This collection of articles by colleagues and students of Leiv Egil Breivik presents studies within both core and peripheral areas of English historical linguistics. Core topics covered include the development of existential there and related phenomena, word order, the evolution of adverbials, null subjects from Old to Early Modern English, pragmatics and information structure and aspects of discourse. Contributors also address the emergence of new syntactic constructions in the past and present, language contact and aspects of style in Early Modern English letters and medical texts....

Pragmatic Markers in Irish English offers 18 studies from the perspective of variational pragmatics by established and younger scholars with an interest in the English of Ireland. Taking a broad definition of pragmatic markers (PMs) as items operating outside the structural limits of the clause that encode speakers intentions and interpersonal meanings, this volume includes discussions of traditional PMs like sure that are strongly associated with Irish English, recent globally-spreading innovations like quotative like, and studies of tag questions, vocatives and...