The editors of Norms and conventions in the history of English present a volume with contributions discussing ‘sociocultural conditions and specific discourse traditions interacting with more universal pragmatic principles and structural aspects of language’ (p. 2), thereby providing a ‘multifaceted approach to the study of changing norms and conventions in the English language’ (p. 5). However, they seem to have had trouble drawing the chapters together, finding an overarching theoretical framework for the volume. Consequently, the introductory chapter seems, at times, to struggle to find clarity, using somewhat undirected and heavily theoretical, abstract concepts. Especially the first few paragraphs (pp. 1–3), before the individual contributions are discussed, do not seem to explicitly expound on the concepts of norms and conventions, and the framework in which they are to be viewed in the volume. Indeed, these two concepts are rarely mentioned in this part of the chapter, leaving it somewhat unspecified to the reader as to how they are to interpret them and find their specific meaning in this volume. Instead, the editors introduce or, perhaps more correctly, invoke the concepts of alterity and historicity as applied to discourse. These concepts, unfortunately, do not seem to form a sufficiently clear basis on which to come to some sort of synthesis of the individual contributions, nor do the contributions necessitate the introduction of these concepts in an obvious way. Though understandably, given the heterogeneity of the contributions and the multifaceted approach of the volume, it will have been a challenge to synthesise a tightly cohesive whole out of these chapters. Fortunately, the individual chapters themselves are more clearly framed, so let's look at them in order.

Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade's ‘Usage guides and the age of prescriptivism’ describes usage guides as a text type, using their treatment of irregular verbs as a kind of case study. Tieken-Boon van Ostade distinguishes between ‘prescription as a late stage in the English standardisation process and the subsequently arising prescriptivism’ (p. 7, emphasis added), indicating ‘a further stage in this process, during which there is an excessive focus on the question of what is correct usage’ (p. 8), with the usage guide as ‘its most outstanding product’ (p. 8). Consequently, she argues that rather than the eighteenth century, which dealt more with the codification of the English language than with overt prescription, the ‘Age of Prescriptivism is now’ (p. 9, original emphasis). Drawing on an analysis of the development of the genre of the usage guide and the notion of prescriptivism, Tieken-Boon van Ostade concludes that, rather than ‘the English standardisation process’ having ‘come to an end’, its ‘focus seems to be changing’ (p. 23). However, she also notes the current rise of a resistance to the perceived oppressiveness of traditional (and conservative) prescriptions and proscriptions: what she calls ‘anti-prescriptivism’ (p. 21). Tieken-Boon van Ostade introduces a necessary problematising of the by now classic division of the stages of standardisation, and of the notion of prescriptivism itself in particular.

Don Chapman's ‘“Splendidly prejudiced”: Words for disapproval in English usage guides’ also deals with the evaluative metalanguage, ‘albeit popular metalanguage’ (p. 30), employed in English usage guides by investigating the most frequently used (mainly negative) comments in two different corpora. Broadly speaking, Chapman finds just about the same trends in the attitude of usage guide writers as Tieken-Boon van Ostade did. He categorises the evaluative comments into those ‘emphasizing correctness . . . , communication . . . , varieties of English . . . , and social judgements’ (p. 29), and suggests that although ‘writers of usage guides have become less harsh or judgmental in their disapproval’ (p. 30), we still find ‘fundamental notions of correctness’ (p. 30) in modern usage guides. But Chapman also concludes that even though ‘labels that simplify language to a simple question of right and wrong still predominate’, they also have evolved to display ‘a little more awareness of the complexity of variation in language’ (p. 43). Chapman shows an appreciation of the difficult balance that usage guide writers have to strike, their ‘looking for ways to account for the complexity of variation, even while trying to write for an audience expecting simple advice’ (p. 39).

The aim of Beatrix Busse, Kirsten Gather and Ingo Kleiber's ‘Paradigm shifts in 19th-century British grammar writing’ is using analysis to ‘reassess . . . assumed (meta)linguistic developments in grammar writing by examining authors’ references to other grammarians’ (p. 49). Using a corpus of nineteenth-century grammars, they perform a network analysis in order to find out which of those grammars refer to which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century grammarians. They find that after 1850, grammars refer considerably less frequently to grammars from the first half of the nineteenth century, becoming ‘more and more independent from the prescriptive tradition’ (p. 67). The corpus used for this study is a sub-corpus of their larger HeidelGram corpus of early to late Modern English grammars. In this corpus, scholarly grammars are overrepresented on purpose because ‘developments in grammar writing would first and foremost manifest in scholarly works’, and although it is not made explicitly clear why that specifically is a desired trait in the corpus, it possibly has something to do with the authors aiming at a ‘more comprehensive systematic analysis of how modern concepts like prescriptivism and descriptivism were defined and evaluated’ (p. 51).

