Focused conference series are an increasingly popular way of collecting together research on areas of specialised expertise, and volumes containing proceedings of such conferences give glimpses at recent work done in the field. The triennial conferences on Late Modern English, the first of which was held in Edinburgh in 2001, constitute one such successful conference series. Current issues in Late Modern English edited by Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade and Wim van der Wurff presents a selection of papers from the third conference in the series arranged in Leiden in August–September 2007.

Over the past few years, Late Modern English has emerged as a vibrant area of study, one that is constantly energised by new initiatives. In addition to the international Late Modern English conferences, one could mention collected volumes such as Hickey (Reference Hickey2010) and the growing number of textbooks, among them Görlach (Reference Görlach1999), Beal (Reference Beal2004) and Tieken-Boon van Ostade (Reference Tieken-Boon van Ostade2009). Empirical studies of the language of the period have also become an attractive option after researchers have gained access to material in electronic corpora or other resources, among them A Corpus of Late Modern English Prose (1861–1919), A Corpus of Nineteenth-Century English, A Corpus of Late Modern English Texts, extended version (1710–1920), the Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension (1653–1800), the Zurich English Newspaper Corpus (1661–1791), the Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts (1640–1740), the Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English (1700–1914) and the Old Bailey Corpus (1720–1913), based on the Proceedings of the Old Bailey (1674–1913), which are available on the internet. While all these resources mainly contain British English, we also have access to a number of corpora devoted to Scottish English, Irish English or transoceanic varieties from the Late Modern period, among them A Corpus of Irish English (fourteenth–twentieth centuries), the ARCHER corpus (British and American English, 1650–1999), the Corpus of Historical American English (1810–2009), the Corpus of Early Ontario English, Pre-Confederation Section (1776–1850) and the Corpus of Oz Early English (1788–1900). Collections containing local or non-standard varieties of English are also available or underway, for instance, A Corpus of Late 18c Prose (1761–1790, north-west), A Corpus of Nineteenth-Century Scottish Correspondence and the Letters of Artisans and the Labouring Poor (England, c. 1750–1835). Further evidence can be explored in large-scale text collections such as Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) and Literature Online (LION). Sources containing British English (standard language) seem to have been the main object of study in the field, but in recent years there has also been an increasing interest in other varieties worth further scholarly attention.

The rapid development in the field can be seen from the fact that many of the above resources were not yet available to those contributing to the present volume, among them the Old Bailey Corpus and the Corpus of Historical American English. As will appear below, of those that were already there, the ARCHER corpus, A Corpus of Irish English, A Corpus of Late 18c Prose, the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts, extended version, A Corpus of Late Modern English Prose and the Lampeter Corpus are among the sources exploited for the papers included in the present volume. In addition, one contributor makes extensive use of the LION collection. ECCO is used for comparisons in one of the papers, and the ECEG (Eighteenth-Century English Grammars) database is also currently linked with this resource.

The definition of the Late Modern English period varies in the literature. The editors adhere to 1700 as the starting point, a date they find most scholars agree on. They also accept ‘a fairly fluid terminus ad quem’ for the period, ranging from 1900 to 1950, along the lines adopted in late twentieth-century and subsequent research (p. 14). The fifteen contributions in the book have been organised around four themes: (i) prescriptive and normative concerns (four papers); (ii) Late Modern work on the English language (five papers); (iii) Late Modern English grammar and lexis (three papers); and (iv) Late Modern English letters (three papers). The editors point out that while their collection offers papers on topics that will be familiar to those interested in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English, the discussions will be of ‘increasing scope and refinement’. This is something that the editors, with good grounds, take to be a sign of ‘a maturing discipline’ (p. 9). In what follows, the papers are commented on in the order they have been included in the volume. A number of more general issues will be addressed in the concluding remarks.

