Dedicated to morphosyntactic variation in the late Middle English Paston letters, this book comprises seven chapters, notes, and author and subject indexes. The introductory chapter gives a clear picture of the research goals as well as the book's structure. Analyzing three central linguistic variables – third person plural pronouns, relativization patterns, and light verb constructions – Bergs explains why he has chosen to study variation in the Paston letters using a sociohistorical approach and social network theory. Presenting research material and his object of investigation in chapter 2, the author introduces the notion of historical sociolinguistics. Taking into account extralinguistic evidence, data, and theories, historical sociolinguistics must be viewed as an independent discipline, separate from present-day sociolinguistics and traditional historical linguistics. The third chapter considers ideas, principles, and methods underlying and constituting social network analysis. Giving a comprehensive theoretical background related to the above-mentioned issues, Bergs develops a network for the Paston family from both egocentric and sociocentric perspectives. A detailed description of the corpus used in the study is also presented. According to Bergs, the question of authorship does not play such an important role in morphosyntactic variables as in phonological or graphological ones.

Chapter 4 shows the considerable change of personal pronouns in Middle and Early Modern English and discusses intralinguistic factors that may have played a role in the development of the th-pronouns. The factors of animacy and gender of the referent, stress, phonetic environment, syntactic position, and syntactic function are evaluated. The corpus reveals that the th-pronouns spread from subject to possessive to object forms. Chapter 5 investigates the formation of relative clauses on the level of the language community, of individual social groups, and of individual speakers. Concentrating mainly on the relativizers that, which, who, whose and whom, Bergs demonstrates an emerging and disappearing range of patterns. The introduction of the wh-forms can be divided into (at least) two different main sections: (i) the landslide-like spread of which at the expense of that deriving from generational analysis, and (ii) the gradual and much more subtle introduction of the who, whose, whom forms. The sixth chapter, “The light verb construction,” observes to what extent the use of light verb constructions corresponds to authors' individual lifestyles and participation in social networks.

Chapter 7, “Conclusion: A network perspective,” offers a comparative perspective on the different linguistic variables, individual speakers, and their network relations. It should be stressed that certain sociolinguistic patterns belong to whole groups, but others to some subgroups or only to an individual. Finding out that speakers with almost the same macro-sociolinguistic characteristics (e.g. age, gender, education, social class) sometimes differed dramatically in their language use, Bergs describes the role played by social networks. The study provides ample evidence that historical sociolinguistics is today a mature discipline making important contributions to linguistics alongside sociolinguistics and historical linguistics.