The Volume contains written versions of some contributions to the Fifth International Conference on Middle English (ICOME 5), held at the University of Naples in 2005. Most of the papers concentrate on individual aspects of grammar and semantics, although some focus on dialectal fragmentation, and others adopt a pragmatic perspective. There is still a lot to be done in the study of the Middle English lexicon, in the same way as there are many aspects of grammar that have not been fully studied yet. The volume aims at providing contributions that can further the knowledge of these subfields of English historical linguistics, through state-of-the-art case studies that also exploit all modern resources such as computerised corpora and electronically tagged texts.