This special issue addresses the question of how we can reconstruct linguistic and textual knowledge before linguistics and philology existed as recognised academic disciplines. It does so by studying the metalanguage of English, that is, the terminology, textual practices and communicative contexts through which linguistic phenomena, textual and discursive artefacts were described, analysed and discussed in the early and late modern periods. Emerging from the MetaLing Corpus project, the collection brings together philological, corpus-based and historiographical perspectives to explore the formation, circulation and transformation of linguistic knowledge between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. The introduction outlines the rationale of the project and the current state of research on premodern English linguistic thought before presenting the contributions included in the special issue.

This article examines Grammatica Anglicana (1594), Paul Greaves’ pioneering English grammar inspired by Ramist principles and one of the earliest grammars dedicated specifically to the English language (Algeo 1985; Padley 1985). Drawing on data from the Early Modern English Grammars Archive (EMEGA), this article focuses on Greaves’ Prefatory Epistle and his treatment of Early Modern English morphology to demonstrate the mediation of Latin grammatical traditions as both a filter and a model for linguistic reflection (Vezzosi 2012; Marsico 2020a, b). The imitative and emulative mechanisms at play in Grammatica Anglicana reveal a marked syncretism, illustrating how the Latin model was adapted (not always successfully) to accommodate the demands of vernacular language learning (Ragni 2023). Such evidence invites reflection on the epistemic transfers across texts, where pedagogical and rhetorical traditions converged to shape new educational tools (Munzi 1992). Greaves’ work, with its balance of innovation and reliance on established traditions, offers a valuable case study for examining how linguistic knowledge was produced, organised and transmitted in the early modern age, and for addressing the issue of metalinguistic awareness. Ultimately, this article seeks to contribute to broader discussions on the history of language education, revealing how historical materials reflect the ideological, cultural and political dynamics of their time (Burke 2004; Gallagher 2019). By exploring Greaves’ Grammatica in relation to these topics, this article aims to underscore how the intersection of tradition, innovation and sociopolitical forces have always shaped pedagogical practices, offering lessons that remain relevant for today’s educators and researchers.

This study investigates how Early Modern English grammarians approached the category of interjections, tracing its inheritance and adaptation from Latin grammatical traditions, which first introduced the concept into Western linguistic thought. The analysis draws on data from the Early Modern English Grammars Archive (EMEGA), a comprehensive digital resource encompassing nine English (and Latin) grammars published in England between 1542 and 1625. Offering fully searchable texts in their original spelling, alongside their modernised versions, and English translations of Latin grammars, EMEGA illuminates the intricate negotiations between classical traditions and the evolving needs of vernacular English, particularly in the theoretical treatment of lexical categories (Nevalainen 2006; Vezzosi 2012). Although recent scholarship has highlighted the complex pragmatic roles of interjections in human communication (Ameka 1992; Dingemanse 2023, 2024), this linguistic category has long been marginalised in linguistic inquiry. Interjections were often dismissed as peripheral to the ‘core’ concerns of language and characterised as purely emotive expressions with minimal communicative or structural significance (Goffman 1978). This reductive view, shaped by classical grammars, persisted in early modern treatments, even as grammarians began to critically engage with inherited frameworks and develop distinctive forms of metalinguistic awareness regarding category boundaries and contextual meaning (Algeo 1985). The present study leverages the EMEGA archive to examine how Early Modern English grammarians framed interjections, focusing on the distribution and conceptualisation of the metalinguistic label interjection, as well as on terminological precision and stylistic considerations. By situating these treatments within broader socio-cultural and historical contexts, the research explores how interjections were shaped by both classical models and the pedagogical needs of English grammar. In conclusion, the analysis highlights the dynamic interplay between linguistic theory, educational materials and cultural contexts, showing how interjections can function as a diagnostic category for descriptive adequacy and for the historiography of language teaching. This work underscores the enduring relevance of historical grammatical frameworks in enriching our understanding of both past and present linguistic practices.

