Susan Fitzmaurice and Catherine Wong (Sheffield)

The panel is an opportunity for English historical linguists to share theoretical and methodological insights based upon the idea that semantic change is rooted in pragmatic meaning and discursive context. The principle underlying this idea is that meaning is both cognitive and communicative in nature, such that we understand semantics as meaning and pragmatics as use. This approach is foreshadowed in nineteenth and twentieth century philological theories of meaning change (e.g. Schleiermacher (1997); Darmesteter (1886); Paul (1891)). The relationship of pragmatic and semantic domains of meaning have since been formalised in the invited inference theory of semantic change as developed byTraugott and her collaborators (e.g. Traugott & Dasher, 2002). Fitzmaurice and Mehl (2026) offer an exploratory treatment of a pragmatic discursive theory of semantic change.

The panel participants will explore the implications for theories of semantic change of approaches that do not begin with the lexical item (semasiology) or the concept (onomasiology) but with discourse. In this session, panellists will address the location of meaning in discourse and demonstrate how to identify those meanings that do not attach to individual lexical items but which reside in the associations between items in the stream of discourse. This will afford the opportunity to examine how discursive meaning is susceptible to change and volatility, affected by time and discourse.

Panel members will be invited to draw upon innovative digital methods for studying meaning change in the history of English to explore patterns and processes of semantic change in diverse corpora and datasets. We expect that panellists will apply a range of approaches afforded by computational methodologies, to yield new accounts of semantic change in English.

References

• Darmesteter, A. 1886. The life of words as symbols of ideas. Translator unnamed. London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co.
• Fitzmaurice, S. and S. Mehl, 2026. The History of Semantic Change. In J. Beal (ed.) Volume 3, The New Cambridge History of the English Language. Cambridge University Press. Pp. 572-597.
• Paul, H., 1891. Principles of the history of language. Trans. by H. A. Strong. London: Longman, Greens, & Co.
• Schleiermacher, F. D. E., 1977. Hermeneutik und Kritik; miteinem Anhang sprachphilosophischer Texte Schleiermachers, hrsg. und eingeleited von Manfred Frank. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp
• Traugott, E.C. and R. Dasher, 2002, Regularity in Semantic Change. Cambridge University Press.

Elisabetta Cecconi (Firenze) and Massimo Sturiale (Milano)

This panel aims to explore the evaluative and persuasive dimensions of secondary newspaper discourse in the Late Modern period (roughly 1700–1900). While previous research on historical news discourse has predominantly focused on editorials, political commentary, and reportage (King, Easley and Morton 2016; Finkelstein 2020; Brownlees 2023), this panel shifts the attention to the less examined but highly revealing sections of magazines and newspapers such as letters to the editor, advertisements, classified announcements, reviews, and advice columns (Wright 2009; Palander-Collin 2015; Brownlees 2017, 2025; Cavanagh 2020; Taavitsainen 2021; Włodarczyk 2021; Norton 2025)

These subgenres offer rich evidence for studying how ordinary writers, readers, and advertisers engaged in acts of persuasion, evaluation, and stance-taking in public print. They also reflect the growing dialogicity of the press, the commodification of persuasion, and the blurring boundaries between private and public discourse in the expanding marketplace of language (Brownlees, Del Lungo and Denton 2010).

We invite papers that address, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• The linguistic expression of evaluation and persuasion in advertisements, classifieds, or want ads.
• Stance-taking and politeness strategies in readers’ letters and opinion pieces.
• Diachronic changes in persuasive or evaluative constructions across newspaper subgenres.
• The interplay between linguistic innovation and emerging communicative norms in public discourse.
• Corpus-based or data-driven approaches to historical persuasion and evaluation.
• Socio-pragmatic and rhetorical approaches to press discourse.

We particularly welcome studies that combine historical pragmatics, corpus linguistics, and discourse analysis (Martin and White 2005; Hunston 2011; Włodarczyk and Taavitsainen 2017; Partington 2025), as well as work that foregrounds lesser-studied textual types and regional or colonial presses (Finkelstein 2024).

