Germanic language histories 'from below' (1700-2000)

Introduction Stephan Elspass: A twofold view 'from below': New perspectives on language histories and historical grammar I. Language variation in letters, diaries and other text sources from below Marina Dossena: "As this leaves me at present" - Formulaic usage, politeness and social proximity in nineteenth-century Scottish emigrants' letters Tony Fairman: 'Lower-order' letters, schooling and the English language, 1795 to 1834 Nicola McLelland: "Doch mein Mann mochte doch mal wissen..." A discourse analysis of 19th-century emigrant men and women's private correspondence Gertrud Reershemius: Remnants of Western Yiddish in East Frisia Marijke van der Wal: Eighteenth-century linguistic variation from the perspective of a Dutch diary and a collection of private letters II. From past to present: Change from above - change from below Joan C. Beal/Karen P. Corrigan: 'Time and Tyne': a corpus-based study of variation and change in relativization strategies in Tyneside English David Denison: Syntactic surprises in some English letters: the underlying progress of the language Richard Dury: YOU and THOU in Early Modern English: cross-linguistic perspectives Kirstin Killie: On the history of verbal present participle converbs in English and Norwegian and the concept of 'change from below' Alexandra Lenz: The grammaticalization of geben 'to give' in German and Luxembourgish Koen Plevoets/Dirk Speelman/Dirk Geeraerts: A corpus-based study of colloquial 'Flemish' Reinhild Vandekerckhove: 'Tussentaal' as a source of change from below in Belgian Dutch. A ca.