Mari-Liisa Varila and Matti Peikola's ‘Promotional conventions on English title-pages up to 1550: Modifiers of time, scope and quality’ presents an overview of the promotional discourse, or advertising language, used in the front matter of early English texts, through an analysis of ‘the emergence of several communicative elements on the title page[s]’ (p. 74) of around 4,000 texts from the Early English Books Online (EEBO) database. The authors suggest that ‘the need to promote the sales . . . and outdo the competing editions issued by rival printers seems to have been a key driving force behind the development of the title-page and its communicative conventions’ (p. 75). The paratextual elements on early English title-pages are classified as expressions addressing either time, scope, quality, or a combination thereof. To find the patterns in the promotional discourse, the authors looked for adverbs and adjectives collocating with ‘key verbs related to textual processes . . . and key nouns referring to abstract and physical materials’ (p. 80). They found that, generally speaking, the key nouns were ‘most often modified with regard to their quality’ (p. 90) or – to a lesser extent – scope. In contrast, the key verbs were ‘most commonly modified in terms of time’ (p. 90), often to draw attention both to the value of the text due to its newness, as well as to its authority derived by alluding to its textual history. Varila and Peikola's chapter is a straightforward and focused study that nicely illustrates the value in analysing paratextual elements of historical printed works. They create a clear context for their study, which seems to be largely exploratory, and to succeed in opening up new, potential research territory.

In the chapter ‘What can we learn from constructed speech errors? Mrs Malaprop revisited’, Lucia Kornexl asks how realistic Sheridan's fictional speech errors are. Exploring malapropisms ‘on the basis of some significant criteria applied in pertinent studies of Present-day English’ (p. 99), she investigates ‘how this particular material relates to modern speech error typologies’ (p. 99). The author suggests that when it comes to the – admittedly – constructed malapropisms in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals, ‘their degree of deviation from natural speech errors of this kind is not as great as is usually assumed’ (p. 105), when viewed from the perspective of the linguistic context of the late eighteenth century, since at that time ‘the difference between creative variation and wrong use was probably often only a subtle one’ (p. 105). Kornexl compares structural features of the type of malapropisms such as those that Mrs Malaprop produces in The Rivals, which are born out of ignorance, to various errors in modern error typology, which classifies malapropisms as ‘spontaneous speech production errors . . . which speakers tend to correct once they notice them’ (p. 106). She concludes that ‘despite their fictitious character’, Sheridan's constructed errors ‘are grounded in contemporary linguistic reality’ (p. 121). What stands out most about this chapter is that it is the only one in the volume that relies on literary data. As such, the investigation of what Kornexl calls a ‘literary sociolect’ (p. 103) could also be characterised as a literary stylistic study, and is consequently somewhat of an odd duck in this collection of studies that fall more readily into the classification of historical and socio-historical studies of English.

Claudia Lückert's ‘The proverbial tradition in the history of English: A usage-based view’ deals with the mental presentation, and mental readiness, connectedness of proverbs. What intrigues Lückert is the seeming discrepancy between three facts: ‘proverbs tend to be linguistically complex’, they are ‘rather infrequent’, but nevertheless ‘appear to be familiar to speakers even if they are infrequently used’ (p. 132). One of the chapter's keywords is discourse traditional norms and conventions, which refers to ‘cultural factors’ (p. 137), specifically ‘sets of more or less fixed norms and conventions for the production and reception of discourse’ (p. 138). Proverbs are an example of such a type of discourse, having its own tradition. The chapter focuses on the relationship between these norms and conventions and on the proposal of a new model of mental representation of proverbs which operates on two levels: one in which, simply put, proverbs are stored as whole units, or superlemmas, and simultaneously another, in which they are represented on a lemmatic level through ‘salient content words’ (p. 133) occurring in these proverbs (which may also link to other proverbs that use these content words). Lückert also compares the cultural salience of proverbs in medieval/Renaissance and modern England, arguing that in medieval/Renaissance usage, a proverb's salient content words could by themselves function as an allusion to that proverb, whereas in the modern version, longer sequences are required to trigger the same association in the discourse participants. This is again a chapter that proposes forays into new – in this case, interdisciplinary – work, with Lückert advocating the position that ‘psycholinguistic research can benefit from research on the history of the English language . . . and vice versa’ (p. 145). Although worthwhile investigating, the seeming disparity between these disciplines may make it difficult to bring them together, and this comes through a little in this chapter, where the connection between the various sections is at times less than obvious.

