Verbs of Speaking and the Linguistic Expression of Communication in the History of English

English verbs of speaking have been affected by profound and intriguing changes, in particular between Old and Middle English. These changes crucially involve the loss of the verb cweþan and its replacement by say , which remains the most common verb of speaking to this day. The present study provides an exhaustive corpus-based, cross-period, and multi-dimensional appraisal of verbs of speaking used as part of the linguistic expression of communication in the history of English situated within a