This article argues that through contextualising metalinguistic terms surrounding several dramatic genres in the Early Modern English period, we can begin to uncover more about the contemporary understanding and use of this genre-based terminology. Specifically focusing on the collocations for the genres ‘comedy’, ‘tragedy’ and ‘tragicomedy’ in the Early English Books Online (EEBO-TCP) corpus on CQPweb, this article explores how these genres may have been discussed and recorded in early modern print culture. The article offers an exploration into whether collocation networks offer a productive means of investigating these sorts of metalinguistic terms in early modern discourse. Using this exploratory method, the extracted terms and their corresponding collocations are mapped onto collocation networks which illustrate both unique and shared collocates between the terms considered. These networks provide some linguistic insight into how these terms are used and understood in the period. With inspection of the concordance lines, several observations about the nature of the discursive contexts of these terms can be made. The exploratory collocation networks have revealed more about the discourse surrounding these terms and the different discourse contexts in which these terms occur, including: the classical influence on genres, genre as a marketing and conceptual category in early modern print, and contemporary metaphorical associations of terms. In addition, potential issues related to EEBOv3 are highlighted, including bias towards certain types of texts like catalogues and the issue of spelling irregularities.

The increasingly popular research on the discourse of men and women that had emerged in the second part of the twentieth century gave rise to a number of generalisations, such as the assumption that women tend to use language to prioritise community relationships and cooperation, while men use it with the aim of asserting dominance and control (Romaine 1996: 117). Similarly, it has been affirmed that women’s discourse is usually less detached, more personal, more tentative and more narrative than male, whereas the latter tends to have a more direct, abstract and informational character (see Lakoff 1990; Biber & Burges 2000; Argamon et al. 2003). From a diachronic perspective, Geisler’s (2003) multidimensional study of nineteenth-century letters confirms that men’s language and women’s language differ along several dimensions of variation, the former tending towards abstractness and elaboration, and the latter towards involvement and a certain degree of persuasiveness. However, when comparing scientific and non-scientific prose written by nineteenth-century women, Crespo (2019) demonstrated that female historians tended to write in a more objective and impersonal way than their non-scientist sisters, thus reflecting a general trend of the evolving – and predominantly male – scientific writing that bloomed in the late modern period (Halliday 1988; Taavitsainen 1994; Atkinson 1999).

In this study, we intend to compare the language of men and women nineteenth-century scientists in order to measure the levels of ‘abstraction’, or abstract reasoning, in their writings. Scientific discourse has often been described as containing certain linguistic features that make it abstract or impersonal (Bazerman 1988; Hyland 1998; Gotti 2003). In a pioneering multidimensional analysis performed on a large corpus containing a wide range of English registers, Biber (1988) showed that passive constructions, conjuncts and certain adverbial subordinators are typically found in academic prose, thus making it more abstract. This was later confirmed in subsequent multidimensional analyses that were restricted to scientific registers, some replicating Biber’s dimensions (Conrad 1996), and some yielding new dimensions (Gray 2011; Monaco 2017). Considering the institutionalised prejudice against women scientists (and women in general) in the patriarchal world of the late modern period, expressed by Rousseau (1762) in his doubt as to whether women are capable of abstract reasoning, our aim is to analyse texts of female scientists in order to find out whether they reach the same level of abstraction in their writings as their male colleagues. To this end, we are using data from the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing (Moskowich & Crespo 2007; Crespo & Moskowich 2020), a diachronic corpus of scientific texts published between 1700 and 1900, arranged in different subcorpora, each subcorpus corresponding to a specific scientific discipline. On this occasion, we will be looking at texts from nineteenth-century History and Life Sciences, using Monaco’s (2017) multidimensional analysis as a methodological basis and a reference – specifically, Dimension 3, characterised by the presence of passive constructions and nominalisations. The ultimate aim of this article is to evaluate the metalinguistic strategies used by male and female nineteenth-century scientists in order to spot subregister variation, by applying variables such as scientific discipline, sex of the author and genre.

This article explores the analytical potential of the MetaLing Corpus, a collection of Early Modern English texts on language dating from 1500 to 1700. Combining corpus-driven and corpus-based approaches, it demonstrates both the opportunities and the challenges of working with a corpus currently under development and reflects on the methodological implications of a minimalist corpus compilation strategy adopted under project constraints. Following an outline of the principles underlying data selection and corpus construction, the article presents two exploratory case studies focusing respectively on spelling and discourse variation. The analysis of spelling practices points to the interaction between authors and typesetters as a factor shaping orthographic choices and potentially influencing the development of linguistic reflection. At the level of discourse, the analysis uncovers a spectrum of educational orientations across the texts, indicating the presence of an additional discourse domain alongside language analysis and description. This finding contributes to a preliminary understanding of the corpus’ thematic organisation and informs its future development in terms of annotation. More broadly, the study highlights the interpretive possibilities offered by the corpus and the methodological challenges posed by early printed materials. By demonstrating how corpus-based methods can be combined with close reading approaches, the article contributes to ongoing discussions in historical corpus linguistics concerning the analysis, interpretation and digitisation of Early Modern English texts.

