Cross-disciplinary approaches to linguistic variation in Early Modern West Germanic

Abstract

T This thematic issue on Early Modern West Germanic aims at bet-ter understanding the processes underlying the extensive amount of mor-phosyntactic variation and change within and between language users inthis era. It demonstrates that language structure and language use often in-teracted with each other. It also illustrates that to gain a full understanding ofthe triggers and extent of this variation and change we need to combine per-spectives and methodological tools from different (sub)disciplines. That iswhy this issue brings together scholars working on Early Modern West Ger-manic in different fields and disciplines –in particular scholars from earlymodern literary studies, formal (historical) linguistics, computational lin-guistics and historical sociolinguistics –to offer a wide range of the possi-ble methodologies to investigate historical language variation and to explorehow the different approaches can complement each other in understandingthe complex setting of variation.