These two handbooks complement each other very well. English linguistics includes diachronic studies, more so than say linguistics for languages where the historical record is not as ample. For practical reasons, however, The Handbook of English Linguistics excludes those studies since a Handbook of the History of English in the same series also exists.

The Handbook of English Linguistics is a very good resource on major areas of English linguistics, among them phonetics and phonology, syntax, corpus linguistics and data collection, morphology, variation, and discourse. I enjoyed reading quite a number of the chapters. The book will be of use in a variety of settings, as state-of-the art summaries of a particular field as well as additional reading for undergraduate and graduate students. A few chapters from the first section, for instance, could be used in a research methods class.

The editors, Bas Aarts from University College London and April McMahon from the University of Edinburgh, start out justifying and defining English linguistics in their introduction. They define it ‘as a discipline that concerns itself with the study of all aspects of Present-day English (PDE) from a variety of different angles, both descriptive and theoretical’ (p. 1). In Europe, though less in North America, there is a sense that English linguistics is a field. There are professorships in English linguistics; there is the Journal of English Linguistics (http://eng.sagepub.com) and English Language and Linguistics (http://journals.cambridge.org); and there are conferences, though many focus on English studies, e.g. ESSE, the European Society for the Study of English. The fact that EL is a separate field doesn't mean it is isolated, but in fact, as the editors argue in the introduction, there is a lot of healthy interaction between EL and specialties in linguistics.

Following the Introduction, there are thirty-one chapters in five parts. In this review, I will provide a description of the contributions with my own comments interspersed. The editors suggest that the theoretical frameworks chosen display some ‘Zeitgeist effects’ (p. 3) though I didn't have that sense.

Part I concerns methodology and has chapters by Kersti Börjars, Tony McEnery and Costas Gabrielatos, Andrew Linn, and Charles F. Meyer and Gerald Nelson. Börjars’ chapter is entitled ‘Description and theory’ and provides a very helpful summary of the tension between data collection and theory building. She reminds us of the prescriptive trends still present in data collection as well as the bias towards written data and cautions us to think carefully about the use of introspective data. The second part of her chapter reviews some current theories, the Minimalist Program, Lexical–Functional Grammar, and Optimality Theory. In the five-page discussion of the Minimalist Program, there is an appropriate emphasis on the interface levels, the conceptual-intentional and sensorimotor. As Chomsky (2006) formulates it, ‘language is a perfect solution to interface conditions’. Börjars then focuses on features and checking which she sees as central. Features are the triggers for movement, another central aspect of Minimalism and the tradition it builds on. Lexical–Functional Grammar relies on mapping rather than on movement (transformations) and phrase structure plays much less of a role. Optimality Theory is special in that one framework covers phonology and syntax. It is also a meta-theory, according to Börjars, regarding the constraints and the generating component called GEN. Her conclusion is that it is not easy to know where description stops and theorizing starts and that the variety of theories available is good for covering the data as well as our insights.

McEnery and Gabrielatos’ chapter bears the title ‘English corpus linguistics’. Corpus linguistics has always seemed to me more practiced within English linguistics than in many other branches (even though only five chapters in the present volume use corpora as their main source of data and one as a partial source). Since the 1960s, corpora have appeared such as the Brown Corpus, the Freiburg Brown Corpus, the Helsinki Corpus, International Corpus of English and many others. After a review of the nature of corpus linguistics and its contribution to linguistic theory, the chapter focuses on the contribution of corpus linguistics to language description, to the lexical approach to language analysis, to the teaching of English (as a foreign language), and to the study of language change. There are many debates within corpus linguistics, not least of all that the use of corpora remains controversial with some linguists. Another debate is between corpus-based (testing descriptions/theories using corpora) and corpus-driven (discovering facts) approaches and if such a distinction can be made. A practical difference is that corpus-based approaches prefer tagged or sorted corpora whereas corpus-driven ones do not. The chapter discusses guidelines for the annotation of a corpus, based on Leech's work, with one of the main points being that the unannotated corpus should be recoverable. As the authors remark, a ‘large number of corpus linguists seem to practice eclecticism in the research techniques they use’ (p. 45). The sections on the use of corpora in making reference tools, both dictionaries and grammars, and in language teaching are very informative. The chapter ends with a (very long) bibliography. I missed a discussion of the British National Corpus and of CHILDES.

Linn's contribution is on ‘English grammar writing’. The chapter gives an overview of what a grammar can be and how the ideas behind it have changed from William Bullokar in 1586 to Lindley Murray in 1795 to Otto Jespersen in the first half of the last century. Hundreds and hundreds of grammars have been published over the centuries, all with slightly different purposes and in different traditions.

Meyer and Nelson discuss ‘Data collection’ in the chapter by that name. It is a very short but useful chapter, about the different applications of experimental data, corpus data, and introspective data. Introspection is a relatively new method, whereby the linguist creates sentences that sound grammatical to her/him and that relate to a linguistic problem s/he is working on. For instance, if one is thinking about complementation, one could think up verbs that can have a full clause as complement or an infinitival one or something else. This method became popular with the mentalist view of language in the 1950s. Linguistic experiments are used to get data from more than one speaker to obtain more reliable data. The authors discuss selecting subjects and experimental design. The third method of data collection is through corpora. The advantage here is that, if the corpus is a true representation of a certain variety of a language, it provides a more complete picture across gender and class.

