English syntax in its linguistic and socio - historical context

At the end of the twentieth century , the Late Modern period still had to be described as ‘the Cinderella of English historical linguistic study’ (Jones 1989 : 279). Fortunately, this scenario has changed over the last fi fteen years or so. Among other things, the change of emphasis within historical linguistics to socio-historical and corpus-based approaches led to a surge of interest in Late Modern English (roughly the period between 1700 and 1900). In August 2001, the University of Edinburgh hosted the fi rst international conference on Late Modern English (LModE). These are now organised on a triennial basis. Research on aspects of LModE has since been published in conference proceedings and more focused thematic volumes such as the one on the nineteenth century edited by Kyt ö et al. ( 2006 ). Introductory textbooks (Beal 2004 and Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2009 ) have also been added to the growing body of literature, and new (editions of) language histories of English now routinely add a chapter or section on the Late Modern period (e.g. Algeo and Pyles 2005, Barber et al. 2009 or Brinton and Arnovick 2011 ). 1 Despite the recent progress in the historiography of the English language between 1700 and 1900, morphological and syntactic change in LModE is still the least researched aspect of this period. (According to the eighteenthcentury grammarian Lowth, English grammar could be described in only ten lines; 2 this is obviously a contemporary misjudgement on the basis of the importance that people attributed to morphology.) Late Modern syntax has received excellent and fairly comprehensive coverage in a book-length chapter of the Cambridge History of the English Language , volume IV (Denison 1998 ). But while this chapter provides a