A broad range of competing theories, analytical strategies and notational systems are surveyed in a comprehensive introduction to the fundamentals of sound structure. Roger Lass sees phonology as essentially a problem-centred discipline.

Professor Roger Lass makes accessible in a linguistically up-to-date and readable form the Indo-European and Germanic background to Old English, as well as what can be reconstructed about the resulting state of Old English itself.

An important theory is examined against a well-studied body of linguistic knowledge, and is partly validated and partly revised. The book will be important for all linguistics and historians of English and Indo-European.

In addition, the book deals in detail with two areas not customarily treated extensively in introductory texts; the phonology of casual speech, and phonological change.

Roger Lass is concerned about the nature of argumentation within linguistics and the status of its data and theoretical constructs.

Roger Lass offers a critical survey of the foundations of the art of historical linguistics.

The Cambridge History of the English Language is the first multi-volume work to provide a full account of the history of English.

Dr Lass examines certain crucial issues in phonological and general linguistic theory through detailed studies of English phonetics, dialectology and language-history.