Variation past and present

Edited by Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, Minna Nevala, Arja Nurmi & Matti Rissanen.
The English language in its many shapes from the earliest surviving texts to present-day media language and dialect speech is the subject of this book. The materials studied range from electronic, structured corpora to works of fiction, the unifying theme being variation and variability of language. The book´s nineteen articles tackle social, regional, generic and pragmatic issues diachronically and synchronically. This volume, a Festschrift for Professor Terttu Nevalainen, Director of the Research Unit for Variation and Change in English at the University of Helsinki, offers an overview of the research carried out in the unit.