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The English Language
'The English language is like a fleet of juggernaut trucks that goes on regardless.' In this fascinating book, Robert Burchfield, editor of the four-volume Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, expertly stresses both the resilience and flexibility of the English language, tracing its history from the 5th century AD to the present day. From the days of runes to the origins of printing, through social, religious, political and industrial change in the eighteenth century, through the rise of the British Empire and the development of world English, and into the twentieth-century, the English language has undergone sweeping changes. 'the best brief survey I have read on the development of English' Anthony Burgess 'an expert, absorbing guide to the English-speaking world's biggest asset' Sunday Times 'It can be recommended without reservation to all who are sensitive to the subtlety, richness and power of the language they speak' British Book News 'so skilfully written that it must surely take a place among the best three or four books ever written about our language' Birmingham Post
Before the Word Was Queer
This book uncovers how same-sex acts, desires, and identities have been represented in English dictionaries in Britain from the early modern to the interwar period. In doing so, it responds and contributes to established traditions and new trends in linguistics, queer theory, literary criticism, and the history of sexuality.
Rude Britannia
Media commentators have noted a rising public tolerance to the use of rude or offensive words in modern English. John Lydon’s obscene outburst on 'I’m a Celebrity...' only provoked a handful of complaints – a muted reaction compared to the furore following his use of the f-word on television twenty-eight years earlier. This timely and authoritative exploration of rudeness in modern English draws together experts from the academic world and the media – journalists, linguists, lexicographers and literary critics – and argues that rudeness is an important cultural phenomenon. Tightly edited with clear accessibly written pieces, the essays look at rudeness in: the media literature football chants street culture seaside postcards. With contributions from media figures including Tom Paulin and leading media-friendly linguists Deborah Cameron and Lynda Mugglestone, Rude Britannia raises concerns about linguistic and social codes, standards of decency, what is considered taboo in the public realm, constructions of bawdy, class, race, power and British identity.
From Earth to Art
This volume presents fourteen papers from a symposium entitled Early Medieval Plant Studies' held at the University of Glasgow in 2000. The contributors approach the subject from a variety of perspectives and includes the results of recent historical, botanical and linguistic research. Divided into four thematic sections (landscape; human sustenance and comfort; plant-names; art and literature), the essays discuss: charter evidence for trees in the Anglo-Saxon landscape; place-name evidence for plants; case histories for assessing the native status of plants; archaeobotanical evidence for plant use; food plants; plant pharmacy; real and not-so-real plant names in Old English glosses; the mor...
The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
This book tells the history of the Oxford English Dictionary from its beginnings in the middle of the nineteenth century to the present. The author, uniquely among historians of the OED, is also a practising lexicographer with nearly thirty years' experience of working on the Dictionary. He has drawn on a wide range of sources--including previously unexamined archival material and eyewitness testimony--to create a detailed history of the project. The book explores the cultural background from which the idea of a comprehensive historical dictionary of English emerged, the lengthy struggles to bring this concept to fruition, and the development of the book from the appearance of the first printed fascicle in 1884 to the launching of the Dictionary as an online database in 2000 and beyond. It also examines the evolution of the lexicographers' working methods, and provides much information about the people--many of them remarkable individuals--who have contributed to the project over the last century and a half.
Words
Essays concentrating on the uses and histories of English words, mainly in the modern period. Contributions vary in focus including work on the development on individual words, lexicography, British and overseas English dialects, and usage in the earlier and later Modern English period.
New Perspectives on Irish English
This volume brings together current research by international scholars on the varieties of English spoken in Ireland. The papers apply contemporary theoretical and methodological approaches and frameworks to a range of topics. A number of papers explore the distribution of linguistic features in Irish English, including the evolution of linguistic structures in Irish English and linguistic change in progress, employing broadly quantitative sociolinguistic approaches. Pragmatic features of Irish English are explored through corpus linguistics-based analysis. The construction of linguistic corpora using written and recorded material form the focus of other papers, extending and analyzing the growing range of corpus material available to researchers of varieties of English, including diaspora varieties. Issues of language and identity in contemporary Ireland are explored in several contributions using both qualitative and quantitative methods. The volume will be of interest to linguists generally, and to scholars with an interest in varieties of English.
Aequanimitas
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