Part II includes ten chapters on syntax. This is ample, certainly considering there are only four chapters in part III on phonetics and phonology. ‘Syntax’ seems to cover a relatively wide set of topics though, e.g. information structure and pragmatics.

In chapter 6, Bas Aarts and Liliane Haegeman define and describe two concepts that are crucial for the description of any language, namely word classes and phrases. If one considers where English grammar presents challenges to syntax, it is in the area of the quite expanded NP as well as the complex auxiliary system. Both areas are addressed, one in the word class section and the other in the structural sections. Word classes ‘can be viewed as abstractions over sets of words displaying some common property or properties’ (p. 117). These common properties can be semantic, morphological, or syntactic. For English, there is general agreement, according to Aarts and Haegeman, about the existence of the categories noun, verb, adjective, preposition, adverb, determinative, and conjunction. They then discuss some well-known problems with the determinative category in English: the special categories of predeterminatives (all, both, half, etc.) and postdeterminatives (two, three, last, next, few) and unclarities on how to analyze many a problem. Phrases are groupings of words and though many are uncontroversial and psychologically real, some questions arise as well. The authors spend considerable time defending the independence of the auxiliaries from the Verb Phrase and also the idea that the Verb Phrase contains the lexical verbs and its complements and adverbials. The most interesting discussion could have been the one on stacked auxiliaries (might have been being). It has always been a debate over what the status of the auxiliaries is (in this chapter, apart from the modal, all auxiliaries are labeled Vs) and how the morphology is dealt with (also known as affix-hop). Recent Minimalism does have new mechanisms such as probes to shed new light on this but that might have been too much in this chapter.

The next two chapters discuss valency, or argument structure, and illocutionary force. David Allerton's chapter about the argument structure of verbs is called ‘Verbs and their satellites’. Argument structure affects aspect and the grammaticality of adverbials. Allerton believes that ‘English needs to be described in its own right’ (p. 152). His annotation system describes four patterns for English simple sentences, two mono-valent, 11 bi-valent, 20 tri-valent, and 6 tetra-valent structures (pp. 170–1). Peter Collins in his ‘Clause types’ defines the latter ‘as a term referring to the syntactic categories of declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamative’ (p. 180). Clause types raise questions concerning the syntax–semantics–pragmatics relationship and when the strict relationship between syntactic type and characteristic meaning breaks down.

‘Coordination and subordination’ is discussed by Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey Pullum in chapter 9. It is based extensively on their earlier work together. An interesting issue in English and other languages is the status of the coordinated phrase and Huddleston and Pullum argue it is a separate category, namely ‘coordination’ (p. 200), though alternative analyses are not discussed. That means two coordinate NPs or two VPs belong to the category coordination. Subordinate (and main) clauses also have the status of a syntactic category. A language has subordinate clauses ‘when it has a grammatically distinctive subcategory of clause whose most prototypical members characteristically function as dependent’ (p. 208). A division and list of finite and non-finite subordinate clauses is then given.

The next three chapters are on ‘Tense in English’ (chapter 10), ‘Aspect and aspectuality’ (chapter 11), and ‘Mood and modality in English’ (chapter 12). Laura Michaelis discusses a number of misconceptions about tense. Following Reichenbach, Michaelis argues that tense expresses ‘the relationship between speech time and another interval of interest’ (p. 221), i.e. that Reichenbach's Reference point (R) is crucial. She also argues in detail that one cannot discuss tense without aspect. Robert Binnick provides overviews of situation aspect, viewpoint aspect, and phasic aspect. There is in general a lot of confusion on the terminology but Binnick helps disentangle the terms: situation aspect is now often used to replace Aktionsart or lexical aspect, viewpoint aspect replaces grammatical aspect, and phasic aspect relates to the stages of an event (begin, stop, finally, etc.). Phasic aspect is relevant to type conversion where one aspectual class changes into another (e.g. the state is coerced into having a phase in *finished being happy and this results in ungrammaticality). Coercion is more general, e.g. due to the progressive: climbing the mountain cannot be accomplishment but must be process. He ends with a section on aspect in discourse. Narratives, for instance, have a foreground (using tense) and a background (using aspect).

If one thinks of mood and modality in English, the changes in modal verbs come to mind immediately as well as double modals and other interesting data in the different varieties of English. Ilse Depraetere and Susan Reed's examples in ‘Mood and modality in English’ are taken from the British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB), and represent very standard English (see their note 1). Their main concern is with a classification of modals.

Gregory Ward and Betty Birner's ‘Information structure’ shows how syntax contributes to the ‘orderly presentation of information in a discourse’ (p. 291). Thus, passives and topicalization can rearrange elements so that they conform more to the ‘old before new’ principle. An open proposition is an information-structuring device which marks shared knowledge in a discourse. The constructions most often associated with open propositions are cleft sentences, gapped, preposed, and inverted ones. So, the clefted It was a sweater I bought contains the open proposition [I bought x] where the new information from the cleft is replaced by a variable. Some less frequent open propositions are deferred equatives and epistemic would (as in Now that would be . . .).

