Social Roles and Language Practices in Late Modern English: 195

This is a trailblazing volume. Too often do studies in historical linguistics adopt social (or other) theories of yesterday. But here we have cutting-edge research on social roles, identities and practices applied innovatively to historical data, leading to new insights – not just about Late Modern English but also about the dynamics of language, social phenomena and change – and lighting the way for future research. — Jonathan Culpeper, Senior Lecturer, English Language and Linguistics, Lancaster University

Adopting a research model from the social sciences, this volume offers a challenging new framework for the study of Late Modern English writings both from the public and the private domain. Uniquely in the context of historical sociolinguistics, the papers included offer important insights into the interrelationship of different social roles adopted by Late Modern English writers and their language use. Each paper provides the reader with an intriguing case study, showing convincingly that data from older stages of the language, despite obvious limitations as deriving from the written medium, are in fact very good data when approached with a research model that takes these limitations into account through consistent and systematic embedding in the context in which the texts were originally conceived. — Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Professor of English, Faculteit der Geesteswetenschappen, Leiden University Centre for Linguistics