The History of English: Volume 3 Middle English 9783110525328, 9783110522761

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Laurel J. Brinton and Alexander Bergs (Eds.) The History of English Volume 3

The History of English Volume 3: Middle English Edited by Laurel J. Brinton and Alexander Bergs

MOUTON

ISBN 978-3-11-052276-1 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-052532-8 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-052296-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at: http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Maisna/iStock/Thinkstock Typesetting: jürgen ullrich typosatz, Nördlingen Printing: CPI Books GmbH; Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Table of Contents Abbreviations

VII

Laurel J. Brinton and Alexander Bergs Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Jeremy J. Smith Chapter 2: Middle English: Overview Nikolaus Ritt Chapter 3: Phonology

29

Jerzy Wełna Chapter 4: Morphology Jeremy J. Smith Chapter 5: Syntax

8

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Louise Sylvester Chapter 6: Semantics and Lexicon

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Elizabeth Closs Traugott Chapter 7: Pragmatics and Discourse Keith Williamson Chapter 8: Dialects

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Herbert Schendl Chapter 9: Language Contact: Multilingualism Janne Skaffari Chapter 10: Language Contact: French Ursula Schaefer Chapter 11: Standardization

184

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David M. Trotter Chapter 12: Middle English Creolization

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165

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Table of Contents

Alexander Bergs Chapter 13: Sociolinguistics Leslie K. Arnovick Chapter 14: Literary Language

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Simon Horobin Chapter 15: The Language of Chaucer Index

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Abbreviations ACC ACT ADJ ADV

AN Angl. AUX

C COMPR DAT DEM DU

EModE EWSax. FEM

Fr. GEN

Ger. Gk. Go. Grmc. IE IMP IND INF INFL INSTR

Kent. LAEME LALME Lt. LModE LWSax. MASC

ME MED ModE NEG

accusative case active adjective adverb Anglo-Norman Anglian auxiliary consonant comparative dative case demonstrative dual Early Modern English Early West Saxon feminine French genitive case German Greek Gothic Germanic Indo-European imperative indicative infinitive inflected instrumental case Kentish A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English Latin Late Modern English Late West Saxon masculine Middle English Middle English Dictionary Modern English negative

DOI 10.1515/9783110525328-203

VIII

Abbreviations

WGrmc. WSax.

neuter noun nominative case noun phrase object objective case Old English Oxford English Dictionary Old French Old High German Old Norse person passive past tense Present-day English Proto-Germanic Proto-Indo-European plural preposition pronoun participle present tense preterit subject singular subjunctive mood superlative subject-object-verb word order subject-verb-object word order tense verb verb second vowel verb-object word order verb phrase West Germanic West Saxon

>
finde) and plural forms (wenten > went). In strong past participles (e.g. bundon > bounde, but: broken), they were sporadic, and even rarer among full lexical words (e.g. mæʒden > maide). Other consonant reductions made voiceless fricatives voiced in the codas and, to a lesser extent, in the onsets of weak syllables. This affected the final /s/ in nominal plurals and genitives, but also the codas of grammatical morphs that normally wound up unstressed, e.g. was, his, as, with, or of. In the prosodically stronger onset position, voiceless /s/ and /f/ remained stable even in unstressed syllables, however, while /θ/ was voiced to /ð/ in this, these, those, they, them, etc. Glottal /h/ was deleted in onsets like those of hit > it, or hem > ’em (the 3P PL pronoun).

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4.2 Segments in strong positions While weak syllable reductions clearly reflect the effects of lexical word stress and rhythmically motivated backgrounding, unifying factors behind the developments that Middle English sounds underwent in other phonological environments are harder to detect. (For the segmental phonology of Middle English, see also Jordan 1934; Jones 1989: 94–190; Luick 1964 [1914–21]: 323–488; Lass 1992: 39– 83; or Mossé 1952.) Nevertheless, the following overview will attempt to impose some order and narrative coherence on the events. First, however, a brief overview of the Early ME phoneme inventory is given in Table 3.1. Table 3.1: Early Middle English vowel phonemes Short monophthongs Front

Back

/i/ /y/ sitten ‘sit’, fyllen ‘fill’ /e/ /ø/ setten ‘set’, heofon ( lauerd ‘lord’), /hr/ (hrydcʒ > ridge), or /hn/ (hnut > nut), and seems to have been unstable even when it was the only consonant in a stressed onset, as occasional spellings like algen ‘hallow’, ate ‘hate’, or reversed herðe ‘earth’ suggest. In codas, [x]/[ç] remained stable until the 15th century, when it came to be lost (plough, knight), or merged with /f/ (rough). Other consonants were also lost. Thus, /w/ disappeared in onset clusters like /sw/ (e.g. such < swylc, sword /sɔːrd/), /l/ sometimes in codas before other consonants (each < /æːltʃ/, such < swylc), and even sporadic precursors of /r/loss seem to have occurred (e.g. ass < ars). Furthermore, occasional metatheses like bird < bryd, horse < hros, or through < þurh suggest that /r/ was sometimes felt to belong to the vocalic syllable nucleus. Although obstruents were more resistant to weakening, they were not completely immune either. Thus, word final /mb/ and /ng/ clusters were simplified to /m/ and /ŋ/ as in comb, climb, or long, and intervocalic /d/ sometimes was weakened to /ð/, as in father (< fader) or weather (< weder).

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5 Summary This survey has necessarily been simplified and has left many details unreported. Yet, the thrust of its argument is likely to remain valid if enriched with more data, and if socioregional variability is taken more strongly into account: many properties of the Middle English sound system and its development can be related to the preference for rhythmic isochrony and to the fact that Middle English words had lexically fixed stress positions. The combination of these factors might explain the decay of quantity distinctions among consonants and vowels, the weakening processes affecting unstressed syllables, and also, albeit less directly, the emergence of new diphthongs. It is even tempting to speculate that also the general tendency of consonants to be weakened more strongly than vowels may be relatable to the requirements of rhythm: consonants are generally less flexible than vowels as far their phonetic duration is concerned, and isochronous rhythm obviously depends on such flexibility. Tempting though it is, this interpretation is clearly in need of further substantiation.

6 References Dresher, B. Elan and Aditi Lahiri. 1991. The Germanic foot: Metrical coherence in Old English. Linguistic Inquiry 22: 251–286. Dresher, B. Elan and Aditi Lahiri. 2015. Romance loanwords and stress shift in English: A quantitative approach. Talk presented at the Second Edinburgh Symposium on Historical Phonology, University of Edinburgh, 3–4 December 2015. http://homes.chass.utoronto. ca/~dresher/talks/Dresher-Lahiri-ESohPh_talk_pub.pdf; last accessed 9 March 2017. Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, Katarzyna. 2002. Beats-and-Binding Phonology. Frankfurt: Lang. Jordan, Richard. 1934. Handbuch der Englischen Grammatik. Heidelberg: Winter. (Rev. edn. by Charles Matthes, 1968.) Jones, Charles. 1989. A History of English Phonology. London: Longman. Kurath, Hans. 1978. The loss of long consonants and the rise of voiced fricatives in Middle English. Language 32: 435–445. Lass, Roger. 1992. Phonology and morphology. In: Norman Blake (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. II. 1066–1476, 23–155. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Luick, Karl. 1964 [1914–21]. Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache. Stuttgart: Tauchnitz. Minkova, Donka. 1982. The environment for Middle English Open Syllable Lengthening. Folia Linguistica Historica 3: 29–58. Minkova, Donka. 1991. The History of Final Vowels in English. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Minkova, Donka. 2006. Old and Middle English prosody. In: Ans van Kemenade and Bettelou Los (eds.), The Handbook of the History of English, 95–125. London: Blackwell.

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Mossé, Ferdinand. 1952. A Handbook of Middle English. James A. Walker (trans.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ritt, Nikolaus. 1994. Quantity Adjustment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stockwell, Robert P. 1986. Assessments of alternative explanations of the Middle English phenomenon of high vowel lowering when lengthened in the open syllable. In: Roger Eaton, Olga Fischer, Willem Koopman, and Frederike van der Leek (eds.), Papers from the fourth International Congress on English Historical Linguistics, 125–134. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Jerzy Wełna

Chapter 4: Morphology 1 2 3 4 5 6

Introduction 51 Nominal system 51 Verbal system 60 Remarks on word formation 70 Major problems in Middle English inflectional morphology References 73

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Abstract: The central part of the chapter contains a succinct account of ME morphology in the roughly four centuries following the Norman Conquest. Attention is focussed on inflectional morphology, especially on the gradual decay of inflectional paradigms which led to the disintegration of the system of grammatical markers. The most important morphological processes of the period include (1) the loss of the majority of oblique cases, generalization of the plural marker -s, and substitution of semantic for grammatical gender in nouns; (2) the loss of inflections and the initial stage of the spread of periphrastic comparison in adjectives; (3) the spread of the pronouns she, they, them, their; and (4) the loss of inflections, decay of the subjunctive mood, and substantial disintegration of the ablaut system in verbs (i.e. the shift from strong to weak). All these processes are viewed against the background of regional variation, with special reference to the dialects which contributed to the formation of the morphology of Standard English. Due attention is given to the impact of phonological factors on the morphological processes. The final sections contain a brief presentation of ME word-formation types, including influences from French in the post-Conquest period, and a critical review of more important contributions to the field of ME morphology, from the end of the 19th century to our times.

Jerzy Wełna: Warsaw (Poland)

DOI 10.1515/9783110525328-004

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1 Introduction Similar to the majority of ME grammars (Brunner 1963; Fisiak 1996) or handbooks of morphological change (Bammesberger 1975) attention is here focussed on inflectional morphology, whose evolution, apart from the processes of analogy, leveling, and perhaps contacts with Scandinavian, was to a large extent determined by phonological changes in English between c.1100–1500. Here belong especially the reduction of vowels in unstressed syllables, which triggered the loss of grammatical gender and leveling of the article forms, case markers in nouns (except genitive), adjectives, and, partially, pronouns. The most spectacular changes affected the adjective, which lost the categories of gender and case, also abandoning the distinction between the strong and weak declension. Verbs proved more resistant because, unlike nouns and adjectives, their inflectional markers contained obstruent consonants, i.e. sounds not subject to vocalization, as in PRES SG 2P -st, 3P -eþ (-eth) or PAST -ed, while the nasal sonorants -m (> -n) and -n, frequently found in the nominal endings, vocalized and were ultimately dropped. With reference to time division, ME inflectional morphology shows two distinct types. While texts from before 1300 still retained conservative features, including inflections (e.g. Poema Morale, which still shows DAT SG -e), the post1300 morphological system became disintegrated, with only verbs preserving inflections; cf. Brunner (1963: 1). In what follows the term “nominal” is used with reference to the declined parts of speech and to adverbs.

2 Nominal system The complex OE grammar of the nominals became simplified following the reduction of case/number distinctions in nouns, adjectives, and determiners. This was either due to phonological processes (reductions in unstressed syllables) or to analogical transfer of the strong markers (GEN -es, PL -as) from the masculine to feminine and neuter declensions. Nouns and adjectives lost DAT and ACC , while GEN SG and PL markers suffered leveling. These processes were accompanied by a gradual replacement of grammatical by semantic gender.

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2.1 Nouns Although the old classification of nouns based on the stem structure requires a revision (cf. Kastovsky 1988), for convenience in what follows, reference is made to the traditional classification. As said earlier, inflections in the period under investigation fall into two distinct types: (a) with inflectional markers considerably leveled but still retained (c.1100–1300) and (b) with such markers practically eliminated (1300–1500).

2.1.1 Number and case The system of the plural marking began to lose transparency even in Late Old English when endings tended towards leveling, so that PL -as of the masculine a-declension began to spread to minor declensions. The change seems to have originated in the North, where the weak ending -(e)n was dropped and the former strong endings -es (GEN SG ) and -as (PL ) began to be also attached to non-masculine nouns. Nominative/accusative singular. In the original a-/-ō-declensions NOM / ACC SG was usually unmarked, but word-final -e and -u are sometimes found: -e retained in ende ‘end’ (OE ende) but added in fowle (OE fugol) ‘fowl’, etc. Some former members of the wa- (MASC / NEUT ) and wō-declensions (FEM ), i.e. nouns ending with -u, modified this vowel to -e, as in bale (OE bealu) or created nominatives based on the oblique-case forms with medial -w-, e.g. clawe (OE clēa-SG . FEM ) ‘claw’. Other members of the declension either preserve (snōw < OE snāw) or drop -w(knē < OE cnēo, -wes ‘knee’). Likewise behave nouns having stems in -i (giste/gest < OE giest-MASC ‘guest’) and in -u (dure/dōr < OE duru-FEM ‘door’). The nominatives in -a (MASC ), -e (FEM / NEUT ) (ACC -an MASC /FEM , -e NEUT ) of the weak nouns also lost distinctions after they merged as -e [ə]. Nouns from minor consonantal declensions, like brōther (r-stem), fiēnd (nd-stem), lamb (iz/az-stem), mōnth (þ-stem) retained their nominative forms and so did nouns of the rootconsonant stem declensions, like foot, man, tooth, woman (MASC ), book, cow, gōs ‘goose’, lous ‘louse’, mouse (FEM ), etc. (For their plural forms see below). Genitive and dative singular. Of these two markers, only the genitive survived in Middle English, while the dative with either strong -e or weak -an, merged into -e [ə], dropped soon. The obstruent in the genitive prevented the loss of -es (MASC / NEUT ) which thus could spread in dialects. The early occurrence of an apostrophe is registered in Robert of Brunne (1338): kynge’s William broþer (cf. Graband 1965: 114), but such forms increased after Middle English. The synthetic forms with -es competed with analytic constructions containing the preposition of,

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frequently found with nouns denoting abstract entities or things (c.85% around 1300; cf. Fries 1938). As a consequence, the inflected genitive became confined to personal nouns, including proper names. Nominative and accusative plural. While the South favored weak plurals in -en, the originally MASC PL -(e)s (OE -as) spread to nouns of the other genders, first in the North and North Midlands, affecting on a larger scale nouns in the South only in the 13th (South-west) and 14th (South-east) centuries. Also loanwords from French regularly received -(e)s. These two types, with -es and with -en (South, The Ancrene Riwle c.1225, William of Shoreham c.1315, Ayenbite of Inwyt c.1340), are exemplified below: adduced are only forms with -es or -en extended to words with an originally different plural marker or unmarked): a. -es (a-NEUT ) gēres ‘years’, hūses ‘houses’, sweordes ‘swords’; (n-FEM ) lefdies ‘ladies’; (r-MASC ) uederes ‘fathers’; (a-NEUT ) gātes, heauedes ‘heads’, wordes ‘words’; (ō-FEM ) halues ‘halves’; (nd-MASC ) vrendes ‘friends’. b. -en (ō-FEM ) soulen ‘souls’, zennen ‘sins’, wunden ‘wounds’; (a-NEUT ) dyēvlen ‘devils’; (u-MASC ) sunen ‘sons’; (r-MASC ) breþren ‘brothers’; (r-FEM ) dogtren ‘daughters’; (-iz/-az-NEUT ) children, eiren ‘eggs’, etc. Although typical of the South/South Midlands, the diffusion of the weak plural lost impetus because of the ongoing vocalization of -n. Originally in common use, weak -en frequently coincided with strong -es, e.g. āpen/āpes, arwen/ arwes ‘arrows’, etc. Still, the rivalry continued with a diminishing intensity into the 15th century, when only remnants of the weak declension in -en survived. The root-consonant stems (mutated) plurals successfully survived the regularizing processes, continuing to express plurality through vowel change (fēte ‘feet’, geese, līce, men, mīce, teeth, women), but several items assumed -es endings, cf. bookes (OE bēc) ‘books’, borughes (Trevisa; OE byrh) ‘boroughs’, gootes/ gaytes (OE gǣt) ‘goats’, etc. The plural brēc (OE brōc SG ) developed a singular meaning, while several mutated plurals failed to survive beyond Old English (ǣc ‘oaks’, *hnyte ‘nuts’, tyrf ‘turfs’). OE cȳ ‘cows’ developed a regular plural only after ME, while irregular kīne ‘cows’ still survives in dialects. Although former strong

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neuters continued to use unmarked plurals (cf. chīld ‘children’, hond ‘hands’, hors ‘horses’, winter ‘winters’), they gradually adjusted to the dominating pattern with -s as the plural marker. Today, only deer, sheep, and swine take no -s in the plural. Cf. also Roedler (1911, 1916) and Newman (2008). Genitive and dative plural. The reduction of vowels and nasals in endings eliminated the old GEN PL (-en)-e < OE (-en)-a, which survived only temporarily in the South. Very similar was the fate of the DAT PL -en (OE -um), which vocalized and disappeared. As a consequence of these processes the genitive and dative plural ceased to be distinguished.

