapter, titled ‘How does causal connection originate?’ (pp. 57–74), Anastasia Eseleva investigates the mechanisms behind ‘structures with explicit causal connectors’ (p. 57) in the Old English Boethius, the OE translation of the Latin text Consolatio. Eseleva focuses on the OE connectors forþæm, forþon and forþy while also addressing the correlation of causal, concessive and conditional relations within a translation studies framework (pp. 58–9). Drawing on the Dictionary of Old English (DOE) Corpus, the author shows that the prose version of Old English Boethius employs these connectors significantly more than other surviving OE materials. Eseleva explains that the study considered all causal structures with the three connectors in the OE text and identified the corresponding passages in the Latin text when possible. Thus, Eseleva identifies three main types of correspondence: none, close and partial. According to Eseleva, ‘[o]ut of the 435 instances of forþæm/forþon/forþy attested in [Old English Boethius] … less than 20 per cent correspond to explicit causal clauses in CP [Consolatio]’ (p. 72). While the translation may thus appear to deviate far from its original, a paragraph-level comparison shows that ‘the original [meaning] is carefully conveyed by different syntactic means’ (p. 72). Further, Eseleva considers causal, conditional and concessive relations (CCC-relations) using Pym's ‘translation solutions’ framework. The investigation into CCC-relations suggests that ‘causal connectors support the main line of argumentation and are thus the core rhetoric device of the OE translation’ (p. 72). Thus, Eseleva concludes, causal connectors in the OE text appear to replace conditional subordinators in the Latin original.

Next, Carole Hough outlines several findings from the Recovering the Earliest English Language in Scotland (REELS) project in her chapter ‘Old Northumbrian in the Scottish borders’ (pp. 75–96). REELS aims to shed light on the lexis, semantics, phonology and morphology of Old Northumbrian and the development of Older Scots; the project does so by using a place-name survey of six border parishes and ‘major place-names’ from the historical county of Berwickshire (p. 76). In her contribution to the present volume, Hough narrows the focus to the first ten letters of the alphabet, which facilitates comparisons with the DOE. Despite the well-known problem of extracting linguistic data from place-names, due to the numerous changes and developments introduced by various speech communities over an extended period, she nonetheless finds place-names to be ‘a rich source’ of lexicographical data (pp. 75–6). As surviving materials written in Old Northumbrian are scarce, place-names may thus be an excellent, and under-used, resource. Hough describes several morphological findings with potential impact on our understanding of the Old Northumbrian dialect while, at the phonological level, she suggests that Channelkirk may reveal new details about the relationship between OE and ON and the prevalence of kirk around the Scottish Borders. Further, the place-name Bassendean is attested in two sources which ‘preserve an etymologically correct <Bakestane>’ from OE bǣc-stān (p. 84). The OE compound had previously been found only in English locations, and Hough argues that it may now be added to the known lexis of Old Northumbrian (p. 84). The author also discusses place-names such as Lennel, a place-name which seems to use OE hlǣne as a metaphorical expression of the semantic category landscape is a body, approximately two centuries before such use is found in English and Scots (pp. 92–3). Thus, Hough shows that the use of place-names as primary data may fill some gaps in the knowledge of Old Northumbrian and Older Scots.

In the following chapter, Rafaɫ Molencki explores the replacement of adjectives relating to fortune in ‘From eadig to happy’ (pp. 97–118). The most prominent sources for borrowed vocabulary during the ME period are commonly recognised to be of Romance origin (i.e. French and Latin); yet the author demonstrates that the adjectives used to replace the OE forms for fortune appear to originate from other Germanic languages. The chapter focuses on the development of OE ēadig, (ge)sǣlig, (ge)bletsod and blīþe (pp. 99–105), the Romance loanwords eurous and fortunate (pp. 105–7), and Present-Day English (PDE) happy and lucky (pp. 107–14). The author uses several lexical databases to extract the primary data, such as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the Middle English Dictionary (MED) and the DOE. Molencki first presents the etymological developments of the items of interest before discussing them jointly in the concluding remarks (pp. 115–16). Here, the author notes that the OE adjectives, except for blessed, either underwent significant semantic shifts, e.g. OE (ge)sǣlig ‘blessed’ > PDE silly, or became obsolete, e.g. ME edi ‘well-being, wealth, happiness’ (p. 115). The PDE adjectives happy and lucky, Molencki suggests, result from language contact with ON and Low Dutch/Flemish respectively; these new adjectives were then quickly accepted in all dialects and genres of ME. When considering the extensive contact with AN during ME, Molencki's conclusion that the PDE adjectives appear to hail from Germanic roots might seem surprising; however, the author also examines the French equivalent, eurous, which had become rare by late ME (p. 105). Molencki suggests that the non-preference for eurous may result from its ‘French phonetic shape’ (p. 106); a similar deterioration in other words with distinctly French phonetic features, such as sans, is also noted in the chapter. Nevertheless, the reader feels that further discussion is necessary; for instance, the aspects of eurous that have been deemed particularly ‘un-English’ (p. 115) could be discussed further. In addition, the origin of hap, n., supposedly from ON (> later happy), as well as the form of its reconstructed etymon, Proto-Germanic *hampą, remain somewhat unclear to the reader. While Molencki's chapter thus sheds new light on the replacement of the OE adjectives in later periods of English, the discussion would have benefited from a more in-depth examination of the development of PDE happy as well as of the aspects of French eurous that purportedly led to its rejection.

