This collection of articles covers a wide range of topics in English philology and history of linguistics. The volume proceeds from Old English studies offering a unique perspective and approach in literary and linguistic research into Anglo-Saxon England. Two articles deal with English phonology from both historical and contemporary standpoints, and another with a theoretical discussion of etymological inquiry. The last section contains three articles focusing on the history of linguistics or the history of ideas. The wide range of topics addressed in the 12 chapters of this volume reflects the diversity of interests in the research efforts of Shoichi Watanabe, professor emeritus at Sophia University, to whom this volume is dedicated by his former students. He is not only highly valued as a distinguished professor of English philology, but also acknowledged for his critique of civilization with his unique view of history and culture.

Contents: Shoichi Watanabe: Curriculum Vitae - Hiroyuki Eto: Introduction - Tetsuji Oda: Shoichi Watanabe: The Philologue and Bibliophile - Kenichi Tamoto: Palaeographical Facts and Conjectures about the Rushworth Gospels (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Auct. D. 2. 19) - Tetsuji Oda: The Sound Symbolism of sc- in Old English Heroic Poetry - Seiji Shinkawa: Unhistorical Gender Assignment in Laamon's Brut: Innovative Attributive Morphology as a Case Marker - Naotoshi Furuta: The Devaluation of Germanic Heroic Tradition in the Old English Poem Andreas - Kazutomo Karasawa: The Negative Conceptions of OE dream and their Origin - Yuki Shimonaga: The Structure and the Thematic Unity of The Dream of the Rood - Kazunori Kumada: Seventeenth-Century Classification of Consonants - Makoto Ikeda: A Contrastive Evaluation of the Pronunciation Components in New English File and New Headway - Kohei Nagase: The Absolute Value of Words in Etymology - Masataka Miyawaki: Ronald Langacker and James Harris: A Case Study of the History of Cognitive Linguistics - Kazuyuki Shimotani: 'Taste is Taste': Shifts in the Entailments of the Metaphorical Concept of Taste in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics - Hiroyuki Eto: Amerikanischer Strukturalismus und deutsche inhaltbezogene Sprachwissenschaft.

Tetsuji Oda is associate professor at Tokyo University of Science where he teaches English as a foreign language and the history of English, and was associate researcher at Westfälische Wilhems-Universität Münster (2009-2010). His principal area of research is sound symbolism used in Old English alliterative poetry. After studying at the University of London (Mphil) he received his PhD from Sophia University in 2000.

Hiroyuki Eto is associate professor of English and linguistics at Tohoku University. His principal research interests lie in the areas of the intellectual history of linguistics, philosophy of language, and English-language teaching as liberal arts education. He received his PhD in Germanic philology from Georgetown University in 2000 and his DLitt in English philology from Sophia University in 2002.