This is a volume of selected papers presented at the International Conference on Historical English Word-Formation and Semantics held in Warsaw in 2011. The conference was attended by scholars from ten countries. Their papers covered a wide range of topics concerning the area of word formation and semantics in Old and Middle English.

Jacek Fisiak is a retired professor and head of the School of English at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań (Poland), and currently head of the School of English at the Warsaw Division of the University of Social Sciences (Społeczna Akademia Nauk) in Łódź. He has published widely in the area of English linguistics including the history of English, Old and Middle English and historical dialectology on both sides of the Atlantic. Magdalena Bator received her PhD from Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań in 2008. Currently she is a lecturer at the School of English at the University of Social Sciences in Warsaw. Her research interests focus on various aspects of English historical linguistics, in particular historical semantics.

Contents: Dieter Kastovsky: English prefixation: A historical sketch – D. Gary Miller: On the history and analysis of V-P nouns – Grzegorz A. Kleparski: Historical semantics: A sketch on new categories and types of semantic change – Hans Sauer: Reginald Pecock and his vocabulary: A preliminary sketch – Magdalena Bator: Verbs of cooking in Middle English: , and – Michael Bilynsky: Unanalysable verb-related coinages as reflected in the OED textual prototypes – Olga Chupryna: Old English ‘time’: Metaphor and metonymy in word and text – Gaye Çinkiliç/Helmut Weiß: Historical word formation in German. On the interpretation of N-N compounds – Ewa Ciszek: Middle English decline of the Old English word : A case study of the two manuscripts of – Xavier Dekeyser: Loss of the prototypical meaning related to lexical borrowing. The battle of (near) synonyms: A case study – Bożena Duda: From to : On etymology and the word-formation processes behind the historical lexical representations in the category FALLEN WOMAN in English – Radosław Dylewski: The first years of . What else can early American newspapers and the tell us about its early meanings and usages? – Camiel Hamans: Historical word-formation caught in the present – changes in modern usage – Robert Kiełtyka: and : On the categorization of verbal zoosemy – Małgorzata Kłos: Old English poetic diction and the language of death: Circumlocutory terms denoting the sense ‘die’ in Anglo-Saxon poetry – Beata Kopecka: Whatever the weather - on semantic change and word-formation processes – Anya Kursova: Folk-etymologies: On the way to improving naturalness – Olivier Simonin: The semantics of noun postmodifying -infinitives in Old English – Marta Sylwanowicz: Names of medicines in Early Modern English medical texts (1500-1700) – Agnieska Wawrzyniak: Metaphors of darkness in – Jerzy Wełna: The regional aspects of the distribution of nouns in - in Middle English.