An Historical Syntax of the English Language

Frederik Theodor Visser’s An Historical Syntax of the English Language, published in four massive volumes between 1963 and 1973, is certainly one of the cornerstones of research in English linguistics. Visser’s achievements can hardly be overestimated. Before the advent of modern corpus linguistics, he compiled a remarkable wealth of detailed philological data from all periods of English and combined this with current grammatical analyses of his time. This has made this publications an indispensable resource for anyone investigating the history of English syntax. This reproduction of Visser’s volumes is more than welcome, and timely, as the volumes have been out of print for quite some time and were sometimes…