The Development of Old English
Published on 30. October 2014
Book
Hardback
630 pages
978-0-19-920784-8 (ISBN)
Description
This book, the second volume in A Linguistic History of English, describes the development of Old English from Proto-Germanic. Like Volume I, it is an internal history of the structure of English that combines traditional historical linguistics, modern syntactic theory, the study of languages in contact, and the variationist approach to language change.
The first part of the book considers the development of Northwest and West Germanic, and the northern dialects of the latter, with particular reference to phonological and morphological phenomena. Later chapters present a detailed account of changes in the Old English sound system, inflectional system, and syntax. The book aims to make the findings of traditional historical linguistics accessible to scholars and students in other subdisciplines, and also to adopt approaches from contemporary theoretical linguistics in such a way that they are accessible to a wide range of historical linguists.
The first part of the book considers the development of Northwest and West Germanic, and the northern dialects of the latter, with particular reference to phonological and morphological phenomena. Later chapters present a detailed account of changes in the Old English sound system, inflectional system, and syntax. The book aims to make the findings of traditional historical linguistics accessible to scholars and students in other subdisciplines, and also to adopt approaches from contemporary theoretical linguistics in such a way that they are accessible to a wide range of historical linguists.
Reviews / Votes
Overall this is an informative and very well-written book, which will clearly benefit advanced students of historical linguistics and readers who require a more in-depth treatment of the history of the languages prehistory than is found in traditional histories and grammars. It provides a successfully updated view of the internal history of the language, which takes into account more recent approaches to language change, and encourages readers to make links with neighbouring linguistic disciplines, and is a welcome addition to existing reference works. * Christine Wallis, LINGUIST *More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Dimensions
Height: 240 mm
Width: 161 mm
Thickness: 38 mm
Weight
1101 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-920784-8 (9780199207848)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
10/2014
1st Edition
OUP eBook
€31.49
Available for download
Persons
Don Ringe was educated at the University of Kentucky, Oxford, and Yale and has taught Classical studies and linguistics at the university level since 1983. He is Kahn Endowed Term Professor in Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of numerous publications on comparative Indo-European linguistics, historical linguistics, and computational cladistics, including On the Chronology of Sound Changes in Tocharian and From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic (OUP 2006) the forerunner of the present volume.
Ann Taylor is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of York. Her main research area is variation and change in the history of English with a primary focus on syntax. She works within a framework that applies quantitative methodology first developed within variationist sociolinguistics to the structural analysis of historical data, and combines formal syntactic analysis, statistical methods, and techniques of corpus linguistics.
Ann Taylor is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of York. Her main research area is variation and change in the history of English with a primary focus on syntax. She works within a framework that applies quantitative methodology first developed within variationist sociolinguistics to the structural analysis of historical data, and combines formal syntactic analysis, statistical methods, and techniques of corpus linguistics.
Content
1. Introduction ; 2. The development and diversification of Northwest Germanic ; 3. The development and diversification of West Germanic ; 4. A grammatical sketch of Proto-West Germanic ; 5. The northern West Germanic dialects ; 6. The separate prehistory of Old English: Sound changes ; 7. The separate prehistory of Old English: Morphological changes ; 8. Old English syntax ; Addenda and corrigenda to Volume I