Bas Aars and April McMahon
When you picked up this book you may have been struck by the phrase English Linguistics (EL) on the cover. What is English Linguistics? Is it like other areas of linguistics, on a par with psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, cognitive linguistics, forensic linguistics, or other topics in the Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics series? Or is it perhaps linguistics as practiced in England by the English? In both cases the answer is ‘no.’ We define English Linguistics as a discipline that concerns itself with the study of all aspects of Present-Day English (PDE) from a variety of different angles, both descriptive and theoretical, but with a methodological outlook firmly based on the working practices developed in modern contemporary linguistics. EL arguably includes diachronic studies, though we have chosen not to include papers from this domain in this Handbook, mainly because there is a separate Handbook of the history of English (edited by Ans van Kemenade and Bettelou Los).
The phrase English Linguistics is not a recent one, and can be traced back at least to a number of publications that have it in their titles, e.g. Harold Byron Allen (1966) (ed.) Linguistics and English linguistics: a bibliography (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts), R. C. Alston (1974) (ed.) English linguistics: 1500–1800 (London: The Scolar Press), and John P. Broderick (1975) Modern English linguistics: a structural and transformational grammar (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co.). However, as these titles show, the phrase is either used in a very wide sense, as in Allen’s and Alston’s books, or quite narrowly, as in Broderick’s.
In its present-day sense it is probably the case that the label English Linguistics is used more in Europe than in other parts of the world. In North America there are programs and courses in EL, but, as Bob Stockwell points out to us “I do not believe there exists in North America a field ‘English Linguistics’ that can be administratively defined. By ‘administratively defined’ I mean something like a faculty, a department, an interdepartmental program that is separately budgeted, or an independent research center. The field exists as a concept, as a set of shared research interests.” >>>>>
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