Diachronic Perspectives on Domain-Specific English

The Editors : Marina Dossena is Professor of English Language at the University of Bergamo. Her research interests focus on the features and origins of British varieties of English and the history of specialized discourse. Recent publications include Methods and Data in English Historical Dialectology, co-edited with Roger Lass (2004), Business and Official Correspondence : Historical Investigations, co-edited with Susan Fitzmaurice (2006) and Scotticisms in Grammar and Vocabulary (2005).
Irma Taavitsainen is Professor of English Philology and Director of the Department of English, University of Helsinki, and Deputy Director of the Research Unit for Variation, Contact and Change in English at the Universities of Helsinki and Jyväskylä. Her research interests cover historical pragmatics, development of specialized discourse, and register and genre studies. She is the co-editor of the Journal of Historical Pragmatics.
Her recent publications include an electronic corpus Middle English Medical Texts (co-compiled with Päivi Pahta and Martti Mäkinen, 2005), Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English 1375-1500 (co-edited with Päivi Pahta, 2004), and Dialogic Language Use : Address in Focus (co-edited with Juhani Härmä and Jarmo Korhonen, 2006).