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Approaches to Middle English

Variation, Contact and Change

by Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre (Volume editor) Javier Calle-Martín (Volume editor)
©2015 Edited Collection 259 Pages

Summary

This volume contains a selection of papers presented at the 8th International Conference of Middle English, held in Spain at the University of Murcia in 2013. The contributions embrace a variety of research topics and approaches, with a particular interest in multilingualism, multidialectalism and language contact in medieval England, together with other more linguistically-oriented approaches on the phonology, syntax, morphology, semantics and pragmatics of Middle English. The volume gives a specialized stance on various aspects of the Middle English language and reveals how the interdisciplinary confluence of different approaches can shed light on manifold evidences of variation, contact and change in the period.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the Editors
  • About the Book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Contents
  • Introduction: J. Camilo Conde-Silvestre and Javier Calle-Martin
  • Part 1: Languages in contact and variation in Middle English, multilingualism and multidialectism
  • Language contact and code-switching in multilingual late medieval England: Herbert Schendl
  • On medieval wills and the rise of written monolingual English: Laura Wright
  • Que ma langue lor est salvaige. The status of French in medieval England: An attitude study: Melanie Borchers
  • The competition between purveyen and providen in late Middle English: Rafał Molencki
  • Middle English voiced fricatives and the argument from borrowing: Raymond Hickey
  • Radical word order change by substratal causation: English versus German: Theo Vennemann
  • Late medieval dialectal and obsolescent spellings in the early sixteenth-century editions of the Kalender of Shepherdes: Hanna Rutkowska
  • Two Middle English texts in the light of the Málaga POS Tagger of Middle English: Laura Esteban-Segura
  • Part 2: Middle English morphology and syntax
  • s-Pluralisation in early Middle English and word frequency: Ryuichi Hotta
  • Final -e in Gower’s and Chaucer’s monosyllabic premodifying adjectives. A grammatical/metrical analysis: Gyöngyi Werthmüller
  • On the V2-type that disappears in ME: María Francisca Buys and Concha Castillo
  • Part 3: Middle English semantics and pragmatics
  • The status of may in Middle English medical writing. Evidence from Middle English Medical Texts and the Málaga Corpus of Late Middle English Scientific Prose: Francisco Alonso-Almeida, Maureen Mulligan, Elena Quintana-Toledo
  • There are wenches and sluts but no traces of cats or bats: On characteristics of the Middle English conceptualisation patterns within the conceptual category Fallen Woman: Božena Duda
  • Spatio-temporal systems in A Treatise on the Astrolabe: Minako Nakayasu
  • Series Index

Introduction

Middle English – of all periods of the history of this language – is often characterized as the epitome of linguistic contact, variation and change: aspects which can be noticed and researched at their best in materials from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. This is, obviously, a gross simplification. Indeed, one of the lessons of historical linguistics is that the phenomena of variation, change and –to a lesser extent – contact are inherent properties of languages, in whatever stage they are considered. Notwithstanding this assumption, the fact is that Middle English is often seen as the ‘transitional’ period par excellence –as the label ‘Middle’ suggests – characterized by long-standing situations of contact, with effects upon all linguistic systems, and accompanied by drastic and radical changes in grammar, from the ‘synthetic-like’ structure of Old English to more ‘analytic’ ones in the Middle and Modern periods. A corollary often touches on the existence of extensive diatopic variation, which has often resulted in references to a ‘chaotic’ dialectal situation. It is true that these postulates are not incorrect, but in the wider context of the history of English they can also be seen at work earlier and later: Old English itself can be qualified as ‘transitional’, contact is as extensive in Modern English as it was in Middle English, and radical changes have been at work at all times.

These truisms do not imply that studying these ‘universal’ facets of language –variation, contact and change – is unnecessary for Middle English. On the contrary, they keep attracting the attention of scholars who devote in-depth research to particular aspects of the period. As a matter of fact, methodological advancements in historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, pragmatics and discourse analysis, as well as the application of well-established tenets from the fields of philology, phonology, syntax and morphology nowadays guarantee that linguistic discussions of Middle English at large are qualified and refined. A most outstanding development, in this sense, is the resource to corpus linguistics: studies on Middle English based on searchable computerised corpora –both publicly-available and designed ad hoc – are now common, and research based on them has gained in reliability and empirical ease.

