Abstract
The chapter is divided into two thematic parts, focusing on historiography and methodology, respectively, and linked by a survey of functions of punctuation {punctuation} over time. The historiographical part offers a discussion on principles of the written language, the fundamental representational principles and functional designs in the history of English orthography, and the system and status of Present-Day English orthography {orthography, principles} in terms of the main historical lines seen from structural viewpoints as well as sociolinguistic ones.
The emphasis in the methodological part is on the development of new approaches and methodologies based on the expanding digitization of historical texts that have grown in interdisciplinary ways out of the traditional philological paradigm - research primarily using large digital datasets and corpus-driven {corpora} methodologies as well as exploring the data in innovative ways to chart sociolinguistic networks.