‘Current changes in English syntax’ by Christian Mair and Geoffrey Leech chronicles some changes in the last 100 years using several British (LOB and F-LOB) and American (Brown and Frown) corpora. This is a wonderful chapter, succinct but with abundant information on increasing grammaticalization. Ever since the Early Modern English period, progressives (be and -ing) have increased in general frequency but it wasn't till the twentieth century that present perfect progressive passives (has been being discussed) and modal passive progressives (will be being approached) appeared. Corpora (even the 100- million-word BNC) are too small to yield many results. Another famous set of changes involves modality, both the use of modals and the subjunctive. Mair and Leech show that the use of low and mid frequency modals such as shall, ought (to), need, must, and may has decreased dramatically, perhaps more pronounced in American than British English, and that the use of semi-modals be going to, need to, be supposed to has gone up dramatically. The use of the subjunctive is interesting in that a modest revival is occurring in Britain, possibly due to ‘Americanization’ (p. 336). Be-passives are replaced by get-passives. This is one example they give of the ‘growing tendency towards the colloquialization of written English’ (p. 332). As for changes in the Noun Phrase, they involve an increase of nouns and adjectives over pronouns and articles, and constitute the opposite trend, namely noun phrases becoming denser and less colloquial. Relative clauses show a tendency not to use a wh-pronoun, but that or zero, as well as to strand prepositions.

Adele Goldberg and Devin Casenhiser present a Construction Grammar approach in ‘English constructions’, the last chapter in part II. They point out that everyone uses ‘constructions’ to talk about passives and relative clauses, and some use names such as the incredulity construction (Him, a trapeze artist?!) and the covariational construction (the more the merrier). Constructionist approaches to syntax go further and even very basic transitive and intransitive sentences involve constructions. The most convincing cases where main verbs on their own do not determine the argument structure are the well-known sneeze something off the table and cough the audience awake. The authors present other constructions and discuss what counts as a construction. The most inclusive definition is a pattern where ‘some aspect of its form or function is not strictly predictable from its component parts’ (p. 349).

Part III ‘Phonetics and phonology’ includes four chapters and covers just under a hundred pages. Phonetics and phonology have a long tradition using English data, from Daniel Jones’ The Pronunciation of English (1909) and Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle's The Sound Pattern of English (1968).

The first chapter is by Mike MacMahon on English phonetics. It provides an introduction on speech organs, the International Phonetic Alphabet, and air-stream mechanisms. It then goes deeper into a description of English consonants and vowels from an articulatory point of view. The chapter will be excellent reading for students to consolidate their knowledge. Acoustic phonetics is dealt with in one page (though Foulkes’ later chapter includes more discussion) and supra-segmental aspects in another page. A separate chapter on acoustic phonetics would have been helpful, especially had it included a discussion on the various free programs available to do such analysis, e.g. PRAAT (www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat) and Speech Analyzer (www.sil.org).

‘English phonology and morphology’ by Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero and April McMahon ‘focuses on interactions between phonology and morphology in present-day English and their implications for the shape of the morphology–phonology interface in natural language’ (p. 382). I found it very comprehensive in laying out the different approaches to phonology, morphology, and lexicon. They aim to present the data in a relatively neutral way, i.e. not singling out rule-based over constraint-based systems. Many issues are discussed: is the lexicon minimal or massively redundant; how transparent can rules be (e.g. can one list sane as [sen] in the lexicon and then derive [sæniti] through a rule or not); how can one distinguish phonological from morphological rules; and do rules have to be ‘natural’?

Michael Hammond's ‘Prosodic phonology’ covers the syllable and the foot. He presents extralinguistic as well as linguistic evidence for both the intuitively obvious syllable and the more opaque foot. Native speakers know how to syllabify words without being taught rules and certain poetry is based on number of syllables (e.g. ten in Shakespearean sonnets). Linguistic evidence for the syllable involves stress rules and sonority. The structure of the English syllable is not straightforward due to the role of stress in determining syllables. For instance, in [hæpi] happy, the intervocalic consonant [p] affiliates with both syllables (and this is then the reason for the absence of syllable-initial aspiration of the [p]). Syllable weight plays a role in a number of processes but determining weight is difficult as well. Extralinguistic evidence for the foot again comes from poetry and language games and linguistic evidence comes from Expletive Infixation. Using the expletive bloody, it is grammatical to insert it into Minnesota between two feet, as in Minne-bloody-sota but not after the first syllable, as in Mi-bloody-nesota.

Francis Nolan explores ‘Intonation’, which is unusually rich in English. Intonation is crucial to syntax (being the ‘punctuation of spoken languages’, p. 440), information structure, and pragmatics. Central to intonation is pitch with timing and loudness closely connected. I found this an interesting and informative chapter with a good explanation of Pierrehumbert's autosegmental-metrical analysis. Nolan's last section is on intonational variation in English and Northern Irish English in particular.

There are six chapters in part IV ‘Lexis and morphology’. The potential size of the English lexicon is infinite. ‘English words’ by Donka Minkova and Bob Stockwell addresses this and brings in much insight from history, frequency, and sources of renewal. They discuss the number of entries in certain dictionaries (615,500 in the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary) and the difficulties in coming up with estimates of the total numbers of English words. The frequency of a word is similarly difficult and they distinguish a core and periphery, with the core being etymologically Germanic, predominantly mono- or disyllabic, and comprising all grammatical categories, e.g. most prepositions. A peripheral word, e.g. population or responsible, is often non-Germanic, multi-syllabic, and mainly a noun, verb, or adjective. Frequencies are given for borrowed words as compared to etymologically Germanic ones. A history of vocabulary expansion is also given including re-borrowings as words undergo phonetic changes. The second half of the last century sees a different source of vocabulary renewal, namely a turning ‘inward to its own resources’ (p. 480) through new affixes, compounds, and acronyms.

