The Editors: Roberta Facchinetti is Professor of English at the University of Verona, Italy. Her research field and publications are mainly concerned with language description, textual analysis and pragmatics. This is done mostly by means of computerized corpora of both synchronic and diachronic English.Matti Rissanen is Emeritus Professor of English Philology at the University of Helsinki and a team leader in the Research Unit for the Study of Variation, Contacts and Change in English, at the same university. His research interests include long-term diachronic development of English syntax and grammatical vocabulary and the compilation of historical corpora.

• Contents: Roberta Facchinetti/Matti Rissanen: Introduction – Anne Curzan/Chris C. Palmer: The Importance of Historical Corpora, Reliability, and Reading – Johan van der Auwera/Martine Taeymans: More on the Ancestors of Need – Manfred Markus: Spotting Spoken Historical English: The Role of Alliteration in Middle English Fixed Expressions – Irma Taavitsainen/Päivi Pahta/Martti Mäkinen: Towards a Corpus-Based History of Specialized Languages: Middle English Medical Texts – Barry Morley/Patricia Sift: Towards the Automatic Identification of Directive Speech Acts – Helena Raumolin-Brunberg: Leaders of Linguistic Change in Early Modern England – Hans Martin Lehmann/Caren auf dem Keller/Beni Ruef: ZEN Corpus 1.0 – Udo Fries: Death Notices: The Birth of a Genre – Franck Zumstein: The Contribution of Computer-Searchable Diachronic Corpora to the Study of Word Stress Variation – Merja Kytö/Erik Smitterberg: 19th-Century English: An Age of Stability or a Period of Change? – Clemens Fritz: The Conventions’ Spelling Conventions: Regional Variation in 19th-Century Australian Spelling – Tine Breban: The Grammaticalization of the English Adjectives of Comparison: A Diachronic Case Study – Göran Kjellmer: Panchrony in Linguistic Change: The Case of Courtesy.