Note: This is the hardback edition of a previously announced book.

This volume is intended to provide undergraduate and postgraduate students with a comprehensive handbook of Middle English. The book begins with a sociolinguistic study of post-Conquest England. Then the volume presents a detailed description of Middle English grammar divided into four parts. The first part is dedicated to morphology, providing students with forms and uses of the traditional parts of speech. The second part of the volume is devoted to a description of the phonology, proposing a historical development of the OE phonemes (and graphemes) until Present Day English.

Students will find the basic rules of the phonological developments accompanied by the most common spellings for the four periods (Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English and Present Day English) and subperiods of the history of the English language. In the third part the volume presents a description of the grammatical categories and functions on Middle English syntactic units. All parts and sections of the book are provided with a wide range of examples, with modern English translations to facilitate a better understanding of Middle English grammar. The fourth part of the volume includes some extracts of early Middle English texts. Each of them is provided with its own glossary. It is particularly easy for students to identify the meaning of a word, because not only are all words included in the glossary, but also a specific meaning is provided for each word in each of its occurrences. (2003 published as paperback).