This volume is a selection of papers presented at the second Studies in the History of the English Language conference (SHEL 2) held at the University of Washington in 2000. According to the editors, the design and organization of the book were inspired by ongoing productive conversations on wide ranging topics in English historical linguistics. This explains the rather opaque subtitle when taken in isolation, and the persistent appearance of the term conversation in the editors' introductory remarks. The book consists of the following four sections: Linguistics and Philology, Corpus- and Text-based Studies, Constraint-based Studies, and Dialectology. Beginning with a useful introduction by the editors, each section contains a key article, a detailed commentary on it by an invited respondent, a brief rejoinder by the keynote author, and two or three independent papers.

In the key article of section 1, “Philology, linguistics, and the history of [hw]∼[w]” (pp. 7–46), Donka Minkova first raises objections on methodological and epistemological grounds to the strict separation of philology and linguistics, calling instead for the need to integrate the two into a single discipline of linguistic philology. As an example of practicing linguistic philology, the author explores the historical development of /hw-/ in English. On the basis of ample evidence consisting largely of alliteration in Old English and Middle English verse and scribal practice in Early Middle English manuscripts, Minkova shows that the merger of /hw-/ with /w-/ was well established in some varieties of Early English in the South. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, the contrast was reintroduced among educated southerners through dialect contact. This approach contradicts the prevailing view, according to which the merger was an eighteenth century development. Further, Minkova argues that the subsequent “unmerger” of /hw-/ and /w-/ in Early Modern English would have been motivated by spelling, word frequency, and the prestige of some northern varieties in which the contrast was maintained throughout.

Minkova's proposal is then made more realistic by Lesley Milroy in “An essay in historical sociolinguistics? On Donka Minkova's ‘Philology, linguistics, and the history of [hw]∼[w]'” (pp. 47–53). Milroy adds a sociolinguistic variationist perspective to the picture. She emphasizes the presumable variability and social dynamics underlying the merger by presenting well-documented parallel developments.

Arguing on theoretical and cross linguistic grounds that phonemic short diphthongs are not known to exist, David L. White in “Why we should not believe in short diphthongs” (pp. 57–84) reiterates Daunt's interpretation that the so-called short diphthongs in Old English were devised for representing phonetic velarization by the hand of Irish missionaries on analogy with their native language. In “Extended forms (Streckformen) in English” (pp. 85–110), Anatoly Liberman calls attention to the role of syllable insertion in word formation in the history of English, and offers a detailed case study of ragamuffin (extended with -a-) and hobbledehoy (extended with -de-/-te-). In “Linguistic change in words one owns: How trademarks become ‘generic'” (pp. 111–123), Ronald R. Butters and Jennifer Westerhaus explore some sociolinguistic aspects of the semantic change of trademarks developing into generics (GENERICIDE), notably the public's understanding of, and the court's decision on, genericness.

Leading section 2 is Susan M. Fitzmaurice's “The meanings and uses of the progressive construction in an early eighteenth century English network” (pp. 131–173). The author investigates the frequency and distribution of progressive constructions overall, as well as their experiential/subjective use to “express a speaker's evaluation of or attitude toward what is being talked about” (p. 133), in contrast to their aspectual or truth-conditional function. Her analysis is based on the Network of Eighteenth-Century English Texts, a corpus of writings containing four prose registers (letters, essays, fiction, and drama) produced between 1653 and 1762 by a group of seventeen individuals affiliated in varying degrees with Joseph Addison, a central figure of the social network in question. Largely attentive to a spectrum of parameters involved in the corpus, Fitzmaurice brings to light a multi-dimensional picture of varied use and function of the progressive. The construction is discussed from the perspective of register, generation, the varying density of network membership, and a set of lexical and grammatical contexts such as tense and clause type. However, as Erik Smitterberg remarks in “Investigating the expressive progressive: On Susan M. Fitzmaurice's ‘The meanings and uses of the progressive construction in an early eighteenth-century English network’” (pp. 175–182), the role of gender seems significant and needs to be fully integrated into the analysis. Furthermore, the occurrence of experiential progressives requires a fuller quantitative treatment on the basis of the close readings that Fitzmaurice's analysis exemplifies.

Based on the data from A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers (ARCHER), Douglas Biber, in “Modal use across registers and time” (pp. 189–216), makes a cross-register comparison of the use of modals and semi-modals through the period of 1650–1990. In “The need for good texts: The case of Henry Machyn's Day Book, 1550–1563” (pp. 217–228), Richard W. Bailey, by documenting a tradition of (mis)treatments of the work by language historians of the past and present, pleads for the necessity of producing reliable editions for the history of English. In “The perils of firsts: Dating Rawlinson MS Poet. 108 and tracing the development of monolingual English lexicons” (pp. 229–272), Ian Lancashire, focusing on the part of MS Rawlinson Poet. 108 (fols. 45r–81v) regarded by some as the first monolingual English dictionary, examines its dating and lexicographical problems against the background of emerging monolingual English lexicons in the early Modern English period, and presents a transcription of the manuscript fragment at issue.