The section on ‘Prescriptive and normative concerns’ opens with ‘Three hundred years of prescriptivism (and counting)’ by Joan C. Beal. This is a delightful discussion where parallels are drawn between the prescriptive tendencies often stereotypically ascribed to Late Modern English grammarians and the ‘new prescriptivism’ of the twenty-first century exemplified by e.g. ‘the best selling non-fiction book in the UK in 2003’, i.e. Lynne Truss's Eats, shoots and leaves: The zero tolerance guide to punctuation (pp. 35, 43). Similarly, what originated as elocution lessons in the eighteenth century are now making a comeback as ‘accent reduction’ (pp. 35, 48). After discussing twentieth-century views of eighteenth-century grammarians’ attitudes to language, Beal demonstrates that the most successful and influential of nineteenth- and twentieth-century handbooks of usage were ‘those that steered a middle path between prescription and description’ (p. 39). According to Beal, perhaps ‘the most celebrated exponent’ of these was H. W. Fowler's Modern English usage (Reference Fowler1926) (pp. 40–1). She then proceeds to make comparisons between the varying faces of ‘new prescriptivism’ today and prescriptivism in the Late Modern period. A particularly interesting part of the paper is section 5, where the author seeks to explain the reasons for the resurgence of prescriptivism in the twenty-first century by comparing today's society in Britain with society in eighteenth-century Britain (pp. 47–51). As in the eighteenth century, so today social climbers and those pursuing success in business benefit from conforming their language habits to those of their employers and others of superior power. The two periods also share a culture of ‘self-improvement’ characterised by avid consumers eager to correct their defects or shortcomings not only with help of guides and courses but also (as is the case today) with the help of life-coaching and cosmetic surgery (pp. 48–9). Among further reasons for the ‘new prescriptivism’, Beal counts the fear of the underclass felt by the middle classes of Britain, and the proper use of language and good manners expected from at least some young women (pp. 49–51). After reading the paper, one is ready to applaud the author's recommendation that ‘we engage critically with prescriptive texts from all periods, including the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in order to gain a better understanding of this phenomenon’ (p. 51).

In his contribution on ‘Deontic and epistemic modals as indicators of prescriptive and descriptive language in the grammars by Joseph Priestley and Robert Lowth’, Robin Straaijer sets out to investigate the linguistic manifestations of prescriptive and descriptive tendencies in quantitative terms, using the grammar of an archetypal prescriptivist, Robert Lowth, and that of Joseph Priestley, who deviated from eighteenth-century grammarians by showing a consistent understanding of the notion of usage (pp. 59–60). The linguistic category investigated in the first and second editions of Priestley's Rudiments of English grammar (1761 and 1768) and Lowth's first and second editions of Short introduction to English grammar (1762 and 1763) is the use of deontic (ought to, must, should and would) and epistemic (may, might) modal auxiliaries as indicators of prescriptivism and descriptivism, respectively. However, the method may suffer from a major weakness: it seems that the different functions of modals have not been taken into consideration, i.e. the occurrences seem to have been counted without a close analysis of each example. Not every instance of must or would indicates deontic meaning, nor does every instance of may or might denote epistemic meaning. One can only wonder that so little attention is paid to terminological and other issues in the analysis of modals. For instance, example (2) (p. 58), given as an instance of an epistemic use, would not be classified as an epistemic use by e.g. Coates (Reference Coates1983): ‘Q. Suppose the noun to be a collective, or one that signifies many particulars under a singular form? A. The verb, in that case, may be either singular or plural. (Priestley 1761: 33)’. Similarly, of examples (8) and (9) given to illustrate ‘epistemic may and might’, only (9) (‘Originally, this form of expression might have been designed to express ridicule. (Priestley 1768: 79)’) would be an epistemic use in Coates's terms while (8) would not (‘some verbs have two participles preterite, which may be used indifferently (Priestley 1768: 17)’) (p. 63). As frequency counts (and the replicability of the study) crucially depend on the definitions applied to linguistic categories, it would have been important to inform readers about the classification criteria and the analytical framework adopted for treating modals in the study. Two control items, the verbs require and seem, are also included in the study as indicative of prescriptive and descriptive tendencies, respectively. The author hypothesises that a quantitative study of these expressions should show that these two grammarians can be placed at opposite ends of the prescriptive–descriptive continuum, something that has been suggested but also questioned in previous literature (p. 61). Although the study of deontic modals as a tool for assessing prescriptiveness in grammars is nothing new (the author reports on the qualitative study by Vorlat (Reference Vorlat and van Ostade1996) of the use made of deontic modals in Lindley Murray's English grammar (1795) (pp. 61–2)), the approach is fresh and makes innovative use of corpus linguistic methodology and the quantitative paradigm. Contrary to expectations, the quantitative analysis yielded hardly any significant differences between the two grammarians (p. 71), apart from pointing to Priestley being more prescriptive in certain respects than had been assumed in previous literature (p. 67). For further insights, the notes included in the four grammar editions were analysed as well. Straaijer expected such notes to be less similar as they could be used by the authors specifically for expressing opinions (p. 71). However, apart from Lowth using more ought to, there were no clear patterns of division between the two grammarians. Straaijer concludes that, generally speaking, what we find in notes is rather differences in authorial styles than a division between descriptive and prescriptive language (p. 75). It is of much credit to Straaijer that these negative results do not leave him discouraged or at a loss. Instead, further factors are considered in the discussion section to account for the findings. Among these are the question of the status of the normative category vis-à-vis the descriptive and prescriptive categories, the grammarians’ aims vis-à-vis the use made of their works by individual readers, and the socio-historical background of Lowth (an authoritative Anglican) and Priestley (an enlightened Dissenter and scientist) which may have contributed to their reputation as a prescriptivist and descriptivist, respectively (pp. 81–2). The question of the status of grammars as a text type is also raised, with the interesting idea of pursuing comparisons with other instructive or didactic genres (e.g. handbooks) and descriptive genres (e.g. travel accounts, scientific reports).

