Medieval English Syntax

The list of publications which, as previously noted, appears at the end of this volume is a truly remarkable record of accomplishments, reflecting many long hours spent in archives and research collections around the world (but particularly in Europe) and a profound knowledge of English syntax from reading and studying the relevant corpora and, it seems, every single article previously published on these questions. Professor Ogura’s scholarship is impeccable. This is hardly a surprise to anyone who has met her at a conference. If you lose a program or need a quick reference or are experiencing stage fright, Michiko is the person to approach. She has her program at her fingertips, always has references ready for the asking, and offers a gentle but pragmatic push in the door as needed. She does all this while always being neat as a pin, ready for any vagary of the weather, calm and unflappable. A good sense of Professor Ogura is provided here by the opening reminiscence of her prepared by her longtime friend Liliana Sikorska. Professor Sikorska works through a series of snapshots of Michiko Ogura over the years, from the first conference where they met to the most recent meeting of the International Association of University Professors in Poznań, Poland. Using Susan Sontag’s deliberations on the ephemerality of images, she describes photographs which delineate her interactions with Professor Ogura, demonstrating the deepening of their friendship and connection as the years went by.

Magdalena Bator investigates the structure of noun phrases in culinary recipes from the end of the fourteenth century to the end of the fifteenth; she finds that the positions of both nouns and adjectives as modifiers shift over time as the recipes move farther away from their French and Anglo-Norman forebears. She has developed a large corpus, and is continuing to expand it to examine the vernacular developments of these texts. In the next paper Daniel Donoghue also investigates a syntactic shift through time, but in this case he considers OE verse and its use of periphrastic verbal constructions – specifically the bracketing pattern and the verbal-auxiliary half-line – as compared to the same two kinds of periphrastic verbal constructions in Lawman’s Brut. As in some of his earlier work, Donoghue is particularly interested in the role of verbal auxiliaries in these constructions, and the size of his corpus (like that of Bator) allows him to draw significant conclusions about the way the highly integrated OE structure of meter and syntax changed in some respects in early ME, but also maintained the middle role of the auxiliary verb, not normally stressed but available to be promoted to a stressed element at need.

Michio Hosaka and Tomofumi Akiha work together on an article that reflects one of Professor Ogura’s principal concerns in her published work, the use of an auxiliary with past participles in OE syntax. Specifically they consider the verb habban, one of the most complicated entries in Professor Healey’s beloved DOE. Here the focus is habban in combination with past participles of intransitive verbs, using the York-Toronto-Helsinki Corpus (HC) to investigate the early symptoms of the expansion of the have-perfect. Hosaka and Akiha might be the first in the volume to use this corpus, but it is a frequent contributor to the papers here, offering an important diachronic perspective that nicely meshes with the many arguments here that focus (as Hill and Healey do) on the Corpus available through the DOE. The paper ranges widely, using a cross-linguistic perspective to start, but then comparing have to be constructions in order to highlight the growing agency of have. Their joint article signals many more to come from both scholars. Taro Ishiguro offers what on the face of it is a more specific study of a crux in the two copies of the vernacular translation of Felix’s Life of St Guthlac but really is a consideration of the little-discussed phenomenon of expletive negation in OE and ME more generally.

Tadashi Kotake returns to questions of word order, focusing on a set of texts particularly beloved by Professor Ogura, and considers the inserted pronominal subjects that scribes and compilers put in OE interlinear glosses. The paper investigates these pronominal subjects, absent in the Latin, for their placement in the vernacular, often to make syntactic sense in OE, in such texts as the glossed psalters, the Rushworth Gospels, the Liber scintillarum, and the OE gloss to the Benedictine Rule. Many of these are earlier OE texts, contrasting to the approach by Yoshitaka Kozuka, who addresses an issue of case in late OE, in which the genitive functions as an object. The paper considers the genitive as an elliptical or absolute genitive, investigating a variety of examples from a range of verbs and texts in order to discover the degrees of transitivity that encode the use of the genitive in particular situations. Rafał Molencki shifts the focus even later, into five manuscripts of the fourteenth-century Cursor Mundi, and the varying use of the pluperfect in these texts. Like many other contributions to this volume, the paper deals with an insufficiently-studied but important text, one that merits attention not just for its syntactic variation but for how the different manuscripts demonstrate a changing language and changing thought patterns. The notion of sequence of tenses was developing here, and this paper demonstrates how thoroughly grammaticalized this periphrastic tense form was in the fourteenth century.

Jane Roberts, like Donoghue, focuses on early ME with particular interest in the Brut, notably the Caligula text. Her concern is the shift from synthetic towards analytic structuring of syntax, and she considers several kinds of syntactic situations to demonstrate this shift. These include the loss of the possessive dative of the mannum to helpe “as a help to humans” variety in favor of the inflected infinitive after to, the growth of the to + infinitive pattern, and many other situations with to and verbs or verbals. The result is significant difficulty in grammatical categorization with respect to the poem, as it navigates a complex intersection of syntax and meter in the post-OE period. Like Orchard, Hans Sauer takes us also to binomials, in this case specifically in John Gower’s version of the Apollonius legend in his Confessio Amantis. His analysis is capacious, identifying all the relevant factors affecting the use of binomials in this text, their structure and metrical patterning, their semantic fields and kinds of usage. Unusually, he is able to conclude that most binomials were involved metrically, but in rhyme – not the alliteration considered in many other papers here.

Jun Terasawa returns us to the world of alliteration, with a study of a crux in the OE poem Judith, specifically the occurrence of wundenlocc at line 325. He studies words for women’s hairstyles in OE, including also bundenheord, and their occurrences in various poems, notably riddles. He then ranges into a broader analysis which results in a new interpretation of this word because of syntactic structure of this section of the poem. Jane Toswell takes on one of the earliest grammars of OE, that of Joseph Gwilt in 1829, and considers his various attempts at presenting OE verbs in that volume. Hideki Watanabe concludes the volume with a detailed consideration of one of the most well-known syntactic constructions in Beowulf, the oft-repeated praise formula þæt wæs god cyning. Watanabe shakes out three instances of this eulogy in the poem, considering their current presentation in various editions and analyses (as did Terasawa for his analysis) as both formula and exclamation, and then turning to the use of this formula on some sixty occasions in OE poems. The formula is often an end-point, a concluding remark, but ambiguity continues to swirl about the phrase, although Watanabe notes in conclusion that the phrase often seems to have the valence of reported speech, or possibly reported speech as merged into the poet’s own assessment.