With this purpose the Eighth International Conference on Middle English (ICOME) was held at the University of Murcia on 2–4 May, 2013. Nearly forty speakers (including four keynote ones) participated in the conference, from a wide-range of countries: Austria, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Norway, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, United Kingdom and the United States of America. Fourteen post-conference papers –revised and ← 7 | 8 → extended – are included in this volume. As such, they are thematically gathered into three sections: (1) Languages in contact and variation in Middle English, multilingualism and multidialectalism, (2) Middle English morphology and syntax and (3) Middle English semantics and pragmatics.

Contact in Middle English and contact-induced language changes are the subjects of the first part. The first paper in this group is “Language contact and code-switching in multilingual late medieval England” by Herbert Schendl. This is a deep methodological analysis of the functions of code-switching as a corollary to the multilingual situation in Middle English, where Medieval Latin, Anglo-Norman French and English (together with Scandinavian and Celtic speakers) coexisted. The author does not elude controversial issues, like the connections of switching to borrowing, which, in his view, would ensure that this process could have functioned as a mechanism of lexical change in medieval times. The question of multilingualism is also addressed by Laura Wright in “On medieval wills and the rise of written monolingual English”. She examines the use of written Medieval Latin, Anglo-Norman French and Middle English in wills –as a prototypical ‘personal’ text-type – and traces the use of one language or another in the different sections of a collection of documents from the late fourteenth to the late fifteenth century. She also tackles diachronically the ‘reestablishment’ of English in these texts, for which the business mixed-language system especially prevalent in London cannot be dissociated.

Attitudes towards French in Middle English is the subject of Melanie Borchers’ “Que ma langue lorest salvaige. The status of French in medieval England: An attitude study”. By looking at text-witnesses in both French and English, she is able to show that Anglo-French remained an intact language long after the thirteenth century –when it was already criticised extensively –, and that this variety needs to be placed within the dialect continuum of medieval French. This may help to understand that it was as ‘degenerate’ as any other continental dialect, with the exception of the prestigious French of Paris, at a time when linguistic attitudes and prejudices were developing anew. Specific borrowings from Latin and French in Middle English are studied by Rafał Molencki in “The competition between purveyen and providen in late Middle English”. The ups and downs of these two lexical items are traced through a wide selection of examples. All possible aspects affecting the final establishment of providen to the detriment of purveyen are discussed, from etymology, to derivational procesess, through phonetic and manuscript variation.

Intensity of contact in Middle English is often held responsible for changes in subsystems other than the lexico-semantical one. A case in point is phonology, with a number of new Middle English phonemes, like the diphthong /oi/ or the ← 8 | 9 → voiced fricatives /v-/ and /z-/, claimed to have found their way into English –or to have changed their early allophonic status – as a result of borrowing. The case of the voiced fricatives is studied by Raymond Hickey in his contribution to the volume: “Middle English voiced fricatives and the argument from borrowing”. He offers a balanced account of the possible reasons behind their phonemicisation, which, in addition to indirect French influence –via borrowings – also explores the continual development of the sound system from late Old English into Middle English. Word order change in Middle English is most often posited to be the result of internal language developments (see the paper by Buys and Castillo in this volume, below). However, Theo Vennemann in “Radical word order change by substratal causation. English versus German” explores the possibility that contact may have also been behind the typological change from the Old English verb-second structure (SVO) into the Middle English main pattern SVO. The author analyses similar radical changes in a number of Indoeuropean and non-Indoeuropean languages, where situations of intense contact involving the shift from one language system to the other are responsible for syntactic changes, and finds support for his thesis that substratal influence from Insular Celtic may be behind this process in the transition from Old to Middle English.

Multidialectalism in late Middle English and early Modern English is the subject of Hanna Rutkowska’s “Late medieval dialectal and obsolescent spellings in the early sixteenth-century editions of the Kalender of Shepherdes”. This is a diachronic analysis of the progress of standardisation in the sixteenth century based on the comparison of the spellings of some key Middle English words in editions of the popular Kalender of Shepherdes ranging from 1503 to 1656. In addition to progress in time, the author is able to trace also the greater resistance of some Middle English types over others, as well as the possible influence of the spelling practices current in some printing houses or even that of the copy text followed by the compositors.