Geoffrey Russom begins the key article of section 3, “The evolution of Middle English alliterative meter” (pp. 279–304), by introducing his four rules of the b-verse in Middle English alliterative meter. Rule 1 (a b-verse must contain a long dip) and Rule 2 (a b-verse must not contain more than one long dip) feature prominently in his analysis of the metrical developments from Old to Middle English. Having identified comparable phenomena inherent in Beowulf, Russom then demonstrates that later works in Old English and in Old Saxon show increasingly stronger tendencies to realize a single long dip in the b-verse. He further claims that Middle English poets would have been led to reanalyze these inherited features as categorical rules. Russom's account thus entails an unbroken continuity in alliterative tradition from Old English through the Middle English period, a hypothesis diametrically opposed to the prevailing view that the Middle English alliterative revival constituted a development out of Ælfric's rhythmical alliterative prose, independent of the Old English alliterative verse tradition that had long died out. As Russom persuasively shows, however, Ælfric's work contains many violations of Rules 1 and 2 above, making the derivation of Middle English alliterative verse from Ælfric's style implausible on structural grounds.

Continuing the conversation about the origin of Middle English alliterative verse in “Old English poetry and the alliterative revival: On Geoffrey Russom's ‘The evolution of Middle English alliterative meter’” (pp. 305–312), Robert D. Fulk points out conceptual and historical difficulties with the dominant view, raising a fundamental question of the distinction between verse and prose in medieval times in general, and in Ælfric's mind in particular.

In “A central metrical prototype for English iambic tetrameter verse: Evidence from Chaucer's octosyllabic lines” (pp. 315–341), Xingzhong Li proposes a prototype of iambic tetrameter verse that determines gradient metricality according to the four ranked gradient metrical saliency principles at work in the metrical positions, the feet, the hemistichs, and the metrical boundaries. He then adduces statistical evidence from Chaucer's octosyllabic lines in support of his model.

In “Early English clause structure change in a stochastic optimality theory setting” (pp. 343–369), Brady Z. Clark analyzes a change in the preferred order of a finite semi-auxiliary verb and a nonfinite verb from Late Old English to Early Middle English. The analysis is launched in a stochastic Optimality Theory framework, in which constraints are associated with a range of variable values rather than fixed single points.

In “The role of perceptual contrast in Verner's Law” (pp. 371–408), Olga Petrova presents a perception-based Optimality Theoretic account of Verner's Law in Proto-Germanic (and also in Early Modern English, albeit less convincingly argued) as a contrast preservation phenomenon. Under her approach, the original pitch contour contrast was reanalyzed as the voice contrast in fricatives as a consequence of accent shift.

Michael Montgomery and Connie Eble's key article of the last section, “Historical perspectives on the pen/pin merger in Southern American English” (pp. 415–434), explores the pre-Civil War development of the merger of /ε/ and /i/ before nasals in the American South on the basis of manuscript evidence. The authors identified two kinds of occasional spellings (phonetic and inverse) in their new three corpora of colloquial documents. Comprising for the most part letters written by Southerners and dating from three roughly consecutive periods between 1761 and 1868, these three corpora contain data from different social and ethnic backgrounds: the educated, landed class of North Carolina; the semi-literate, working class white men (plantation overseers); and African Americans. By sorting out relevant data into three phonological groups (stressed and prenasal, unstressed and prenasal, stressed and non-prenasal) and comparing them across the three corpora in question, Montgomery and Eble conclude that the variation of /ε/ and /i/ was already underway in their earliest, late eighteenth-century corpus from North Carolina in all the three phonological contexts. Furthermore, the variation was apparently limited to prenasal environments in the later two corpora of the early nineteenth-century. As Guy Bailey points out in his response, “Digging up the roots of Southern American English: On Michael Montgomery and Connie Eble's ‘Historical perspectives on the pen/pin merger in Southern American English’” (pp. 435–444), the authors' data should be better analyzed quantitatively by calculating ratios of occasional spellings to their conventional counterparts. The debate between Montgomery/Eble and Bailey further highlights the fundamental issue of the upsurge of the prenasal (as opposed to the non-prenasal) merger in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their findings suggest that the phenomenon of dialect contact requires closer consideration within a specific socio-historical setting (for example, urbanization and migration).

In “Vowel merger in west central Indiana: A naughty, knotty project” (pp. 447–457), Betty S. Phillips reports on major findings of her and her students' class project on the vowel merger in naughty and knotty and similar pairs in Terre Haute, Indiana. In “The spread of negative contraction in early English” (pp. 459–482), Richard M. Hogg carefully argues on the basis of safely localizable Old and Middle English texts that negative contraction—originally a random variation throughout the country—became categorical in the southwest, spreading northwestwards over time, but lost in the east and northeast.

Finally, the editors are applauded for bringing out this valuable collection of stimulating, and sometimes even provoking scholarly conversations in English historical linguistics, which readers may wish to continue (or discontinue) in their own different ways.