Norman Blake

Most scholarly attention on Shakespeare's vocabulary has been directed towards his enrichment of the language through borrowing words from other languages, and has thus concentrated on the more learned aspects of his vocabulary. However, the bulk of Shakespeare's output consists of plays, and to make these appear lifelike he needed to employ a collquial and informal style. This aspect of his work has been largely disregarded apart from his bawdy language. This dictionary includes all types of non-standard and informal language and lists all examples found in Shakespeare's works. These include dialect form, colloquial forms, non-standard and variant forms, fashionable words and puns. Norman Blake is Emeritus Professor of English at Sheffield University.

When you read Shakespeare or watch a performance of one of his plays, do you find yourself wondering what it was he actually meant? Do you consult modern editions of Shakespeare's plays only to find that your questions still remain unanswered?A Grammar of Shakespeare's Language, the first comprehensive grammar of Shakespeare's language for over one hundred years, will help you find out exactly what Shakespeare meant.Steering clear of linguistic jargon, Professor Blake provides a detailed analysis of Shakespeare's language. He includes accounts of the morphology and syntax of different parts of speech, as well as highlighting features such as concord, negation, repetition and ellipsis. He treats not only traditional features such as the make-up of clauses, but also how language is used in various forms of conversational exchange, such as forms of address, discourse markers, greetings and farewells. This book will help you to understand much that may have previously seemed difficult or incomprehensible, thus enhancing your enjoyment of his plays.

Unlike other histories of the English language, this introduction cuts away traditional divisions into old, middle and modern English to chart the rise of and changes in standard English. It covers the English and historical background, changes in phonology, vocabulary and syntax, and offers close analyses of individual texts of English from a wide range of periods. The final chapter focuses on the place of English as a world language and the growing array of the varieties of English spoken today. A useful appendix gives definitions of technical terms and phonetic symbols.

This book presents an introduction to stylistics for students of literature. It does not presuppose linguistic knowledge, but it approaches literature in a linguistic way. In the first half it looks at the make-up of a sentence in English and how sentence elements are exploited by literary authors. In the second half it looks at the way in which a text is unified by elements beyond the sentence. The conclusion exemplifies the theory explained in the previous chapters.