Chapters in this book

1. Prelim pages i
2. Table of contents v
3. Acknowledgements vii
4. The future of historical sociolinguistics? 1
5. Part I. Methodological innovations
6. Exploring part-of-speech frequencies in a sociohistorical corpus of English 23
7. Reading into the past 53
8. Ireland in British parliamentary debates 1803–2005 83
9. Discord in eighteenth-century genteel correspondence 109
10. Part II. New data for historical sociolinguistic research
11. Competing norms and standards 131
12. Relativisation in Dutch diaries, private letters and newspapers (1770–1840) 157
13. “A graphic system which leads its own linguistic life”? 187
14. Part III. Theory: Bridging gaps, new challenges
15. Historical sociolinguistics and construction grammar 217
16. A lost Canadian dialect 239
17. “Vernacular universals” in nineteenth-century grammar writing 275
18. Revisiting weak ties 303
19. Index 327