Joseph Wrights English Dialect Dictionary and Beyond

One of the rather neglected fields of Late Modern English studies is English Dialectology. This volume includes sixteen papers based on presentations of the workshop Wrights English Dialect Dictionary and Beyond at the 15th ICEHL in Munich (2008). The book is divided into three sections: The first two refer to the genesis and the structure of the EDD respectively. The third part throws light on other dictionaries, from OED3 to the Bank of Canadian English, and on research related to the Survey of English Dialects. This is the first edition of dialect studies that moves Wrights remarkable dictionary in the centre of interest, at the same time seeing his contribution to dialectology critically from a modern point of view. Three of the papers are introductions to the books sections written by two of the editors. They not only represent the state of the art on Wrights personal achievement as lexicographer and an in-depth analysis of the EDDs complex structure, but also include a survey of the development of English dialectology in the early 20th century. The books general motivation is to promote the methodological reflection of dialectology in the face of recent corpus linguistics and digitised dictionaries.