Raymond Hickey's paper, ‘“Telling people how to speak”: Rhetorical grammars and pronouncing dictionaries’, probes into the strictures of eighteenth-century pronunciation and expertly shows what they can tell us about incipient sound changes in the period in view of subsequent developments in English. The views of two elocutionists are studied closely, those of Thomas Sheridan and John Walker. After discussing the factors underlying the rise of prescriptivism in the early eighteenth century and the contemporaneous view of the emerging standard of English, Hickey describes rhetorical grammars that, as he explains, were ‘designed to produce “propriety of pronunciation”’ (p. 96) in order to help their readers to achieve the socially acceptable variety of pronunciation ‘free of all traces of regional origin’ practised by the well-educated echelons of society (p. 94). Pronunciation dictionaries also shared this ideology and were reference works that echoed ‘social attitudes of the later eighteenth century’ (p. 97). Both Sheridan and Walker produced an elocution guide, a rhetorical grammar and a dictionary, Sheridan being the first to do so (in 1762, 1781 and 1780, respectively), with Walker in his aftermath (in 1781, 1785 and 1791, respectively). In Hickey's view, based on evidence from contemporaneous commentary, Sheridan's Irish origin was a disadvantage as far as English pronunciation was concerned, and it was Walker that became the authority on English language use. The comparisons Hickey makes concerning Sheridan's and Walker's systems of pronunciation and sociolinguistic impact, including what we learn about their rivalry, make rewarding reading. Of great interest are also sections on Walker and his comments on ongoing change and regional variation (pp. 107–10). To the intriguing question whether Walker's or Sheridan's strictures influenced the later pronunciation of standard British English, Hickey answers ‘no’ (p. 112). Rather, their legacy lies in promoting prescriptivism and in contributing to the concern felt for pronunciation in British society today. In addition, as Hickey's own study evinces, they have also left behind material for the study of language change.

Further material on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century strictures albeit of an apparently less reliable kind is presented in the last paper in this section of the book, Carol Percy's ‘Periodical reviews and the rise of prescriptivism: The Monthly (1749–1844) and Critical Review (1756–1817) in the eighteenth century’. Adding to her previous work on reviews in the Monthly and Critical Review, Percy turns this time to the role that the reviews might have played in the rise of prescriptivism when giving examples of bad grammar and usage in quotations drawn from contemporary authors. The picture that emerges from this empirical investigation is that comments on bad usage in the reviews bear witness to general confusion about codified usage rather than point to consistent aspirations towards it. Linguistic criticism and linguistic anxiety were already present among authors, grammarians and publishers prior to mid-eighteenth-century reviews (Percy gives many examples of this, pp. 119–22), and what the reviews then did was to contribute ‘to the shaping of linguistic attitudes in mid-century Britain’ (p. 122). Among language or usage ‘errors’ commented on in the reviews were contraction, forms of irregular verbs, subject–verb non-concord, double negation, and the use of will and shall. Such comments caused anxiety, defensive reactions or even shocks among the targeted authors, who found it difficult to anticipate linguistic criticism in a period when the standard was still being codified and when individual language users could still have varying opinions about usage, and when certain constructions were treated inconsistently or not at all in grammars and reference works (pp. 127, 131). Reviewers could also be biased, which left little room for objectivity (pp. 134–5). In her concluding discussion, Percy reminds readers of the fact that if the 1750s saw reviewers humiliate authors on false grounds, as codified and comprehensive grammars of English were not yet available, the 1760s meant intensified activity in grammar production and dissemination of information about codified usage. Overall, Percy's argumentation is exemplary in all its nuances and goes to show how complex the issues we are dealing with are, and how important it is to avoid a black-and-white approach when interpreting primary and secondary linguistic evidence from the period.

