The Oxford Handbook of the History of English - Paperbackby Terttu Nevalainen (Editor), Elizabeth Closs Traugott (Editor) The availability of large electronic corpora has caused major shifts in linguistic research, including the ability to analyze much more data than ever before, and to perform micro analyses of linguistic structures across languages. This has historical linguists to rethink many standard assumptions about language history, and methods and approaches that are relevant to the study of it.