Transforming Early English shows how historical pragmatics can offer a powerful explanatory framework for the changes medieval English and Older Scots texts undergo, as they are transmitted over time and space. The book argues that formal features such as spelling, script and font, and punctuation - often neglected in critical engagement with past texts - relate closely to dynamic, shifting socio-cultural processes, imperatives and functions. This theme is illustrated through numerous case-studies in textual recuperation, ranging from the reinvention of Old English poetry and prose in the later medieval and early modern periods, to the eighteenth-century 'vernacular revival' of literature in Older Scots.

The chapters in this volume investigate how visual and material features of early English books, documents, and other artefacts support - or potentially contradict - the linguistic features in communicating the message. In addition to investigating how such communication varies between different media and genres, our contributors propose novel methods for analysing these features, including new digital applications. They map the use of visual and material features - such as layout design or choice of script/typeface - against linguistic features - such as code-switching, lexical variation, or textual labels - to consider how these choices reflect the communicative purposes of the text, for example guiding readers to navigate the text in a certain way.

This multidisciplinary volume offers new insights into the development of genres of medical discourse in changing socio-cultural contexts.

Reading English Verse in Manuscript, c.1350-c.1500 is the first book-length history of reading for later Middle English poetry. While much past work in the history of reading has revolved around marginalia, this book consults a wider range of evidence, from the weights of books in medieval bindings to relationships between rhyme and syntax. It combines literary-critical close readings, detailed case studies of particular surviving codices, and systematic manuscript surveys drawing on continental European traditions of quantitative codicology to demonstrate the variety, vitality, and formal concerns visible in the reading of verse in this period. The small-and large-scale formal features of poetry affected reading subtly but extensively, determining how readers might move through books and even shaping physical books themselves. Readers' responses to one formal feature, rhyme, meanwhile, evince a habitual but therefore deep-rooted formalism which can support and enhance close readings today. Reading English Verse in Manuscript sheds fresh light on poets such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate, and Thomas Hoccleve, but also shows how their works were read in manuscript in the context of a much larger mass of anonymous poems that influenced canonical poems, in a pattern of mutual influence.

This volume provides a diachronic and synchronic overview of linguistic variability and change in involved, speech-related and spoken texts in English. While previous works on the topic have focused on more limited time periods, this book covers data from the 16th century up to the present day. The studies offer new insights into historical and present-day corpus pragmatics by identifying and exploring features of orality in a variety of registers. For readers who are new to the field, the range of approaches will provide a helpful overview; for readers who are already familiar with the field, the volume will shed light on the complexity of factors such as register, sociolinguistic variability and language attitude, thus making it a useful resource and stepping stone for further exploration. The volume celebrates the groundbreaking contributions of Professor Merja Kytö in making accessible speech-related corpus material and leading the way in its exploration.

Traders around the world use particular spoken argots, to guard commercial secrets or to cement their identity as members of a certain group. The written registers of traders, too, in correspondence and other commercial texts show significant differences from the language used in official, legal or private writing. This volume suggests a clear cross-linguistic tendency that mercantile writing displays a greater degree of language mixing, code-switching and linguistic innovations, and, by setting precedents, promote language change. This interdisciplinary volume aims to place the traders' languages within a wider sociolinguistic context. Questions addressed include: What differences can be observed between mercantile registers and those of court or legal scribes? Do the traders' texts show the early emergence of features that take longer to permeate into the 'higher' varieties of the same language? Do they anticipate language change in the standard register or influence it by setting linguistic precedents? What sets traders' letters apart from private correspondence and other 'low' registers? The book will also examine bilingualism, semi-bilingualism, reasons for code-switching and the choice of particular languages over others in commercial correspondence.

This volume explores the complex relations of texts and their contextualising elements, drawing particularly on the notions of paratext, metadiscourse and framing. It aims at developing a more comprehensive historical understanding of these phenomena, covering a wide time span, from Old English to the 20th century, in a range of historical genres and contexts of text production, mediation and consumption. However, more fundamentally, it also seeks to expand our conception of text and the communicative ‘spaces’ surrounding them, and probe the explanatory potential of the concepts under investigation. Though essentially rooted in historical linguistics and philology, the twelve contributions of this volume are also open to insights from other disciplines (such as medieval manuscript studies and bibliography, but also information studies, marketing studies, and even digital electronics), and thus tackle opportunities and challenges in researching the dynamics of text and framing phenomena in a historical perspective.