I-IV -- Introduction -- Contents -- Excellent in Shakespeare -- Address pronouns in Shakespeare's English: a re-appraisal in terms of markedness -- Gender voices in the spoken interaction of the past: a pilot study based on Early Modern English trial proceedings -- Is there a social element in English word-stress? Explorations into a non-categorical treatment of English stress: a long-term view -- The modal verb shall between grammar and usage in the nineteenth century -- Social relations and forms of address in the Canterbury Tales -- Covert and overt language attitudes to the Scots tongue expressed in the Statistical accounts of Scotland -- Fashionable idiolects? The use of the negative prefix dis- 1520-1620 -- On the conditioning of geographical and social distance in language variation and change in Renaissance Scots -- The influence of political correctness on lexical and grammatical change in late-twentieth-century English -- The changing role of London on the linguistic map of Tudor and Stuart England -- The rise and regulation of periphrastic do in negative declarative sentences: a sociolinguistic study -- Shibboleths galore: the treatment of Irish and Scottish English in histories of the English language -- Ethnolinguistic identity as common denominator: a socio-historical investigation of the lexical items for 'people' in South African English -- Perceived and real differences between men's and women's spellings of the early to mid-seventeenth century -- Sociohistorical linguistics and the observer's paradox -- Index of subjects -- Index of authors -- 485-486