The next section in the book, ‘Late Modern work on the English language’, comprises five papers: four are devoted to dictionaries and the fifth to a new database of eighteenth-century grammars. The section opens with the last-mentioned paper on ‘The ECEG-database: A bio-bibliographical approach to the study of eighteenth-century English grammars’ by María Esther Rodríguez-Gil and Nuria Yáñez-Bouza. The abbreviation ‘ECEG’ stands for ‘Eighteenth-century English Grammars’; this resource, an electronic relational and searchable database, is intended to provide an up-to-date tool for the study of the eighteenth-century grammatical tradition. The eight volumes of Alston's monumental A bibliography of the English language from the invention of printing to the year 1800 (Reference Alston1965–1970) served as the starting point for the project. ECEG updates and goes beyond the information in Alston's work and takes into account past and present advances in the field. In addition to information on the grammars, it includes bio-bibliographical information on their authors coded by fields of interest to researchers. The present paper is a work-in-progress report with descriptions of the background to the study of early grammars, of methodology, and of the database itself. Since the time of writing, the database has been released (in December 2010) and ‘is available in free electronic format for research and educational purposes’ against the completing and returning of the access request form (see www.llc.manchester.ac.uk/research/projects/eceg/ecegdatabase/). The paper affords a very helpful introduction to the tool including the definition adopted for ‘English grammar’ (for the four criteria applied, see pp. 161–2), the stages of compilation, and the thematic subfields observed in coding. The coding plan has been designed carefully to maximise efficient and versatile use of the resource. Consequently, exhaustive information is given regarding the title and publication details of the grammars, and nine types have been distinguished to do justice to the full range of grammars included in the database (e.g. English grammars as such, English grammars prefixed to dictionaries or encyclopedias, letter-writing manuals and spelling books containing English grammars as subsidiary or secondary content, and books of exercises containing grammars) (pp. 169–70). The compilers emphasise the need for scholars to also consider other than mere stand-alone grammars of English, e.g. letter-writing manuals and spelling-books that include subsidiary English grammars, and polyglot grammars intended for foreigners (p. 169). Coding also conveys information on the contents of the grammars, and the target audience (age, gender, type of instruction and specific purpose as gleaned from title pages, introductions and prefaces). Detailed biographical information is given on the authors of the grammars (e.g. name, gender, place of birth, occupation). Three further items of information are provided for each grammar to help save scholars’ time, namely all the sources consulted in the compilation work, the libraries holding copies of the first or earliest edition, and various notes on dubious or anonymous authorship, length of the grammar, plagiarism and so forth. It goes without saying that ECEG can be counted among the electronic tools that can be expected to raise the standards of research on early English grammars substantially.

Of the four papers on Late Modern work on the English language, the first is that by Alicia Rodríguez-Álvarez, entitled ‘“With a concise historical account of the language”: Outlines of the history of English in eighteenth-century dictionaries’. The aim of the paper is to find out, on the basis of a systematic study of contemporaneous primary sources, about the ways in which those versed in language study in the Late Modern period construed the development of English. Rodríguez-Álvarez argues that these early accounts were surprisingly similar in form and content, inspired in much by ‘the champions of the Antiquarian movement of the seventeenth century’ (p. 184). The analysis is based on a corpus of the prefaces or separate supplements included in three seventeenth-century and twelve eighteenth-century dictionaries. Among the similarities that the author discusses are the arrangement of information in the works, the periodisation schemes, and the understanding that the English language could be traced back to its Anglo-Saxon ancestor and that this lineage was continuous and something to be proud of. Further similarities identified include the excellence and superiority of the English language, which was considered to have adopted the best features of the other languages it had been in contact with, the depreciation or even hostility expressed towards other languages, and the nationalistic spirit going back to the Elizabethan period (p. 204). Rodríguez-Álvarez does refer to the fact that the historical accounts included in the analysis are based on previous works also included in the study (examples of such relationships are given on p. 186), but does not seem to use this factor to account for the findings about the above similarities. Even so, the survey raises intriguing questions about the treatment of the topic in subsequent reference works and begs for a follow-up study.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the common denominator for the two ensuing papers in the volume. The first of them is ‘The Oxford English Dictionary’s treatment of female-authored sources of the eighteenth century’ by Charlotte Brewer and the second ‘Living history: Andrew Clark, the OED and the language of the First World War’ by Lynda Mugglestone. Both papers are valuable contributions to the study of the lexicographical practices observed in the compilation of the OED. As Brewer correctly points out (p. 211), it is easy to forget the limitations of a rich data source such as the OED caused by biases in the textual basis and by principles applied in the selection of quotations. This concerns the use of the electronic OED Online (www.oed.com), in particular, as it allows automated searches for linguistic and extralinguistic information across the history of English. In her previous work, Brewer has provided systematic evidence on ‘wide variations’ in how the OED lexicographers have handled the material (p. 212). Even though the scholarly community has been aware of many of these biases for quite some time, there is reason to take the research a step further and ask, as Brewer does in her present contribution, whether such variations could tell us anything about the English language or whether they might have more to do with the lexicographers’ assumptions about it and the constraints at work at the time of the compilation (p. 213). The paper reports on initial results obtained for the low number of female authors represented in the OED quotations and the scarce representation of eighteenth-century sources (p. 213). In addition to the OED Online itself, Brewer makes use of the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), online editions of texts and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) to identify sources omitted in the OED and to investigate systematically a sample of her material to see whether any relevant information might have been missed by the lexicographers (p. 214). Commendably, the methodology applied in the investigation and in a pilot study on Anna Letitia Barbauld is described and justified in detail. In the final section of the paper, the use made of female authors’ works in the OED3 receives much appreciated attention and provides information that should be of great interest to both the OED revisers and a general audience (for the OED3 project, which comprises the first full-scale revision of the OED, see the online Preface to the new edition at www.oed.com). Brewer's project and its future progress definitely merit close attention.

