Special issue on sense of place in the history of English

Abstract

This special issue is concerned with how the multidisciplinary concept ‘sense of place’ can be applied to further our understanding of ‘place’ in the history of English. In particular, the articles collected here all relate in some way to complicated processes through which individuals and the communities they are embedded within are defined in relation to others and to their socio-cultural and spatial environments (Convery et al.2012). We have brought together eight articles focusing on specific aspects of this theme using different theoretical models that offer new insights into the history of the English language from the Old English (OE) period to the twenty-first century. The findings will also be of interest to researchers in the fields of corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, English dialectology, lexicography, pragmatics, prototype theory, sociolinguistics and syntactic theory.