Investigating the metalanguage of English: texts, corpora and models

Abstract This special issue addresses the question of how we can reconstruct linguistic and textual knowledge before linguistics and philology existed as recognised academic disciplines. It does so by studying the metalanguage of English, that is, the terminology, textual practices and communicative contexts through which linguistic phenomena, textual and discursive artefacts were described, analysed and discussed in the early and late modern periods. Emerging from the MetaLing Corpus project, the collection brings together philological, corpus-based and historiographical perspectives to explore the formation, circulation and transformation of linguistic knowledge between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. The introduction outlines the rationale of the project and the current state of research on premodern English linguistic thought before presenting the contributions included in the special issue.