Historical linguistic studies of spoken english

This volume contains the papers read at the 11th Italian national Conference on the History of the English Language, dealing with historical studies of the spoken language. The contributions, which apply different theoretical models, cover a wide range of aspects concerning spoken English through the centuries (phonetic, phonological, sociolinguistic, historiographical, pragmatic and interactional ones), and provide material for further debate and research.

Antonio Bertacca teaches English at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Pisa. His main interest is in historical linguistics in general and in the history of the English language, on which he has published extensively in Italian and international journals. He wrote a book on The Great Vowel Shift (Rome, 1995), and is about to publish a book on the loss of nominal inflections in English with Edizioni PLUS (Pisa).