By bringing together these perspectives, the panel seeks to contribute to a fuller understanding of how persuasive and evaluative meanings circulated in the late modern press, not only through institutional voices but also through everyday acts of expression, self-promotion, and opinion-making at the margins of public discourse.

Keywords

Historical pragmatics; persuasion; evaluation; newspapers; Late Modern English; discourse analysis; corpus linguistics

Selected References

• Bös, B. and N. Brownlees 2025. “The Language of Newspapers”. In M. Kytö and E. Smitterberg (eds.) The New Cambridge History of the English Language: Documentation, Sources of Data and Modelling, pp. 534-558. The New Cambridge History of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
• Brownlees, N. 2025. “Female-male relations in letters to the editor in The Orphan Reviv’d: or, Powell’s Weekly Journal (1719-1720)”. In C. Claridge (ed.) News with an Attitude. Ideological perspectives in the historical press, pp. 165-176.Amsterdam: Benjamins.
• Brownlees, N. (ed.) 2023. History of the British and Irish Press, vol. 1 Beginnings and Consolidation (1640-1800), Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
• Brownlees, N. 2017. “Contemporary observations on the attention value and selling power of English print advertisements (1700-1760)”. In: M. Palander-Collin, M. Ratia and I. Taavitsainen (eds.) Diachronic Developments in English News Discourse, pp. 61-79, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing,
• Brownlees, N., G. Del Lungo and J. Denton (eds.) 2010. The Language of Public and Private Communication in a Historical Perspective. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
• Cavanagh, A. 2020. “Letters to the Editor.” In D. Finkelstein (ed.) The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, Volume 2: Expansion and Evolution, pp. 180–185. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
• Finkelstein, D. (ed.) 2020, History of the British and Irish Press, vol. 2 Expansion and Evolution (1800-1900). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
• Finkelstein, D. D. Johnson, C. Davis (eds) 2024. The Edinburgh Companion to British Colonial Periodicals. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
• Hunston, S. 2011. Corpus Approaches to Evaluation. London: Routledge.
• King, A., A. Easley and J. Morton (eds.), 2016. The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-century British Periodicals and Newspapers. London, Routledge.
• Martin, J. R. and White, P. R. R 2005. The Language of Evaluation. Appraisal in English. Houndmills: Macmillan.
• Norton, M. B. (ed.) 2025. “I Humbly Beg your Speedy Answer” Letters on Love and Marriage from World’s First Personal Advice Column. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Palander-Collin, M. 2015. “Changing genre conventions and sociocultural change: Person-mention in 19^th century English advertisements”. In B. Bös and L. Kornexl (eds.) Changing Genre Conventions in Historical English News Discourse, pp. 81-102. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
• Partington, A. 2025. The Language of Persuasion in Politics and the Media. (2^nd edition). Oxon: Routledge.
• Taavitsainen, I. 2021. “Medical book reviews 1665-1800: From compliments to insults”. Journal of historical pragmatics, 22(2), 245-262. 
• Wright, L. 2009. “Reading late eighteenth-century want ads”. In A. H. Jucker (ed.) Early Modern English News Discourse, pp. 31-56. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
• Włodarczyk, M. and I. Taavitsainen 2017. “Historical (socio)pragmatics at present”. Journal of historical pragmatics 8(2): 159-174.
• Włodarczyk, M. 2021. “ ‘Whoever will discover where he lurks’: Presenting Addresses and Advertisers in Runaway Slave Classifieds” In N. Brownlees (ed.) The Role of Context in the Production and Reception of Historical News Discourse, pp. 263-286. Bern: Peter Lang.

Oliver Currie (Ljubljana) and Paul Cooper (Liverpool)

A key challenge of the study of written dialect in late Modern English is its interdisciplinary nature, which, as Hodson (2017, 3) observed, encompasses not only “dialectology and literary criticism, but also the history of the English language, sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, stylistics and folklore”. Many of our sources of written dialect, indeed, come from writers – e.g. Sidney Oldall Addy, W. E. A. Axon, William Barnes, Richard Blakeborough, Mabel Peacock – who were themselves interdisciplinary, being not only authors of dialect literature/literary dialect and literature (wholly) in Standard English, but also dialect philologists, folklorists and antiquarians (Townend 2024). Such interdisciplinarity is also reflected in dialect writers/scholars’ communities of practice: Axon seems, for instance, to have been at the centre of several overlapping networks of Lancashire dialect writers, dialect scholars, folklorists and antiquarians, and also corresponded with nationally prominent dialect scholars such as Alexander Ellis, John Nodal and Walter Skeat (Evans and Axon-Waters 2025).