In her contribution, Lynda Mugglestone sheds further light on the sources behind the OED and its compilation stages by examining the First World War diaries (over ninety volumes) and other records (seventy notebooks) left by Andrew Clark, a hitherto neglected figure in the history of the OED (pp. 243–4). Clark recorded ‘the ordinary words of the language’ (as James Murray, editor of the OED from 1878 to 1915 had put it in 1911 (pp. 240, 242)), which he envisaged might be relevant items to document language change in progress especially in times of national conflict (p. 243). Mugglestone provides fascinating information on this so far largely unexplored material and demonstrates its great value (p. 245). Many of the usages recorded by Clark were set aside by the editors of the 1933 Supplement, whose patterns of selection regarding Clark's work Mugglestone finds ‘perplexing’ (p. 254). Indeed, as Mugglestone shows, editorial policy and space restrictions meant that much of Clark's material was not made use of. Ironically, when Burchfield tackled the late twentieth-century Supplements, he had to work from scratch on entries that could have been found documented comprehensively in Clark's notebooks (pp. 257–8). In drawing due attention to this primary source, and in positioning it in the lexicographical scene of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Mugglestone's paper is one of the most attractive contributions to the volume.

The last paper in the section devoted to Late Modern work on the English language is a work-in-progress paper by Manfred Markus on the digitised version of Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary (1898–1905), or EDD Online. The resource has been designed to not only allow the attribution of words to dialect levels (nations, regions, counties and subdivisions of counties) but also enable searches for patterns of word formation, phraseology, semantics and pragmatics, and spelling variants (p. 265). After describing the state of the art in the study of English dialects in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the paper surveys the number and validity of Wright's sources and what he made of them when compiling his dictionary. Regarding the EDD Online, the plan is to make use of these sources in the future to enrich and complement the resource (p. 265). Markus distinguishes three basic types of sources: written documents referring to dialects, books of general reference (including literary works), and, pooled together, unprinted collections and information by correspondence. The paper highlights the enormous range of sources used by Wright (p. 270). Markus also assesses the value of Wright's sources for linguistic inquiry and finds a great deal of variation in their scholarly value, many of them having been compiled for pragmatic and folkloristic aims by philological non-professionals (pp. 271–2). Nevertheless such sources do lend themselves to digitisation, with due attention paid to careful analysis of levels such as ‘quotation’ and ‘comment’ (p. 273). Similarly, there are 291 different works of general reference, among them literary works from the Old and Middle English periods and books on archaeology and on German and Scandinavian dialects (pp. 274–5). In the third category, Wright lists 750 names of individuals that sent him unpublished lists of dialect words. According to Markus's counts, most correspondents came from Yorkshire, Wright's own county (pp. 276–7). Clearly, the EDD Online will enhance scholars’ access to Wright's work and background sources enormously. A beta version of the resource is already available at www.uibk.ac.at/anglistik/projects/edd-online/.