The construction of historical text corpora presents distinctive challenges in terms of metadata curation, annotation practices and long-term accessibility. This article explores how standards-based approaches can enhance the discoverability, interoperability and sustainability of historical linguistic data. Emphasis is placed on aligning corpus design with the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) (Wilkinson et al. 2016), which are increasingly important for research transparency and cross-platform integration in the digital humanities.

After outlining the conceptual landscape of metadata and annotation in corpus linguistics, the article examines several existing projects that demonstrate the operationalisation of metadata standards across genres and temporal ranges. These include corpora that integrate CMDI profiles for complex resources (Paquot et al. 2024), and others that have transformed legacy metadata into machine-readable formats to facilitate data exchange and semantic enrichment (Fallucchi & De Luca 2020). Key issues addressed include orthographic variation, the limits of automated tagging tools for historical data (Pettersson & Megyesi 2018) and the need to balance standardisation with the preservation of linguistic idiosyncrasies.

The article explores a case study of the MetaLing Corpus, a one-million-token historical corpus of English metalanguage from 1500 to 1700 (Andreani & Russo 2026). Practical constraints and editorial decisions are discussed. A minimalist encoding strategy was adopted following compatibility issues with TEI and Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al. 2004; Kilgarriff et al. 2014), resulting in a plain-text corpus linked to metadata managed through Omeka using Dublin Core (Caplan 2003).

This study contributes to ongoing discussions on metadata sustainability, annotation design and best practices for corpus construction in underrepresented linguistic domains. It advocates for adaptable, transparent approaches that foster cross-disciplinary collaboration and position corpora as evolving infrastructures within broader digital ecosystems.

I argue for a hybrid analysis of English numeratives that (i) treats the extended basic numeratives (0–99) as lexemes but (ii) analyzes larger expressions as syntactic phrases or coordinations with magnitudes (hundred, thousand, million, …) as heads and factors (two hundred, forty-two million, …) as (obligatory) modifiers. A number of independent diagnostics – including ordinal/fractional morphology, prosodic phrasing and ellipsis/coordination – converge on the existence of a constituent containing all preceding material up to the rightmost base; this directly contradicts the cascading NumP + NP-deletion architecture of Ionin & Matushansky (2006, 2018) when applied to English. The analysis preserves the category assignments of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language – cardinals as determinatives and nouns, ordinals as adjectives, fractionals as nouns – and refines the functional picture: (i) multiplicative factors (one hundred) function as modifiers, never as determiners or complements, and (ii) additions (one hundred and two) are coordinates in a coordination. The resulting determinative category is a small closed list, not an open-ended stock of ‘numeral lexemes’. Cardinal nouns split in two: proper when they name, common when they count – a division borne out by distributional diagnostics. The result is a more complete, empirically tighter, morphosyntax-sensitive account of English numeratives that explains why English is lexical below 100 but demands overt syntax above it.

This article revisits the diachrony of the genitive alternation, the alternation between ’s and prepositional phrases headed by of in Present-Day English. It is usually assumed to have developed around 1400 CE. For Old English (c. 650–1000 CE), a different alternation between pre-modifying and post-modifying genitive-case-marked noun phrases is suggested to be the genitive alternation. Building on descriptions of competition between genitive-case-marked noun phrases (gen) and prepositional phrases with of (of) in Old English, and unpicking some of the preconceptions about the alternation in Old English, we propose a bottom-up method for systematically identifying possible alternation between of and gen in the York–Toronto–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (Taylor et al. 2003). Our findings indicate that there is plausibly an alternation in Old English that stands in continuity with Present-Day English and suggest a more complex diachrony for the alternation characterized by continuity and discontinuity in the alternants and the envelope of variation.