This panel seeks to explore from an interdisciplinary perspective writers’ and scholars’ different interactions with dialect – their literary and scholarly publications, cultural activities, networks and communities of practice – focusing on the theme of dialect and identity. Different aspects of identity have been central to the study of late modern written dialect, for example what spoken dialectal reality written dialect represents (Honeybone 2020; Maguire 2020), what/how social identities are enregistered in written dialect (Beal 2017; Ruano-García 2020; Cooper 2025) and the use of linguistic variation to represent different identities in literature (Hodson 2016; Hakala 2017). An interdisciplinary approach can potentially shed new light on the representation of dialect in writing as well as the construction of social identities in written dialect by exploring the interconnections between the cultural domains of dialect, dialect writing/scholarship communities of practice and inter/intra-writer variation in the use of dialect.

References

• Beal, Joan C. 2017. “Nineteenth-century dialect literature and the enregisterment of urban vernaculars.” In Dialect and Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Jane Hodson, 17-32. London: Routledge.
• Cooper, Paul. 2025. Yorkshire Dialect in the Nineteenth Century: Enregisterment, Authenticity, and Identity. New York: Routledge.
• Evans, Lucy, and Rachael Axon-Waters. 2025. Axoniana: William Edward Armytage Axon (1846-1913) and the Communities of Print. United Kingdom: Book Empire.
• Hakala, Taryn. 2017. “Linguistic Self-Fashioning in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton.” In Dialect and Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Jane Hodson, 146-161. London: Routledge.
• Hodson, Jane. 2016. “Talking like a servant: What nineteenth century novels can tell us about the social history of the language.” Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 2 (1): 27-46.
• Hodson, Jane. 2017. “Introduction.” In Dialect and Literatutre in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Jane Hodson, 1-14. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
• Honeybone, Patrick. 2020. “Which phonological features get represented in dialect writing?Answers and questions from three types of Liverpool English texts.” In Dialect Writing and the North of England, edited by Patrick Honeybone and Warren Maguire, 211-242. Edinburgh University Press.
• Maguire, Warren. 2020. “Phonological analysis of early-nineteenth-century Tyneside dialect literature. Thomas Wilson’s The Pitman’s Pay.” In Dialect Writing and the North of England, edited by Warren Maguire and Patrick Honeybone, 243-265. Edinburgh University Press.
• Ruano-García, Javier. 2020. “On the enregisterment of the Lancashire dialect in Late Modern English: Spelling in focus.” Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 6 (1): 1-38.
• Townend, Matthew. 2024. The Victorians and English Dialect: Philology, Fiction, and Folklore. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Roberta Facchinetti (Verona), Louise Sylvester (Westminster), Gloria Mambelli (Verona)

Scholarly discussions of the standardisation of English, a long process that began in the late Middle English period and continued into the nineteenth century, have a long tradition and have primarily focused on spelling. However, recent research has challenged earlier narratives, drawing attention to the multilingual origins of Standard English and the role of vocabulary in its emergence (Wright 2020). Unlike orthographic standardisation, which largely occurred through the elimination of variants, lexical standardisation involved the differentiation of synonyms (Sylvester et al. 2022; Sylvester 2025). Factors such as the advent of print, the vernacularisation of specialised domains, and the extensive lexical expansion typifying the Early Modern English period led to a phase of codification marked by the publication of the first “hard word” dictionaries (Nevalainen 2017; Nurmi 2017). These dictionaries were primarily designed to record borrowed lexis, mainly deriving from Latin during this period (Durkin 2014), for the benefit of the general population, who would otherwise have been unable to understand it.

Today, the availability of electronic corpora, dictionaries, and lexical databases offers unprecedented opportunities for investigating the lexis of this pivotal stage in the development of Standard English.