Laurie Bauer's ‘Compounds and minor word-formation types’ is a very nice continuation of such an internal lexical renewal though the emphasis is on the definition of compounds and a discussion of other non-affixal word-formation such as clipping, using letters (UN, TESOL), blending, and echo words. Stress is often used as a defining characteristic of compounds, e.g. the compound blackboard has black stressed, whereas the phrase a black board has board stressed. Bauer notes that stress is often unpredictable, e.g. in apple pie, pie is stressed, and concludes that ‘there is little evidence that first-element stress is a necessary or even consistent correlate of compound structure’ (p. 488). He then discusses the lexical, grammatical, and semantic aspects of compounds. For instance, for most compounds, the headedness is ‘uncontroversial . . . : money belt refers to a type of belt not a type of money’ (p. 492). Here too there are exceptions. Perhaps the least known aspect Bauer discusses is the pragmatics of compounding: compounds are compact and perfect for discussing a previous reference such as the orange-coat lady.

In some current frameworks, e.g. Minimalism, morpho-syntax is extremely important. ‘English inflection and derivation’ by James Blevins presents a fairly traditional account of English inflection and covers the forms there are (e.g. number and person). Börjars’ chapter in part I covers some inflectional morphology in terms of feature checking and cross-references might have been useful. Blevins also touches on derivational morphology. Ingo Plag's ‘Productivity’ discusses the productivity of morphological rules, both qualitatively (i.e. productive) and quantitatively. Interesting questions asked are: what native speakers know about the productivity of an affix. In the chapter on ‘Lexical semantics’, Kate Kearns focuses on semantic fields, lexical relations such as synonymy, componential analysis, and sense differentiation. It might have been good to counterbalance this chapter with one on formal semantics. For instance, quantifiers and determiners in English are fascinating.

Dictionaries of the English language are models for those in many other languages. It is therefore very appropriate to have a chapter on this topic. In ‘Lexicography’, Julie Coleman explains that the term lexicography is not just used for writing dictionaries (and that dictionaries can cover words related to very specific fields such as dreams, birds, or love) and that ‘there is a bewildering array of publications that describe themselves as dictionaries’ (p. 582). It may be the most daunting chapter to write (especially in fourteen pages) if one considers the history, varieties, uses, and media (paper or electronic or free internet use), sources (spoken as well as international), and usage issues.

Part V includes seven chapters on variation, discourse, stylistics, and usage. Bernd Kortmann's chapter is entitled ‘Syntactic variation in English: a global perspective’ and this chapter together with Paul Foulkes’ chapter specifically examine World Englishes, or ‘global English’. Kortmann sets an ambitious goal of being ‘a first attempt at providing an overview of syntactic variation in English on a global scale’ (p. 604). His chapter provides a good summary of what is known from a variety of sources.

‘Phonological variation: a global perspective’ by Foulkes outlines ‘the various causes and effects of phonological variability’ (p. 625) in an interdisciplinary way from which I learned a lot. He starts by emphasizing that all acoustic signals are unique and that variation should be treated as a given. Variation, however, is often seen as a problem both for the phonetician and the phonologist. He discusses coarticulation and the role of prosody and morphological status in variation before turning to geographical and social reasons. The chapter finishes by showing the relatively limited impact of variation studies on grammatical theory and vice versa and the wider significance of phonological variation to speech pathology, forensics, and pedagogy. He recommends ‘viewing variability not as a nuisance but as a universal and functional design feature of language’ (p. 654).

‘Spoken language is more fundamental than written language’, writes Jim Miller in his chapter ‘Spoken and written English’ (p. 671). Yet, systematic study of it has only been possible for the last thirty years. Some spoken genres (e.g. formal lectures) resemble written genres but spontaneous, unplanned speech has a character of its own. Distinguishing genres is therefore very important. Miller lists the characteristics of unplanned spoken language, e.g. small quantities of information in each clause and paratactic syntax (Miller uses ‘adjacent’) and goes on to examine small texts and to review studies that examine the differences between different genres. He discusses the controversy about whether or not spoken language can be analyzed and what unit to use for such an analysis.

Douglas Biber and Paulo Quaglio's ‘The grammar of conversation’ is a good continuation of Miller's chapter. Their chapter contains very helpful tables summarizing the studies on the grammar of conversation, from relative clause markers to degree adverbs, to passive auxiliaries. They also make a list of grammatical features available that are frequent in conversation, e.g. the use of certain verbs, the prevalence of present tense, and the use of certain clause types.

‘Gender and the English language’ by Deborah Cameron discusses the question of whether an author's gender manifests itself in written text. She reviews a study of male and female authors in the British National Corpus (with males using higher frequencies of determiners and quantifiers and females using more personal pronouns) and questions the direct link. The linguistic differences could also be determined by the genre and subject. Cameron then examines the role of gender in language change and the resources the English language has for representing gender, e.g. kinship terms, pronouns, diminutives, and titles.

