i-iv -- Table of contents -- Foreword -- Section 1: Linguistics and philology -- Introduction: Linguistics and philology -- Philology, linguistics, and the history of [hw]~[w] -- An essay in historical sociolinguistics?: On Donka Minkova's "Philology, linguistics, and the history of [hw]~[w]" -- A brief response -- Why we should not believe in short diphthongs -- Extended forms (Streckformen) in English -- Linguistic change in words one owns: How trademarks become "generic" -- Section 2: Corpus- and text-based studies -- Introduction: Corpus- and text-based studies -- The meanings and uses of the progressive construction in an early eighteenth-century English network -- Investigating the expressive progressive: On Susan M. Fitzmaurice's "The meanings and uses of the progressive construction in an early eighteenth-century English network" -- A brief response -- Modal use across registers and time -- The need for good texts: The case of Henry Machyn's Day Book, 1550-1563 -- The perils of firsts: Dating Rawlinson MS Poet. 108 and tracing the development of monolingual English lexicons -- Section 3: Constraint-based studies -- Introduction: Constraint-based studies -- The evolution of Middle English alliterative meter -- Old English poetry and the alliterative revival: On Geoffrey Russom's "The evolution of Middle English alliterative meter" -- A brief response -- A central metrical prototype for English iambic tetrameter verse: Evidence from Chaucer's octosyllabic lines -- Early English clause structure change in a stochastic optimality theory setting -- The role of perceptual contrast in Verner's Law -- Section 4: Dialectology -- Introduction: Dialectology -- Historical perspectives on the pen/pin merger in Southern American English -- Digging up the roots of Southern American English: On Michael Montgomery and Connie Eble's "Historical perspectives on the pen/pin merger in Southern American English" -- A brief response -- Vowel merger in west central Indiana: A naughty, knotty project -- The spread of negative contraction in early English -- Name index -- Subject index