This volume includes fifteen papers focussing on three important aspects of the history of English in Britain and overseas since the eighteenth century the grammatical tradition of prescriptivism syntactic developments and sociolinguistic factors affecting language variation. Within these areas methodological approaches include those relating to corpus linguistics social network theory the investigation of specialized discourse in a diachronic perspective and lexicography. The individual sections are highly cohesive with each other as the ideological considerations on which the prescriptive tradition was founded are underpinned by sociological factors. Theoretical contributions appear alongside case studies in which instances of specific usage are investigated.