Book excerpt: The Handbook of the History of English is a collection of articles written by leading specialists in the field that focus on the theoretical issues behind the facts of the changing English language. organizes the theoretical issues behind the facts of the changing English language innovatively and applies recent insights to old problems surveys the history of English from the perspective of structural developments in areas such as phonology, prosody, morphology, syntax, semantics, language variation, and dialectology offers readers a comprehensive overview of the various theoretical perspectives available to the study of the history of English and sets new objectives for further research