Periphrases in Medieval English

| 9 →

Preface

From about 1980 onwards many books and articles have been published on Old and Middle English syntax, as Mitchell’s Old English Syntax is a representative. Owing to the development of technological devices, the making of web corpora has accelerated the use of the great amount of data in this field, and the limited number of medieval texts has become a strong point of digitalising the data. Many early manuscripts have been made available on the screen, which has enliven the discussion on the original texts without turning pages by our own hands. The most striking change has occurred in dictionaries. The 3^rd edition of the Oxford English Dictionary is now on the website and the data can be updated whenever necessary; the difference between the paper version of the 2^nd edition of OED and the digitalised OED3 is now quite noticeable.

I started writing on Old English syntax from 1974 and enjoyed finding examples of a particular construction which was earlier than the first quotation in OED. But now almost all my findings are cited clearly in OED3, MED or DOE Web Corpus. Though the completion of DOE as a dictionary is unpredictable at this stage, we have the whole remaining data of Old English texts based on, and updated constantly, the Microfiche Concordance preceding this computer era. As both linguists and philologists have started using the DOE, OED3 and MED data, citations from each specific edition is now used only in discussions or critical comments as variant readings. We should be mindful of looking at these alternative readings or possible choices, without ignoring them. In this monograph I shall give the dictionary data first so that everyone may notice what dictionaries say admitting the results of investigations in recent years, and then add past and present opinions of studies in this field. The important thing, I think, is to show the tendency found in the history of English — the tendency of using various periphrastic constructions throughout the language history so as to make the records, translations, and literary works to be readable, as well as people make the speech communicative. Old English data is left for us in the process of making the language periphrastic, i.e. the periphrastic tendency had already started, and it became obvious in the transitional ← 9 | 10 → period, even though the data was scarce, because we find the syntactic shift from Anglo-Saxon to ‘English’, accelerated by the morphological change. The tendency of using periphrases has continued even after the medieval period, which gives a variety of expressions in the English language.

Acknowledgements are due to the librarians of the British Library, London, Bodleian library, Oxford, and Parker Library and University Library, Cambridge, for letting me investigate manuscripts of the Gospels: MSS Auct.D.2.19, Bodley 441, Corpus Christi College Cambridge 140, Cotton Neor D.iv, Cotton Otho c.i. (vol.1), Eng.B.b.C.2, Hatton 38, and Royal I.A xiv. My studies on medieval English for these thirty years or so have been done by the generous grants from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the British Council and the British Academy.

Summer 2017

| 11 →

Table of Abbreviations

Abbreviated titles of the texts examined are shown in Select Bibliography.