This book covers the historical development of the English phonological system from its earliest reconstructed and recorded forms to its most recent variations.

This is an attempt to view historical phonological change as an ongoing, recurrent process. The author sees like events occurring at all periods, a phenomenon which he considers is disguised by too great a reliance upon certain characteristics of the scholarly tradition. Thus he argues that those innovations arrived at by speakers of the English language many years ago are not in principle unlike those that can be seen to be happening today. Phonological mutations are, on the whole, not to be regarded as unique, novel, once only events. Speakers appear to present to speech sound materials, a limited set of evaluative and decoding perceptions, together with what would seem to be a finite number of innovation producing stratagems in response to their interpretation. It is stressed that this interpretation may itself be a direct product of the kinds of data selected for presentation in traditional handbooks and Jones notes the fact that phonological change is often "messy" and responsive to a highly tuned ability to perceive fine phonetic detail of a type which, by definition, rarely has the opportunity to surface in historical data sources.

This critical overview examines every aspect of the field including its history, key current research questions and methods, theoretical perspectives, and sociolinguistic factors. The authors represent leading proponents of every theoretical perspective. The book is a valuable resource for phonologists and a stimulating guide for their students.

Phonological evolution is a major component of the overall history of the language; the subject matter is both significant on its own terms and relevant in curricular terms. This book describes the segmental and prosodic changes in the history of English, provides analyses of these changes both as phonological events and in relation to the evolution of interlocking aspects of earlier English and highlights the relevance of the topics and possibly generate further interest by projecting historical phonological change onto Present-Day English and its varieties.

The Handbook of the History of English is a collection of articles written by leading specialists in the field that focus on the theoretical issues behind the facts of the changing English language. organizes the theoretical issues behind the facts of the changing English language innovatively and applies recent insights to old problems surveys the history of English from the perspective of structural developments in areas such as phonology, prosody, morphology, syntax, semantics, language variation, and dialectology offers readers a comprehensive overview of the various theoretical perspectives available to the study of the history of English and sets new objectives for further research

The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics.

Old English is a companion to Old English studies and to historical studies of early English in general. It is also an introduction to Indo-European studies in the particular sense in which they underpin the history of English. Professor Roger Lass makes accessible in a linguistically up-to-date and readable form the Indo-European and Germanic background to Old English, as well as what can be reconstructed about the resulting state of Old English itself. His book is a bridge between the more elementary Old English grammars and the major philological grammars and recent interpretations of the Old English data.Old English assumes a basic knowledge of phonetics and phonology, the elements of syntactic and morphological theory, and an introduction to historical linguistics. An extensive glossary gives definitions of the major technical terms used.