2.1.2 Gender The loss of grammatical gender, a consequence of the decay of inflections, was a functional change which began in the North around 1200, reaching the South some two centuries later. That development coincided with the rise of semantic, or natural gender, whose first signs are evident in Late Old English. According to Moore (1921), the two events involved two separate developments. The loss of grammatical gender is reflected in the Peterborough Chronicle, whose three segments show how gender-distinctive inflections were eliminated. The explanations of the process vary. Thus, Clark (1957) attributed the loss to a masculinizing tendency, while Markus (1988), to the rise of the uninflected definite article (see Jones 1988).

2.2 Adjectives The immensely complex inflections of the OE adjective simplified in Middle English when it lost practically all inflectional markers, eliminating the distinction between the strong and weak declensions and losing the grammatical categories of gender, number, and case. The only surviving category was that of degree.

2.2.1 Inflection Adjectives lost endings due to either reduction of unstressed syllables (-en, -ene-, later -e) or to analogical influences caused by the paradigm leveling in the South/ Midlands (Fisiak 1996: 76–79). Although several oblique case markers continued to be used in the South, the only ending which survived, -e, was for some time

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attached in the nominative of the former strong and weak declensions, e.g. black (-e) ‘black’, smal(-e) ‘small’, etc. The loss of inflectional -n in the early 13th century resulted in the merger of -e(n) with [ə], which was subsequently lost, first in the North. The above concerned non-poetic language: in poetry, [ə] in adjectives survived into Late Middle English, extensively employed for reasons of metrics by Chaucer and other poets. Minkova (1990: 330) writes that “final -e as a singular adjectival grammatical marker in Late Middle English appeared intact only as a result of the complex interaction between syntax, morphology, and the requirements of the speech rhythm”. Loanwords, especially from French, are not distinguished morphologically from the native adjectives. Case inflections on the comparative and superlative forms were also lost.

2.2.2 Comparison The comparative suffix -re and superlative -est, the continuations of OE -ra/-ost, survived with only minor phonological modifications; cf. ME bold, bolder, boldest. An essential change was the replacement of the irregular mutated forms of the comparative and superlative by the stem of the positive, e.g. short, short-er, shortest (OE sceort, scyrt-ra, scyrt-est), etc. Such leveling affected adjectives with the original mutated comparative and superlative stems like brōd ‘broad’, ōld, yung ‘young’, etc. (OE brǣd-ra, -est, ield-ra, -est, gieng-ra, -st, etc). The suppletive comparison continued in spite of a tendency to level roots in the three forms (e.g. badder, baddest, of badd(e), coexisting with wurs(e), wurst). The 13th century saw the first signs of periphrastic comparison, when mō(re), mōst began to modify adjectives to form analytic degrees. This type gained a stronger position in the two following centuries; cf. González-Díaz (2008) and Janecka (2008).

2.3 Numerals Although phonological change affected the forms of ME numerals their system remained practically unchanged, with only minor modifications affecting cardinal and ordinal numbers. Like adjectives, also the cardinal numerals lost inflections early. The numeral ‘one’ developed two variants, stressed ōn ‘one’ (sometimes ō and Southern oo before consonants), with the semivowel [w] attached initially in the 15th century (cf. South-western wōne), and unstressed an. Ultimately, the unstressed variant

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lost -n before vowels, which produced the present-day indefinite article with preconsonantal a and prevocalic an. The original threefold gender distinction of the numeral denoting ‘two’ (OE tweȝen- MASC , twā-FEM /NEUT , tū-NEUT ) was abolished, although the former masculine form twayn continued into the 15th century without gender distinction. But it was the original feminine/neuter twō (OE twā) which became a standard form. The remaining numerals survived as thrē ‘three’, foor ‘four’, five, six, seven, eyght(e), nīne, tēn, elleven, twelve. The suffix -tēn was attached to the numerals 13–19 (þrettēne, fourtēne, fiftēne, sixtēne, seventēne, eiȝtetēne, niȝentēne), while the numerals 20–90 attached the suffix -ti (twenti, þretti, fourti, fifti, sixti, seventi, eiȝteti, niȝenti). The highest numbers were hundred, thousand, and millioun ‘million’ (< Fr., 14th century). The dialectal distinction between the ordinal forms of ‘first’ continued in Middle English: first (East Midlands/Northern), furst (West Midlands/South-western), uerst (Kentish). The most spectacular innovation, the replacement of other by Fr. secounde ‘second’, occurred in the 13th century. The metathetic form therd(e) replaced thridde a century earlier. During the period, higher ordinal numbers except fifte ‘fifth’, sixte ‘sixth’, ellefte ‘eleventh’, twelfte ‘twelfth’ developed the regular marker -þ, later -th (fourþe, sevenþe, eiȝteþe, niȝeþe, tēþe). The ordinal numbers thirteenth to nineteenth had the suffix -te(o)þe, -tiȝeþe later replaced by -tenþe ‘-teenth’, while the numerals ‘twentieth’ to ‘hundredth’ attached the suffix -ti(ȝ)(e)þe . Ordinal numbers higher than ‘100’ were virtually absent in Middle English.

2.4 Adverbs To form adverbs the suffix -e was attached to adjectives. Because of the reduction of unaccented vowels in the word-final position such adverbs were distinguished from the respective adjectives only through their place in a phrase; cf. lāte, swēte ‘sweet’ (ADJ / ADV ), etc. Consequently the suffix -liche (OE -lice) transformed as -ly (Northern -lik) became the principal adverbial marker, cf. fully, soothly, wīdely, etc. Leveling affected adverbial comparative/superlative degree forms, e.g. strong-er : strong-est, the suffixes -er, -est replacing OE -ra, -ost/-est (cf. streng-ra : streng-est). However, forms without a suffix, like leng ‘longer’, mo ‘more’, bet ‘better’ continued to be used.

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2.5 Pronouns The earlier system embracing personal, possessive, demonstrative, interrogative, and indefinite pronouns acquired a new type: reflexives. Simultaneously, the interrogatives who, what, etc. began to function as relative pronouns. The pronoun was the only nominal part of speech which retained a fully-realized category of case.

2.5.1 Personal The ME system of pronouns became modernized due to external influences (borrowing) but also as a consequence of language internal processes. Thus, ich ‘I’, frequently dropped in the Midlands (12th century) especially before a following consonant. The surviving became capitalized in the 14th century, and the vowel became lengthened before the Great Vowel Shift. Chaucer’s verse contains both types, ich being less frequent, while I only is found in his prose. In the plural, vowel shortening affected the object case ūs (Ormulum, c.1200), but the spelling in the Paston Letters (15th century, East Anglia) testifies to the survival of long [uː] beyond Middle English. Standard wē substituted for the dual wit ‘we two’ in the 13th century. The transformations of the 2P pronouns were determined by sociolinguistic factors: a tendency to employ one pronominal form for the singular and plural. Originally, thou was used when referring to inferiors, and yē (also singular from the 13th century), when addressing superiors. The current form you, perhaps the contamination of yē and ou (object), is first recorded in the 14th century used then as the plural object case, the nominative still being yē. Curiously, the nominative singular you is found in the 14th century, i.e. earlier than the respective plural. In the 13th century the dual yit ‘two of you’ was replaced by yē. While the oblique feminine (her, object case) and neuter (h/it) forms are only slightly modified, the merger of masculine hē and feminine hēo ‘she’ (ēo > ē) abolished the functional contrast between the two pronouns. This triggered the rise of feminine schē ‘she’ in the 13th century, perhaps influenced by Northern schō (ȝh; Ormulumo). The conservative character of the West and South is reflected in the survival there of the old h-forms into the 15th century. Analogous functional reasons seem to have underlain the replacement of the plural forms hi(e/hio/he/ho (oblique hem/hom/him) by the Scandinavian loanwords ðeȝȝ/thei ‘they’ (oblique thaim/them) because h-forms were phonologically similar to the masculine and feminine pronouns. The new th-forms appeared in the North in the 12th century, spreading a century later over the Midlands and

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South, where both types are found in the 14th century. In London, forms with initial h-, like hem ‘them’, still survived a century later. The standard distribution in Middle English was as follows: th-forms in the North, they vs. her, hem in the Midlands (Chaucer), h-forms only in the South. The spread of the oblique th-forms in the South was slower and they were for a long time confined to documentary and late texts (cf. Stenroos 2005).

2.5.2 Possessive The 1P possessive developed two forms, stressed mīne and unstressed mī ‘my’ (now an adjective). Originally their distribution was governed by syntactic factors, mīn appearing before vowels, mī before consonants. In the 14th century the plural forms ūr/oūr (now an adjective) attached -s (oūres, now ours, a pronoun). The form was in all probability influenced by the 3P SG possessive his. Like other duals, uncer ‘of the two of us’ was replaced by the standard form our. Like the 1P SG , the 2P possessive also distinguished forms with and without -n (thīne, thī ‘thy’), earlier in accordance with stress conditions, and later depending on the position before vowels or consonants. The first use of your in the singular occurs at the end of the 13th century, while the pronoun yours was coined a century later. The dual incer ‘of the two of us’ ceased to be used in later Middle English. The possessive his continued as a form common to the masculine and neuter, while hir/her developed the pronominal possessive form hers (15th century) The new th-pronouns are recorded in the 13th century, e.g. þeȝȝre (Ormulum). The distribution of possessive h- and th-forms in the plural was analogous to those of personal hi/they (see Section 2.5.1). The rare instance of the possessive ðayres ‘theirs’ is found in the Cursor Mundi (North).

2.5.3 Demonstrative The complex five-case inflections of the OE demonstrative became simplified, especially in the North and East Midland, while the South and West continued to use a four-case system until the 14th century. The replacement of the initial s- (OE sē, sēo) by þ-/th- was an essential step towards establishing the definite article the, a form recorded in Northumbrian Old English. Wright (1928: 167) observes that “In the northern and East Midland dialects the uninflected nom. masc. and fem. form þe had come to be simply the by about 1150, and almost everywhere else by about 1300”. But before 1300, in the majority of English dialects the former neuter demonstrative þat ‘that’ prevailed before vowels, instead of the.

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The true demonstrative pronouns are this, that (former NOM / ACC NEUT ) and thēse (former MASC / FEM NOM SG ), thōse (PL ). In general, such pronouns were first adopted in the North and East Midland, later spreading to the South. The “remote” plural those appears in Wyclif (Midlands) long before the general acceptance of the form in the 15th century.

2.5.4 Reflexive Although in Old and in Early Middle English the pronoun self was used for emphasis after personal pronouns, in later Middle English it began to stand after 1/2P SG possessives, gradually merging with them into compounds, cf. myself, thyself, yourselfe ‘yourself’. Similar combinations with 3P SG masculine possessive hisself were replaced by himself. The form it self (OE hit self) is first recorded in the 12th century. The respective plural forms of the reflexive originated very late, the last one being the 2P PL *yourselve, recorded only after Middle English, while the 1P PL ourselfs/our selves ‘ourselves’ and themself ‘themselves’ emerged in the 15th century.

2.5.5 Interrogative, relative, and indefinite The reduction of cases also affected the interrogative pronouns who (MASC / FEM ) and what (NEUT ). As a consequence the emerging inflectional paradigm did not differ much from that functioning in current English (who, whom, whose, what). The old instrumental case hwī (OE hwy), reinterpreted as an interrogative adverb, joined words like when, where etc. In addition, two more interrogatives were current: hwilc/which OE hwylc) and hweþer/whether (OE hweþer), both exhibiting strong dialectal variation. A completely new system of relative pronouns emerged after the historical relative þe went out of use in the 13th century. Its function was taken over by the interrogative pronouns whōse, whōm and which, while whō used as the relative joined other pronouns only in the 15th century. Middle English also exploited þatt ‘that’ as a relative pronoun (e.g. the Ormulum). Several adverbial relatives like whēr ‘where’, whēreas, when were also in use. ME indefinite pronouns were chiefly reflections of their OE counterparts. They can be represented by items like all, any, both, each, either, elles ‘else’, eny body ‘anybody’, euery ‘every’, many, neither, nōne, ōne, ōther, some, such, etc. As said earlier (see Section 2.3.1), the pronoun/numeral an (‘one’) began to serve as the indefinite article.

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3 Verbal system The grammatical categories of OE verbs, i.e. person, number, tense, mood, were retained in Middle English. Also, the division of verbs into weak and strong remained valid, although their distribution changed because of many attaching the suffix -ed to mark the past tense. The end of the period coincided with the incipient stage of the rise of the passive voice and two types of aspect.

