Methods and Data in English Historical Dialectology

This volume contains a selection of papers presented at the First International Conference on English Historical Dialectology (ICEHD), organized at the University of Bergamo in September 2003. It includes papers on fundamental aspects of English historical dialectology, from Old English to Late Modern English. The papers discuss points in two thematically distinct but related sections, ‘Methods’ and ‘Data’. The volume also includes the transcript of a debate on methodological issues, in which the main themes are the principles of historical investigation of geographical varieties, the new approaches provided by corpus linguistics and computer technology, and the need for greater awareness of textual reliability.

The Editors: Marina Dossena is Associate Professor of English Language at the University of Bergamo. Her research interests focus on the features and origins of British varieties of English and the history of specialized discourse. Recent publications include Insights into Late Modern English, co-edited with Charles Jones (Lang 2003) and Scotticisms in Grammar and Vocabulary (2004). She is currently compiling a corpus of 19th-century Scottish correspondence and is the current editor of the Online Bibliography of Scots and Scottish English.
Roger Lass is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Honorary Research Associate in English at the University of Cape Town. His special interests are the history of English, historical linguistic theory, and its interface with evolutionary biology. His most recent publications include Historical Linguistics and Language Change (1997) and volume III of The Cambridge History of the English Language (1999). He is currently working on the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English.