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English in its socio-historical context

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Robert McCollMillar, English Historical Sociolinguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. Pp. xvi + 220. Paperback, £22.99, ISBN 9780748641802.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 August 2013

J. M. Hernández-Campoy
J. M. Hernández-Campoy*
Affiliation:
University of Murcia
*
[email protected]
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Extract

Since Romaine's (1982) pioneering work, historical sociolinguistics has been studying the relationships between language and society in its socio-historical context by focusing on the study of language variation and change with the use of variationist methods. Work on this interdisciplinary sub-field subsisting on sociology, history and linguistics is expanding, as shown, for example, by Milroy (1992), Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg (1996; 2003), Ammon, Mattheier & Nelde (1999), Jahr (1999), Kastovsky & Mettinger (2000), Bergs (2005), Conde-Silvestre (2007), Trudgill (2010), or Hernández-Campoy & Conde-Silvestre (2012). These works have been elucidating the theoretical limits of the discipline and applying the tenets and findings of contemporary sociolinguistic research to the interpretation of linguistic material from the past. Yet in the course of this development historical sociolinguistics has sometimes been criticised for lack of representativeness and its empirical validity has occasionally been questioned. Fortunately, in parallel to the development of electronic corpora, the assistance of corpus linguistics and social history has conferred ‘empirical’ ease and ‘historical’ confidence on the discipline.

Type
Review
Information
English Today , Volume 29 , Issue 3 , September 2013 , pp. 58 - 59
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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