Token focuses on English linguistics in a broad sense, taking in both diachronic and synchronic work, grammatical as well as lexical studies. That being said, the journal favors empirical research. All submissions are double-blind peer reviewed. Token is the original medium of publication for all articles that the journal prints.

Anne Curzan presents a pioneering new definition of prescriptivism as a linguistic phenomenon.

The updated and revised edition of this volume maintains its focus on the dialectic interrelation between ‘news’ and ‘change’. News is intended as a textual type in its evolutionary – and revolutionary – development, while change is discussed with reference to the form, content and structure of news texts. The news texts in question range from the first forms of periodical news in the seventeenth century up to the news blogs and social media of the present day. Divided into four chapters, representing key historical moments in the process of news writing, each chapter makes use of a set of corpora specifically designed to suit the needs of scholars working in those particular fields. Topics that the authors examine include pronominal usage and the interrelationship between news writer and reader, heads and headlines, the language of advertisements and other text classes, the trend towards conversationalization, and impartiality and ‘perspective’ in modern-day news. These and other topics, coupled with the varying corpora that are exploited to analyse them, call into question basic methodological issues that are examined from different perspectives. Throughout the volume, the authors contextualise the news publications of the day so as to better understand the continuous process of adjustment and renewal that news texts are subject to over time.

This volume follows the beginnings and development of seventeenth-century English periodical print news and sees how contemporary news writers shaped their news discourse over the decades. Interdisciplinary in its approach, the volume analyses the different strategies employed by news writers of the day as they determined how best to present and write up both foreign and domestic events for a news-obsessed English readership. In his examination of the language used in corantos, newsbooks and gazettes—the first forms of periodical news in the English press—Nicholas Brownlees provides innovative analyses regarding a rich variety of topics including: the role of translation in early periodical news; the language of hard news in corantos and news pamphlets; forms and styles of epistolary news; fluctuating editorial strategies used to address and involve the reader; text structure and prototypical headlines; English news discourse within a wider European news context; the language of propaganda in the English Civil War; periodicity and the reporting of the Tuscan crisis in 1653; the language of ‘Advertisements’ in The London Gazette; the changing fortunes and semantics of News, Intelligence and Advice. In its focus on how news writers worked and experimented with seventeenth-century English language structures and discourse conventions to forge a style of news rhetoric that could inform, persuade and even entertain, this volume is essential reading for all historians, news analysts and historical linguists working in the early modern period.

The eighteenth century was a key period in the development of the English language, in which the modern standard emerged and many dictionaries and grammars first appeared. This book is divided into thematic sections which deal with issues central to English in the eighteenth century. These include linguistic ideology and the grammatical tradition, the contribution of women to the writing of grammars, the interactions of writers at this time and how politeness was encoded in language, including that on a regional level. The contributions also discuss how language was seen and discussed in public and how grammarians, lexicographers, journalists, pamphleteers and publishers judged on-going change. The novel insights offered in this book extend our knowledge of the English language at the onset of the modern period.

Talking Proper is a history of the rise and fall of the English accent as a badge of cultural, social, and class identity. Lynda Mugglestone traces the origins of the phenomenon in late eighteenth-century London, follows its history through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and charts its downfall during the era of New Labor. This is a witty, readable account of a fascinating subject, liberally spiced with quotations from English speech and writing over the past 250 years.