This collected volume brings together a wide array of international linguists working on diachronic language change with a specific focus on the history of English, who work within usage-based frameworks and investigate processes of grammatical change in context. Although usage-based linguistics emphasizes the centrality of the discourse context for language usage and cognition, this insight has not been fully integrated into the investigation of processes of grammatical variation and change. The structuralist heritage as well as corpus linguistic methodologies have favoured de-contextualized analytical perspectives on contemporary and historical language data and on the mechanisms and processes guiding grammatical variation and change. From a range of different perspectives, the contributions to this volume take up the challenge of contextualization in the investigation of grammatical variation and change in different stages of English language history and discuss central theoretical notions such as gradable grammaticality, motivation in hypervariation, and hypercharacterization. The book will be relevant to students and linguists working in the field of diachronic and variational linguistics and English language history.

• Contents 6
• List of tables and figures 8
• Grammar – discourse – context: Grammatical variation and change and the usage-based perspective 10
• Contextualizing Old English noun phrases 24
• Syntax, text type, genre and authorial voice in Old English: A data-driven approach 58
• The intensifier system of the Ormulum and the interplay of micro-level and macro-level contexts in linguistic change 102
• Constructional change across the lifespan: The nominative and infinitive in early modern writers 134
• Contextualizing dual-form adverbs in the Old Bailey Corpus: An assessment of semantic, pragmatic, and sociolinguistic factors 166
• Bridging contexts in the reanalysis of naturally as a sentence adverb: A corpus study 200
• From parataxis to amalgamation: The emergence of the sentence-final is all construction in the history of American English 230
• The role of context in the entrenchment of new grammatical markers in World Englishes 258
• Paradigms, host classes, and ancillariness: A comparison of three approaches to grammatical status 286
• The motivated unmotivated: Variation, function and context 314
• Grammar in context: On the role of hypercharacterization in language variation and change 342
• List of contributors 374