Peter Stockwell argues in ‘Language and literature: stylistics’ that stylistics is a coherent discipline, though it is often not regarded as such. He provides a history of stylistics, examples of stylistic analysis, and a discussion of the new trends.

The first time I heard the word ‘usage’, I understood it to mean descriptive grammar (though prescriptive was in fact meant). As Pam Peters makes clear in ‘English usage: prescription and description’, there is a difference of opinion as to whether usage refers to prescriptive or descriptive use, or a mixture of both. She supplies quotes from different sources showing this, as well as a review of usage writing. A fascinating section is the examination of four grammatically prescribed rules, regarding the future shall/will, the use of the subjunctive, conjunctive like, and the Case of the gerund subject. Wallis in the seventeenth century was the first to prescribe shall for first persons and will for second and third. This was not very successful since the long years of insisting on this rule still result in a predominance of will in all persons. Fowler's advice in the 1920s was to stop using the subjunctive but again there was no major increase in loss. In the 1950s and 1960s, the conjunctive use of like was criticized, most fiercely in the US. Corpus data show that Americans were nevertheless more tolerant of this use than British users though mainly in fiction. That shows prescriptive rules did have an influence on the more formal registers. Both Webster and Fowler thought the genitive pronoun my should be used in They spoke of my being there rather than the accusative me. Though early in the twentieth century this rule seems to have had some influence, its ‘effect is fading’ (p. 773).

In conclusion, The Handbook of English Linguistics covers many areas very well and makes one think about the contributions of the English language to linguistics. I would recommend many of its chapters for further reading in graduate classes (and sometimes in undergraduate ones). Since every reader has a bias about what s/he would have like to have seen more of, I will mention some topics I would have liked. For instance, I don't agree that ‘Modern English approaches the ideal of an isolating language’ (p. 507) and would therefore have liked a chapter on clitics/contractions such as in I shoulda . . .or he's gonna . . .which I think are the beginnings of a synthetic stage. As mentioned above, I also would have liked a chapter on formal semantics and acoustics of English. However, this volume has many chapters of interest to linguists of different theoretical persuasions and they are written by what Peter Trudgill (on the cover) calls ‘a star-studded cast of linguistic experts’.

The history of English is a field of its own, with professorships as well as conferences completely devoted to its study, e.g. International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (www.icehl.de) and Studies in the History of the English Language (www.english.uga.edu/shel5). It has a number of websites, e.g. www.uni-essen.de/SHE; www.chass.utoronto.ca/~cpercy/hell; http://ebbs.english.vt.edu/hel/hel.html, my own www.historyofenglish.net/, as well as a number of handbooks, such as the six-volume Cambridge History of the English Language, weighing over 7 kilos and containing over 4,000 pages. The Handbook of the History of English is a good addition to this tradition but because of the previous work it does not need to give a complete introduction to the history of English and can be selective and more in-depth on certain issues. As with the The Handbook of English Linguistics, I enjoyed different insights and would also use it for state-of-the-art summaries and additional reading.

The editors, Ans van Kemenade and Bettelou Los, both from the Radboud University Nijmegen, ‘decided to concentrate . . . on typical handbook functions: those of providing shortcuts to current thinking for readers who want to become familiar with subjects that are outside their own areas of interest, and of providing a “state of the art” overview of current research’ (p. vii). The book ‘attempts to give new and theoretically informed answers to old questions’ (p. ix).

Following the Introduction by the editors, there are twenty-three chapters in six parts. The number of chapters in each part is nicely divided, with between three and five chapters in each part. As with The Handbook of English Linguistics, I provide a description accompanied by my own comments where relevant in what follows.

Part I ‘Approaches and issues’ contains four chapters concentrating on new approaches to language change by April McMahon, David Lightfoot, Anthony Warner, and William Croft. McMahon's chapter has the suitably ambiguous title ‘Change for the better? Optimality Theory versus history’ and has as goals (a) to describe changes in Optimality Theory (OT) since its inception and (b) to show how problems in language change are very relevant to the theory. McMahon first provides a very short introduction on CON(straints) and GEN(erator) and the changes. ‘Early OT accounts tended to assume that change was, in some sense, for the better’ (p. 3) whereas currently there is more of a global view, namely to model ‘conflicting factors and motivations’ (p. 4). She then discusses how OT would handle the (infamous) Great Vowel Shift where roughly between 1400 and 1600 the vowels raised, namely through a constraint that prefers high vowels (p. 7), as well as a constraint against mergers (p. 15). Not being an OT phonologist, I found this chapter good in that it explained well-known data in an OT framework and then showed the significance of these data in a new light, posing the question whether CON(straints) are phonetically grounded (p. 19).

