Reviewed by Agnieszka Pysz, Adam Mickiewicz University

This collection of twelve papers, originally presented at the 13th International Conference of English Historical Linguistics in Vienna in 2004, explores clausal connectives in the history of English by means of various methodological tools and from a variety of theoretical perspectives.

The first two papers consider connectives in the context of categorial continua. In ‘Adverbial connectives within and beyond adverbial subordination: The history of lest’, María José López-Couso traces the development of lest from a subordinator (specifically, an adverbial connective of negative purpose) into a complementizer. Bettelou Los explores ‘To as a connective in the history of English’ and presents the accompanying diachronic changes in morphology and syntax.

Several papers discuss individual connectives that express specific semantic relations. Matti Rissanen, ‘From oþ to till: Early loss of an adverbial subordinator’, and Laurel J. Brinton, ‘Rise of the adverbial conjunctions {any, each, every} time’, both focus on temporal connectives. Brinton discusses the use and discourse functions of these conjunctions in contemporary English and in historical data.

The next four papers deal with connectives that signal concessive or contrastive relations. Rafał Molencki presents ‘The evolution of since in medieval English’, taking into account its orthographic, phonological, morphosyntactic, and semantic changes. Elina Sorva’s ‘Grammaticalization and syntactic polyfunctionality: The case of albeit’ is a corpus-based study devoted to the diachrony of the concessive connective albeit. ‘On the subjectification of adverbial clause connectives: Semantic and pragmatic considerations in the development of while-clauses’, by Ana I. González-Cruz, traces the different meanings while has expressed over time. In ‘A relevance-theoretic view on issues in the history of clausal connectives’, Carsten Breul presents an account of the semantic diachrony of where and whereas. Finally, in ‘Forhwi “because”: Shifting deictics in the history of English causal connection’, Ursula Lenker outlines major tendencies in the development of English connectors that express causal relations.

The last three papers examine text-organizational aspects of connectives. Claudia Claridge, ‘Conditionals in Early Modern English texts’, presents a number of functions for which conditional clauses were used in Early Modern English. Anneli Meurman-Solin discusses the use of ‘Relatives as sentence-level connectives’, especially in the context of anaphoric reference. In ‘“Connective profiles” in the history of English texts: Aspects of orality and literacy’, Thomas Kohnen looks at English connectives that appear in sermons and statutes and describes patterns of distribution across the different text types.

This volume documents important research of the diachrony of English connectives, taking into account syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects.