The final decades of the eighteenth century provide the starting point for this volume - a time when arguably less was happening to shape the structure of the English language than to shape attitudes towards it in a social climate that became increasingly prescriptive. Baugh and Cable (1993) appropriately entitle their chapter on the period from 1650 to 1800 'The Appeal to Authority', characterising the intellectual spirit of the age as one seeking order and stability, both political and linguistic. This so-called Augustan Age was one of refinement. After two centuries of effort to remedy the perceived inadequacies of English to enable it to meet a continually expanding range of functions, the eighteenth century was a time for putting the final touches on it, to fix things once and for all. In the nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth the success of England as an imperial nation combined with romantic ideas about language being the expression of a people's genius would engender a triumphalist and patriotic attitude to English. The language was now not so much to be improved but preserved as a great national monument and defended from threat in a battle over whose norms would prevail. As the demographic shift in the English-speaking population moved away from Britain, the twentieth would be declared the American century, and the Empire would strike back.

The most radical changes to English grammar had already taken place over the roughly one thousand years preceding the starting year of this volume. Certainly MacMahon's chapter makes clear how in our own period the phonology of English underwent nothing like the series of changes called the Great Vowel Shift (see Lass, volume III). It is noteworthy too that changes affecting morphology are insignificant by comparison with those of previous periods. Hence, there is no separate chapter devoted to them here. English is currently undergoing the final stages of changes begun centuries earlier, e. g. the loss of case marking in ^-pronoun.. The use of who in the objective case occurs sporadically even as early as the sixteenth century among writers such as Marlowe. Even though who has become increasingly accepted in written English and Sapir (1921:167) predicted the demise of whom within a couple of hundred years, it is still with us.

The immediately preceding period dealt with in Volume III (1476-1776) of this series, the Early Modern Period, has often been described as the formative period in the history of Modern Standard English. By the end of the seventeenth century what we might call the present-day 'core' grammar of Standard English was already firmly established. As pointed out by Denison in his chapter on syntax, relatively few categorical innovations or losses occurred. The syntactic changes during the period covered in this volume have been mainly statistical in nature, with certain construction types becoming more frequent. The continuing expansion of the progressive, in particular, its use in passives such as the house is being built, is a product of the late eighteenth century. By the time it appeared, the prescriptive spirit was so well established that it was condemned as an inelegant neologism and consciously avoided by many writers. As Baugh and Cable (1993: 287-8) note, the origin of the construction can be traced back to the latter part of the eighteenth century, but its establishment and ultimate acceptance required the better part of a century. The so-called get passive, e. g. the vase got broken, is also largely a nineteenth-century development.

Other changes such as the spread and regulanzation of do support began in the thirteenth century and were more or less complete in the nineteenth. Although do coexisted with the simple verb forms in negative statements from the early ninth century, obligatoriness was not complete until the nineteenth. The increasing use of do periphrasis coincides with the fixing of SVO word order. Not surprisingly, do is first widely used in interroga-tives, where the word order is disrupted, and then later spread to negatives.

The part of the language probably most affected by change in our period is its vocabulary. Baugh & Cable (1993: 292) draw our attention, in particular, to the great increase in scientific vocabulary and the large number of new terms in common use among modern English speakers, e. g. bronchitis, cholesterol, relativity, quark, etc. Under James Murray's editorship of the Oxford Engiish Dictionary (OED,, scientific and technical vocabulary fell outside the range of 'common words' to which the dictionary was committed (see 1.3.1). Murray, for instance, rejected appendicitis as too technical only to have it quickly become part of common usage after the coronation of Edward VII was postponed in 1902 due to an inflamed appendix (Willinsky 1994:125). As time went on, citation sources drew more on science than humanities, reflecting the increasingly important role of science and technology in everyday modern life. In my own time as an academic I have witnessed the introduction and spread of computer literacy, which has given new senses to old words, e. g. windows, virus, boot, as well as completely new terms and acronyms, e. g. DOS {Disk Operating System), Bitnet {Because it's time network), byte, micro-processor, etc. Computer technology has also made its impact felt in research methods, where machine-readable text corpora are now indispensable tools in the study of the English language, particularly in cases where there is no possibility of examining informants' intuitions, or listening to tape recordings.

Many of the great grammarians, lexicographers and dialectologists such as Poutsma, Jespersen, and Visser, worked from manually compiled and analysed corpora. James Murray is said to have had over four million citation slips in the editing of the OED. The corpus grew to over eleven million during the some forty years the dictionary was being edited. Yet it would probably have been hard for Murray to imagine his successors having the possibility of working with corpora of 500 million words capable of being searched by a computer in a matter of minutes, one which is well within today's technical capabilities. While Murray and his coworkers struggled with slips of paper in proverbial shoe boxes, dictionary staff at Oxford University Press today are able to access electronic databases which they scan for new terms. The OED is now available on CD-ROM.

The resources for exploiting corpora and the increasing number of large corpora in existence today open up linguistic phenomena to empirical investigation on a scale previously unimaginable. Grammatical and lexicographical studies that formerly took a lifetime to complete can now be done in a relatively short time span with increasing precision. In the past three decades corpora and text banks of natural language sentences or utterances have become increasingly widely used in linguistics, lexicography, information technology and computer science research.

• Documentation

The problem of documentation is to find strong evidence for the origin of a word. Our major source for such documentation is the OED. However, the evidence of the OED has to be used cautiously because we know that its earliest date of attestation is frequently not the earliest documentable

• Consonant systems

The consonant system during and after the late 1770s was as it is today: /p tkbdgtj-d3f0sj-hv6z3lrwjmn n/,107 except that two additional phonemes, /AY/ and /x/, were in limited use. Both were in the process of undergoing change. Walker's notation (1791) typifies a popular method of transcribing the 25 phonemes (including

• The study of the English vocabulary

Vocabulary study has a long history, going back in the Western world to Plato's Cratylus. The study of English vocabulary, however, received a sharp boost with the interest of members of the Philological Society in making a New English Dictionary, eventually renamed The Oxford English Dictionary (Murray, Bradley, Craigie &

• While the English vocabulary has grown much in size since 1776

While the English vocabulary has grown much in size since 1776, it is difficult to say precisely how large it is today for reasons explained by Algeo in his chapter. Borrowing has recently become less important as a source for new English words than it was previously. The formation of

• Vowel phonotactics (structural)

In his analysis of unaccented vowels from 1500 to 1700, Dobson (1968) laments the difficulty in reaching firm conclusions because of the unreliability of the opinions of the orthoepists; furthermore, there appears to have been considerable variation amongst the educated population in how the unaccented vowels were realised (cf. Dobson