Social networks and historical sociolinguistics

"The author analyzes, from a historical sociolinguistic point of view, selected domains of morphosyntactic variation in a 250,000 word collection of the Middle English Paston Letters (1421-1503). While the author aims at a balanced integration of different approaches in sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, typology, and language change, the main focus is on social network theory and the role of the linguistic individual in the formation and change of linguistic structures."--Jacket.