Contents

Chapters in this book

1. I-IV I
2. Introduction V
3. Contents XVII
4. Excellent in Shakespeare 1
5. Address pronouns in Shakespeare's English: a re-appraisal in terms of markedness 25
6. Gender voices in the spoken interaction of the past: a pilot study based on Early Modern English trial proceedings 53
7. Is there a social element in English word-stress? Explorations into a non-categorical treatment of English stress: a long-term view 91
8. The modal verb shall between grammar and usage in the nineteenth century 115
9. Social relations and forms of address in the Canterbury Tales 135
10. Covert and overt language attitudes to the Scots tongue expressed in the Statistical accounts of Scotland 169
11. Fashionable idiolects? The use of the negative prefix dis- 1520-1620 199
12. On the conditioning of geographical and social distance in language variation and change in Renaissance Scots 227
13. The influence of political correctness on lexical and grammatical change in late-twentieth-century English 257
14. The changing role of London on the linguistic map of Tudor and Stuart England 279
15. The rise and regulation of periphrastic do in negative declarative sentences: a sociolinguistic study 339
16. Shibboleths galore: the treatment of Irish and Scottish English in histories of the English language 363
17. Ethnolinguistic identity as common denominator: a socio-historical investigation of the lexical items for 'people' in South African English 377
18. Perceived and real differences between men's and women's spellings of the early to mid-seventeenth century 405
19. Sociohistorical linguistics and the observer's paradox 441
20. Index of subjects 463
21. Index of authors 477
22. 485-486 485