The Development of Old English

Don Ringe was educated at the University of Kentucky, Oxford, and Yale and has taught Classical studies and linguistics at the university level since 1983. He is Kahn Endowed Term Professor in Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of numerous publications on comparative Indo-European linguistics, historical linguistics, and computational cladistics, including On the Chronology of Sound Changes in Tocharian and From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic (OUP 2006) the forerunner of the present volume.Ann Taylor is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of York. Her main research area is variation and change in the history of English with a primary focus on syntax. She works within a framework that applies quantitative methodology first developed within variationist sociolinguistics to the structural analysis of historical data, and combines formal syntactic analysis, statistical methods, and techniques of corpus linguistics.

Overall this is an informative and very well-written book, which will clearly benefit advanced students of historical linguistics and readers who require a more in-depth treatment of the history of the languages prehistory than is found in traditional histories and grammars. It provides a successfully updated view of the internal history of the language, which takes into account more recent approaches to language change, and encourages readers to make links with neighbouring linguistic disciplines, and is a welcome addition to existing reference works.

• 1. Introduction ; 2. The development and diversification of Northwest Germanic ; 3. The development and diversification of West Germanic ; 4. A grammatical sketch of Proto-West Germanic ; 5. The northern West Germanic dialects ; 6. The separate prehistory of Old English: Sound changes ; 7. The separate prehistory of Old English: Morphological changes ; 8. Old English syntax ; Addenda and corrigenda to Volume I