Frontmatter -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- Contributor addresses -- Introduction: Boundaries and boundarycrossings in the history of English -- Section 1: Conceptual and methodological boundaries -- 1. Scale and mode in histories of English -- 2. The blurred boundaries of genres-in-use: Principles and implications from rhetorical genre studies for English historical linguistics -- 3. Meanderings from early English to World Englishes: A Complex Systems perspective on morphosyntactic changes in wh-pronouns -- Section 2: Linguistic boundaries -- 4. First or best, last not least: Domain edges in the history of English -- 5. Expanding boundaries of a function word: Uses of one in Early Modern and Modern English -- 6. Non-correlative commas between subjects and verbs in Early and Late Modern English sermons and scientific texts -- 7. Old English verbs of envy: Class membership and grammatical behaviour -- Section 3: Language and language variety boundaries -- 8. Germanic /r/ as an isogloss, rhotacism, and the West Germanic gemination -- 9. Migration, localities, and discourse: Shifting linguistic boundaries in Swedish-American cookbooks -- 10. Specimen texts and boundaries in the history of the English language -- Coda: HEL-bound -- Index