In chapter 7 (pp. 119–42), Daniela Pettersson-Traba reports on the findings of an investigation into the distributional patterns of the synonym set for sweet-smelling, containing the synonyms fragrant, perfumed and scented. The chapter, ‘Distributional changes in synonym sets’, discusses the distinctions in meaning between the synonyms when they occur as attributive adjectives, and also considers collocational patterns in a five-word span on either side of the noun collocates, including all adjectival uses regardless of position. The data, extracted from the Corpus of Historical American English, is divided into four fifty-year periods (1810–2009), allowing the author to investigate diachronic change. When analysing the attributive uses of the adjectives, Pettersson-Traba concentrates on the adjectives’ head nouns, dividing these into three main types – natural, artificial and neutral – before she divides them into nine semantic categories based on the Historical Thesaurus of the OED. Using conditional inference trees, that is, a statistical test that ‘predicts the probability of the values of a dependent variable by means of a series of binary splits’ (p. 125), Pettersson-Traba illustrates an increased use of scented, a decreased use of fragrant and a relatively stable use of perfumed diachronically. Further, she suggests that there is a distinction in the semantic categories of fragrant and perfumed: fragrant appears to collocate with words suggesting natural smells (e.g. flowers) more commonly, while perfumed seemingly collocates with words denoting artificial smells (e.g. handkerchief). Pettersson-Traba suggests that the distinction in preference indicates a pattern of differentiation, i.e. a difference in use between the two synonyms. On the other hand, the third synonym in the set, scented, shows a pattern of attraction, whereby the synonym comes to share an increasing number of collocates with both fragrant and perfumed. According to the author, differentiation and attraction are generally considered mutually exclusive; therefore, the study paves the way for future research on synonym sets in HEL. In addition, the synonym scented has increased significantly in both natural and artificial senses over the periods under study. This increase leads Pettersson-Traba to suggest that scented appears to be working towards replacing the other two synonyms in some functions, potentially due to the increasingly specialised use of fragrant and perfumed, while scented remains less semantically restricted in its collocation patterns (p. 137). Other possible explanations are alluded to; however, the relatively sparse number of attestations – only three noun collocates for scented in the first period (1810–59) and only thirteen in the final period (1960–2009) – weakens the findings somewhat. Although scented shows a significant increase, the relative scarcity of collocates may have impacted the study's overall findings, a potential limitation that might have been considered in more detail.

In ‘The taking off and catching on of etymological spellings in Early Modern English’ (pp. 143–64), Ryuichi Hotta and Yoko Iyeiri take a quantitative approach to the development of etymological spellings. Etymological spelling refers to the preservation of etymological features in a word's spelling, e.g. the inclusion of <b> in English debt, in which the spelling reflects its etymological origin (Lat. debitum) rather than the word's pronunciation (/det/). Although the topic has received previous scholarly attention, Hotta and Iyeiri argue that previous studies are ‘commonly lacking’ in empirical evidence, noting that ‘[s]ome are little more than anecdotal or impressionistic comments … [or] are too limited in their coverage for any generalisations’ (p. 145). They, therefore, aim to study the development of etymological spelling through empirical data, employing Early English Books Online (EEBO) as their underlying corpus. Several methodological issues arise from the use of these data, all of which are addressed, notably the varying availability of data in different subperiods as well as varying degrees of spelling variation. The authors then discuss fifteen lexical items that illustrate spelling variation from a diachronic perspective, describing a spelling variant as primary when it occurs in two-thirds of the available tokens over two consecutive decades (p. 156). In doing so, Hotta and Iyeiri show that etymological spellings generally appear to have become primary around the mid sixteenth century. They further explain the development in relation to the theory of lexical diffusion, that is: ‘a few items shift to innovative forms at an early point in time; they are then followed by an increasing number of items within a relatively short period of time; and finally, more join the process at a slower pace’ (p. 157). Thus, findings of previous studies that the mid sixteenth century was the ‘heyday’ (p. 143) of etymological spellings are empirically substantiated by Hotta and Iyeiri.