This panel seeks to explore methodological and theoretical approaches to the study of the lexicon from Late Middle English to Early Modern English (1300-1700). We invite papers addressing, but not limited to:

• Lexical and semantic change
• Multilingualism, language contact, lexical borrowing
• Specific lexical or semantic fields
• Studies of specific lexicographical resources and other lexical databases
• Corpus-based studies
• Vernacularisation of specialised discourses

References

• Durkin, P. (2014). Borrowed Words: A History of Loanwords in English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Nevalainen, T. (2017). Early Modern English. In M. Aronoff (Ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Nurmi, A. (2017). Early Modern English: Overview. In A. Bergs & L. Brinton (Eds), The History of English (Vol. 4: Early Modern English, pp. 8-26). Berlin: De Gruyter.
• Sylvester, L., Tiddeman, M., & Ingham, R. (2022). Lexical Borrowing in the Middle English Period: A Multi-Domain Analysis of Semantic Outcomes. English Language & Linguistics, 26(2): 237–261.
• Sylvester, L. (2025). Early Standardization. In L. Wright & R. Hickey (Eds), The New Cambridge History of the English Language (Vol. 1: Context, Contact and Development, pp. 300-324). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Wright, L. (2020). The Multilingual Origins of Standard English. Berlin: De Gruyter.utilizzare l’anteprima

Peter J. Grund (Yale) and Merja Kytö (Uppsala)

Our proposed panel (workshop) deals with nineteenth-century American English. There is fairly limited previous work concentrating on American English of this century, whether broadly (e.g., Mencken 1919; Bailey 1998, 2012) or in detail (e.g., Ellis and Montgomery 2011; Anderwald 2012; Levey and DeRooy 2021). Our aim is to bring together scholars from a variety of perspectives and with different methodological and theoretical commitments to provide an up-to-date, focused, and well-rounded examination of the use, variation, and change in American English and the broader context of attitudes to variation and change in American English in the nineteenth century. In addition to filling a descriptive gap in the history of English, the panel also has significant urgency in light of recent and continuing developments and attitudes toward language and linguistic diversity in the US, such as the differential valuing of regional varieties, discrimination against speakers of Black English (Rickford & King 2016), and the establishing of English as the official language of the US in March 2025 (Executive Order No. 14224). As we know, language developments and sentiments often have historical roots, and bringing greater understanding to historical contexts and patterns has the potential to dispel misunderstandings and biases both in specific cases of usage as well as more generally (Curzan 2024). We hope that the panel will contribute strongly to such conversations.

Panel participants will engage with the following themes in nineteenth-century American English: the use, variation, and change of specific features; attitudes toward various Englishes; the codification and prescription of a standard or other variety of English; contact between speakers of different languages or aspects of multilingualism involving English; and regional and social dialects.

References

• Anderwald, Lieselotte. 2012. “Variable Past-Tense Forms in Nineteenth-Century American English: Linking Normative Grammars and Language Change.” American Speech 87(3): 257–293.
• Bailey, Richard W. 1998. Nineteenth-Century English. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
• Bailey, Richard W. 2012. Speaking American: A History of English in the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Curzan, Anne. 2024. Says Who? A Kinder, Funner, Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares about Words. New York: Crown.
• Ellis, Michael, and Michael Montgomery. 2011. “About All: Studies in Nineteenth-Century American English I.” American Speech 86(3): 340–354.
• Executive Order 14224: “Designating English as the Official Language of the United States.” 2025. (As accessed Oct. 2025.)
• Levey, Stephen, and Gabriel DeRooy. 2021. “North versus South: Regional Patterns of Grammatical Variation in Nineteenth-century American English.” American Speech 96(3): 297–331.
• Mencken, H. L. 1919. The American Language. New York: Knopf.
• Rickford, John R., and Sharese King. 2016. “Language and Linguistics on Trial: Hearing Rachel Jeantel (and other Vernacular Speakers) in the Courtroom and Beyond.” Language 92(4): 948–988.