Of the three papers included in the grammar and lexis section, two pay attention to transplanted varieties of English, one on Irish English and the other on grammatical divergence between British and American English. In her paper entitled ‘The Irish contribution to the English language during the Late Modern period’, Daniela Cesiri focuses on the influence that words of Irish origin exerted on Late Modern English lexis and seeks to identify the original semantic fields characteristic of the borrowings and what they might reveal to us about the attitude of the contemporaneous English towards the Irish. The raw material was drawn from the OED and totalled 524 items containing ‘Irish’ in their etymology (e.g. galore ‘plenty of something’) and 674 words containing ‘Irish’ in their definition (e.g. parnellism ‘politics inspired by the Irish leader Charles S. Parnell’) (pp. 286–7). After a careful screening round based on criteria partially drawn from previous literature, 311 entries remained in the data included for further scrutiny (159 in the etymology category and 152 in the definition category, p. 288). To track down real-use attestations outside the OED, a number of electronic resources containing Irish and/or British English were searched for the 311 terms. The majority of Irish loans appear to have entered the English language in the middle of the nineteenth century; across the period included in the study (1730–1930), the best-represented semantic field is that of ‘colloquialisms’. The results for the distribution of the Irish loans across time and semantic fields are given in the form of two graphs (pp. 289, 291), but no corresponding tables giving the raw figures accompany either of them. Considering the relatively small number of lexical items examined, such tables would have been of help. The data drawn from further electronic resources showed that contrary to ‘the commonly held view of the English rejecting the Irish’, Irish words had entered English consciousness (p. 294). Another surprising result of the study was the very small number of Irish words yielded by semantic fields such as politics, history, folklore and mythology, all areas of major interest in nineteenth-century England (p. 295). Cesiri does not venture to suggest any explanations that might account for this finding. A further study of mid-nineteenth-century Irish migrants and their background might shed light on the issue (keep in mind the migration of large numbers of destitute Irish people who fled from the Great Famine and who may have contributed chiefly colloquial terms).

In his paper on ‘Grammatical divergence between British and American English in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’, Günter Rohdenburg turns to eight grammatical variation phenomena in the areas of nominal and sentential complementation where British and American usage differ distinctly today. Following the Complexity Principle based on the notion of grammatical explicitness, Rohdenburg distinguishes ‘more complex (or more explicit) choices and simpler (or less explicit) ones’ (p. 302). The phenomena involving nominal complementation include the use of reflexives, double objects, primary passives of double objects and alternations in prepositional usage. Those involving sentential complementation include to be deletion (they ordered it (to be) done), the loss of prepositions in certain constructions (they busied themselves (in) organizing conferences), the decreasing use of the infinitive marker to after help, and the increasing use of the subjunctive to replace should constructions (p. 302). The data are drawn from large-scale electronic corpora compiled at the University of Paderborn to cover the two regional varieties in three key periods, the mid nineteenth century (18 million words by authors born between 1803 and 1828), the late nineteenth century (50 million words by authors born between 1830 and 1869) and the early twentieth century (16 million words by authors born between 1870 and 1894) (p. 301). This is an exemplary collection of case studies in many ways, profiting from the previous work the author has carried out on the features: after the general historical background and the present state of each linguistic feature have been outlined, the results of the analyses are tabulated. The regional divergences are then traced back to their origins in the period investigated with special attention paid to comparisons between the generations of authors in the two countries. Conclusions are then drawn on the stages that must have taken place in the processes of change. However, unfortunately no attempt has been made to see whether applying multifactorial techniques might help one to probe further into the nature of processes of change. Pursuing this line of methodology can be recommended regarding future work. In his synthesis, Rohdenburg points out, among other things, that while the general tendency in English is towards the simpler (or less explicit) variant, American English is more advanced than British English in this respect; also, the two developments favouring the more complex (or more explicit) variant, double objects and their primary passives, are delayed in American English (p. 322). Rohdenburg's final point is that there is an urgent need for ‘a series of larger and more homogeneous historical corpora’ than are available for the time being, and it is also highly desirable ‘that the huge gap presented by most of the twentieth century will be filled in the near future’ (p. 323).

The third paper in the grammar and lexis section is by Svenja Kranich on ‘Interpretative progressives in Late Modern English’. This use of progressives highlights the speaker's subjective interpretation of a situation and is of special interest to the Late Modern period partly because it has been underresearched and also partly because it has been viewed as a fairly recent development in previous literature (pp. 331–2). The data for the study are drawn from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sections of British English in the ARCHER-2 corpus, totalling some 750,000 words. Of the 1091 instances of progressives (321 recorded for the eighteenth century and 770 for the nineteenth), 51 were classified as interpretative (12 for the eighteenth and 39 for the nineteenth century) (pp. 333, 337). A range of linguistic factors were included in the analysis, among them grammatical context (tense, clause type, grammatical person) and semantic factors (situation type, lexical verb, subject type regarding animacy and agentivity). Kranich ascribes the relatively scarce number of instances yielded by the corpus to the newness of the form in the period, but hypothesises that this number is nevertheless sufficient to allow one to arrive at distributions of contextual features that might enable an automated detection of interpretative progressives from other uses in a future study based on a larger corpus (p. 337). The results of these contextual analyses are depicted in a number of graphs where interpretative progressives are contrasted to all progressives. However, no corresponding tables giving the raw figures accompany the graphs despite the low total of interpretative instances and the discrepancy between this and the much larger total figure of progressives. It is difficult to fathom the dimensions of categories when no direct information is given on the number of actual examples behind the percentages. Direct access to raw figures would also have facilitated future use of the results for further studies. On the whole, the analyses point to interpretative progressives showing certain contextual preferences but at the same time to no formal criteria that could as such help identify examples in automated searches. Kranich remains sceptical about automatic searches ever being able to find all interpretative uses in even semantically tagged corpora (p. 353). In diachronic terms, Kranich found that the interpretative function is accompanied by other linguistic markers especially in the earlier uses and that a more independent use develops in the nineteenth century, a tendency that grows stronger in the twentieth century (p. 352). Kranich's discussion bears witness to the various ways in which linguists may approach a construction and to the subsequent problems involved in trying to bring together the results obtained in different studies based on varying analytical criteria.