In ‘Testing a stylometric tool in the study of Middle English documentary texts’, Martti Mäkinen describes a new methodological approach, using the Stylo package for R, with which to stylometrically analyse and compare Middle English texts showing local features and spelling variation. Through corpus analyses, Mäkinen attempts to discover whether it is possible to effect Stylo-assisted discrimination between these documents in terms of geographical variation (identifying them by county of origin) and functional variation (identifying genres and registers). He finds that the automated system is able to distinguish between functional genres, but that such a system is not as effective when it comes to identifying differences between the regional spelling variations in the corpus. This chapter is probably most readable when the reader has some knowledge of (and perhaps even some formal schooling in) computational linguistics and statistics, as well as familiarity with concepts such as cluster analysis and principal component analysis, and visualisation techniques such as multi-dimensional scaling and consensus trees, including some knowledge of R – knowledge, admittedly, that members of the more recent generations of linguists are more likely to have these days. The technical complexity of the chapter is unfortunately not made more easily digestible by some unclear labelling, where in one graph, the codes on the branches of the dendrogram do not match those in the text, and in another, the title and caption do not seem to match. It does, however, illustrate the versatility of current computer-assisted methods.

Christine Elsweiler describes functional variation in use of the modal verbs shall and will in relation to epistolary conventions in the chapter ‘Pragmatic and formulaic uses of shall and will in Older Scots and Early Modern English official letter writing’. Elsweiler tries to find out how, compared to the linguistic functions of making predictions and declaring intentions, ‘conventional formulaic and pragmatic uses motivate the choice of modal auxiliary’ (p. 169). The chapter perhaps tries to do too many different things: investigating diachronic change, and regional variation, and formulaic and pragmatic uses, but Elsweiler manages to present a followable through-line. She finds that ‘in the Scots letters it is the pragmatic function rather than the modal meaning which determines the choice of modal auxiliary’ (p. 187). A criticism – and perhaps this is more than anything a pet peeve of this reviewer – is that the line graphs (pp. 180-1) appear to be derived from data that consist of discrete values and which would consequently have been more appropriately displayed in bar graphs.

Göran Wolf's ‘Studying dialect spelling in its own right: Suggestions from a case study’ deals with dialect spelling in historical linguistics: Ulster Scots. Wolf posits that ‘dialect spelling consists of relatively complex conventions’, which, though partly ‘tied up with a correlated standard orthography’, also ‘correspond to structures not present in that system’ (p. 195). One question that comes to mind is how far these conventions are retrievable when they have not been codified. Wolf finds the use of the term orthography in the context of graphic presentation of dialect speech problematic because of its etymological implication of correctness. He therefore argues that the term ‘as a notion, should be reserved for the licensed and prescriptively promoted spelling present in standard languages’ and that dialects ‘do not possess orthography’ (p. 196). This is Wolf's argument for the use of the alternative term ‘dialect graphy’. However, the question that comes to mind here is whether it is at all possible to omit the notion of correctness from ‘graphy’. This can be made clear by looking at, for example, the character set of a certain dialect graphy: are the conventions regarding which characters are ‘allowable’ not part of a language or dialect's orthography as well?

Although all the contributions have a historical component to them, what appears to unite them more clearly is that they discuss what is new (methodologically, theoretically, attitudinally) in the fields of study that concern themselves with norms and conventions. The volume is not without its blemishes: there are some inevitable misses in the copy-editing (textual, mislabelling of graphics) but these are not worth mentioning in any further detail. As noted, a flaw is perhaps that there does not appear to be an overarching theory, or cohesively binding theoretical construct. However, rather, what Bös and Claridge have done very well is to produce a volume that lays out new forays of inquiry into the topics of norms and conventions. Several of the chapters seem to be largely exploratory, and overtly so, setting up new research areas, particularly those by Busse, Gather and Kleiber; Varila and Pekola; Mäkinen; and Wolf, but the other chapters in the volume do this to various extents as well. As much as they answer questions, all of them, as they should, raise new ones as well. In doing so, Norms and conventions in the history of English offers thought-provoking approaches to, and presents options for, the future study of linguistic norms and conventions.