Claudia Claridge (Augsburg) and Gabriele Knappe (Bamberg)

The aim of this workshop is to bring together scholars working on the varied history of conventionalized multi-word constructions (CMCs) in English within different theoretical frameworks, and thus to make a first contribution towards the establishment of the field of English historical phraseology. CMCs, also known as phraseological units or multi-word units, are here understood as conventionalized form-meaning or form-function pairings of two or more lexemes within the sentence boundary. The units may be lexically variable to a certain extent, such as seen in, e.g., to trip/dance/tread the light fantastic ‘(facetious) dance’. Furthermore, they may be deviant in syntax, as in the example just given, and they may contain lexical and semantic relics. Furthermore, CMCs are idio­matic to different degrees with respect to their semantic compositionality. Thus, the conventionalized simile as hot as fire ‘very hot’is only slightly idiomatic compared to the fully idiomatic verbal unit to kick the bucket ‘to die’. CMCs may also serve pragmatic functions, such as when a speaker marks ironic understatement by the conventionalized unit to put it mildly. What all these conventionalized multi-word constructions share is (partial) lexical, and semantic and/or pragmatic fixedness.

Thirteen scholars or teams of scholars have agreed to participate in this panel with papers that cover a wide range of topics and different kinds of conventionalized construc­tions from Early Modern English until the present day. These have been arranged into six sections according to topical and chronological criteria.

The panel will start with two papers which address, from quite different perspectives, how and for which purpose CMCs have been and are being collected. The first is a joint contribution by Natalia Filatkina and Miriam Hinterholzer (University of Hamburg, Germany), titled “Formulaic language in Early Modern foreign language textbooks: Phraseology, pedagogy, and practice”. Its twofold aim is 1) to set the scene for the whole panel by addressing challenges of researching historical phraseology from the experi­enced point of view of a non-English research tradition and 2) to address some of these challenges on the basis of a current project, namely the compilation of a corpus of multilingual textbooks from the early modern period, particularly considering the impact of author diversity and multilingual design on the treatment of CMCs in language peda­gogy. The second contribution, by Anna Cichosz and Piotr Pęzik (University of Łódź, Poland), is titled “LLM-assisted lemmatization of historical English corpora as a pre­requisite for phraseology extraction” and catapults the vital question of data retrieval for historical phraseological research straight into AI-based research of the 2020s. The panellists share their experience with LLM-assisted lemmatization (currently ChatGPT5) of historical English texts as a precondition for phraseological data retrieval on the example of The Penn–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English. The aim of the project is to ensure easier access to historical data in order to encourage more and better research of CMCs in English historical linguistics in the future.

The second section brings to the fore the preserving effect that CMCs can have in the history of English. While obvious lexical relics in CMCs, such as fro in to and fro, have variously been addressed in scholarship, this is not so for semantic relics, or fossils, such as happy ‘fortunate’ in happy accident. Hilke Ceuppens (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium) and Kathryn Allan (University College London, England) jointly investigate under the title “Happy accidents or sorry sights? Semantic fossils in multi-word units” what has determined the likelihood that a sense is preserved in a CMC from Early Modern English onwards. Taking the discussion of the preserving effect of CMCs to a sociolinguistic level, and also harking back to the first section, Joanna Kopaczyk-McPherson’s (University of Glasgow, Scotland) contribution studies 17th-century collections of proverbs with regard to Scottish linguistic and cultural identity in a shifting Anglo-Scottish cultural landscape. The panellist asks how the important cultural meanings inherent in proverbs are negoti­ated when they are recontextualized for a London readership.

After these more general contributions, sections 3 through 5 are devoted to the rise and life of particular CMCs in various time periods in the history of English, starting with the most recent developments in CMC types, which – compared to long-term diachrony – rise and (possibly) die extremely quickly. The first is a study of internet memes. Adopting a multimodal approach necessitated by the form of memes, Barbara Dancygier (University of British Columbia, Canada) and Lieven Vandelanotte (University of Namur / Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium) explore the conventionalized nature of memes in a contri­bution titled “Internet memes: Constructional entrenchment across grammar, lexis, and image”. In this very recent kind of conventionalized expression, image, text (often with non-canonical syntax) and spatial structure become entrenched and replicable. Hence the panellists claim that in the light of new forms a renewed definition of CMCs is neces­sary. The second contribution in section 3 addresses another very recent phraseological phenomenon, in a Construction Grammar approach. These are snowclones such as One does not simply X. In their joined presentation titled “The life cycle of snowclones: A corpus-based study on the micro-diachrony of constructional idioms”, Stefan Hartmann (Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf, Germany), Lena Stutz (Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf, Germany) and Tobias Ungerer (University of Toronto, Canada) offer a micro-diachronic study of slot-filler frequencies, thereby characterizing the development of the snowclones’ semantic profile.

