The Handbook of the History of English is a collection of articles written by leading specialists in the field that focus on the theoretical issues behind the facts of the changing English language.

• organizes the theoretical issues behind the facts of the changing English language innovatively and applies recent insights to old problems
• surveys the history of English from the perspective of structural developments in areas such as phonology, prosody, morphology, syntax, semantics, language variation, and dialectology
• offers readers a comprehensive overview of the various theoretical perspectives available to the study of the history of English and sets new objectives for further research