The first volume to focus on the communicative aspects of English manuscripts from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century. It demonstrates how these handwritten texts can be used to analyse the history of language as communication between individuals and groups, and discusses the challenges these documents present to present-day scholars.

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 study investigates how medieval abbeys in the Southern Low Countries used hagiographical manuscripts as a communicative tool. Four basic questions are addressed: How did layout influence a manuscript's communicative potential? Was manuscript communication influenced by its composition? How did the flexibility of texts and manuscripts influence their communicative function? And how did the position of the monastery within the monastic landscape influence manuscript communication? Ranging from in-depth case studies to discussions of structure and agency in manuscript terminology and layout in the aftermath of New Philology, this book argues that the High Middle Ages witnessed a fundamental process of manuscript diversification and specialisation, which was at the basis of the thirteenth-century revolution in manuscript layout. This led twelfth-century monks to start conceptualising the manuscript as an object with fixed contents, which was to be used and copied as a whole. Consequently, the production and spread of saints' lives became part of a process of ideological homogenisation among Benedictine monasteries and started a crucial development in medieval literacy. Awarded the Mgr. Charles De Clercq award from the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts (2012) and the five-yearly Flemish Award for Historical Sciences of the Academische Stichting Leuven (2013).

This book uses a corpus of manuscript letters from Bess of Hardwick to investigate how linguistic features characteristic of spoken communication function within early modern epistolary prose. Using these letters as a primary data source with reference to other epistolary materials from the early modern period (1500-1750), the author examines them in a unique and systematic way. The book is the first of its kind to combine a replicable scribal profiling technique, used to identify holograph and scribal handwriting within the letters, with innovative analyses of the language they contain. Furthermore, by adopting a discourse-analytic approach to the language and making reference to the socio-historical context of language use, the book provides an alternative perspective to the one often presented in traditional historical accounts of English. This volume will appeal to students and scholars of early modern English and historical linguistics.

Considers how medieval English and Scots texts were re-worked in later centuries, and the implications for philological theory and practice.

Reflecting a multitude of developments in the study of language change and variation over the last ten years, this extensively updated second edition features a number of new chapters and remains the authoritative reference volume on a core research area in linguistics. A fully revised and expanded edition of this acclaimed reference work, which has established its reputation based on its unrivalled scope and depth of analysis in this interdisciplinary field Includes seven new chapters, while the remainder have undergone thorough revision and updating to incorporate the latest research and reflect numerous developments in the field Accessibly structured by theme, covering topics including data collection and evaluation, linguistic structure, language and time, language contact, language domains, and social differentiation Brings together an experienced, international editorial and contributor team to provides an unrivalled learning, teaching and reference tool for researchers and students in sociolinguistics

Drawing on extensive corpus-based research, this book explores the nature and behavior of coordinate constructions in three case studies, covering order in copulative compounds, binomials (bare phrases), and more complex phrases. Historically, research on order in coordination has concentrated on so-called irreversible binomials, but Lohmann's research places significant focus on reversible ad hoc coordination and also presents a detailed comparison between irreversible and reversible binomials. This book uses empirical analyses to explore a wide range of factors, ranging from pragmatic to phonetic influences on the ordering process. It also offers readers a processing perspective on the results obtained, and puts forth a processing explanation for the characteristics of irreversible binomials. The book is ideal for researchers and advanced students working in English linguistics, syntax and psycholinguistics, and due to the multifactorial methodology applied it will be of particular interest to quantitatively minded corpus linguists.

Using increasingly sophisticated databases, this volume explores grammatical usage from the Late Modern period in a broad context.

This collection explores the links between multimodality and multilingualism, charting the interplay between languages, channels and forms of communication in multilingual written texts from historical manuscripts through to the new media of today and the non-verbal associations they evoke. The volume argues that features of written texts such as graphics, layout, boundary marking and typography are inseparable from verbal content. Taken together, the chapters adopt a systematic historical perspective to investigate this interplay over time and highlight the ways in which the two disciplines might further inform one another in the future as new technologies emerge. The first half of the volume considers texts where semiotic resources are the sites of modes, where multiple linguistic codes interact on the page and generate extralinguistic associations through visual features and spatial organizaisation. The second half of the book looks at texts where this interface occurs not in the text but rather in the cultural practices involved in social materiality and text transmission. Enhancing our understandings of multimodal resources in both historical and contemporary communication, this book will be of interest to scholars in multimodality, multilingualism, historical communication, discourse analysis and cultural studies. Chapters 1, 4, and 5 of this book are available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. Chapters 1 & 4 have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license, with Chapter 5 being made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.

Bess of Hardwick's Letters is the first book-length study of the c. 250 letters to and from the remarkable Elizabethan dynast, matriarch and builder of houses Bess of Hardwick (c. 1527–1608). By surveying the complete correspondence, author Alison Wiggins uncovers the wide range of uses to which Bess put letters: they were vital to her engagement in the overlapping realms of politics, patronage, business, legal negotiation, news-gathering and domestic life. Much more than a case study of Bess's letters, the discussions of language, handwriting and materiality found here have fundamental implications for the way we approach and read Renaissance letters. Wiggins offers readings which show how Renaissance letters communicated meaning through the interweaving linguistic, palaeographic and material forms, according to socio-historical context and function. The study goes beyond the letters themselves and incorporates a range of historical sources to situate circumstances of production and reception, which include Account Books, inventories, needlework and textile art and architecture. The study is therefore essential reading for scholars in historical linguistics, historical pragmatics, palaeography and manuscript studies, material culture, English literature and social history.