From instantiations of most recent English discussed in section 3, section 4 takes the panel back to past centuries, highlighting particular phraseological developments and their theoretical implications. First, Eva Berlage (Universität Hamburg, Germany) studies the evolution of two particluar CMCs and how they have specialized semantically over time in her contribution titled “On the evolution of two negative polarity items: Make mention of and take notice of across 19th and 20th century American English”. In partic­ular, she asks to which degree these units have developed into fully-fledged negative polarity items. Then Paula Rodríguez-Puente (Universitdad de Oviedo, Spain) and Paloma Núñez-Pertejo (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Spain) will extend the dia­chronic investigation into further temporal depth in a joint presentation titled “Double trouble: Binomial constructions in the diachrony of English legal discourse”. While bino­mials and their history have received some recent attention in scholarship, this contribu­tion adds on existing research by providing a study of the binomials’ historical trajectory in legal writing. Particular attention is paid to the development in frequency, structure and lexical patterns as well as to the question of the effect of both the genre and the Plain Language Movement on the development of binomials in legal discourse.

Section 5 is comprised of three studies which variously address the relationship between developments in CMCs and changes in their pragmatic force. Pragmatization of CMCs has been addressed in several studies in the past, and Claudia Claridge (University of Augsburg, Germany) thus opens this section by enlarging this line of research with a dis­cussion of the “Pragmaticalization of metapragmatic evaluative formulae with speak and say”. In a similar vein, Gabriele Knappe (Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, Germany), in a contribution titled “As hell – The history of a multi-word booster and the story of conventionalized similes” traces the development of the booster as hell, attached to adjectives, emerging from non-conventionalized similes by reanalysis and asks the question in how far this reanalysis can help us trace a constructional split that non-conventionalized similes undergo when they become CMCs. On the other hand, pragmatic force might also become lost. Staying with expletives of stigmatized words, Reijirou Shibasaki’s (Meji UniversityTokyo, Japan) contribution “From pragmatic marker to premodifier: A history of wh-the-interrogative constructions with hell/heck/fuck/devil intensifiers in American English” shows exactly such a development. The speaker addresses in particular the role of frequency of use as a trigger of the pragmatic markers’ potential of being selected in the prenominal position in a noun phrase (e.g. With a what-the-hell sort of shrug…).

The last section is devoted to implications of the role of CMCs in theoretical models of language change. Employing the Corpus of Historical American English as a data base, Martin Hilpert (Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland) models the development of a syn­tactic amalgam in his paper titled “A good enough story to attract attention: The develop­ment of a syntactic amalgam” in terms of Construction Grammar. Understanding the role of the lexical preferences in this syntactic amalgam, in particular of CMCs, allows to draw broader theoretical conclusions on the role of conventional multi-word units in the process of constructionalization. The panel ends with a contribution by Graeme Trousdale (University of Edinburgh, Scotland) with the title “Phraseology without phrases: A Word Grammar analysis of the development of my word in English”. Based on the rise and development of the unit (upon) my word, the speaker asks the question how the investigation of connections between elements inside conventionalized multi-word units and those between different conventionalized constructions can, from the point of view of Word Grammar and thus beyond Construction Grammar, help us understand the language network and its changes.

The panel organizers are planning to invite the panellists to submit their contributions for publication in an edited volume with the provisional title Perspectives on convention­alized multi-word constructions in the history of English: Towards defining English historical phraseology.

