This collection reflects Minoji Akimoto s concern with studies of change in English that are theoretically-informed, but founded on substantial bodies of data. Some of the contributors focus on individual texts and text-types, among them literature and journalism, others on specific periods, from Old English to the nineteenth century, but the majority trace a linguistic process such as negation, passivisation, complementation or grammaticalisation through the history of English. While several papers take a fresh look at manuscript evidence, the harnessing of wideranging electronic corpora is...

This volume completes the first uniform edition of the Early Middle English Ancrene Wisse Group. It contains Sawles Warde from the Katherine Group, and the Wooing Group of lyrical meditations. These works, originally written for devout women, are of unusual literary and linguistic interest. The readings of all the manuscripts are printed in parallel for easy comparison, presenting the various versions of the Wooing Group in a more cohesive form than in existing editions. Paleographical and textual notes are provided, along with frequency wordlists and a selection of notes from...