Three studies on the language of letters conclude the book. This is an exciting area closely linked to sociohistorical linguistics, historical sociolinguistics and historical pragmatics: letter writers and their addressees can often be identified in terms of their social background, and letters (or at least personal letters) have been taken to reflect colloquial everyday usage that is difficult to access in historical studies. In her study entitled ‘The problem of small numbers: Methodological issues in social network analysis’, Froukje Henstra applies two network model approaches, one of them a classical model of network strength analysis drawing on biographical and contextual information, and the other a model where network strength is measured in terms of linguistic involvement (p. 362). The linguistic feature investigated is be/have variation, and the specific problem highlighted in the study is the problem of the small number of instances in analyses carried out within these frameworks. The correspondents analysed include Horace Walpole and his Eton school friends Thomas Ashton, Thomas Gray and Richard West. On the basis of biographical background information and epistolary evidence, Henstra divided her material into three periods to allow the different network structures across the periods to reflect possible changes in the authors’ language use (p. 366). This resulted in gaps in representation in the word counts and number of letters available from some of the correspondents and into overrepresentation of others. However, as Henstra points out, it is a common practice within the kind of sociohistorical research envisaged in the study to use ‘focused rather than representative corpora’ (p. 368) and thus accept a situation where nothing other than, as Labov put it (Reference Labov1994: 11), ‘bad data’ is available. After carrying out her classical network strength scale analysis, Henstra returns to the question of reliability of the sources used and to the degree to which one is allowed to generalise from them. This is a valuable part of the paper, leading the author to consider her results ‘very tentative’ (p. 375). Similarly, after carrying out her linguistic involvement strength scale analysis, Henstra notes that while this approach may be a very useful tool in predicting linguistic influence, one should pay attention to contextual information and subject matter and ‘watch out for overgeneralising influences on language such as text type and underestimating the influence of other extra-linguistic factors when devising a model of linguistic influence which is itself linguistically based’ (p. 383). Henstra also manages to sum up the problems she encountered in her study by stating that ‘there seems to be a mismatch between the type of research sociolinguistic models make possible, namely a very specific, micro-level network analysis, and the type of research which our historical linguistic data allow for’ (pp. 387–8). As, understandably enough, the solution to the problem is not to create good historical data where it has not been preserved, scholars are left to develop and improve their methodology in a direction that will better suit the extant data (p. 388). Among the strengths of this meticulously researched study is the close attention paid to tensions between the aspirations of language theory and the limitations set by empirical concerns, among them the mere availability of data. Such discussions are welcome in times when there is a danger that scholars’ research interests may begin to be governed by the availability of massive amounts of easily retrievable data in electronic form.

In her paper entitled ‘Plain speech in Lindley Murray's letters: Peculiar or polite?’, Lyda Fens-de Zeeuw examines the use made by Murray of the word friend in epistolary formulas. The question is whether Murray when using the address term Esteemed Friend to a woman addressee unknown to him followed a common practice at the time or whether this usage could be accounted for as a Quakerism (p. 392). In addition to findings presented in previous work on epistolary formulas, Fens-de Zeeuw uses primary evidence from the correspondence between Henry Fielding and his younger sister Sarah Fielding as her comparative material (pp. 393, 398). It remains unclear, however, why precisely these two individuals have been considered suitable for this purpose. The upshot of her investigation is that in using friend as an address term, Murray did indeed follow the specific Quaker directives intended for members of the Society of Friends. As Fens-de Zeeuw points out, with reference to Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg (Reference Nevalainen, Raumolin-Brunberg and Jucker1995), these directives reflected the culture of positive politeness valid among socially equal individuals (pp. 401–3). Murray also adhered to Quaker directives in the conclusions of his letters (pp. 403–4). Outside the Quaker directives, there was wide variation in the use of the word friend as a term of address. According to Fens-de Zeeuw, the general understanding was that it conveyed a high degree of informality and indicated close friendship (p. 405). The paper is well researched and includes a substantial survey of previous work on address terms. However, one wonders why no mention is made of the substantial work by Nevala (e.g. Reference Nevala2004, Reference Nevala2007) on this topic.

