This collection of articles by colleagues and students of Leiv Egil Breivik presents studies within both core and peripheral areas of English historical linguistics. Core topics covered include the development of existential there and related phenomena, word order, the evolution of adverbials, null subjects from Old to Early Modern English, pragmatics and information structure and aspects of discourse. Contributors also address the emergence of new syntactic constructions in the past and present, language contact and aspects of style in Early Modern English letters and medical texts. The ideological discourses of children’s dictionaries and medieval letters of defence are also explored.
The essays are all empirical studies, based on a wide range of corpora (both historical and contemporary) and applying theoretical approaches informed by Systemic-Functional Grammar, grammaticalization theory, dependency grammar, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics and corpus linguistic methods. Issues of methodology, statistics and corpus construction and annotation are also addressed in several contributions.

Table of Contents:
Contents: Kevin McCafferty, Kari E. Haugland and Kristian A. Rusten: Preface: Charms of grammar/Source of all glamour – Kari E. Haugland: Þa rinde hit & Þær comun flod & bleowun windas: On expletives and word order in Old English – Gard B. Jenset: In search of the S (curve) in there – María José López-Couso/Susana Formoso-Rodríguez: There follows + that-clause: A case of syntactic blend? – Kristin Killie: The development of colour adverbs in Norwegian and English: Similar paths, different paths – Toril Swan: Hopefully: The evolution of a sentence adverbial – Gisle Andersen: The double copula revisited – Bjørg Bækken: The noun phrase as a style marker in seventeenth-century English – Dagmar Haumann: On the ascent and decline of the passive tough-infinitive – Kevin McCafferty: I think that I will be after making love to one of them: A revised account of Irish English be after V-ing and its Irish source – Ana Elina Martínez-Insua: Language, medicine and choice: A Systemic-Functional study of Early Modern English medical writing – Kristian A. Rusten: Null referential subjects from Old to Early Modern English – Kristin Bech: Non-specificity and genericity in information structure annotation – Øystein Heggelund: Information structure as an independent word ordering factor in Old and Middle English – Sarah Hoem Iversen: Do you understand this, my little pupil?: Children’s dictionaries, pedagogy and constructions of childhood in the nineteenth century – Merja Stenroos: Fugitive voices: Personal involvement in Middle English letters of defence – Anna-Brita Stenström: The pragmatic marker come on in teenage talk – Leiv Egil Breivik: A bibliography.