Lightfoot's chapter ‘Cuing a new grammar’ starts by discussing E-language approaches to language change, and contrasts them to I-language approaches. Lightfoot, as always, is very clear about these different approaches. E-languages deal ‘with the products of the language capacity’ and I-languages ‘with the capacity itself’ (p. 25). He gives his (usual) argument against grammaticalization, namely that language change is not unidirectional and that a description of change in the E-language (=grammaticalization) is not explanatory. One can of course argue against both: the vast majority of change is unidirectional (Traugott Reference Traugott2001), and grammaticalization can be seen in terms of Universal Grammar (UG) principles, i.e. of the I-language (van Gelderen Reference Gelderen2004). The ‘cuing’ from the title refers to the ‘idea that children scan their linguistics environment for structural cues’ (p. 32) and concerns the change of the triggering experience from the E-language such that the language learner will come up with an I-language different from that of the previous generation. Thus, for Lightfoot, change can only come from the outside, i.e. triggered by variable data. He shows on the basis of morphological changes in English modal auxiliaries that small changes in the output triggered the change from V to I. The syntactic effects of morphological Case loss in English are similarly important for the grammar the child is constructing.

In ‘Variation and the interpretation of change in periphrastic do’, Warner shows ‘how an understanding of variation can contribute to our understanding of earlier grammars and of linguistic change’ (p. 45). The facts of the changes in English do are well known and perhaps therefore not reviewed much by Warner. In Old English, do is used as a main verb, though already as a light, causative verb. The earliest examples of do as an auxiliary in questions and negatives are from a little before 1400 and its use is optional up to about 1700, by which time it occurs in all questions and negatives. On the basis of the well-known graph by Ellegård (Reference Ellegård1953), Warner asks some questions, e.g. why does do in questions lead the way ahead of do in negatives and why is there a constant rate? A variety of answers from the literature is reviewed. One of the puzzles that remains (p. 53) is why affirmative do, as in I do think that she is nice, lags behind that in other constructions. The reason for having affirmative do would be the same as in questions and negatives, namely the loss of verb-movement to I to check agreement. Warner identifies the period before 1575 as one where do is an equivalent to tense, and freely selected from the lexicon as such. After 1575, it becomes a last-resort item. He then turns to another aspect, namely, stylistic variation and shows a relation, initially between lexically complex texts and the use of do and later the reverse.

Croft's ‘Evolutionary models and functional-typological theories of language change’ ‘describes an evolutionary model for language change’ (p. 68). The term ‘evolutionary’ is not what I initially expected, namely connected to the origins of language, but ‘a theory of how the generalized analysis of selection . . . is to be applied to the processes of language change’ (p. 68). The basic fact about language in this model is the variation that is inherent in the replication of language as speakers use it. Replications cause change but are of two kinds: altered replication occurs when a /p/ is replicated as [f] rather than as [p], and differential replication where there is an increase in frequency of one over the other. The chapter also includes two pages on grammaticalization, but other chapters, e.g. Brinton's, provide further study on this topic.

Part II ‘Words: derivation and prosody’ includes a chapter by Donka Minkova, one by Paula Fikkert, Elan Dresher & Aditi Lahiri, one by Dieter Kastovsky, and one by Laurie Bauer.

Minkova's ‘Old and Middle English prosody’ is extremely clear in the presentation of the data as well as the account. The chapter outlines the main and secondary stress assignment in Old English and changes after Middle English. The Old English main stress is always fixed on the first syllable of the root but secondary stress is much more complicated. She then presents an OT analysis of these facts. Turning to Middle English, Minkova looks at the effect of the numbers of loans, and their accompanying stress system, introduced in later Middle English. She shows (p. 114) that most of the loans in Late Middle English kept the stress on the initial syllable, regardless of the Romance Stress Rule which looked at the weight (and number) of syllables. After 1500, however, ‘the infiltration of Romance vocabulary continued at a faster pace’ (p. 118) and resulted in a hybrid system, with (Old English) morphologically assigned stress as well as (Romance) weight-driven.

Fikkert, Dresher & Lahiri's contribution ‘Prosodic preferences: from Old English to Early Modern English’ discusses the prosodic organization of Old English, including changes up to the Early Modern English period. It very nicely complements Minkova's chapter. Their focus is on the internal aspect to the changes, i.e. on the language learner, and they develop the idea of the pertinacity of certain rules. For instance, the Old English metrical pattern persisted and came to apply to Romance loans with certain changes. They first present the prosodic system and then show how a number of phonological rules (High Vowel Deletion, Trisyllabic Shortening, and Open Syllable Lengthening) influenced this system since some of these changes led to the opacity of stress assignment. Like Minkova, they put the effect of the loans on the stress system quite late.

Kastovsky's ‘Typological changes in derivational morphology’ comments on word formation and morphological typology. He shows that, in highly inflectional languages, derivational morphology cannot always be clearly distinguished since the two interact. For instance, even in Modern English, the affix -ly creates a new word (derivational) but is also an affix with a special grammatical function (inflectional). Other typological inconsistencies are discussed and explained from a historical perspective.

Bauer's ‘Competition in English word formation’ studies the introduction of new word formation patterns in English, using the online Oxford English Dictionary. One case study involves the history of -ster (seamster and baxter ‘female baker’) and its competitors -ess (seamstress) and -ette (suffragette). The rise of -ess as a feminine gender marker corresponds to the increase of the more general use of -ster (as in gangster); -ette competes with -ess. Bauer then goes into the notion of competition and provides more case studies, e.g. the competition between de-, dis-, and un- (decrown, discrown, and uncrown) and the diminutives -kin, -ling, -let, and -ette (ladykin, ladyling, roomlet, and roomette).

