ABSTRACT
This chapter examines few present-day ongoing innovations in the central historical processes which have been our recurrent concern thus far. It would, of course, take all of a book of this size and more even to review the exciting and increasingly productive research being carried out at present into contemporary language change along a temporal axis. As in a great many general English language histories', our section dealing with materials from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will be considerably briefer than the rest. It is of course important to bear in mind that, in our brief description of the English vowel shift as it occured in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and stressed the fact that its application was not infrequently asymmetrical. Harris' evidence from contemporary Belfast usage also points to the possibility that might be premature in assuming that historical phonological mergers took place even to the more limited extent people have been suggesting.