Javier Ruano García (Salamanca) and Joan C. Beal (Sheffield)

The recent turn that historical linguistics has taken towards third-wave sociolinguistic approaches is opening the door to revisit linguistic variation from angles that prioritise agentive and self-conscious speech. The notion of style has been re(de)fined (Hernández-Campoy 2016), whilst meaning has gained renewed scholarly attention. It has been considered “an intrinsic feature of language, understanding variation as a social semiotic system which conveys the entire spectrum of social issues within a community” (García-Vidal 2023: 3). Core sociolinguistic concepts such as identity and ideology have thus taken centre stage, as they have been reassessed through the lens of key frameworks in this constructionist and speaker-oriented approach. This has been especially the case as regards the Late Modern English period (1700–1945), which, as is known, is characterised by marked linguistic awareness and dialect loss prompted by standardisation, the spread of education as well as mobility. In this context, recent related research (e.g. Beal 2020; Beal and Cooper 2025; Cooper 2025; Gerwin 2023; Paulsen 2022; Ruano-García 2023; Schintu 2023) has convincingly argued that, despite the pervasive bad data problem, light can be shed on how variation was conceptualised, negotiated and represented in the past. More specifically, it has been shown that the data preserved in older and new materials lend themselves to such an approach, highlighting that frameworks like indexicality, enregisterment, intra-speaker/writer variation, and vernacular norming can provide revisionist insights that inform our knowledge of Late Modern English(es) from complementary perspectives.

This panel focuses on the application of third-wave sociolinguistic frameworks to the history of Late Modern English(es). It has a twofold purpose. On the one hand, to discuss how recent third-wave perspectives can advance our understanding of (non)-standard varieties that remain relatively unexplored, e.g. regional dialects, the speech of specific individual and social groups, overseas Englishes, emerging national varieties, etc. On the other, to explore the methodologies as well as the materials that are most appropriate to undertake this third-wave historical revision. We envisage that the panel will include eight papers that address topics related but not restricted to:

(1) the discursive and stylistic (re)construction of Late Modern English(es) in different
geographical and writing contexts;
(2) patterns of variation and salience;
(3) the role that linguistic attitudes and perceptions had on the representation of identity;
(4) the written practices that contributed to the formation of vernacular norms;
(5) the methods that can be used to explore the social meaning of linguistic variation and to map late modern indexical fields.

We welcome proposals that fit within the remit of the panel.

References

• Beal, Joan C. 2020. Dialect and the construction of identity in the ego-documents of Thomas Bewick. In Patrick Honeybone and Warren Maguire (eds.), Dialect Writing and the North of England. Edinbugh: Edinburgh UP, 51–74.
• Beal, Joan C. and Paul Cooper. 2025. Indexicality, enregisterment and the history of English. In Joan C. Beal (ed.), The New Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. III Transmission, Change and Ideology. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 774–800.
• Cooper, Paul. (2025). Yorkshire Dialect in the Nineteenth Century: Enregisterment, Authenticity, and Identity. New York: Routledge.
• García-Vidal, Tamara. 2023. Contextualising third-wave historical sociolinguistics. International Journal of English Studies, 23(2), 1–14.
• Gerwin, Johanna. 2023. Between Nottin’Ill Gite and Bleckfriars—the enregisterment of Cockney in the 19th century. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics, 9(1), 31–67.
• Hernández-Campoy, Juan Manuel. 2016. Sociolinguistic Styles. Oxford: Wiley.
• Paulsen, Ingrid. 2022. The Emergence of American English as a Discursive Variety. Berlin: Language Science Press.
• Ruano-García, Javier. 2023. ‘Well, taakin about he da bring inta me yead wat I promised var ta tell ee about’: Representations of south-western speech in nineteenth-century dialect writing. English Language and Linguistics, 27(3), 561-590.
• Schintu, Paula. 2023. Dialect in the making: A third-wave sociolinguistic approach to the enregisterment of late modern Derbyshire spelling. International Journal of English Studies, 23(2), 65–87.

