Frontmatter -- Table of contents -- Introduction -- I. Particularizing and generalizing for written records -- A philological tour of HEL -- From stop-fricative clusters to contour segments in Old English -- On the regrettable dichotomy between philology and linguistics: Historical lexicography and historical linguistics as test cases -- II. Particulars of authorship -- The history of the English language and the history of English literature -- "Of harmes two, the lesse is for to chese": An integrated OT-Maxent approach to syntactic inversions in Chaucer's verse -- The effect of representativeness and size in historical corpora: An empirical study of changes in lexical frequency -- III. Particulars of communicative setting -- Seeing is believing: Evidentiality and direct visual perception verbs in Early Modern English witness depositions -- Sincerity and the moral reanalysis of politeness in Late Modern English: Semantic change and contingent polysemy -- Something to write home about: Socialnetwork maintenance in the correspondence of nineteenth-century Scottish emigrants -- IV. Particularizing from words -- Words swimming in sound change -- Plural marking in the Old and Middle English nd-stems feond and freond -- From Shakespeare to Present-Day American English: The survival of 'get + (XP) + gone' constructions -- Index