Part III ‘Inflectional morphology and syntax’ has chapters by Cynthia Allen, Ans van Kemenade & Bettelou Los, Susan Pintzuk & Ann Taylor, and David Denison.

‘Case syncretism and word order change’ by Allen reconsiders the long tradition that the loss of Case endings in the history of English resulted in its fixed SVO word order and argues that there is some connection. She focuses on two instances of variation that disappear: the variability in the order of two bare nominal objects (the direct and indirect objects) and variation in the position of a genitive phrase in relation to the head nominal. The texts she examines cover the entire Middle English period (p. 205) and are divided into case-rich and case-impoverished texts. Her conclusion is that ‘although it may have been pragmatic considerations which gave the initial impetus to making certain word orders more dominant than others, deflection played a role in making these orders increasingly dominant’ (p. 220).

Van Kemenade & Los’ chapter is entitled ‘Discourse adverbs and clausal syntax in Old and Middle English’. It concentrates on Þa ‘then’ and Þonne ‘then’ and argues these reveal major changes in the organization of the clause. The adverbs Þa and Þonne occupy a fixed position in the left periphery with pronominal subjects to their left and nominal ones to their right. Their data come from the York Corpus of Old English and the Penn–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English and they provide very helpful long quotes from Old English (and other stages). They note that the construction with Þa followed by the finite verb marks discourse continuity. They also examine sequences of clauses introduced by Þa or Þonne and come to the same conclusion about the function of Þa/Þonne followed by the finite verb. If the earlier stage of the language (family) was paratactic, then with the change to a hypotactic stage, the discourse function of Þa/Þonne (marking continuity or not) was reanalyzed in terms of the main/subordinate clause distinction (p. 230). They then turn to the clause-internal position of those discourse adverbs and show that the position of the subject depends on definiteness considerations. In the transition to Middle English, Þa and Þonne lose their discourse-marking functions and the authors conclude that ‘the topic area has been drastically simplified’ (p. 244).

Susan Pintzuk & Ann Taylor study ‘The loss of OV order in the history of English’. They see the early variation in word order ‘as the reflex of competition between internalized grammars’; ‘speakers can be viewed as bidialectal or bilingual in their command of distinct grammars’ (p. 250). The data come from two parsed corpora: the York–Toronto–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose and the Penn–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English. They present a detailed analysis of the position of non-quantified objects, quantified ones, and negative ones, and examine how the preverbal position is lost at different rates for these three different kinds of objects. They take into account the length of objects, the clause type, and the Case/thematic role of the object, and find the position of the three types of objects is influenced in the same way by the length, clause type, and Case. In absolute terms, the different objects do show different patterns of pre- and post-verbal position. Their data are presented meticulously, using clear graphs and tables. A few additional references I would add are the work of Michael Canale (Reference Canale1978, not cited here or in any of the chapters) and Carola Trips (Reference Trips2002).

‘Category change and gradience in the determiner system’ by David Denison explores the fuzziness between determiners and adjectives. He gives examples of ‘good’ and ‘not so good’ word classes or parts of speech: a ‘good’ adjective is fat, ‘less good’ adjectives are mere, potential, ill, and well, a good noun is boy, and ‘less good’ nouns are ridicule and English. For each category, there are semantic, syntactic, and morphological criteria. The distinction between determiner (D) and adjective (A) is quite difficult to make according to Denison and ‘the existence of D [as a category] is much shakier in earlier English’ (p. 288).

Part IV includes three chapters on pragmatics, by Laurel Brinton, Elizabeth Closs Traugott, and Elena Seoane.

Brinton's ‘Pathways in the development of pragmatic markers in English’ notes that ‘little attention has been paid to the syntactic origins of discourse markers’ (p. 308) and especially how these markers come to have scope over propositions. Brinton identifies three main pathways of development. The first is the change of an adverb or preposition first to a conjunction and then to a pragmatic marker, e.g. like, so, and now. Brinton also counts the pragmatic markers why (e.g. why just feel free . . .) and hwæt (e.g. the famous first line of Beowulf) in this category. The second cline is from predicate adverb to sentence adverb to pragmatic marker. Examples are indeed (from in dede) and actually. The third cline is when full matrix clauses, such as I believe, become parenthetical adjuncts before becoming discourse markers. The unifying factor to all three clines is that they go from scope within the proposition to scope over the proposition to scope over discourse (p. 330), or one could say from VP to CP adverb. There are additional pathways discussed.

Traugott's ‘The semantic development of scalar focus modifiers’ is a very interesting companion to Brinton. It discusses the change of a word functioning within a phrase to an intensive adverb with scope over the phrase, though Traugott's emphasis is on the semantic change from degree to focus modifier. She gives much credit to Stoffel (Reference Stoffel1901) for first identifying this group and points ‘to some of the theories currently available to us that allow us to investigate in greater depth adverbials of the type that concerned Stoffel’ (p. 336). Careful distinctions are made in this chapter between degree and focus modifiers, as well as among various subdistinctions of focus modifiers. The scalar focus modifiers not only ‘invoke alternatives [like other focus modifiers] on a scale but also rank the focus on that scale’ (p. 342). The remainder of the chapter discusses the historical development, provides two case studies on even and barely, and asks further questions. It is astonishing to see how many minute semantic distinctions can be drawn on the basis of such a precise examination of the data.

