Insights into Late Modern English

The Editors: Marina Dossena is Associate Professor of English Language at the University of Bergamo. Her published and current research focuses on English historical dialectology («Like runes upon a standin’ stane»: The Perception of Scotticisms in Grammar and Vocabulary: forthcoming 2003). She is currently compiling a corpus of 19th-century Scottish correspondence.Charles Jones is Forbes Professor of English Language at the University of Edinburgh. Recent publications include A Language Suppressed (1995), an edition of A Treatise on the Provincial Dialect of Scotland, by Sylvester Douglas (1779) (1992) and The Edinburgh History of the Scots Language (1997).

• Contents: Richard W. Bailey: The Ideology of English in the Long Eighteenth Century – Carol Percy: The Art of Grammar in the Age of Sensibility: The Accidence [...] for [...] Young Ladies (1775) – Joan C. Beal: John Walker: Prescriptivist or Linguistic Innovator? – Lynda Mugglestone: Proof and Process: The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary – Maurizio Gotti: Central Modal Verbs in Three 18th-Century English Grammars – Ilse Wischer: The Treatment of Aspect Distinctions in 18th- and 19th-Century Grammars of English – Rafał Molencki: Proscriptive Prescriptivists: On the Loss of the ‘Pleonastic’ Perfect Infinitive in Counterfactual Constructions in Late Modern English – Uwe Vosberg: Cognitive Complexity and the Establishment of -ing Constructions with Retrospective Verbs in Modern English – Elena Seoane Posse: The Codification of Indefinite Agents in Early and Late Modern English – Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade: Lowth’s Language – Tony Fairman: Letters of the English Labouring Classes and the English Language, 1800-34 – Marina Dossena: Modality and Argumentative Discourse in the Darien Pamphlets – Robert McColl Millar: ‘Blind attachment to inveterate custom’. Language Use, Language Attitude and the Rhetoric of Improvement in the first Statistical Account – Agnieszka Kiełkiewicz-Janowiak: Language and Society in the Diaries of Two Women in Early New England – Raymond Hickey: How and Why Supraregional Varieties Arise.