The concluding paper in the letter section and the whole book, ‘She has four and big agane: Ellipses and prostheses in mechanically-schooled writing in England, 1795–1834’, is by Tony Fairman and takes up an intriguing area of language use from the Late Modern English period, the writing habits of those who to a great extent lack formal education, or as Fairman puts it, the ‘mechanically-schooled’ writers. These individuals had to express themselves in writing without having much practice in the use of Standard English. Accordingly, Fairman assumes that ‘the dominant model for putting their words into writing was their own and their family's and friends’ speech’ (pp. 414–15). The linguistic phenomena in focus in the study are what Fairman calls ‘prosthesis’ (‘whether or not to add words’) and ‘ellipsis’ (‘write phrases and clauses whose grammatical structure they [= the mechanically-schooled writers] do not express explicitly’) (p. 415). Some of the examples given seem more convincing than others. For instance, in example (5), by an unknown informer in 1815 (pp. 422–3), we find the following instance: ‘She has four and big agane | and common prostitute Bad woman’ (Yorkshire R. O. (Beverley): Beverley, St. Mary's, PE/1/702; the symbol ‘|’ has been added here to indicate the line-break, see p. 418, note 4). Fairman postulates that the writer ‘is more likely to have written as he/she spoke: “Common prostitute! Bad woman!”’ and renders the instance in conventional clauses as follows (the additions are given in italics): ‘His wife has four children and is big agane. She's a common prostitute and a bad woman’ (p. 423). However, the analyses given for some of the examples are difficult to follow. One of these is example (1): ‘. . . it is impossible | for me to get it myself out of nine shillings aweek and six | people to live on it’, by ‘D Stevens (male) or someone writing for him, in Netherbury’, on 25 April 1804 (Dorset R.O.: Blandford Forum, PE/BF/OV/13/1) (pp. 417–18). According to Fairman, the writer's ‘verbless’ unit ‘and six people to live on it’ is an elliptical use, which is ‘neither grammatical, nor phonological, but emotional’ and which leaves the precise verb ellipted unrecoverable (pp. 418–19). By way of clarification, Fairman writes on this point: ‘Stevens did not know how to express in words (and I cannot match in strength) the emotion (desperation?) which seems prosodically to run through his and six people to live on it’ (pp. 418–19). In Fairman's terms, ‘supplying either of the two preceding verbs, is or get is . . . meaningless’ (p. 418) thus rejecting the preceding verb ‘is’ as the ellipted verb, despite this being a logical reading, i.e. ‘. . . it is impossible | for me to get it myself out of nine shillings aweek and it is impossible for six | people to live on it’. Moreover, one wonders why ‘to get’ is considered a verb if ‘to live’ is not. Also, there is, of course, the possibility of seeing the two to-infinitive clauses as co-ordinated and both introduced by for: ‘it is impossible for [me . . . a week] and [six . . . it]’, a reading that would require no expansion at all. Fairman's linguistic reasoning is thus not always easy to follow, and it seems that the problems of bringing together non-standard language data and grammatical analyses remain to some extent unresolved. There is also the question as to what extent this empirical study might be replicable, i.e. whether another researcher would be able to identify the same 133 instances with prosthetic possibilities in the material as Fairman identified (p. 419). However, Fairman is clearly aware of the importance of methodological concerns (pp. 415–19), and also, to cite the editors of the volume, of ‘the need to take into account not only the existence of gradual stylistic differences but also the possibility that there may be discrete grammatical systems underlying different texts’ (p. 27).

Taken as a whole, this is a substantial and very readable volume. The authors’ enthusiasm for their topics is catching and the quality of their work is mostly high. Only minor points can be raised concerning the quality of editorial work. The editors state in their Introduction that ‘[t]the papers focus on a number of clearly defined and to a certain extent interrelating series of topics’ (p. 14), but provide no cross-references across the papers for the benefit of readers even when there would have been good grounds for doing so (e.g. connections between the papers by Hickey, Percy and Cesiri on their points about non-English speakers of English). Yet the overall impression yielded by the book is that the editors have been careful about attending to the details (for instance, there are only a few typos, e.g. EED Online > EDD Online, p. 263; Moroever > Moreover, p. 338).

In sum, the book is rich in information on Late Modern English and covers a wide range of issues that have been found to be of relevance to the history of English. The selection of papers in the volume confirms that English historical linguists still find the Late Modern English period a treasure-trove for work on the early codifiers of the language and the influence they exerted on its development long after their hey-day. In this vein, the ECEG-database project will provide a powerful tool. As for language studies, the electronic resources referred to above can only be expected to fuel further research on the area.