‘Information structure and word order change: the passive as an information-rearranging strategy in the history of English’ by Seoane intends ‘to examine the interaction between syntax and pragmatics as reflected in the diachronic development of the passive construction’ (p. 360). In earlier English, the preverbal position was available for topics but with an increasingly strict word order new ordering strategies become necessary to position old information towards the beginning of the sentence. Seoane provides definitions of the notion of topic and also observes that thematically unmarked sentences have the topic as their subject. She then relates the loss of verb-second, which allowed elements other than the subject to precede it, to the rise of the passive. Many helpful tables are included.

Part V is on ‘Pre- and post-colonial varieties’ and contains five chapters, on Old English by Richard Hogg, on Early Middle English by Margaret Laing & Roger Lass, on African American English by Shana Poplack, on the legacy of British dialects by Sali Tagliamonte, and on Celtic Englishes by Markku Filppula.

Hogg in ‘Old English dialectology’ provides a bit of history on when the four major Old English dialect areas, Northumbrian, Mercian, West-Saxon, and Kentish, were first recognized and what some of the problems in distinguishing among them are. Hogg provides a few of the phonetic, syntactic, and vocabulary differences.

In ‘Early Middle English dialectology: problems and prospects’, Laing & Lass discuss historical dialectology and describe their work in progress on the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME), on texts written between 1150 and 1325. They focus on methodology, and the important difference with the Linguistic Atlas of Late Middle English (LALME) is that LAEME is corpus-based and includes all instances of a variant rather than a preselected set. Texts are tagged and dictionaries can be generated. Many examples of output, as well as a few maps, are provided.

Poplack's ‘How English became African American English’ outlines how the origins and development of African American English ‘are controversial [d]espite decades of study’ (p. 452). Based on work together with Tagliamonte and others, she reconstructs an earlier stage of this variety relying on a number of clues, from historical comparative reconstruction, from sociolinguistics, and from areas where relics are spoken. These diaspora communities are located in the Dominican Republic and in Nova Scotia. Poplack examines a number of morphological characteristics (simple past and present, strong verbs) and finds striking parallels not only among these varieties but also with English as it would have first come over to the New World. ‘The results of this research rightly legitimate Early AAE as a conservative rather than an incorrect variety of English’ (p. 474).

‘Historical change in synchronic perspective: the legacy of British dialects’ by Tagliamonte examines a number of syntactic characteristics of contemporary British dialects, namely modality, possession, relatives, and -ly. It makes creative use of the different types of data available. For instance, for the expression of deontic modality, a corpus of texts from York is used that spans four generations. It is concluded that the use of must is declining rapidly while have to is increasing. The differences in expressing possession, either through have, have got or got, are compared by looking at remote rural data from Buckie, from suburban Wheatley Hill, and from urban but conservative York. The main conclusions are that different degrees of grammaticalization can be seen in dialects.

Filppula's ‘The making of Hiberno-English and other “Celtic Englishes”’ looks at the spread of English across England from the beginnings of English in the fifth century to the present moment. For a long time, it had been a popular belief that the Celts and their languages had been ‘pushed out’ from the eastern and southern parts of Britain by the Germanic invaders. Recent historical and archeological evidence has shown this picture to be inaccurate, as common sense could have probably told us too. As a result of this changed picture, a reevaluation of the role of Celtic in English is also taking place. Filppula provides lists of shared phonological and syntactic features of the Celtic Englishes as well as a list of differences.

Part VI concludes the book with three chapters on ‘Standardization and globalization’ by Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Terttu Nevalainen, and Suzanne Romaine.

In ‘Eighteenth-century prescriptivism and the norm of correctness’, Tieken-Boon van Ostade makes a plea for us to pay attention to prescriptive grammars in that they reveal a number of things. She reconstructs the social network of the normative grammarian Robert Lowth, who in 1762 wrote the very popular A Short Introduction to English Grammar. Her conclusion is that the linguistic rules he suggests in his grammar are not his or those of his peers but ‘of the social classes higher up on the social scale’ and his ‘grammar was so popular because it gave its readers exactly what they were looking for, a respected norm to imitate if they wished to improve their position in society’ (p. 552). The lesson is, I guess, that structural, nonprescriptive linguists should realize this and allow speakers to be normative if they so wish.

‘Historical sociolinguistics and language change’ by Nevalainen observes that sociolinguistics can add to historical linguistics a systematic attention to speaker variables, such as social status, education, gender, and age. She provides examples of variation across gender, the role of social networks, and social and regional embedding.

‘Global English: from island tongue to world language’ by Romaine chronicles the development of English from a tiny ‘island tongue’ to a world language in 1,500 years. She shows the shift from English to Englishes, and notes many problems in ‘dividing’ different types of speakers, e.g. native speakers and speakers of English as a second or foreign language. She also discusses characteristics of global English and ends asking the question if ‘the future [is] English-speaking?’ (p. 602).

The book ends with a two-page Appendix listing some historical and modern English corpora, as well as with a very usable index.

In conclusion, The Handbook of the History of English manages to be ‘insightful and thorough’, as Matti Rissanen writes on the back cover, and to provide ‘deeper access’, as Robert Stockwell writes. As with the other handbook, there are of course approaches or topics that I missed but the vastness of the field of English historical linguistics makes that inevitable.