Suzanne Romaine

Richard M. Hogg

Norman Francis Blake

Roger Lass

R. W. Burchfield

Volume two of this set covers the Middle English Period, approximately 1066-1476, and describes and analyses developments in the language from the Norman Conquest to the introduction of printing.

The Cambridge History of the English Language: 1066-1476

The volumes of The Cambridge history of the English language reflect the spread of English from its beginnings in Anglo-Saxon England to its current role as a multifaceted global language that dominates international communication in the 21st century.

The Cambridge History of the English Language

England's First Publisher

Caxton

Richard Hogg

The Cambridge History of the English Language is the first multi-volume work to provide a full account of the history of English. Its authoritative coverage extends from areas of central linguistic interest and concern to more specialised topics such as personal and place names. The volumes dealing with earlier periods are chronologically based, whilst those dealing with more recent periods are geographically based, thus reflecting the spread of English over the last 300 years. Volume 1 deals with the history of English up to the Norman Conquest, and contains chapters on Indo-European and Germanic, phonology and morphology, syntax, semantics and vocabulary, dialectology, onomastics, and literary language. Each chapter, as well as giving a chronologically-oriented presentation of the data, surveys scholarship in the area and takes full account of the impact of developing and current linguistic theory on the interpretation of the data. The chapters have been written with both specialists and non-specialists in mind; they will be essential reading for all those interested in the history of English.

This collection of texts is designed to show the continuity and at the same time the diversity of work by English writers in the religious prose tradition during the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. The aim of the edition has been to provide the student with a selection of complete texts representative of the Middle English period as a whole, and the criticial introduction points to the literary excellence of much of the prose work of the period, suggesting that it may have been undervalued by critics in the past.

Middle English Religious Prose

Norman Blake

Most scholarly attention on Shakespeare's vocabulary has been directed towards his enrichment of the language through borrowing words from other languages and has thus concentrated on the more learned aspects of his vocabulary. However, the bulk of Shakespeare's output consists of plays and to make these appear lifelike he needed to employ a colloquial and informal style. This aspect of his work has been largely disregarded apart from his bawdy language. This dictionary includes all types of non-standard and informal language and lists all examples found in Shakespeare's works. These include dialect forms, colloquial forms, non-standard and variant forms, fashionable words and puns. >

A Dictionary of His Informal Language

Shakespeare's Non-Standard English

This volume spans Middle English, Early Modern English and the early stages of modern language.

Robert Burchfield

Volume 5 covers the dialects of England since 1776, the historical development of English in the former Celtic-speaking countries, and English other countries.

Norman Francis Blake

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