In the closing chapter of the volume, ‘Speech acts in the history of English’ (pp. 165–80), Thomas Kohnen discusses the potential impact of loanwords on the formation of speech acts in the history of English. Specifically, Kohnen introduces two possible paths in the evolution of a speech act: ‘speech act first’ or ‘loanword first’. The author uses data from the MED and the OED to examine two examples of each path. He starts by considering the ‘speech act first’ path, illustrated with apologising. Kohnen notes that this speech act is an integral part of PDE discourse, yet it appears to have been conventionalised only in early ME; in other words, the speech act associated with apologising seems to have been absent in OE, as previously reported in other studies. However, despite a relatively late conventionalisation, the first attestation of the verb apologise in the OED dates from 1609, when, Kohnen argues, it seems likely to have been applied to an existing social convention in English society. In the second path, ‘loanword first’, the illustrative case is the verb congratulate. Here, the author suggests, the loanword entered English in its current sense around the mid sixteenth century; however, unlike in the case of apologising, the associated speech act was adopted with the borrowed word rather than applied to a pre-existing social convention. Kohnen's chapter also describes findings from a pilot study of Scandinavian loans in ME, a study based on data from the MED. In this part of the study, Kohnen concentrates on loans with an ON etymological background and checks them against the data in the OED (when available), intending to identify ‘words that designated speech acts’ (p. 174). This study yielded thirty-nine speech-act terms, which Kohnen divides into ‘traditional classes of speech acts’: eight representatives, five commissives, eight directives, sixteen expressives and two declarations (p. 175). However, Kohnen notes that all but two items investigated are obsolete or dialectal and suggests that this may be due to the common Germanic heritage of the two languages. The commonality, he continues, ‘makes it unlikely that the contact with Scandinavian would trigger any new speech-act conventions that would go beyond Germanic customs and persist beyond the Middle Ages’ (p. 176). Nonetheless, these findings appear to suggest that other major contact languages (Latin, Greek and potentially French) may have had a more significant influence on the development of speech-act terms in English than ON. The author therefore highlights further avenues of research that might complement our understanding of the history of English. However, while Kohnen shines additional light on speech acts from a diachronic perspective, a topic that has recently received increasing attention, he also notes that it is ‘notoriously difficult to identify non-lexicalised speech acts in the documents that have come down to us from Old English times and even more difficult to prove that these speech acts were not part of social interaction in Anglo-Saxon society’ (p. 167). Kohnen, relying on two previous corpus studies on the act of apologising, nonetheless suggests that ‘in Old English apologies were extremely rare’ (p. 167), highlighting the lack of expressive speech acts in societies such as the Ilongots to ‘make the [OE] gap at least plausible’ (p. 168). However, the assumption that absence of evidence in this regard equals evidence of absence may be debatable. Kohnen suggests that the chapter provides some preliminary answers as to whether the ‘remarkable lexical gaps’ may be indicative of a lack of such speech acts in OE (p. 166), which makes the present reader feel that additional consideration of this matter would have been beneficial.

Overall, the volume offers new insights into HEL in contact situations through a balanced account that considers both traditional philological analysis and the ‘big data’ approach. The volume further provides new and nuanced understandings of several areas which are generally less known or less often researched, for example, Cornish English (Corral Esteban), Old Northumbrian and Older Scots (Hough), lexical replacement (Molencki) and diachronic speech acts (Kohnen). Innovative methods may also open new avenues of research into the history and development of English, as described in chapters 1 (Percillier), 7 (Pettersson-Traba) and 8 (Hotta & Iyeiri). Some chapters contain minor errors, such as missing parentheses around dates of sources (e.g. p. 108) and occasional punctuation issues causing ambiguity (e.g. p. 63); however, these generally do not hamper the overall comprehension of the texts nor do they affect the valuable insights provided in each chapter.