The monograph aims at filling a long-existing gap in English historical linguistics by offering a comprehensive account of the semantic development of Old and Middle English synonyms of the term sickness, and an examination of possible conditioning factors leading to the loss of Anglo-Saxon lexical items, presented within the context of previous research on the semantic change in general, and theoretical and practical discussion of English medieval medicine, in particular. Analyzing the origin and meaning of the terms within the overall structure of the lexical field, the author also considers different chronological layers of the sickness-nouns and the explicatory techniques used by the scribe when presenting those terms to their reader. The book will be of interest to lexicologists, scholars interested in historical language for specialized purposes, as well as historians of medicine.

Medical texts written in English during the late Middle Ages have in recent years attracted increasing attention among scholars. From approximately 1375 onwards, the use of English began to gain a firmer foothold in medical manuscripts, which in previous centuries had been written mainly in Latin or French. Scholars of Middle English, and editors of medical texts from late medieval England, are thus faced with a huge medical vocabulary which no single volume has yet attempted to define. This dictionary is therefore an essential reference tool. The material analysed in the Dictionary of Medical Vocabulary in English, 1375–1550 includes edited texts, manuscripts and early printed books, and represents three main types of medical writing: surgical manuals and tracts; academic treatises by university-trained physicians, and remedybooks. The dictionary covers four lexical fields: names of sicknesses, body parts, instruments, and medicinal preparations. Entries are structured as follows: (1) headword (2) scribal variants occurring in the texts (3) etymology (4) definition(s), each definition followed by relevant quotations (5) references to corresponding entries in the Dictionary of Old English, Middle English Dictionary, and The Oxford English Dictionary (6) references to academic books and articles containing information on the history and/or meaning of the term.

The Oxford Dictionary of English offers authoritative and in-depth coverage of over 350,000 words, phrases, and meanings. The foremost single-volume authority on the English language.

The order and behaviour of the premodifier (an adjective, or other modifying word that appears before a noun) has long been a puzzle to syntacticians and semanticists. Why can we say 'the actual red ball', but not 'the red actual ball'? And why, conversely, do some other premodifiers have free variation in sentences; for example we can say both 'German and English speakers' and 'English and German speakers'? Why do some premodifiers change the meaning of a phrase in some contexts; for example 'young man', can mean 'boyfriend', rather than 'man who is young'? Drawing on a corpus of over 4,000 examples of English premodifiers from a range of genres such as advertising, fiction and scientific texts, and across several varieties of English, this book synthesises research into premodifiers and provides a new explanation of their behaviour, order and use.

This volume synthesizes recent approaches to the study of historical English and long-established philological scholarship. Using this synthesis, it casts doubt upon the old antagonisms between modern linguistics and traditional approaches, and makes the historical study of English accessible to scholars and students of both backgrounds. This book brings together 10 studies on various characteristics of the historical development of English, and mainly Old and Middle English, first presented in workshops at the “Old and Middle English” and “Language Variation and Change in Ancient and Medieval Europe” summer schools, organized in Naxos, Greece. It includes studies derived from the first four workshops: “New Approaches to the History of Early English(es)” I, II and III and “Language Change in Indo-European” I. The first part of the volume emphasizes the synchronic description of syntactic, morphological and semantic features of Old English, while the second section emphasizes explanations of the development of various features of English, starting with Old English.