The essays discuss the development of English during the Middle Ages. A common theme is variation and variability – dialectal, social, temporal, stylistic and idiolectal – with much work fitting under the heading of historical pragmatics. Some of the essays also shed light on everyday life, customs, culture and religious practices.

Contents: Richard Dance/Laura Wright: Introduction – Javier Calle Martin/David Moreno Olalla: Body of evidence: Middle English annotated corpora and dialect atlases – Julia Fernández Cuesta/Luisa García García/J. Gabriel Amores Carredano: Compilation of an electronic corpus of northern English texts from Old to Early Modern English – Gabriella Mazzon: Now what? The analysis of Middle English discourse markers and advances in historical dialogue studies – Hans-Jürgen Diller: Ssoong on Ifaluk, ANGER and WRATH in Middle English: Historical Semantics as bridge-builder – Cynthia Allen: The Poss(essive) Det(erminer) construction in Early Middle English writings – Ewa Ciszek: The suffix -ish: Its semantic development and productivity in Middle English – María José Carrillo-Linares/Edurne Garrido-Anes: Lexical variation in late Middle English: Selection and deselection – Anna Wojtyś: The prefix y-: grammatical marker or meaningless appendage? A contrastive analysis of selected manuscripts of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales – Joanna Esquibel: Gratter cost, more grat zenne, þe more gratter torment: Comparison in Dan Michel’s Ayenbite of Inwyt – Carole Hough: Names in Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale – Nils-Lennart Johannesson: «Rihht alls an hunnte takeþþ der./Wiþþ hise ʒæpe racchess»: Hunting as a metaphor for proselytizing in the Ormulum – Mayumi Taguchi: Devotional terms and the use of the Bible in Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ – Nicolay Yakovlev: Metre and punctuation in the Caligula manuscript of Laʒamon’s Brut – Ad Putter: A prototype theory of metrical stress: Lexical categories and ictus in Langland, the Gawain-poet and other alliterative poets.