Can an author's preference for expressing modality be quantified and then used as a marker of attribution? This book explores the possibility of using the subjunctive mood as an indicator of style and a marker of authorship in Early Modern English texts. Using three works by the sixteenth-century biblical translator and polemicist, William Tyndale, Elizabeth Bell Canon establishes a predictable preference for certain types of modal expression. The theory of subjunctive use as a marker of attribution was then tested on the anonymous 1533 English translation of Erasmus' Enchiridion Militis Christiani. Also included in this book is a modern English spelling version Tyndale's The Parable of the Wicked Mammon.

Token focuses on English linguistics in a broad sense, taking in both diachronic and synchronic work, grammatical as well as lexical studies. That being said, the journal favors empirical research. All submissions are double-blind peer reviewed. Token is the original medium of publication for all articles that the journal prints.

The papers in this volume cover a wide range of interrelated syntactic phenomena, from the history of core arguments, to complements and non-finite clauses, elements in the clause periphery, as well as elements with potential scope over complete sentences and even larger discourse chunks. In one way or another, however, they all testify to an increasing awareness that even some of the most central phenomena of syntax – and the way they develop over time – are best understood by taking into account their communicative functions and the way they are processed and represented by speakers’ cognitive apparatus. In doing so, they show that historical syntax, and historical linguistics in general, is witnessing a convergence between formerly distinct linguistic frameworks and traditions. With this fusion of traditions, the trend is undeniably towards a richer and more broadly informed understanding of syntactic change and the history of English. This volume will be of great interest to scholars of (English) historical syntax and historical linguistics within the cognitive-linguistic as well as the generative tradition.

The translation of Erasmus's Manual of the Christian Soldier, thought to be by William Tyndale, is one of the foundational texts of the English Reformation. The present edition is based for the first time on the recently-discovered manuscript dating from 1523. It is accompanied by translations of other key religious works, Erasmus's treatise on the Lord's Prayer and the introduction to the New Testament; by the anti-papal satire, Julius Exclusus; and by the Epistle in Praise of Matrimony and the Proverbs, both translated by the English Erasmian, Richard Taverner, in support of Thomas Cromwell's reformist agenda.