THE EARLY MODERN ENGLISH PERIOD. Periods of English. Shakespeare-our contemporary. Evolution and standardization. SUMMARY. Sources for the study of early modern English. Range of evidence. Comments on varieties of English. EARLY GRAMMARS. Texts and genres. Corpus resources. Towards a standard language. MIDDLE ENGLISH LEGACY. Fixing the form: spelling standardization. Elaborating the functions: borrowing and codification. Old words and loan words. CONTINUITY AND CHANGE. Borrowing. Borrowing. Word-formation and semantic change. WORD-FORMATION. Semantic change. Nouns and pronouns. Word classes. NOUNS. Pronouns. Verbs, adjectives and adverbs. Verbs. ADJECTIVES AND ADVERBS. Syntactic structures. Larger structures. Noun phrases. VERB PHRASES. Changing syntactic patterns. Changing pronunciation. Surprising and confusing? Some general features. DEVELOPMENTS IN THE VOWEL SYSTEM. Developments in the consonant system. Stress and prosody. Language in the community. WIDENING PERSPECTIVES. Printing and literacy. Social variation. Urbanization and dialect leveling. EXPANSIÓN OF ENGLISH.