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This is a collection of essays about the English language by English and American men of letters, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries; that is, until the rise of formal linguistic studies. The writers represented are concerned with the history, the use, the reform or the changing nature of English. Topics discussed include the defence of English as a literary language; the relationship with other languages; propriety in literary style; the psychological bases of speech; the relationship between words and things; usage; the need for academies and standards of correctness; the rise of lexicography; spelling reform; prescriptive grammar. These essays are the most important serious attempts to consider the language from various standpoints. Students of English in university departments will find this a convenient and comprehensive collection. It is also in itself an illustration of the development of the literary language.
The native speaker is one of the central but at the same time most controversial concepts of modern linguistics. With regard to English, it became especially controversial with the rise of the so-called "New Englishes," where reality is much more complex than the neat distinction into native and non-native speakers would make us believe. This volume reconstructs the coming-into-being of the English native speaker in the second half of the nineteenth century in order to probe into the origins of the problems surrounding the concept today. A corpus of texts which includes not only the classics of the nineteenth-century linguistic literature but also numerous lesser-known articles from periodical journals of the time is investigated by means of historical discourse analysis in order to retrace the production and reproduction of this particularly important linguistic ideology.
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.
This influential and widely used book has been extensively revised and includes a new chapter on linguistic discrimination on the basis of class, race and ethnicity.
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.
A groundbreaking history of worldwide English in all its dialects, differences, and linguistic delights: “Informative . . . distinctive . . . a spirited celebration.” —The Guardian In this “well-informed and appealing” work (Publishers Weekly), David Crystal puts aside the usual focus on “standard” English, and instead provides a startlingly original view of where the richness, creativity, and diversity of the language truly lies—in the accents and dialects of nonstandard English users all over the world. Whatever their regional, social, or ethnic background, each group has a story worth telling, whether it is in Scotland or Somerset, South Africa or Singapore. He reminds us that for several hundred wonderful years, there was no such thing as “incorrect” English—and traces the evolution of the language from a few thousand Anglo-Saxons to the 1.5 billion people who speak it today. Moving from Beowulf to Chaucer to Shakespeare to Dickens and the present day, Crystal puts regional speech and writing at center stage, giving a sense of the social realities behind the development of English. This significant shift in perspective enables us to understand for the first time the importance of everyday, previously marginalized, voices in our language—and provides an argument too for the way English should be taught in the future. “A work of impeccable scholarship [that] could easily serve as a standard textbook for students of linguistics, but Mr. Crystal, reaching out to a more general audience, recognizes that even the most avid reader might flinch at the sections on Old Norse grammatical influence. Cleverly, he has sprinkled the book with little digressions, set apart in boxes, that address historical mysteries, strange loanwords, interesting etymologies and the like.” —The New York Times “Learned and often provocative . . . demonstrates repeatedly that common conceptions about language are often historically inaccurate—split infinitives bothered no one until recently (likewise sentence-ending prepositions).” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Simply the best introductory history of the English language family that we have. The plan of the book is ingenious, the writing lively, the exposition clear, and the scholarly standard uncompromisingly high.” —J.M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
Frederik Theodor Visser's An Historical Syntax of the English Language, published in four massive volumes between 1963 and 1973, is certainly one of the cornerstones of research in English linguistics. Visser's achievements can hardly be overestimated. Before the advent of modern corpus linguistics, he compiled a remarkable wealth of detailed philological data from all periods of English and combined this with current grammatical analyses of his time. This has made this publications an indispensable resource for anyone investigating the history of English syntax. This reproduction of Visser's volumes is more than welcome, and timely, as the volumes have been out of print for quite some time and were sometimes a little bit difficult to navigate. Having a searchable and easy-to- use online version, although maybe not perfect, available now means a revival for scholarship that celebrates its fiftieth birthday without losing any of its relevance.