Late Modern English is a fruitful period for linguistic research of all kinds. This became evident once again at the Third Late Modern English Conference, held at the University of Leiden in 2007, from which the papers presented in this volume derive. Themes dealt with include the nature, form and effects of prescription, an issue of increasing importance during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; grammars and dictionaries produced during the period; specific topics in Late Modern English grammar and lexis; the language of letters; and methodological issues in the study of Late Modern English as such.

The Editors: Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade holds a Chair in English Sociohistorical Linguistics at the University of Leiden. Her research interests include historical social network analysis and the English standardisation process, in particular codification and prescription. She is editor of the internet journal Historical Sociolinguistics and Sociohistorical Linguistics, and is the director of the VICI research project `The Codifiers and the English Language¿. She is currently writing a book on Robert Lowth and the rise of prescriptivism that is expected to appear in 2010.
Wim van der Wurff is senior lecturer in English language and linguistics at Newcastle University (UK). His research interests include English historical syntax, mechanisms of linguistic change, the syntax and semantics of imperative clauses, and Bengali linguistics.

Contents: Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade/Wim van der Wurff: Papers from 3LModE: an introduction - Joan C. Beal: Three hundred years of prescriptivism (and counting) - Robin Straaijer: Deontic and epistemic modals as indicators of prescriptive and descriptive language in the grammars by Joseph Priestley and Robert Lowth - Raymond Hickey: «Telling people how to speak»: rhetorical grammars and pronouncing dictionaries - Carol Percy: Periodical reviews and the rise of prescriptivism: the Monthly (1749-1844) and Critical Review (1756-1817) in the eighteenth century - María Esther Rodríguez-Gil/Nuria Yáñez-Bouza: The ECEG-database: a bio-bibliographical approach to the study of eighteenth-century English grammars - Alicia Rodríguez-Álvarez: «With a concise historical account of the language»: outlines of the history of English in eighteenth-century dictionaries - Charlotte Brewer: The Oxford English Dictionary's treatment of female-authored sources of the eighteenth century - Lynda Mugglestone: Living history: Andrew Clark, the OED and the language of the First World War - Manfred Markus: Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary and its sources - Daniela Cesiri: The Irish contribution to the English language during the Late Modern period - Günter Rohdenburg: Grammatical divergence between British and American English in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - Svenja Kranich: Interpretative progressives in Late Modern English - Froukje Henstra: The problem of small numbers: methodological issues in social network analysis - Lyda Fens-de Zeeuw: Plain speech in Lindley Murray's letters: peculiar or polite? - Tony Fairman: She has four and big agane: ellipses and prostheses in mechanically-schooled writing in England, 1795-1834.