3.1 Inflectional markers The inflectional paradigm of Middle English verbs was as follows: a. resent indicative: SG 1P -e, 2P -st, 3P -th, PL -en (all with -es in the North). Due to i-mutation strong verbs continued to exhibit fronted root vowels in the 2/3P SG . subjunctive: SG -e, PL -en. imperative: 2P SG Ø /-e, 2P PL -eth. b. preterit indicative: sg. 1P -e (WEAK )/-Ø (STRONG ), 2P -est (WEAK )/-e (STRONG ), 3P -e (WEAK W EAK )/-Ø (STRONG ), PL -e(n). Subjunctive: SG -e (North -Ø), PL -(e)n (all with the preterit marker -(e)dattached after the root). c. other markers: INF -e(n), PRESPRTC -end/-ind/-and (North)/-ing (Midlands), PASTPRTC ‑ed/-en. The decay of inflections was initiated in the Northern dialect which lost the endings of the infinitive, 1P indicative, subjunctive, and imperative. The currently surviving 3P SG present ending -(e)s spread from the North. That dialect also contributed to paradigm leveling when the 2/3P SG present tense root vowels began to be replaced by the non-mutated vowels of the 1P SG . Likewise, the North removed the prefix ȝe- marking the past participle (which still survived as Southern i-/y-) but retained the suffix -en, serving the same purpose. Other dialects also contributed to the new inflectional paradigm. Verbs in the Midlands replaced the PRES PL -eth by -en, which spread to the South. The West Midlands invented the new PRESPRTC form -ing(e), perhaps a modified form of conservative -inde. The former may have been reinforced by the gerund in -inge.

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3.2 Weak verbs Weak verbs formed their past/past participle forms with the dental suffix -d/-t. The pre-dental -i-, lost in the North and East Midlands, remained in the South and West. The class of weak verbs grew following the adoption by many strong verbs of the past tense dental marker. Here, the traditional division into three classes is replaced by a classification into two groups, (1) verbs with the past/participle ending -ed (Northern -id/-yd), from OE -od(e) (original class 2 verbs) and (2) verbs with -d/-t- (the remaining verbs).

3.2.1 Class 1 This class constitutes the basis of the present-day class of regular verbs with -ed in the past tense (see Table 4.1). Here belong native and foreign verbs. Table 4.1: Class 1 weak verbs INFINITIVE acsien/ask call(en) chacen/chase chew(e) dīe(n) live love nēde/need pleie/play prōve use(n) wend(e)

PAST/PAST PARTICIPLE

(< ON) (< OFr.) (< OE cēowan STRONG 2) (< ON) (< OE libban)

(< OFr.) (< OFr.)

axed/asked called/callyd chaced chewed/chewyd dīed lived loved nēdede (PAST ) played prōved used went (later used as the PAST of go)

3.2.2 Class 2 Class 2 contained partly or fully irregular past/past participle forms with two types of endings, -d/-t, sometimes alternating with -ed. Considering their past tense markers they can be divided into minor subclasses. Tables 4.2 –4.6 adduce the most advanced forms, closest to those in Present-day English.

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Table 4.2: Class 2 weak verbs with -d/-t-, sometimes alternating with -ed INFINITIVE

PAST/PAST PARTICIPLE

bletsien/blesse ‘bless’ dēlen ‘deal’ dreame duell(e) fēle/feel have hēre keepe ‘keep’ lern(e) ‘learn’ lōse meane ‘mean’ say smell(e) spill wurche/worke ‘work’ (cf. Wełna 2017)

blessed/blest delde/delt/dealed drempte ‘dreamt’ ( PAST ) / drēmed ( PASTP RTC ) dwelt(e)/dwelled (PAST PA ST )/dweald (PA PASTPRT STPRTC C) felde/felte/feeled had/haued herd/hēred kept/kēped lerned (PAST )/ileornet/learned (PASTPRTC ) lost/lōsed (PAST PA ST ) mende/mente/mēned said (PAST )/isēd (PASTP PAST PRTC RTC ) smelde/smelled spild/spilt wrought/wyrkhyd (PAST )/wrought/worched (PASTPRTC )

Table 4.3: Class 2 weak verbs with post-liquid root-final -d with a characteristic devoicing d > t in the past/past participle INFINITIVE

PAST/PAST PARTICIPLE

bende ‘bent’ blend buylde ‘build’ lend rende ‘rent’ send spend

bent blent bild (PAST )/bilt (PASTPRT PASTPRTC C) lent rent sent spent

Table 4.4: Class 2 weak verbs with root-final postvocalic -d/-t- with root-vowel variation INFINITIVE

PAST/PAST PARTICIPLE

blēde feede ‘feed’ hīde lęęde ‘lead’ meet spēd ‘speed’ spręęde

bled fed hid led mett sped spredd (PAST PA ST )

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Table 4.5: Class 2 weak verbs with root-final -t showing no variation of vowel length, now invariable verbs INFINITIVE

PAST/PAST PARTICIPLE

cast

(< ON)

cast

cost cutt hit hurt put set shutte ‘shut’ slit spit thruste ‘thrust’

(< OFr.)

costed (PAST PA ST )/coste ( PASTPRTC PASTP RTC ) cut hit hurt put set shut slit spit (later also with -a- in the PAST ) thrust

(< ON) (< OFr.)

Table 4.6: Class 2 weak verbs with suppletive bases (with root-vowel variation) INFINITIVE

PAST/PAST PARTICIPLE

besēche ‘beseech’ bring buye ‘buy’ catche ‘catch’ seek tęęchen ‘teach’ think

besought ( PAST ) brought bought ( PAST PA ST ) caught sought (-k from inflected forms) taught thought

(< OFr.)

3.2.3 Weak verbs which developed strong forms Middle English demonstrated an evident trend towards reducing the number of strong verbs, which helped regularize inflectional paradigms (see Section 2.3). But simultaneously several weak verbs began to mark tense distinctions by differentiating root vowels and sometimes by attaching the past participle ending -en to the originally weak form. The trigger of such changes was analogous to that determining forms of the common strong verbs. Table 4.7 includes items whose new strong forms survived into Modern English, but excludes those which exhibited short-lived strong forms. Loanwords expressed tense difference through root vowel variation extremely rarely, cf. strive (< OFr.; PAST strōve/strīved).

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Table 4.7: Weak verbs which developed strong forms INFINITIVE

PAST/PAST PARTICIPLE

chide ring sawe sew shew/show stycke ‘stick’ węęr ‘wear’

chidde/chōde ( PAST PA ST ) /chidden ( PASTP PAST PRTC RTC ) ringde/rongen ( PL ) (PAST ) /runge ( PAST PASTPRTC PRTC ) sawed/sew ( PAST PA ST ) /sawid/sown ( PASTPRTC PA STPRTC ) sowed ( PAST ) /sewed/sowen ( PASTP PASTPRTC RTC ) showed ( PAST PA ST ) /showed/showen ( PASTP RTC ) stiked/stacke (PAST )/sticked/stōken ( PA STPRTC ) wēred/wōre (PAST )/wēred/worn ( PASTPRTC )

(< ON ‘saw’)

3.3 Strong verbs Strong verbs expressed the present/past tense distinction by using different root vowels. Continuing the OE pattern also the singular and plural preterit roots exhibited vowel differences, but a drift towards leveling the forms of the preterit/ past participle led to their uniformity, with the vowel either from the preterit or from the past participle generalized. Ninety-seven OE strong verbs were lost in Middle English, while many others underwent leveling, first in the North, then in the South (Krygier 1994: 251). Also alternating consonants were subject to leveling in verbs, cf. frēse, frōse, frōzen (< froren), etc. The most important process which affected strong verbs was their shift to the weak class. Although only some ME strong verbs permanently established new fully weak forms, almost all of them attached dental preterit markers. Frequently confused were verbs in Classes 4 and 5 or those in Classes 6 and 7. The process of the strong-to-weak shift gathered speed in the 13th–14th centuries. The division of verbs into seven classes seems to hold, with each class exhibiting four subtypes (Wełna 1996: 120–121): a. strong (STRONG ; no weak forms); b. strong/weak (STRONG /WEAK ; surviving as strong with occasional weak forms); c. mixed (MIX ; both forms survive in Modern English); and d. the most advanced, weak/strong (WEAK /STRONG ; tending to retain weak forms only). The statistical data below concerning the relevant forms in Old English and those surviving now come from Brunner (B, 1962: 209–252,) and Krygier (K, 1994: 255– 267)

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3.3.1 Class 1 INF

-ī-

PAST

-ō-/-i-

PASTPRTC

-i-

Strong Class 1, with its very transparent vowel alternation pattern, proved relatively resistant to the leveling trend and, as Hogg (1992: 152) writes, “it forms the basis of a fairly stable group of irregular verbs in Present-Day English”. Of the total number of strong 1 verbs in Old English (65 in B, 71 in K), 10 retain vowel alternation, while 13 exhibit mixed forms in their subsequent evolution. The most characteristic forms include rīde (STRONG ); (a)rīse, bīte, drīve, shīne, slīde, smīte, strīke, wrīte (STRONG /WEAK ). Mixed forms possess verbs such as rīve, shrīve, strīve (< OFr.) (MIX ), while other common verbs, e.g. glīde, wrīthe (WEAK /STRONG ), etc., abandoned vowel alternation as an indicator of the past tense. Because of their modified vocalism a group of OE contracted verbs like wrēon ‘cover’, tēon ‘accuse’, tended to join strong Class 2.

3.3.2 Class 2 INF

-ē-~-ū-

PAST

-ē-~-u-

PASTPRTC

-o-

Having less transparent forms than strong 1 verbs, strong 2 exhibited two vowels (-ēo-/-ū-) in the OE infinitive, this variation being retained in Middle English. Following the change -ēoȝ- > -ēȝ- > -ī- certain verbs appeared with long -ī- in the infinitive (e.g. flīe ‘fly’). Of the total number of strong Class 2 verbs in Old English (51 in B, 60 in K), only 10 retain vowel alternation in Modern English, while 13 exhibit mixed forms at different stages of their evolution. The most important forms are chēse (later chōse ‘choose’), flēo/flī/flŷ, forbēde/forbid, frēse ‘freeze’ (with the levelling frōr-/ WEAK EAK ); clēve ‘cleave (split)’ (confused with OE > frōs- in PAST / PASTPRTC ) (STRONG / W clīfan, hence a variety of strong and weak forms/(MIX )). The largest group is that of verbs eliminating strong forms, such as creepe ‘creep’, flee, lēȝe/līe, sheete/ shōte ‘shoot’ (original infinitives in -ē), and bow, shōve, sucke, sup (infinitives in -ū-).

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3.3.3 Class 3 a.

INF

-i/ī-

PAST

-a~ō-/-u-

PASTPRTC

-u-~-ū-

b.

INF

-e-

PAST

-a-/-u-

PASTPRTC

-o-

Strong Class 3 exhibits two distinct types, depending on whether their infinitives have roots with either prenasal -i- (-ī- before homorganic clusters) or nonprenasal -e-. The former subgroup includes verbs with a well-contrasted vowel pattern. Of the total number of strong 3 verbs in Old English (41 in B, 50 in K), as many as 22 retain root vowel alternation in Modern English with only 6 transferred to the weak class. Here belong strong verbs like sing, sling (< ON?), win; bīnd, fīnd, wīnd (the last three with a-preterits in the North) (STRONG ) as well as begin, cling, drink, rinne (later run), schrinke ‘shrink’, sink, spinne ‘spin’, spring, sting, stink, swime ‘swim’, swing, wring, grīnd (STRONG /WEAK ), while brinne/ birne/burne ‘burn’, clīm ‘climb’ (WEAK /STRONG ) develop weak forms surviving in Modern English. The group with the underlying vowel -e- contains verbs (47 in K) which dropped strong forms in Middle English, like berst/brust ‘burst’ (later an invariable verb), fight (STRONG /WEAK ), as well as swell (with PASTPRTC swollen; MIX ), Other verbs exhibit only occasional strong forms, cf. bark, braid, carve, delve, help, melt, starve, swallow, swerve, thresh, warp, yell, yelp, yield (WEAK /STRONG ). Practically all verbs in this subclass shifted to weak in the 12th–13th centuries, with only very few strong forms surviving longer.

3.3.4 Class 4 a.

INF

-ē-

PAST

-a-/-ē-

PASTPRTC

-ō-

b.

INF

-u-

PAST

-ō-~-a-

PASTPRTC

-u-

Verbs in this relatively small class (14 in B, 18 in K) are either lost or retain strong forms, although traces of the shift to weak are well documented. Their development reveals confusion with strong 5. In subgroup (a) exclusively strong is stēle ‘steal’ (STRONG ), while other verbs occasionally use the dental suffix. Here belong verbs like beare ‘bear’, brēke ‘break’, tēre ‘tear’ (STRONG /WEAK ), and shear (MIX ). To subgroup (b) belongs come and its derivative become (STRONG ), both exhibiting strong forms exclusively. Attention should be called to the emergence of the new preterit cam of come, which originated in the Northumbrian dialect, later spread-

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ing to the Midland and South. The high frequency verb nim (OE niman) failed to survive beyond Middle English, replaced by Scandinavian tāke with the same meaning (cf. Wełna 2005).

3.3.5 Class 5 a.

INF

-ē-

PAST

-a-/-ē-~-ē- (-ō-~-o-)

PASTPRTC

-ē-

b.

INF

-i-

PAST

-a-

PASTPRTC

-e-~-o-~-i-

From the earliest time Class 5 verbs (26 in B, 30 in K) had a tendency to shift to strong 4. Thus, brecan ‘break’, which joined strong 4 in Old English, was now followed by spēke ‘speak’, trēde ‘tread’, wēve ‘weave’, wrēke ‘wreak’. The reason for the shift could have been the resemblance of their present and preterit root vowels to those in strong 4. The typical representatives of the class were: (1) quēth ‘-quethe’ (PAST quōth), ēte ‘eat’ (STRONG ); gēte/get, gēve/yēve/give, speake ‘speak’ (PASTPRTC spōken for spēken), trēde ‘tread’ (PASTPRTC trōden STR ONG /WEAK ); bequēthe ‘bequeath’, knēde for trēden), wēve ‘weave’, sē/see (STRONG ‘knead’, frēt ‘fret’, mēte ‘mete’, wey ‘weigh’, wrēke ‘wreak’ (WEAK /STRONG ); and (2) bid (STRONG ); lie, sit (forms often confused with those of weak sette ‘set’) WEAK EAK ). (STRONG /W

3.3.6 Class 6 a.

INF

-a-~-ā-

PAST

-ō-/-ō-

PASTPRTC

-ā-~-a-~-ō-

b.

INF

-e-~-ē-

PAST

-ō-~-a-~-ō-

PASTPRTC

-a(i)-~-ei-~-ō-

Class 6 (31 in K) was characterized by a double set of root vowels, with much variation, so that Brunner (1962) distinguishes here four subgroups, of which one contains verbs contracted in Old English. This class showed a relatively strong tendency to shift to weak. To strong 6 belonged: (1) stand (also understand), wāde (STRONG ); draȝen/draw, forsāke, shāke, swēre ‘swear’, tāke (< ON; with numerous compounds, like underrtāken ‘undertake’, W EAK ); grāve (later displaced by engrāve, from OFr.), lāde, shāve, etc.) (STRONG /WEAK wāke (MIX ); āke ‘ache’, bāke, fāre, gnaw, laghe/laugh, shāpe (replacing sheppen), wash (WEAK /STRONG );

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(2) slē/slō/slay (STRONG /WEAK ); hebbe/hēve ‘heave’ (MIX ); flēn/flay, stappe/step (WEAK /STRONG ). Practically all these verbs developed forms with root variation, especially in dialects.

3.3.7 Class 7 a.

INF

-ē-

PAST

-e-

PASTPRTC

-ē-

b.

INF

-ō-

PAST

-ē-~-e-

PASTPRTC

-ō-

c.

INF

-ow-

PAST

-ew-

PASTPRTC

-ow-

d.

INF

-ē-

PAST

-ē-

PASTPRTC

-ē-

e.

INF

-a-

PAST

-ē-(-e-)

PASTPRTC

-a-

The specific character of strong 7 is determined by its containing former reduplicating verbs. As opposed to the simple division of these verbs into two classes in Old English, ME forms are split into at least 5 subclasses (66 in K, 7 subclasses), their vast majority shifting to the weak class. The strong past participle marker -en survives in verbs with the root sequence containing a vowel + . The particular subclasses include: (1) beate ‘beat’, lēte/let (vowel shortened in the 13th century, but a long vowel in parallel use) (STRONG / WEAK ); hew (MIX ); drēd/dredde ‘dread’, leape ‘leap’, rēd ‘read’ (chiefly weak in the 15th century), schēde/shed, sleepe ‘sleep’ (WEAK / STRONG ); WEAK EAK ); fōld, swōpe/sweepe ‘sweep’, wōlde/weeld ‘wield’ (WEAK / (2) hōld (STRONG /W STRONG ); (3) mowe ‘mow’, throw (STRONG ); blow (‘move’), blow (‘bloom’) (both frequently confused, merging in the 15th century), grow, know (STRONG /WEAK ); crow, sow (MIX ); flow, row (WEAK /STRONG ); (4) wēpe ‘weep’ (STRONG /WEAK ); (5) fall (STRONG /WEAK ); walk, wax (‘grow’; WEAK /STRONG ); hang (MIX ). The fates of hang are particularly complex as apart from PAST heng the verb also developed forms with -a- and -u-. The present-day double forms of the past tense (hung vs. hanged) reflect the competition of the strong verb with weak intransitive hangian. The contemporary semantic distinction of the past tense forms was not yet established at the close of Middle English.

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3.4 Preterit-present verbs This group of verbs retained the PIE perfect stems with the present meaning and consequently formed new preterit forms in Old English. In their evolution, preterit-present verbs exhibited a drift towards modality (they survive as modals in Modern English). Their root vowels match the vocalism of the respective strong verbs (Classes 1, 3–6). Of the original twelve verbs, only seven survive in Middle English. Of the two verbs whose vocalism corresponded to that of strong 1 only owe (PAST ought/owed, PASTPRTC owne/owed) retained its strong position, while wit (PAST wiste, PASTPRTC witen/wist) hardly survived till the end of Middle English. In the 14th century owe became weak in the South, while ought acquired its present tense meaning a century earlier. Of the original four members  whose vocalism corresponded to that of STRONG 3 only two retained their status: cunne/cann (PAST couthe/ coud/kowlde ‘can, could’) and durre/dear/dar/dāre (PAST durst PASTPRTC dorren). The form cann reflects the 1/3P SG present, while the substitution of -d for -th in the past tense was analogical (from weak verbs). The -l- in could may be due to the analogy of wolde (> would), the past tense of will. Also dare joined the class of weak verbs, while the two other verbs in this subclass, þurfan ‘need’ and unnan ‘grant’, ceased to be used very early. PASTPR TC The only verb in strong 5, mowen/maiȝ/mai/may (PAST mihte/might, PASTPRTC mowe/mowed) ultimately yielded the modal may (PAST might), reflecting OE mæȝ (1/3P SG PRES ). The verb mōte (with the vocalism of strong 6) which developed the preterit mōste, falling together with 2P SG mōst. It acquired the present tense meaning, and now the modal must survives without a past tense form.

3.5 Anomalous verbs All Old English anomalous verbs (bēon/wesan ‘be’, dōn ‘do’, gān ‘go’, willan ‘will’) have survived into Middle English. The most important of them, bē, continued to use suppletive forms in its inflectional paradigm: PRES SG 1P am, 2P art, 3P is, PL sind, are (PAST SG was, PL wēre, PASTPRTC ibē/been). The are forms probably developed in the North or North East, spreading to the South and London in the 13th–14th centuries. The forms of the verb dō survive with only small modifications as dō (PAST did, PASTPRTC PASTPR TC (i)dōn). As with other verbs, the 3P PRES SG form showed dialectal variation: -(e)s in the North, -(e)th in the South.

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The most important innovation in the inflectional paradigm of gō was the curious replacement in later Middle English of the suppletive preterit ēode/yedd/ yōde by another suppletive form, the preterit wente, of wende ‘turn’, while the past participle shows a regular development (gōne) (Wełna 2001). The verb wille/will survived unchanged into Middle English, with the preterit forms wōlde wulde would, etc. The new present tense form wol, with a rounded vowel, the basis of the contemporary negative won’t, originated in the Midlands as a back-formation from the preterit wolde.

4 Remarks on word formation As in the earlier periods, ME word formation involved processes such as compounding, prefixation, suffixation, derivation by a zero-morpheme, and backderivation, the first three supplying the majority of new lexical items. ME writers continued to create new compounds but not as extensively as Anglo-Saxon anonymous poets, which is testified by 1069 compounds in the poem Beowulf compared with 800 compounds in Laȝamon’s Brut, a text five times longer than the former, cf. Burnley (1992: 441) and Sauer (1988). One of the reasons for that decline must have been the influence of French and Latin, from which numerous affixes were borrowed. Some of them became productive in English.

4.1 Compounding The OE technique of creating new words by compounding, i.e. putting two roots together, continued to be employed in Middle English. Sometimes it is difficult to evaluate whether we are dealing with a compound or with a “syntactic group”, e.g. dai-liȝt, daies liȝt and liȝt of daie (Sauer 1988: 187; cf. also 1992). Although less numerous than in Old English, ME compounds represented new types, for instance, with a verb in initial position (leep-yeer ‘leap-year’) or sex-determining compound nouns, with a pronoun in initial position, e.g. he-lamb, she-ass, sheape (cf. Marchand 1969: 75–79). Such compounds represented both endocentric (goggle-eye) and exocentric structures (barefoot). Also predicate-object compounds in -ing formed a new category of words, e.g. backbiting, grisbitting, together with adjectives representing the newborn type or with locative particles like over, attached initially, which “come to be used figuratively in compounds (as overking, overlord, from about 1200)”; cf. Strang (1970: 259–260). The period also witnessed the growing popularity of compound agent nouns like man-slayer, good-doer, soothsayer, peacemaker (14th–15th centuries). The same period saw

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the rise of compound adjectives, like icy-cold or lukewarm. Simultaneously, verbal compounds were often matched by particle verbs, which indicated a drift towards analytic structures, e.g. outflee and flee out, overlook and look over, etc. (Burnley 1992: 445). In some cases French loanwords replaced English compounds, cf. chueteine ‘chieftain’ substituting for OE heretoga ‘consul, army chief’, abbey for OE munucclif, or marbre ‘marble’ for OE marmon-stane.

4.2 Derivation Certain prefixes, like a-, be-, for-, to-, un- and others continued being attached in Middle English, together with the unproductive continuation of ȝe-, surviving as i- especially in the South. These were joined by loan-prefixes like de-, dis-, en-, in-, mis-, re-, sub-, super-, but their vast majority were unproductive. In Early New English, some of them became productive (en-, non-, etc.). Derivation by suffixing was one of the principal methods of creating new words. Especially frequent were the adjectival suffixes -ful, -ish as well as -ling found in nouns (cf. Burnley 1992: 448). More than twenty suffixes surviving in Middle English were joined by numerous suffixes of French origin. Here belong such common items as -able, -āge, -al, ‑ācioun, -erie, -ess, -itee, -ment, -ous, etc. While suffixes like -āge, -ity, and -ment are only attached to Romance bases, -able can be found after both native and foreign stems. As regards the foreign morphological element in English, all major controversies concern the question of whether French suffixes were productive in Middle English (cf. the standard studies by Koziol 1937; Jespersen 1942; Marchand 1969). Based on her Helsinki Corpus (HC) data, Dalton-Puffer (1996) answers the question negatively, whereas Miller (1997) claims that they became productive in Late Middle English. Of special importance is a pair of papers by Kastovsky (e.g. 1982, 1996). For a state-of-the-art report, cf. Ciszek (2008: 21–30, 110). For a relatively comprehensive listing of examples of different word-formation types in Middle English, see Fisiak (1996: 104–112).

5 Major problems in Middle English inflectional morphology Unlike ME phonological processes, such as Open Syllable Lengthening or the Great Vowel Shift, whose implementation has raised numerous interpretative controversies, the chronologically parallel morphological developments have

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failed to trigger similar heated disputes. Morphological changes in Middle English were characterized by a drift towards reducing inflections and transforming synthetic into analytic structures. The general accounts of the morphological processes are Moore (1928), O’Neill (1980, 1982), Kastovsky (1988 on the typology of morphological change; 2007), and the monographs on English historical morphology by Bammesberger (1975), Wolff (1975), Faiss (1992), and Wełna (1996). As regards developments in inflection, they affected practically all parts of speech. Thus, apart from the emergence of the definite article contrasting with the indefinite one, Middle English suffered the loss of the dative and accusative cases. More important are, however, two other developments: the first is loss of the PL -en and other types of plural marking, which coincided with the spread of the PL -es; cf. Roedler (1911, 1916), Peters (1985), and Newman’s recent study (2008). The second is the substitution of semantic for grammatical gender (cf. Moore 1921; Jones 1988; Markus 1988) which was the consequence of the reduction of gender distinctive endings in nouns. The most important development in adjectives was, apart from the loss of inflections, the initial stage of the replacement of synthetic comparatives and superlatives by periphrastic forms with more and most, a process which began at the close of the 15th century; cf. Pound’s (1901) traditional account and the recent studies by Janecka (2008) and Gonzáles-Díaz (2008: Chapter 3). As to the system of personal pronouns, discussions concentrate around the pronoun she whose appearance was due to functional reasons (cf. Britton 1991) following the merger of the feminine hēo with masculine hē. Similar factors determined the borrowing of the set of 3P PL pronouns they, their, them from Scandinavian (Stenroos 2005). Also verbs show loss of inflections, although not as intensively as the nouns. Some endings were replaced, as was the indicative PRES PL marker -eth (from OE -aþ) by -en, while 3P PRES SG -eth continued to be used. The origin of -ing, either marking the PRESPRTC (Rooth 1941/1942, Gleissner 1979) or attached to mark the gerund (Jack 1988) still remains a controversial issue (cf. Budna 2007). Several studies deal with the decay of PASTPRTC prefixal marking, e.g. Pilch (1955a, b) and a recent study by Wojtyś (2016). Perhaps the most spectacular event in the area of verbs was connected with the disintegration of the ablaut system whose effect was the shift of strong (ablaut) verbs to the class of weak verbs. How this complicated process operated in Middle English is discussed directly in Michelau (1910), Wełna (1990, 1997), Krygier (1994; the best study of the problem to date), Kahlas-Tarka (2000), and indirectly in Long (1944; focused on late ME). An account of suppletion in ME morphology (e.g. bad, went, syndon, be) is Hogg (2003).

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6 References Bammesberger, Alfred. 1975. A Sketch of Diachronic English Morphology. Regensburg: Pustet. Britton, Derek. 1991. On Middle English she, sho: A Scots solution to an English problem. NorthWest European Language Evolution 17: 3–51. Brunner, Karl. 1962. Die englische Sprache. Vol. II. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Brunner, Karl. 1963. An Outline of Middle English Grammar. G. K. W. Johnston (trans.). Oxford: Blackwell. Budna, Anna. 2007. On the origin of the present participle marking in mediaeval English. In: A. Weseliński and J. Wełna (eds.), Explorations in Literature and Language, 111–126. Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego. Burnley, David. 1992. Lexis and semantics. In: Norman Blake (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. II. 1066-1476, 409–499. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ciszek, Ewa. 2008. Word Derivation in Early Middle English. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Clark, Cecily. 1957. Gender in “The Peterborough Chronicle”. English Studies 38: 109–115. Dalton-Puffer, Christiane. 1996. The French Influence on Middle English Morphology: A CorpusBased Study of Derivation. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Faiss, Klaus. 1992. English Historical Morphology and Word-Formation: Loss Versus Enrichment. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag. Fisiak, Jacek. 1996. A Short Grammar of Middle English. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN. Fries, Charles Carpenter. 1938. Some notes on the inflected genitive in Present-Day English. Language 14: 121–133. Gleissner, Reinhard. 1979. Middle English -ind>-ing? and Bavarian -ind>-ing: A note. In: O. Hietsch (ed.), Bavarica Anglica, Vol. I. A Cross-Cultural Miscellany Presented to Tom Fletcher, 53–60. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. González-Díaz, Victorina. 2008. English Adjective Comparison: A Historical Perspective. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Graband, Gerhard. 1965. Die Entwicklung der frühneuenglischen Nominalflexion. Dargestellt vornehmlich auf Grund von Grammatikerzeugnissen des 17. Jahrhunderts. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Hogg, Richard M. 1992. Phonology and morphology. In: Richard M. Hogg (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. I. The Beginnings to 1066, 67–167. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hogg, Richard M. 2003. Regular suppletion. In: Raymond Hickey (ed.), Motives for Language Change, 71–81. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jack, George. 1988. The origins of English gerund. North-Western European Language Evolution 12: 15–75. Janecka, Joanna M. 2008. Periphrastic and Suffixal Adjectival Grading in Middle English (12th–14th c.). Warsaw: Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw. Jespersen, Otto. 1942. A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles. Vol. VI. Morphology. London: Allen & Unwin, Ltd. Jones, Charles. 1988. Grammatical Gender in English: 950 to 1250. London: Croom Helm. Kahlas-Tarka, Leena. 2000. A note on non-standard uses in Middle English: Weak preterits of strong Old English verbs. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 101: 217–223. Kastovsky, Dieter. 1988. Typological changes in the history of English morphology. In: Udo Fries and Martin Heusser (eds.), Meaning and Beyond. Ernst Leisi zum 70. Geburtstag, 160–178. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.

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Kastovsky, Dieter. 1996. Morphological reclassification: The morphological and morphophonemic restructuring of the weak verbs in Old and Middle English. In: J. Klein and D. Vanderbeke (eds.), Anglistentag 1995 Greifswald. Proceedings 17, 273–284. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Kastovsky, Dieter. 2007. Middle English word-formation: A list of desiderata. In: Gabriella Mazzon (ed.), Studies in Middle English Forms and Meanings, 41–56. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Koziol, Herbert. 1937. Handbuch der englischen Wortbildungslehre. Heidelberg: C. Winter. Krygier, Marcin. 1994. The Disintegration of the English Strong Verb System. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Long, Mary McDonald. 1944. The English Strong Verb from Chaucer to Caxton. Menasha, WI: Banta. Marchand, Hans. 1969. The Categories and Types of Present-Day English Word-Formation. 2nd edn. München: Beck. Markus, Manfred. 1988. Reasons for the loss of gender in English. In: Dieter Kastovsky and Gero Bauer (eds.), Luick Revisited, 241–258. Tübingen: Narr. Michelau, Erich. 1910. Der Übertritt starker Verba in die schwache Coniugation. Königsberg: Karg und Manneck. Miller, Gary. 1997. The morphological legacy of French: Borrowed suffixes on native bases in Middle English. Diachronica 14: 233–264. Minkova, Donka. 1990. Adjectival inflection relics and speech rhythm in Late Middle and Early Modern English. In: Sylvia Adamson, Vivien A. Law, Nigel Vincent, and Susan Wright (eds.), Papers from the 5th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, Cambridge, 6–9 April 1987, 313–336. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Moore, Samuel. 1921. Grammatical and natural gender in Middle English. Publications of the Modern Language Association 36: 79–103. Moore, Samuel. 1928. Earliest morphological changes in Middle English. Language 4: 238–266. Newman, John G. 2008. The Spread of the s-Plural Formative in Old and Middle English Nouns. Warsaw: Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw. O’Neil, Wayne. 1980. The evolution of the Germanic inflectional systems: A study in the causes of language change. Orbis 27: 248–286. Peters, Robert A. 1985. Historical development of noun plural -(e)s. Journal of English Linguistics 18: 25–32. Pilch, Herbert. 1955a. Der Untergang des Präverbs ge- im Englischen. Anglia 73: 37–64. Pilch, Herbert. 1955b. ME. i- beim Participium Präteriti. Anglia 7: 279–291. Pound, Louise. 1901. The Comparison of Adjectives in English in the XV and the XVI Century. Heidelberg: Carl Winter’s Universitätsbuchhandlung. Roedler, Eduard. 1911. Die Ausbreitung des s-Plurals im Englischen (1). Ph.D. dissertation, Kiel. Roedler, Eduard. 1916. Die Ausbreitung des s-plurals im Englischen (2). Anglia 4: 420–502. Rooth, Erik. 1941/1942. Zur Geschichte der englischen Partizip-Präsens-Form auf -ing. Studia Neophilologica 1: 71–85. Sauer, Hans. 1988. Compounds and compounding in Early Middle English: Problems, patterns, productivity. In: Manfred Markus (ed.), Historical English. On the Occasion of Karl Brunner’s 100th Birthday, 186–209. Innsbruck: AMOE. Sauer, Hans. 1992. Nominalkomposita im Frühmittelenglischen. Mit Ausblicken auf die Geschichte der englischen Nominalkomposition. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Stenroos, Merja. 2005. The spread of they, their and them in English: The Late Middle English evidence. In: Marcin Krygier and Liliana Sikorska (eds.), Naked Words in English, 67–96. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

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Strang, Barbara M. H. 1970. A History of English. London: Methuen. Wełna, Jerzy. 1990. The strong-to-weak shift in English verbs: A reassessment. Kalbotyra 42(3): 129–139. Wełna, Jerzy. 1996. English Historical Morphology. Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego. Wełna, Jerzy. 1997. Weak-to-strong. A shift in English verbs? In: Jacek Fisiak (ed.), Language History and Linguistic Modelling, 215–228. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Wełna, Jerzy. 2001. Suppletion for suppletion, or the replacement of ēode by went in English. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 36: 95–110. Wełna, Jerzy. 2005. Nim or take? A competition between two high frequency verbs in Middle English. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 41: 53–69. Wełna, Jerzy, 2017. From wyrcan to work in Middle English prose texts: A route towards regularisation. In: Jacek Fisiak, Magdalena Bator, and Marta Sylwanowicz (eds.), Essays and Studies in Middle English, 235–248. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Wojtyś, Anna. 2016. Past Participle Marking in Mediaeval English: A Corpus-Based Study in Historical Morphology. 2nd edn. San Diego: Æ Academic Publishing. Wolff, Dieter. 1975. Grundzüge der diachronischen Morphologie des Englischen. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Wright, Joseph and Elizabeth Mary Wright. 1928. An Elementary Middle English Grammar. London: Oxford University Press.

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Chapter 5: Syntax 1 2 3 4 5

Locating syntax 76 The syntax of Middle English prose The syntax of Middle English verse Form and function 93 References 94

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Abstract: Recent research has emphasized the importance of performance/parole as much as competence/langue in linguistic theory; a good example is William Kretzschmar’s (2009) The Linguistics of Speech. This chapter offers a qualitative analysis of a series of four short Middle English texts, both in verse and prose, to illustrate developments in syntax during the period. These analyses engage not only with modern notions of syntactic structure but also with medieval ideas; whereas many modern grammarians reify the grammatical conception of the sentence, medieval thinking focused on rhetorical structure, in which the sentence was primarily a semantic notion and the units of analysis were the “period”, the “colon” and the “comma”. Issues of variation – dialectal, diachronic, and genre-driven – are also addressed. Topics arising from these analyses and discussed here include coordination and subordination, element-order practices, concord, changes in the structure of noun- and verb-phrases, and negation.

1 Locating syntax Linguists traditionally distinguish between two axes of grammatical analysis: “paradigmatic” and “syntagmatic”. The paradigmatic axis deals with the relationship between forms of lexemes, e.g. love, loves, loved or book, books, book’s, while the syntagmatic axis deals with the relationships between lexemes, e.g. the relationships between subject, predicator, and object in a clause such as She loves him. The paradigmatic axis is often referred to as inflectional morphology. The syntagmatic axis engages with the study of syntax. To put it another way, the

Jeremy J. Smith: Glasgow (UK)

DOI 10.1515/9783110525328-005

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paradigmatic axis focuses on linguistic form, while the syntagmatic axis engages primarily with linguistic function. (Lexical morphology, often referred to as word formation, is not discussed here. Word formation deals with the creation of new lexemes through the linking of morphemes, e.g. blackbird from black and bird, or disgraceful from combining grace with dis‑ and ‑ful. Historically, there are also interesting questions as to whether morphemes were seen as forming one or more lexemes; the common practice in Early Modern English of printing shalbe ‘shall/must be’ as one word rather than two suggests that these two words were conceived of as forming one unit. Similar issues apply in ME; thus, for instance, in example (1) below the item ‘upon’ appears as up on in the manuscript, while in example (4) ‘amiss’ appears as a mys. Word formation has clearly both paradigmatic and syntagmatic aspects, but on grounds of space and clarity it is not discussed further here; see further Wełna, Chapter 4, Section 4 and Sylvester, Chapter 6, Section 3.1.) Until fairly recently it was commonplace to emphasize the discrete character of linguistic categories, but recent work – influenced by developments in cognitive studies – has drawn attention to the fuzzy divisions between these traditional distinctions: whether a particular construction is discussed under the heading of lexical morphology or syntax depends on the definition of the notion “word”, while of course paradigmatic selection in a clause such as She loves him depends on the syntagmatic relations which obtain between the chosen forms. There is therefore a difficulty in separating the study of syntax from the investigation of other aspects of grammar – or indeed in distinguishing grammar from the study of the lexicon (lexicology), since grammar and the lexicon are both ways whereby meaning (semantics) is instantiated, and thence transmitted through speech or writing. It is not unexpected that much recent research in historical syntax has engaged with issues such as grammaticalization, i.e. the process whereby the instantiation of meaning is transferred from lexical to grammatical expression (see Fischer et al. 2000, Chapter 9, which is an important starting point for further study). Any discussion of ME syntax, therefore, needs to engage not only with syntax as traditionally delimited but also with the overlaps which obtain between syntax and other aspects of linguistic enquiry. A second major development in the study of syntax is in some sense operational, but has a theoretical implication. Developments in corpus studies, encouraged by ground-breaking work on historical data at the University of Helsinki in particular, have led to a new interest in evidential matters (see https://www. helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/varieng; a collaborative project relevant for this chapter is the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English [Kroch and Taylor 2000]). It is no coincidence that there has been a consequent shift in theoretical studies, from a focus on competence/langue to a new interest in performance/

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parole. The study of electronic corpora allows researchers to observe the emergence of new structures both diachronically (i.e. through time) and diatopically (i.e. through space); it also enables a reassessment of the traditional concept of well-formedness, whereby researchers used their native-speaker intuition to determine whether or not a particular sentence was acceptable or not. Native-speaker intuition is of course not available to historical linguists, but corpora supply at least some data, enabling us to identify dominant patterns which may address that lacuna (for an example of what can be achieved by these means, see Los 2005). A focus on parole rather than langue reminds researchers that notions such as “sentence” are, like “word”, less straightforward than have been often assumed. Medieval grammarians considered the sententia to be primarily a semantic rather than a grammatical notion while the primary unit for analysis was the periodus or period, i.e. “[…] an utterance or complete rhetorical structure which expresses a single idea or sententia […]” (Parkes 1992: 306). The sentence was thus a “thought or opinion; especially the substance or significance expressed by the words of […] a rhetorical ‘period’” (Parkes 1992: 307). Medieval rhetoricians also distinguished divisions within the period: the colon (PL cola) and, within the colon, the comma (PL commata) (these terms were later transferred to the punctuation-marks which evolved originally to distinguish them). These divisions were traditionally flagged in speech through the use of rhythmical features where it was necessary to pause to a greater or lesser extent. They are therefore essentially rhetorical units, correlating with patterns of speech and employed as guidance to assist reading aloud; written texts are seen as secondary aids to the primary method of communication, viz. speech. In the medieval period, the comma was often marked by the virgula suspensiva or virgule , or sometimes the punctus or point , while the colon was marked typically by the punctus elevatus יִ‬the period was marked by a punctus but sometimes by the use of litterae notabiliores (“more notable letters”, i.e. capitals). Such notions not only underpin the very various punctuation-practices of ME scribes but they also, of course, challenge universalist claims in modern linguistic categorization. An attempt will be made here to harness these new insights, in a preliminary way, to studying Middle English (hence ME) syntax. The main resources to be used other than standard editions will be the most recent version of the Stavanger-Glasgow Middle English Grammar Corpus (MEG-C) (Stenroos et al. 2011), and the corpus developed for the Edinburgh Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME) (Laing 2013–). Discussion will be informed by illustration: short texts in verse and prose will be presented and analyzed. These texts will be presented in what may seem to some readers (and users of other corpora) an unfamiliar guise: they will appear in “diplomatic” editions, whereby an attempt is made to reflect

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not only the spellings but also the punctuation (or lack of punctuation) of the original. Such editions engage with the text as it is, rather than present it through the interpretative lens of modern critical editors whose concerns often skew our reading anachronistically. Moreover, these texts will be chosen from different centuries within the ME period and from different geographical areas. It should be noted that a chapter on “ME syntax” should not reify a single kind (let alone a “standard” variety) of Middle English. For various reasons discussed elsewhere (see Schaefer, Chapter 11; Smith, Chapter 2), Middle English was not only, like Present-day English, a congeries of varieties, but these varieties were reflected in the written as well as in the spoken mode. A distinction is made between prose and verse, though that distinction was arguably looser in ME times than it is today. Such a short chapter cannot of course supply a comprehensive outline of ME syntax; the distinction made here between verse and prose, for instance, is undoubtedly crude, and generic considerations demand a much more nuanced approach than is possible here (see Arnovick, Chapter 14). This chapter, which focuses on qualitative rather than quantitative approaches, is intended simply as a starting-point for discussion. It supplements rather than replaces classic accounts such as Mustanoja 1960, and the important study guide, Fischer et al. 2000.

2 The syntax of Middle English prose MS Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 402 is generally dated to the second quarter of the 13th century, perhaps about 1230 (see Laing 1993: 24 and references there cited). The text’s language has been localized to Herefordshire or Shropshire (see Laing 1993: 24, although see also Millett 2005 and subsequently Laing 2013–). The manuscript contains a single item: the Ancrene Wisse (‘Guide for Anchorites’). The Corpus manuscript of Ancrene Wisse has been the basis for most modern editions of this important piece of ME religious prose, ever since the pioneering work of J. R. R. Tolkien (1929; see also Shepherd 1972; Millett 2005). It represents a variety of ME which was both conservative and innovatory. Copies of the Old English (hence OE) homilies of Ælfric and Wulfstan were still being produced in the south-west Midlands when the work was composed, and there are aspects of this text which demonstrate the impact of the Anglo-Saxon prose-tradition; but the author was also clearly well-acquainted with issues current in contemporary Parisian intellectual circles, and was therefore in touch with the French-centered 12th-century renaissance. The form of ME prose which resulted, devised originally for a “gentle and lettered” (D’Ardenne 1961: 177) female audience/readership, reflects these two influences.

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The following passage, (1), from Part VII of the text and based on Tolkien’s diplomatic edition (Tolkien 1962: 198–199), is often quoted in studies of the text, although generally in a form different from how it appears in the manuscript. The passage allegorizes the soul as a lady besieged in a castle, offered the support of a mihti kinges luue ‘a powerful king’s love’; this king is later revealed to be iesu godes sune ‘Jesus, God’s son’. Expanded abbreviations are underlined. (1)

A leafdi wes mid hire fan ‫ יִ‬bis et al abuten. hire lond al destruet. & heo al poure inwið an eorðene castel. A mihti kinges luue wes þah biturnd up on hire swa unimete swiðe ‫ יִ‬þet he for wohlech sende hire his sonden. an efter oðer. ofte somet monie. sende hire beawbelez baðe feole & feire. sucurs of liueneð. help of his hehe hird to halden hire castel. Heo underfeng al as on unrecheles. & swa wes heard iheortet ‫ יִ‬þet hire luue ne mahte he neauer beo þe neorre. hwet wult tu mare he com him seolf on ende. schawde hire his feire neb. as þe þe wes of alle men ‫ יִ‬feherest to bihalden. spec se swiðe swoteliche. & wordes se murie ‫יִ‬ þet ha mahten deade arearen to liue. wrahte feole wundres & dude muchele meistries biuoren hire ehsihðe. schawde hire his mihte. talde hire of his kinedom. bead to makien hire cwen of al þet he ahte. al þis ne heold nawt. nes þis hoker wunder? for heo nes neauer wurðe forte beon his þuften. ah swa þurh his deboneirte luue hefde ouercumen him ‫ יִ‬þet he seide on ende. Dame þu art iweorret. & þine van beoð se stronge ‫ יִ‬þet tu ne maht nanesweis wið ute mi sucurs edfleon hare honden. þet ha ne don þe to scheome deað efter al þi weane. Ich chulle for þe luue of þe ‫ יִ‬neome þet feht up o me. & arudde þe of ham þe þi deað secheð. Ich wat þah to soðe þet ich schal bituhen ham neomen deaðes wunde. & ich hit wulle heorteliche forte ofgan þin heorte. Nu þenne biseche ich þe for þe luue þet ich cuðe þe. þet tu luuie me lanhure efter þe ilke dede dead ‫ יִ‬hwen þu naldest liues. þes king dude al þus. arudde hire of alle hire van. & wes him seolf to wundre ituket & islein on ende. þurh miracle aras þah from deaðe to liue. Nere þeos ilke leafdi of uueles cunnes cunde. ʒef ha ouer alle þing ne luuede him her efter? (Ancrene Wisse; Tolkien [ed.] 1962: 198– 199) ‘A lady was surrounded all about by her enemies, her land entirely destroyed, and she entirely poor, inside an earthen castle. A powerful king’s love was nevertheless directed at her, so very great that he, in order to woo her, sent to her his messengers, one after another, often many together. He sent her jewels, both many and beautiful, succour in materials for existence, help from his noble court to defend her castle. She received everything in a careless fashion, and was so hard-hearted that he could never be any nearer her love. What more do you want? He came himself at last, showed her his handsome face which was, in comparison with all men, most beautiful to

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look at; he spoke so very sweetly, and words so pleasant that they could raise the dead to life; he performed many marvels and did many exceptional deeds in front before her eyes; he showed her his power, told her of his kingdom, offered to make her queen of everything that he owned. All this had no effect. Was this disdain not a marvel? – for she was never worthy to be his maidservant. But even so through his generosity love had overcome him, so that he said at last: “Lady, you are attacked, and your enemies are so strong that you could not in any way escape from their hands without my help, lest they put you to a shameful death after all your sorrows. I must because of my love for you take that battle upon myself, and rid you of those who seek your death. I know nevertheless in truth that I must receive death’s wound from them, and I wish it heartily in order to win your heart. Now then I beseech you, in the name of the love I feel for you, that you may love me when I am dead after this deed, when you would not so while I was alive”. This king did everything thus; he rid her of all her enemies, and was himself terribly tormented and eventually killed. Through a miracle he arose nevertheless from death to life. Would not this same lady have an evil-natured character is she did not love him thereafter above all things?’ (For the convenience of readers, translations into Present-day English of all the passages in this chapter are offered here. It will be observed that PDE punctuation has been supplied, although there are of course distortions which necessarily follow. For a modern translation of Ancrene Wisse, see White 1993.) Four marks of punctuation are used in this passage: the punctus, the punctus elevatus, the punctus interrogativus , and litterae notabiliores. The punctus and punctus elevatus are used to distinguish major and minor pauses respectively. The punctus interrogativus is used to indicate a question, while litterae notabiliores are used sparingly to mark major shifts in the rhetoric of the passage; thus A mihti kinges luue contrasts with the lady’s response, flagged by the capitalized Heo ‘she’; and stages in the king’s statements are marked by Dame, Ich and Nu. The syntax of the passage is highly complex. The following section demonstrates the impact of two stylistic modes, crudely distinguished as (a) parataxis, and (b) hypotaxis: hwet wult tu mare he com him seolf on ende. schawde hire his feire neb. as þe þe wes of alle men ‫ יִ‬feherest to bihalden. spec se swiðe swoteliche. & wordes se murie ‫ יִ‬þet ha mahten deade arearen to liue. wrahte feole wundres & dude muchele meistries biuoren hire ehsihðe. schawde hire his mihte. talde hire of his kinedom. bead to makien hire cwen of al þet he ahte.

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In parataxis, units are placed in parallel with each other and readers/audiences are invited to make connections themselves, while in hypotaxis hierarchical relationships between units are made explicit: we might compare “I came, I saw, I conquered” (parataxis) with “I conquered because I saw. Because I came, I saw” (hypotaxis). Periods such as schawde hire his feire neb, spec se swiðe swoteliche, talde hire of his kinedom are deployed paratactically; close examination of the passage shows that the section includes a series of verbs all dependent on he: schawde, spec, wrahte, dude, schawde, talde and bead. But interposed within these paratactic elements are modifying/subordinated constructions: as þe þe wes of alle men ‫ יִ‬feherest to bihalden, and þet ha mahten deade arearen to liue. The technique is an example of the author’s “careful involved symmetry” (Shepherd 1972: lxxii), frequently demonstrated elsewhere in the work: “symmetry, parallelism, and antithesis are habits of his thought” (Shepherd 1972: lxvii). This kind of sophisticated usage clearly derives in part from the models supplied by the great homilists of the Anglo-Saxon period, but it also shows the impact of the rhetorical arts current in France, most notably the preaching-style developed by writers such as Maurice of Sully. It is interesting that the rhetorical question hwet wult tu mare which opens this sequence is not distinguished by a punctus interrogativus or even a punctus or punctus elevatus; the passage moves swiftly to the sequence of statements which follow, and no pause is suggested by the Corpus scribe. Other important early manuscripts of the text, roughly contemporary with the Corpus MS, manifest different behaviors. Whereas the principal scribe of MS London, British Library Cotton Cleopatra C.vi shares the usage of the Corpus scribe, the scribe of MS London, British Library Cotton Nero A. xiv places a punctus after the equivalent period, thus, hwat wult tu more. (It should be noted, however, that the Nero scribe tends to use punctuation more insistently than the Corpus and Cleopatra scribes. Parallel passages from the various texts may be examined in Day 1952: 177, Dobson 1972: 284–285.) It is possible to distinguish dominant element-order patterns in example (1). The commonest usage is the ordering subject-verb, as in Heo underfeng al […], he com him seolf on ende. However, constructions such as A leafdi wes mid hire fan ‫ יִ‬bis et al. abuten, where the interposed prepositional phrase mid hire fan and punctus elevatus suggests that the past participle biset is still perceived as a complement rather than part of the verb phrase, indicate that the PDE complex verb phrase has still not wholly emerged. As was frequently the case in Old English (and as is still the case in Present-day German), an initial adverbial construction causes the position of the following subject and verb to be reversed in sequence, e.g. Nu þenne biseche ich þe. In subordinated periods, more flexible element-orders are possible, e.g. þet hire luue ne mahte he neauer beo þe

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neorre, and in questions verbs precede subjects, e.g. nes þis hoker wunder?, Nere þeos ilke leafdi of uueles cunnes cunde [….]?. A delayed verb appears in ʒef ha ouer alle þing ne luuede him her efter, while we might note the verb at the end of the period in the relative construction þe þi deað secheð. Double negation is used, apparently for emphatic reasons: al þis ne heold nawt (we might note in this last example the intransitive use of heold, cf. OED hold, vb. sense 25) beside single negation in ha ouer alle þing ne luuede him; constructions with ne preceding the verb are common in Early ME prose, shifting to not – predominantly but by no means exclusively post-verbal – later in the ME period. Contracted forms are also commonly used, e.g. Nere, naldest etc; such forms seem to have been innovative in late OE but recessive as the ME period progressed (see for all these findings, and for further discussion of negation, Iyeiri 2001). Within noun phrases agreement of adjective and noun is sustained, e.g., muchele meistries, with an adjective inflected in ‑e, or in the genitive phrase within the prepositional construction of uueles cunnes cunde. Morphological change has clearly had an impact on syntactic usage; inflectional endings in this passage, though of a wider variety than in Present-day English, are clearly reduced in comparison with Old English, and this development has syntactic implications. Thus both forms in the noun phrase feole wundres ‘many marvels’ derive from Old English, but OE fela ‘many’, which seems to have been classified as a numeral, was followed by the plural genitive, thus OE fela wundra. The emerging indefinite article appears in an eorðene castel; Old English, which had a two-way deictic system (“simple” versus “compound”), did not have an equivalent to this construction (see e.g. Jones 1988). Prepositional use is more widespread in example (1) than was the case in Old English. Verb phrases similarly reflect certain OE patterns but modified to reflect linguistic developments. We might note the retention of the formal subjunctive in certain subordinate clauses, e.g. þet tu luuie me lanhure efter þe ilke dede dead (cf. indicative luuest; D’Ardenne 1961: 234) or in questions, e.g. Nere þeos ilke leafdi of uueles cunnes cunde …?; auxiliaries such as maht(en) seem not yet to have taken over the subjunctive function they have in Present-day English, although of course there is a semantic overlap (see Smith 1996a: 151–153). Similarly, forms such as schal, chulle, naldest, wulle, etc. have not yet taken over fully the role of future auxiliary, and are still used with their “full” lexical meaning, i.e. ‘must’ for schal etc. and ‘wish’ for wulle etc. Lexical uses of these words in example (1) are clear in & ich hit wulle heorteliche forte ofgan þin heorte, if less so in Ich chulle for þe luue of þe ‫ יִ‬neome þet feht up o me; the process of grammaticalization of these forms seems incipient rather than complete (see further Warner 1992; see also Denison 1993: 292–339).

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A contrasting passage (example 2) in a very different genre comes from the opposite end of the country and from later in the Middle English period: a copy of the so-called “defective” version of the prose Mandeville’s Travels, once MS Cambridge, Bradfer Lawrence 7 and now MS Tokyo, Takamiya 63 (see Seymour 2002). The language of the text has been localized by the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (McIntosh et al. 1986) to the West Riding of Yorkshire, as LP 1349; the manuscript dates from the first quarter of the 15th century. The passage is taken (with some modifications and the omission of some lines, marked […]) from the first tranche of the text printed in MEG-C (Stenroos et al. 2011). The passage printed here corresponds to chapter 5 and the beginning of chapter 6 of the work in Seymour’s critical edition (2002: 21–23). As in example (1), expanded abbreviations are underlined. (As is common in many northern varieties of Middle English, the letter “thorn” is represented in example (2) by the figura , e.g. as in yat ‘that’, and is thus written in a way indistinguishable from “y”. Not all northern varieties, however, collapse the distinction, as will be noted in example (4) below. See further Benskin 1982. For the interpretation of the place-names in example (2), see Seymour 2002.) (2)

And who so wille ga to ye land of babilone ‫ יִ‬wher ye sawtene duelles to haue leue to ga ye mar sykerle yoro ye contrees ‫ יִ‬and for to ga to mounte Synay be for he come to jerusalem. and yan turne a gayne to jerusalem he sall ga fra gasa to ye cas[t]elle dayre and aftur men comes oute of s[u]rry & gas in to wildernese. wher ye way is fule sandy and yatt wildernese lastes. viij iournese whar men fyndes alle att yam neddyse of vitayles ‫ יִ‬and men calles yat wildernese of achelleke ‫ & יִ‬when a man comes out of desertte he entres in to Egipte canapote ‫ & יִ‬in a noyer langage men calles itt Mercyne ‫ יִ‬and ye firste goode toune yat men fyndes is called beley and itt is of ye kyngdome of alape ‫ יִ‬And fro yennes men comes to babilone. and yer is a fayr kyrke of our ladye. wher scho duellyde. vij ʒeer when scho wentte. when scho went [dittography] oute of lande of Jnde ‫ יִ‬ffor drede of kynge heroude ‫ יִ‬and yar lygges ye body of saynte barbare. and yer duellyde on iosephe when he was saulde of his bredyr ‫ & יִ‬yar made Nabogodonoser thre childre be brentte er yai wer in ryʒte trouthe. whilke childer men calles ‫ יִ‬Ananya ‫ יִ‬aʒarya ‫ יִ‬Misael ‫ יִ‬as ye psalme of benedicite telles ‫ יִ‬Bott nabogodonoser callede yame yus ‫ יִ‬Sidrake Misaake abdenego. yat is to say. gude glorius gode. vittorius gode. our alle kyngdome and yatt was for ye grett myracle yatt he sawe gode ga. yoro ye fyer with yes childer ‫ יִ‬yar duelles ye. souden. ffor yar is a fayr see in a Castelle. and itt is strange. & well sette on a roche Jn yatt Castell. is duellynge to kepe yatt Castelle & to serfe ye sowdane ‫יִ‬ mo yane viij thosande persones of folke ‫ יִ‬yatt takes alle ye nessessaries of ye contre. of ye soudane J awghte well to witte ‫ יִ‬For J duellede with hym in his

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werres soudeour a grett whille. a gayne ye bedoynes ‫ יִ‬and he walde haue weddyde me to a grett prynce douʒter ryghte Richelye ‫ ]…[ יִ‬Now when aman has visetyde yis place of saynt katerine ‫ יִ‬and he wille turne to Jerusalem ‫ יִ‬he sall firste take leefe att ye monkes. & Recomaunde hym specialie to yer prayere and ye same Monkes gifes with goode wille vitayles to pilgrymes to passe with yoro wildernese to Surry and yatt lastes well xiij iournese ‫ יִ‬and in yatt Contre duelles many arabiens yat men calles bedoynese and ascoperdes. and yes er men of alle Euel condicoun & yai haue ne houses. bott tentes whilke yai make of Camelus & of oyer bestes yat yai ette and yar vnder yai lygge ‫ יִ‬and yai duel. in places whar yai may fynde water of ye rede see ‫( יִ‬Mandeville’s Travels) ‘And whosoever wishes to go to the land of Cairo (babilone) where the sultan dwells, in order to get leave to go more safely through the countries and in order to go to Mount Sinai before he may come to Jerusalem, and then turn back to Jerusalem, he must go from Gaza to Castle Darum. And afterwards men come out of Syria and go into the wilderness, where the way is very sandy, and that wilderness lasts eight days’ journeying, where men take all that they need in provisions. And men call that the wilderness of Achelleke. And when a man comes out of the desert he enters into Egypt Canopus, and in another language men call it Mesryn. And the first good town that men find is called Beleth, and it is part of the kingdom of Aleppo. And from thence men come to Cairo, and there is a fair church of Our Lady, where she lived for seven years when she went from the land of Judaea for fear of King Herod. And there lies the body of Saint Barbara, and there Joseph continued to live when he was sold by his brothers. There Nebuchadnezzar caused three children to be burned before they were in the true faith, which children men call Ananiah, Azariah, Misael, as the psalm of blessing tells. But Nebuchadnezzar called them thus: Shadrach, Meschach and Abednego, that is to say, good God, victorious God, our entire Kingdom. And that was because of the great miracle that he saw God go through the fire with these children. The sultan dwells there. For there is a handsome seat in a castle, and it is strong, and well set on a rock. In that castle, to protect it and to serve the sultan, more than 8000 persons from that people are dwelling. I ought well to know, for I dwelt with him for a great while as a soldier in his wars against the Bedouins, and he wished to wed me very nobly to the daughter of a great prince […] Now when a man has visited this place of Saint Katherine, and he wishes to turn to Jerusalem, he must first take leave from the monks, and commend himself to their prayers. And the same monks give with good will provisions to pilgrims to pass with through wilderness to Syria, and that lasts a good thirteen days’ journey. And in that country dwell many Arabs whom men call Bedouins and Azoparts (i.e. Ethiopians). And these are men of an entirely evil condition,

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and they have no houses, except tents that they make from camels and other beasts that they eat, and under which they lie. And they dwell in places where they can find water from the Red Sea’ The main marks of punctuation in example (2) are the same as those in Ancrene Wisse, viz. the punctus and punctus elevatus (the passage does not include questions), accompanied by a few litterae notabiliores. These last are mostly used for proper names, but also sporadically in (2) for some conjunctions (And, Bott, ffor); the capital letter in the preposition Jn ‘in’ seems also to mark a new period. Here the punctus elevatus is much more common than the punctus, and seems to be used by the scribe to mark most periods as well as lesser divisions. The punctus seems to be used in this passage either to mark some subordinate structure or in lists, rather in the fashion of the present-day comma. However, as in PDE usage, some subordinated constructions are not so marked, e.g. the post-modifying unit att yam neddyse of vitayles. Examination of this passage shows a sustained dominance of parataxis: periods are commonly linked by and, &, etc. Hypotactic structures are much more sparingly used, e.g. whilke childer men calles […]. It is customary for historians of English prose style to detect a steady movement from parataxis to hypotaxis over time, correlating with increasing literacy in the vernacular, but the evidence from this passage is that the movement is not straightforward; indeed, in the 15th century, the paratactic style was still quite widespread. It is interesting, for instance, that Thomas Malory, when translating from French for his Arthurian cycle, chose to replace the hypotaxis of his French originals with a paratactic style which he clearly felt more appropriate (see Smith 1996b and references there cited). Element-order within periods is predominantly subject-verb, even in units beginning with a subordinating conjunction, e.g. when a man comes out of desertte. Verb-subject ordering after an adverbial, however, is retained in yar lygges ye body of saynte barbare, yar made Nabogodonoser thre childre be brentte […], in yatt Contre duelles many arabiens etc. Some variation is clearly still allowed, as in the relative construction whilke childer men calles […], but such usages are still found in formal Present-day English. The lengthy sequence Jn yatt Castell. is duellynge to kepe yatt Castelle & to serfe ye sowdane ‫ יִ‬mo yane viij thosande persones of folke ‫ יִ‬might also be noted, where the complex verb phrase is duellynge is positioned some way before the extended subject mo […] of folke. Noun-phrase syntax is essentially that of Present-day English. The ‑e inflection which was used in (e.g.) late 14th-century Southern Middle English to distinguish plurals and weak adjectives from strong singulars is no longer used in this way, as is to be expected in Northern Middle English at this date; thus ye grett myracle. Where ‑e is retained it seems to be simply a scribal flourish; thus whereas

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ye firste goode toune would seem to retain ‑e, we might also note gude glorius gode, where the form gude, being in “strong” position, would not have attracted an inflectional ‑e in (for instance) contemporary southern Chaucerian English. An uninflected genitive appears in a grett prynce douʒter; elsewhere in example (2) possession is commonly expressed by means of the preposition of, while we might also note the uninflected noun after a numeral in vij ʒeer. The indefinite article a is commonly deployed in the passage, e.g. a fayr see. Verb-phrase syntax is much closer to that used in Present-day English than was the case in example (1). In the period when aman has visetyde yis place of saynt katerine the past participle visetyde is not separated from has, as was habitual in example (1). A formal subjunctive, however, appears in be for he come to jerusalem, and may still best seems translated as ‘can’ in in places whar yai may fynde water of ye rede see ‫יִ‬. The modals wille and sall (cf. PDE ‘shall’) still, moreover, seem to sustain lexical rather than grammatical force in and he wille turne to Jerusalem ‫ יִ‬he sall firste take leefe att ye monkes. (see further Warner 1982: 192–197). As is common in Northern Middle English, plural subjects govern present-tense verbs in ‑es in men fyndes etc., and in ye same Monkes gifes with goode wille vitayles to pilgrymes. We might also note, however, yai make, yai ette, yai lygge, and yai duel, showing a distinct inflection when the verb is preceded by a pronoun. The text therefore illustrates the operation of the Northern Middle English/Older Scots Personal Pronoun Rule. Relics of this system still remain in certain rural varieties of Present-day Scots, and indeed elsewhere; its origin is much debated, but the current scholarly consensus is that its occurrence is the result of interaction with Celtic (see further Benskin 2011 and references there cited). The system works as follows: if the subject of the clause is a personal pronoun (i.e. ‘I’, ‘thou’, ‘he’, etc.), and comes immediately before or after the verb, the paradigm is as in Table 5.1: Table 5.1: Northern Middle English/Older Scots Personal Pronoun Rule SG

P PLL

1 2 3

I keip thou keipis he/scho/it keipis we/ʒe/thai keip

Otherwise the ‑is form is used throughout the paradigm. We might also note the verb phrase in Jn yatt Castell. is duellynge to kepe yatt Castelle & to serife ye sowdane ‫ יִ‬mo yane viij thosande persones of folke ‫יִ‬. The verb phrase is duellynge represents the appearance of the progressive present construction, rare in earlier English but subsequently commonplace (see further Brinton 1988).

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It will be observed therefore that example (2) displays both more “advanced” and more “conservative” features. The preference for parataxis might seem conservative, as might be the handling of verbs which later developed into auxiliaries; but (e.g.) the handling of element-order is, as might be expected from the later date, much more in line with PDE than was the case in example (1).

3 The syntax of Middle English verse MS London, British Library, Cotton Caligula A.ix (Part I), dated to the second quarter of the 13th century, has been localized, like the Corpus manuscript of Ancrene Wisse, to the south-west Midlands, although in this case to north-west Worcestershire (Laing 1993: 69–70; see also Laing 2013–). It contains one of the two surviving texts of Lawman’s Brut, lines from which appear in example (3). Example (3) is based on Brook and Leslie’s edition (1963: 3–4), but corrected with reference to the text as it appears in LAEME. Although verse, the passage is written out – as was the case with Anglo-Saxon poetry – as prose, and lineendings in the original manuscript are marked by |. However, example (3) is laid out below for the most part in pairs of “half-lines”, the basic metrical unit of Anglo-Saxon prosody, to reflect the verse structure of the text. (3) Nu bidde[ð] laʒamon alcne| æðele mon ‫יִ‬ for þene almiten godd. | þet þeos boc rede ‫ & יִ‬leornia þeos ru|nan. þat he þeos soðfeste word ‫ יִ‬seg|ge to sumne. for his fader saule ‫ |יִ‬þa hine for[ð] brouhte. & for his mo|der saule ‫ יִ‬þa hine to monne iber. | & for his awene saule ‫ יִ‬þat hire| þe selre beo. AmeN. NV seið mid loft songe þe| wes on leoden preost. al| swa þe boc spekeð ‫ יִ‬þe he| to bisne inom. Þa grickes hefden| troye ‫ יִ‬mid teone bi wonen. & þat lond| iwest ‫ & יִ‬þa leoden of slawen. & for| þe wrake dome ‫ יִ‬of Menelaus que|ne. elene was ihoten. alðeodisc| wif. Þa paris alixandre ‫ יִ‬mid pret| wrenche. bi won. for hire weoren| on ane daʒe ‫ יִ‬hund þousunt deade. | vt of þan fehte ‫ יִ‬þe was feondli|che stor. Eneas þe duc ‫ יִ‬mid ermðen| at wond. Nefede he boten anne|sune ‫ יִ‬þe was mid him isund. | Asscanius was ihoten ‫ יִ‬nefede he| bern no ma.

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& þes duc mid his drih|te ‫ יִ‬to þare sæ him droh. of kunne| & of folke ‫ יִ‬þe fulede þan duke. of| monne & of ahte. þe he to þare| sæ brouhte. & tuenti gode scipen. | he guðliche fulde. & þa scipen foren| wide ‫ יִ‬ʒeon þare wintrede sæ. (Brut; Brook and Leslie [eds.] 1963) ‘Now Lawman [laʒamon] asks every noble man, for the sake of almighty God, who may read this book and discover these secrets, that he may recite appropriately this true speech, for the soul of his father, who brought him forth, and for the soul of his mother, who bore him as a man, and for his own soul, so that it may be safer. Amen. Now say with inspiration he who was priest among the people, just so the book speaks, which he took as an exemplary narrative. When the Greeks had tragically captured Troy, and laid the land waste, and slain the people, and for the avenging of Menelaus’s queen, who was called Helen, an alien woman (whom Paris Alexander won with practiced treason), for her in a single day a hundred thousand died. Out of that fighting, which was extremely fierce, Aeneas the duke escaped with anguish. He had only one son who was saved with him, who was called Ascanius; he had no more children. And this duke retreated with his household to the sea, of family and of people who followed the duke, of men and of property which he brought to the sea. And he filled twenty good ships in martial fashion, and the ships went far and wide across the wintry sea’. (For an excellent up-todate translation of the poem, see Allen 1992.) The punctuation of the passage is closely tied to its verse-structure. Thus the midline caesura is generally flagged by the punctus elevatus and the end of lines by a simple punctus; it will be observed that, in this passage at least, the occurrence of the caesura corresponds to a break between periodic units, such as phrases or clauses. Litterae notabiliores are deployed in general to mark steps in the argument, although they are also sporadically used for personal names. In general the syntax of the passage is comparable with that in example (1). Parataxis and hypotaxis are both employed, though linking elements are generally the coordinating conjunction & or the relative particle þe. It is noticeable that each verse-unit (“half-line”) tends to coincide with clauses or longer phrases. Old English element-order is also sustained. Verb-final constructions are common in subordinated clauses, such as þet þeos boc rede and þa hine to monne iber. Subject-verb ordering is found in & þa scipen foren| wide ‫ יִ‬ʒeon þare wintrede sæ, even within a clause beginning with &. Double negation is deployed in nefede he| bern no ma; it is interesting that in this example the negator ne, with which the

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verb hefede has been assimilated, is immediately followed by the verb, suggesting that ne is seen as an adverb (cf. also Nefede he boten anne| sune). Noun-phrase syntax is more archaic in this passage than in Passage 1. Inflected forms of the determiner appear, e.g. alcne| æðele mon (alcne = ACC ), for þene almiten godd (ACC ), to þare sæ (DAT ); phrases such as for þene almiten godd also demonstrate concord between determiner and modifying adjective. As yet the indefinite article has not emerged boten anne| sune; includes an inflected form anne derived from the OE numeral ān ‘one’. In the verb phrase, the formal subjunctive is retained in þat he þeos soðfeste word ‫יִ‬seg|ge to sumne. The complex verb phrase has not yet fully emerged; the retention of the delayed past participle in Þa grickes hefden| troye ‫ יִ‬mid teone bi wonen. & þat lond| iwest ‫ & יִ‬þa leoden of slawen. suggests that the participle is still, as in Old English, conceived of as an adjective postmodifying the object rather than as the headword of a complex verb phrase. Example (4) is from MS London, British Library, Egerton 3309 (olim Castle Howard), the Metrical Life of St Cuthbert, dating from the middle of the 15th century; the passage is taken from the first tranche presented in MEG-C (Stenroos et al. 2011), with a few minor modifications. The language has been localized to County Durham (Laing 2013–: LP 13). The most recent edition of the work dates from the late 19th century (Raine 1889). (4) [folio 18r] […] To pray for þaim we halde it waste þai haue fordone oure alde lawes And broght in newe þat na man knawes Were þai all deede it war na charge þan myght we leue all at oure large […] Þis tale to saint bede was tolde Of ane of þaim þat case beholde Þat was a trewe and symple man Þat walde noʒt lye ne feyn þan In þis forde chapitill þou sall wat gif þou rede will Before he was fourten ʒere elde

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he had his wittes wele in welde hende hirdmen he was sett amange he saw aungels with ioy and sange Bischop saule Aydane beere to heuen […] [folio 18v] […] And on a nyght when þai slepyd He waked in prayers as he was wont He saw with in a schort stont Come fra heuen alufsom lyght And þat with many worthy wyght þai toke a saule was clere and clene And bare it to heuen þaim betwene […] lo brethir a litil stounde J haue bene wakand on þis grounde heuen yate J . saw opyn And haly aungels lede þider in þe saule of some bischop it is þat with slyke lyght was ledd to blis (Metrical Life of St Cuthbert folio 18r–18v; Raine [ed.] 1889) ‘“We consider it foolish to pray for them who have abandoned our old laws, and brought in new ones that no man knows; it would be no difficulty if they were all dead, then we could leave everyone unconfined […]” This tale was told to Saint Bede [sic] by one of those who observed that event, who was a true and simple man, who then wished not to lie or pretend. In this fourth chapter you shall know, if you wish to read it. Before he was fourteen years’ old he had his wits well under control; he was set among noble shepherds; he saw angels, with joy and song, bear to heaven the soul of Bishop Aidan. […] And one night when they slept he stayed awake in prayers as he was accustomed to do; he saw within a short time a beautiful light come from heaven, and that with many a noble person they took a soul who was clear and pure, and bore it to heaven between them […] “… Lo brother, I have been waking at this place for a little while; I saw heaven’s gate open and holy angels lead in thither the soul, it is, of some bishop, who was lead to joy with such light” ’.  

It will be immediately observed that the passage lacks punctuation as we understand it. Litterae notabiliores are deployed generally at the beginning of lines, but not elsewhere. The reason for this omission is fairly obvious: punctuation is

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not needed for purposes of disambiguation. In contrast to example (3), the layout of the text on the manuscript-page clarifies the verse structure: the poem is written out as verse, not like prose; and, as has often been commented upon, the choice of iambic tetrameter means that there is a persistent close correlation between p and grammatical unit (see Attridge 1982: 81–82). We might note how many of the lines in example (4) begin with a conjunction (either coordinating or subordinating) or a preposition. Close examination of the passage without imposing modern punctuation practices reveals that the grammatical structure of the passage is loose, with periods linked by conjunctions in a way which modern readers would see as more appropriate for speech rather than formal written text. Many changes from the usages found in example (3) may be noted. We might examine these lines: And on a nyght when þai slepyd He waked in prayers as he was wont He saw with in a schort stont Come fra heuen alufsom lyght And þat with many worthy wyght þai toke a saule was clere and clene The dominant element-order in these lines is subject-verb, even after two initial adverbials, as in And on a nyght when þai slepyd/ He waked in prayers. An exception is Come fra heuen alufsom lyght, although here rhyming constraints are probably significant. More interesting is the omission of an explicit relative pronoun between saule and was in þai toke a saule was clere and clene, a fairly common usage in northern Middle English. But, most notably, it will be observed that there is in example (4), in contrast with example (3), a distinct structure of noun and verb phrases which is much more like Present-day English. The inflectional system within the noun phrase retained in example (3) has largely disappeared; the article system is clearly in place, as in a saule. The complex verb phrase seems to be established in J haue bene wakand. The present-day configuration of the use of the subjunctive seems to be emerging in Were þai all deede it war na charge þan myght we leue all at oure large where the expression myght we seems more appropriately translated as ‘might we’ rather than ‘could we’. A formal subjunctive is retained in a conditional clause, as

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in gif þou rede will (cf. second person singular indicative wilt), but even here will seems to imply simple futurity and not have the implication of volition.