Finally, within this section, Laura Esteban indirectly tackles the issue of text-type in her “Two Middle English texts in the light of the Málaga POS tagger of Middle English”. A fifteenth century medical treatise is here compared to a tract on astrology and cosmology, with the special aim of testing the pros and the cons of a tagging programme for Middle English developed at Málaga. This computational tool has proved very useful for the part-of-speech annotation of other fifteenth-century texts and manuscripts, but testing it against different (but complementary) text-types allows the author to notice that there are still challenges to be overcome. ← 9 | 10 →

Three papers in this selection touch on morphological and syntactic change in Middle English from different standpoints. Ryuichi Hotta deals with the lexical diffusion of the –s plural (< OE –as) as attested both in one ad-hoc built corpus and in the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME). The aim of “–s Pluralisation in early Middle English and word frequency” is to study the possible correlation between the diffusion of this morpheme and the frequency of individual nouns, by noticing whether it was high-frequency or low-frequency that statistically led the pattern. At the crossroads of metrics, morphology and syntax is Gyöngyi Werthmüller’s paper “Final –e in Gower’s and Chaucer’s monosyllabic premodifying adjectives. A grammatical/metrical analysis”. On the basis of a large corpus based on Gower’s Confessio Amantis (c. 1390) and Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (c. 1380–1400), the author offers a complete typology of the behaviour of final –e in monosyllabic premodifying adjectives, noticing all possible constraints, from etymological and metrical to purely functional ones. The last paper in this section is concerned with syntactical change. In “On the V2 type that disappears in Middle English” Mª Francisca Buys and Concha Castillo deal with the word order shift from an Old English SOV pattern to the Middle English SVO –the same issue Theo Vennemann addresses in his paper (above). The phenomenon is here studied within a generative theoretical framework, which specifically allows the authors to highlight those syntactic factors that contribute to the demise of the V2 structure.

A final bunch of papers deal with semantic and pragmatic aspects in Middle English. The contribution by Francisco Alonso-Almeida, Maureen Mulligan and Elena Quintana-Toledo deals with the changing semantic and pragmatic meanings of the verb may in late Middle English. In their joint paper “The status of may in Middle English medical writing. Evidence from Middle English Medical Texts and the Málaga Corpus of late Middle English Scientific Prose”, they analyse the contexts where may appears in medical texts extracted from these corpora and the shifts of meaning that can be derived from them. Special emphasis is given to the identification of earlier ‘evidential’ functions of may possibly derived from intersubjective, rather than subjective, uses. A cognitive framework encompasses the paper by Božena Duda, “There are wenches and sluts but no traces of cats or bats. On characteristics of the Middle English conceptualisation patterns within the conceptual category FALLEN WOMAN”. She traces the diachronic mechanisms involved in the formation of synonyms for prostitute along the history of English, and notices the growth in productivity of zoosemic metaphors in Modern and Present-Day English, in contrast to Middle English when they were virtually non-existent. The author tries to find possible reasons for this onomasiological ← 10 | 11 → absence. The last paper in this collection is Minako Nakayasu’s “Spatio-temporal systems in A Treatise on the Astrolabe”. This is a complete analysis of Chaucer’s text (c.1392), with special attention given to the synchronic spatio-temporal systems it deploys. Following the methods of historical pragmatics and disourse analysis, a quantitative analysis reveals the frequency of expressions for both ‘proximal’ or ‘distal’ deixis and their interrelation in discourse.

All in all, these papers give a deeply specialized stance on a diversity of aspects of Middle English language, showing how the interdisciplinary confluence of different approaches can shed light on manifold evidences of variation, contact and change in the period. We, as editors, are very grateful to all the authors for their contributions and specially for patiently answering all our queries and quickly forwarding all revisions required. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions and amendments. The University of Murcia and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (research project FFI2011-26492) are hereby gratefully acknowledged for partially funding the organisation of the Eighth International Conference on Middle English. Our gratitude also extends to Professor Jacek Fisiak, editor of the series, as well as to Fundación Séneca (The Institute for Science and Technology of Murcia) and the Department of English, French and German Philology at the University of Málaga for the generous support given to the publication of this volume.

J. Camilo Conde-Silvestre (University of Murcia)
Javier Calle-Martín (University of Málaga)
Murcia – Málaga, November 2014

← 11 | 12 → ← 12 | 13 →

Details

Pages
259
Year
2015
ISBN (PDF)
9783653049022
ISBN (ePUB)
9783653980004
ISBN (MOBI)
9783653979992
ISBN (Hardcover)
9783631655153
DOI
10.3726/978-3-653-04902-2
Language
English
Publication date
2015 (May)
Keywords
Language contact Multilingualism Language variation
Published
Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Wien, 2015. 259 pp., 8 b/w fig., 45 tables

Biographical notes

Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre (Volume editor) Javier Calle-Martín (Volume editor)

Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre is professor at the University of Murcia (Spain). He works on a variety of topics in historical sociolinguistics, especially on the social and geographical diffusion of late Middle English and on medieval English dialects and standardisation. Javier Calle-Martín is senior lecturer at the University of Málaga (Spain). His research interests include historical linguistics and manuscript studies, focusing on early English documents.

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