The book contains nine papers on linguistic and socio-linguistic aspects of the use and historical development of designations of women, men and children in English. A recurrent theme of the volume is that the study of concepts denoting human beings, of the lexical encodings of concepts like 'man' and 'woman' and their paradigmatic alternatives in time and over time, must be considered a major issue in our studies of human language.
Some papers present onomasiological analyses of semantic change and of terms from various periods.
A theoretical approach based on the idea of semantic frames or scenarios is also presented. Other topics dealt with are male and female terms in Jane Austen's letters and novels, terms for 'male homosexual' in English, invectives and gender, idioms denoting persons, and male and female terms in Old English, in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and in 18th century English novels.