Kristin Bech (Oslo) and Giovanni Iamartino (Milano)

Without students, our field dies out. And yet we rarely have the chance to discuss teaching practices and get information and inspiration from colleagues internationally. This panel seeks to remedy that. Colleagues are invited to submit brief abstracts (c. 200 words) for 10-minute presentations. Some topics that might be of interest are:

• Do you teach the History of English chronologically or with reverse chronology? Advantages and disadvantages?
• How do the students cope with Old English, and which strategies do you use?
• Do you make use of authentic texts, and if so, how?
• Do you make use of corpora, and if so, how?
• Do you make use of specific pedagogical models or theories?
• Do you include your own research in your teaching?
• Do you rely on published handbooks or use your own teaching materials? And why?
• Does your History of English teaching make up a full course or is it part (a module or unit) of another course? 
• What are the prerequisites for attending your History of English course?
• What is the attitude of your organizations towards History of English courses – is the field affected by the cuts the humanities are experiencing everywhere?

The panel will last for 90 minutes, structured as follows:

Introduction: 10 minutes
Presentations: 5 x 10 minutes = 50 minutes
Discussion: 30 minutes

Elisabetta Lonati (Eastern Piedmont) and Alessandra Vicentini (Insubria)

Background. The late modern period witnessed the emergence and expansion of private and public ideas and representations of welfare in British society. These developments fostered the production of a wide range of texts addressing diverse subjects and areas of interest for equally diverse readerships. Issues such as private and public health, the administration of medicine, social care and social progress, philanthropic attitudes, attention to vulnerable groups and the lower ranks, material needs and personal improvement, hygiene and sanitation, and the urban environment are only some of the many ideals, values, and agendas which framed late modern Britain.

Aims and sources. The panel aims to examine a variety of texts and genres which focus on the notion of welfare and its multifaceted realisations in social practices for the ‘benefit of people’ and their well-being between 1700 and 1900.

Methods. Drawing on corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, historical sociopragmatics and sociolinguistics, along with other methodologies, the contributions will provide different perspectives on, and examples of, the discourses of British welfare over time.

Expected results and discussion. Through this exploration, the panel seeks to shed light on the language and discourse construal of welfare in late modern Britain, highlighting how different textual traditions and communicative settings contributed to shaping contemporary understandings of health, wealth, poverty, social care, private and public responsibility.

Possible topics and areas of interest include (but are not limited to):

• Medical and health-related writing: public health reports, sanitary reform tracts, medical treatises, hospital records.
• Philanthropic and charitable discourse: charity organisation reports, missionary texts, philanthropic society publications.
• Religious and moralising discourse on charity, compassion, and the deserving/undeserving poor.
• Parliamentary debates and political pamphlets relating to poverty, assistance, and social reform.
• Periodicals and newspapers discussing welfare, wealth, poverty, and social responsibility.
• Lexicographic and terminological developments related to welfare, wealth, poverty, health, and reform.
• Official and administrative Institutional language of hospitals, infirmaries, asylums, and voluntary organisations.
• Books of advice, domestic guides, household management manuals, ephemera on practical and everyday issues for improving individual well-being and private welfare.

Keywords: late modern welfare; social care; social progress; private and public sphere; lower ranks; philanthropy; historical linguistics; applied linguistics in historical perspective.

References

• Bergdolt, Klaus. 2008. Wellbeing: a cultural history of healthy living. Cambridge: Polity.
• Brown, John. 1995. The British welfare state: a critical history. Oxford: Blackwell.
• Bowern, Claire and Bethwyn Evans (eds.). 2014. The Routledge handbook of historical linguistics. London and New York: Routledge.
• Brinton, Laurel (ed.). 2017. English historical linguistics. Approaches and perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Charters, Erica. 2014. Disease, war, and the imperial state: the welfare of the British armed forces during the Seven Years’ War. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press.
• Hitchcock, Tim. 2015. London lives: poverty, crime and the making of a modern city, 1690-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Kytö, Merja an Päivi Pahta (eds.). 2016. The Cambridge handbook English historical linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Levene, Alysa. 2012. The childhood of the poor: welfare in eighteenth-century London. Houndmills, Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Steckel, Richard H. and Roderick Floud. 1997. Health and welfare during industrialization. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press.
• Sullivan, Michael. 1996. The development of the British welfare state. London: Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf.