Insights into Late Modern English

Contents: Richard W. Bailey: The Ideology of English in the Long Eighteenth Century - Carol Percy: The Art of Grammar in the Age of Sensibility: The Accidence [...] for [...] Young Ladies (1775) - Joan C. Beal: John Walker: Prescriptivist or Linguistic Innovator? - Lynda Mugglestone: Proof and Process: The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary - Maurizio Gotti: Central Modal Verbs in Three 18th-Century English Grammars - Ilse Wischer: The Treatment of Aspect Distinctions in 18th- and 19th-Century Grammars of English - Rafal Molencki: Proscriptive Prescriptivists: On the Loss of the 'Pleonastic' Perfect Infinitive in Counterfactual Constructions in Late Modern English - Uwe Vosberg: Cognitive Complexity and the Establishment of -ing Constructions with Retrospective Verbs in Modern English - Elena Seoane Posse: The Codification of Indefinite Agents in Early and Late Modern English - Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade: Lowth's Language - Tony Fairman: Letters of the English Labouring Classes and the English Language, 1800-34 - Marina Dossena: Modality and Argumentative Discourse in the Darien Pamphlets - Robert McColl Millar: 'Blind attachment to inveterate custom'. Language Use, Language Attitude and the Rhetoric of Improvement in the first Statistical Account - Agnieszka Kielkiewicz-Janowiak: Language and Society in the Diaries of Two Women in Early New England - Raymond Hickey: How and Why Supraregional Varieties Arise.

The Editors: Marina Dossena is Associate Professor of English Language at the University of Bergamo. Her published and current research focuses on English historical dialectology («Like runes upon a standin' stane»: The Perception of Scotticisms in Grammar and Vocabulary: forthcoming 2003). She is currently compiling a corpus of 19th-century Scottish correspondence.
Charles Jones is Forbes Professor of English Language at the University of Edinburgh. Recent publications include A Language Suppressed (1995), an edition of A Treatise on the Provincial Dialect of Scotland, by Sylvester Douglas (1779) (1992) and The Edinburgh History of the Scots Language (1997).