The contributions to this volume smoothly blend synchronic theory and diachronic investigations, and thus they offer novel observations about the historical evolution of the English language from various theoretical angles (minimalist theory, formal semantics, recent theories on productivity, various discourse models, etc.). By offering new vantage points and improved frameworks for the study of Present-Day English the papers also provide solutions to problems that have been persistently present in the synchronic analysis of English. The papers are arranged around four thematic headings. The first part discusses patterns and models of replacement; the second has syntactic and semantic variation in its focus. The third part presents case studies of the historical development of adverbials and particles. The last part investigates functional and regional variation in discourse and vocabulary. The 15 peer-reviewed, revised papers were originally presented at the 16th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics held in August 2010 in Pecs, Hungary.The volume would appeal to linguists interested in the following areas of linguistic research: language change, grammatical theory, language variation, semantic change, diachronic discourse analysis, translation studies, and corpus-based study of English.