Late Modern English is a fruitful period for linguistic research of all kinds. This became evident once again at the Third Late Modern English Conference, held at the University of Leiden in 2007, from which the papers presented in this volume derive. Themes dealt with include the nature, form and effects of prescription, an issue of increasing importance during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; grammars and dictionaries produced during the period; specific topics in Late Modern English grammar and lexis; the language of letters; and methodological issues in the study of Late Modern English as such.

Contents:

Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade/Wim van der Wurff: Papers from 3LModE: An introduction

Joan C. Beal: Three hundred years of prescriptivism (and counting)

Robin Straaijer: Deontic and epistemic modals as indicators of prescriptive and descriptive language in the grammars by Joseph Priestley and Robert Lowth

Raymond Hickey: «Telling people how to speak»: Rhetorical grammars and pronouncing dictionaries

Carol Percy: Periodical reviews and the rise of prescriptivism: The Monthly (1749-1844) and Critical Review (1756-1817) in the eighteenth century

María Esther Rodríguez-Gil/Nuria Yáñez-Bouza: The ECEG-database: A bio-bibliographical approach to the study of eighteenth-century English grammars

Alicia Rodríguez-Álvarez: «With a concise historical account of the language»: outlines of the history of English in eighteenth-century dictionaries

Charlotte Brewer: The Oxford English Dictionary's treatment of female-authored sources of the eighteenth century

Lynda Mugglestone: Living history: Andrew Clark, the OED and the language of the First World War

Manfred Markus: Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary and its sources

Daniela Cesiri: The Irish contribution to the English language during the Late Modern period

Günter Rohdenburg: Grammatical divergence between British and American English in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Svenja Kranich: Interpretative progressives in Late Modern English

Froukje Henstra: The problem of small numbers: Methodological issues in social network analysis

Lyda Fens-de Zeeuw: Plain speech in Lindley Murray's letters: Peculiar or polite?

Tony Fairman: She has four and big agane: Ellipses and prostheses in mechanically-schooled writing in England, 1795-1834.