4 Form and function A long-standing debate amongst historical linguists has been to do with the primacy of form over function in linguistic change. Its origins lie in debates that preoccupied the neogrammarians of the late 19th century, and those who reacted against them; the discussion underpins classic accounts such as Samuels (e.g. 1972: 28–29), and remains a live issue in more recent surveys with different theoretical bases, such as (for syntax) Fischer et al. (e.g. 2000: 319). In essence, and as applied to the history of English syntax, the question is: does a change in form, such as (e.g.) inflectional loss, drive the development of (say) a more fixed element-order? Or is it that inflections are dropped because they no longer have a function, that function having been taken over by a more fixed element-order? The answer, it has been held for several years, is that both form and function are relevant for the history of syntax; and this observation may be related to Kretzschmar’s (2009) discussion of the “linguistics of speech”. Kretzschmar’s observations, though brought up-to-date and of course harnessing notions deriving from his engagement with electronic corpora, can be related rather well to the famous distinction made by Samuels (1972: 139) between the “spoken chain” (Samuels’s term for Saussure’s parole) and “system” (Samuels’s term for Saussure’s langue). Samuels defined these two notions as follows: Spoken chain: the total utterances of a given group or community over a limited period, whether fully intelligible or not; System: the total of accepted and intelligible norms […] in the same group and period (1972: 139).

Samuels (1972: 140) saw the relationship between spoken chain and system as iterative; variants may be selected “according to current requirements of the system for the maintenance of equilibrium and of the level of redundancy” or they “may occur in such quantity that the selection of other minority-variants is no longer in question. They are imposed on the system, and the system is thereby altered”. Such notions still resonate in current discussions of the importance of “frequency” (as for example in the essays collected in Bybee and Hopper 2001). It seems likely, therefore, that the next major advances in the study of historical syntax in general, and of ME syntax in particular, will take place through the analysis of large bodies of data, bringing quantitative as well as qualitative insights to bear. Such approaches are already being adopted by various projects. (Several

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projects are currently under way which approach the study of ME syntax using corpora: most notably at Helsinki, but also at York and Manchester in the UK, at Amsterdam and Nijmegen in the Netherlands, at Kyoto in Japan, at Pennsylvania and Toronto in North America, and at many major institutions in Spain, Italy and Germany. A list of relevant websites appears immediately before the List of References, Section 5.) This meshing of theoretical “linguistic” insights with older datafocused “philological” approaches seems to be a fruitful and exciting way forward for the subject, and underpins the discussion offered above.

5 References 5.1 Electronic Resources Kroch, Anthony and Ann Taylor. 2000. Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English (PPCME2). Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania. CD-ROM second edition, release 4. http://www.ling.upenn.edu/ppche/ppche-release-2016/PPCME2-RELEASE-4; last accessed 31 December 2016. Laing, Margaret. 2013–. A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, 1150–1325 (LAEME). Version 3.2. Edinburgh: © The University of Edinburgh. http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laeme2/ laeme2.html; last accessed 31 December 2016. McSparran, Frances (ed.). 2006. Middle English Compendium. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mec/; last accessed 31 December 2016. Nevalainen, Terttu, Irma Taavitsainen, and Sirpa Leppänen. 1998–. The Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English (VARIENG). Department of English, University of Helsinki. http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/series/index.html; last accessed 31 December 2016. Stenroos, Merja, Martti Mäkinen, Simon Horobin, and Jeremy Smith. 2011.The Middle English Grammar Corpus (MEG-C). Version 2011.1. University of Stavanger. http://www.uis.no/ research/history-languages-and-literature/the-mest-programme/the-middle-englishgrammar-corpus-meg-c/; last accessed 18 July 2017.

5.2 Print References Allen, Rosamund (trans.). 1992. Lawman: Brut. Dent: London. Attridge, Derek. 1982. The Rhythms of English Poetry. Longman: London. Benskin, Michael. 1982. The letters and in later Middle English, and some related matters. Journal of the Society of Archivists 7: 13–30. Benskin, Michael. 2011. Present indicative plural concord in Brittonic and Early English. Transactions of the Philological Society (Special Issue on Languages of Early Britain, ed. by Stephen Laker and Paul Russell) 109(2): 158–185. Brinton, Laurel J. 1988. The Development of English Aspectual Systems: Aspectualizers and Postverbal Particles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Brook, G. L. and R. F. Leslie (eds.). 1963. Laʒamon: Brut. (Early English Text Society, 250, 277.) London: Oxford University Press. Bybee, Joan and Paul J. Hopper (eds.). 2001. Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. D’Ardenne, S.R.T.O. (ed.). 1961. Þe Liflade and te Passiun of Seinte Iuliene. (Early English Text Society, 248.) London: Oxford University Press. Day, Mabel (ed.). 1952. The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle (Cotton Nero A. xiv). (Early English Text Society, 225.) London: Oxford University Press. Denison, David. 1993. English Historical Syntax: Verbal Constructions. Longman: London. Dobson, E. J. (ed.). 1972. The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle (Cotton Cleopatra C.vi). (Early English Text Society, 267.) London: Oxford University Press. Fischer, Olga, Ans van Kemanade, Willem Koopman, and Willem van der Wurff. 2000. The Syntax of Early English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Iyeiri, Yoko. 2001. Negative Constructions in Middle English. Fukuoka: Kyushu University Press. Jones, Charles. 1988. Grammatical Gender in English 950 to 1250. London: Croom Helm. Kretzschmar, William A. 2009. The Linguistics of Speech. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laing, Margaret. 1993. Catalogue of Sources for a Linguistic Atlas of Early Medieval English. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Los, Bettelou. 2005. The Rise of the To-Infinitive. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McIntosh, Angus, Michael Samuels, and Michael Benskin, with Margaret Laing and Keith Williamson. 1986. A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (LALME). Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Millett, Bella (ed.). 2005. Ancrene Wisse. (Early English Text Society, 325.) Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mustanoja, Tauno. 1960. A Middle English Syntax, Part 1. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Parkes, M. B. 1992. Pause and Effect: Punctuation in the West. London: Scolar. Raine, James (ed.). 1889. The Metrical Life of St Cuthbert. London: Surtees Society. Samuels, M. L. 1972. Linguistic Evolution, with Special Reference to English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seymour, M. C. (ed.). 2002. Mandeville’s Travels: The Defective Version. (Early English Text Society, 319.) Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shepherd, Geoffrey (ed.). 1972. Ancrene Wisse: Parts Six and Seven. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Smith, Jeremy J. 1996a. An Historical Study of English: Form, Function and Change. London: Routledge. Smith, Jeremy J. 1996b. Language and style in Malory. In: Elizabeth Archibald and A. S. G. Edwards (eds.), A Companion to Malory, 97–113. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer. Tolkien, J. R. R. 1929. Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad. Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association 14: 104–126. Tolkien, J. R. R. (ed.). 1962. The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle: Ancrene Wisse, edited from MS. (Early English Text Society, 249.) London: Oxford University Press. Warner, Anthony. 1982. Complementation in Middle English and the Methodology of Historical Syntax. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Warner, Anthony. 1992. English Auxiliaries: Structure and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. White, Hugh (trans.) 1993. Ancrene Wisse. Harmondworth: Penguin.

Louise Sylvester

Chapter 6: Semantics and Lexicon 1 2 3 4 5

Introduction 96 Semantics 99 Structure of the lexicon Summary 113 References 113

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Abstract: The lexicon of Middle English has been approached from a variety of perspectives. The semasiological approach begins with the set of lexemes and investigates what they mean and what they meant at different times during the period in question. The lexicon has also been approached from the opposite direction: the onomasiological approach takes a set of objects or concepts as the starting point and investigates what words were used to express them. This chapter considers the Middle English lexis from both these points of view, beginning with semantic changes and then examining collocational studies and investigating how we understand Middle English vocabulary within the context of the evidence provided by historical lexicography. The second part of the chapter is concerned with the structure of the Middle English lexicon, examining word formation and then briefly considering word borrowing and its effects on the structures of word fields in Middle English.

1 Introduction A number of approaches have been taken to the vocabulary of Middle English. The most salient of these from the position of post-medieval readers of ME texts is the semasiological, in which investigation focuses on a given set of lexemes, asking what they mean and, more specifically, what they meant at different times during the period in question. The issues arising from this endeavor include: what changes in meaning are found in the history of a particular term, and what motivations can be traced for those changes. For answers to questions Louise Sylvester: London (UK)

DOI 10.1515/9783110525328-006

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framed within the semasiological approach, we may turn to historical dictionaries such as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (Proffitt [ed.] 2000–) and the Middle English Dictionary (Kurath et al. 1952–2001). The policies that lie behind the major works of historical lexicography will form part of my discussion about the semantics and lexicon of Middle English. There is also a considerable body of work which begins from the onomasiological standpoint. This approach starts with a set of objects or concepts and investigates which words have been used to express them. One project investigating Old and Middle English from an onomasiological point of view is the Lexis of Cloth and Clothing in Britain c.700–1450 project (Owen-Crocker et al. 2006–), the aim of which is to gather together all the vocabulary which named items of dress as well as textiles, leather, and the techniques involved in making clothes (sewing, weaving, etc.), and to use the resulting database of terminology to attempt more precise designations for manuscript illustration, grave art and archaeological remains. Another resource, the recently completed Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED) (see Kay et al. 2009) guides readers approaching the lexicon from either the semasiological or the onomasiological direction, since it offers both a conceptual classification of the lexis of English, arranged hierarchically and within the categories and sub-categories chronologically, and an index. This means that researchers may consider which words were available for a particular concept at a specific moment in time, or they may begin with the word and investigate which conceptual groupings it falls into at different points in its history of usage. Example (1) from the HTOED’s data shows a small onomasiological investigation: these are the terms with first usage in the ME period for the concept of HEALING / CURE : (1)

Healing/cure n: bot(e)ning 1303–c1315 · recover 1303–1631 · curation c1374–1677 · mending c1375 (Scots) · warishing c1386–c1440 · recovery 1387/ 8–1686 · cure 1393 (also fig) – · sanation · c1440–1697 (also fig)

By contrast, (2) indicates a semasiological investigation: these are the headwords of the lexical categories, in some cases subcategories, in which the term recovery appears in the HTOED with the dates of usage in the particular sense: (2)

Healing/cure 1387/8–1686 .restoration to health 1590–1774 .a cure/remedy 1620–1761 Recovery 1606– .of one’s health 1568–1678

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Habits & actions ..return/capture of ringed/tagged animal 1909– Reclamation 1853 Restoration .return to a previous better state 1932 .restoration to sound/proper/normal state 1669 Recovery from misfortune/error etc. 1525– Change of direction, reversion .of material things 1885– Posture ..act of regaining original position 1876– Reaching a point/place .arrival c.1540–1653 Respect …act of rising after recovering 1712–1867 Obtaining/acquiring .back/again 1555–1863 ..of territory, etc. 1555–1788 ..possibility of recovering something 1538 .of one’s health, etc. 1568– ..again 1771 Victory in arms ..recovery of territory 1555– Fine 1479 Claim at law .fact of succeeding in claim 1472/3 (Law) Types of transfer ..recovery 1515–1741 Reform/amendment/correction 1593–1853 Arrival c1540–1653 Propelling boat by oars/paddle/pole ..recovery of oar 1856 Construction and servicing aircraft/spacecraft .retrieval of spacecraft/satellite after flight 1949– General/industrial manufacturing processes ..extracting 1885– Constructing/working with wood .ratio of final product to log volume 1958– Payment of debt .collecting debts 1745

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Profit 1931– Indebtedness ..recovering a debt 1745; 1922 In this example we see that the focus is the lexical item, which appears to have had a long life in the language from its first appearance in Middle English through to its continuing use in Present-day English. The list of meaning categories into which the term falls at different points in its history offers a beginning place for thinking about which categories have recovery as a prototypical term, and where the headword offers an idea which is on the periphery of the variational space of the term. We can see which of the occurrences of recovery occur within the categories which appear below headwords and which are found within subcategories further down the lexical hierarchies. In the excerpt from the thesaurus classification of the semantic category HEALING / CURE , the different forms recover and recovery, as well as the date ranges for their usage, suggest that ‘healing/ cure’ was for a long time a core sense for the term.

2 Semantics 2.1 Semantic change What the semasiological investigation highlights is the process of semantic change. Smith (1996) sets out three stages of semantic change which may happen in any order: the conceptual meaning of a word moves from one part of its variational space to another; one (or more) conceptual or associative meaning(s) of a word within its variational space is (or are) dropped; a word develops a new conceptual or associative meaning and thus extends its variational space. A stage in the process of semantic shift is indicated by the presence of polysemy, and we can point to examples within the ME period which indicate the parameters of the variational space of individual lexical items, such as the senses ‘claim at law’ and ‘fine’ for the term recovery. Given the possibilities of movement within variational space, including shifts in register and connotation as well as meaning, it is not surprising that semantic change is evident in the ME period. It has been suggested that metaphorization may be one of the main mechanisms of semantic change (Schendl 2001: 30). This is generally considered alongside another type of meaning extension, metonymization, though neither has been considered in detail in discussions of ME vocabulary. Metaphorization is defined as the understanding of one element in a conceptual structure in terms of an element of another conceptual structure. An example is provided by the sense history of temporal while ‘during

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the time that’ which develops into concessive while ‘although’ within the ME period. Metonymization is generally understood in terms of the relationship partwhole, generally within the domain of physical contiguity. An example is offered by the term keel ‘the lowest longitudinal timber of a ship or boat’ and ‘a small vessel for loading ships, a lighter’ (see Traugott and Dasher 2002: 28). Although both the OED and MED classify these two senses of keel as different nouns, they indicate almost complete overlap in their dates of usage. This evidence indicates that metonymization is a more complex notion than the idea of a development that takes the term from denoting a part to denoting the whole might suggest. Processes of semantic change which have traditionally received more attention are narrowing and widening; for example, in Old English deor meant all kinds of wild creatures, but by the mid-14th century the term was rarely used of wild animals in general and had become restricted to the modern sense ‘deer’. This semantic development is described as ‘narrowing’ or ‘specialization’. The opposite process is traceable too: in Old English the term brid denoted a young bird, such as a chicken or eaglet. According to the OED, by the ME period it had extended its range of meaning so that it designated ‘the young of other animals’ (from 1388); ‘a young man, youngster, child, son’ (from a1300); ‘a maiden, girl’ (from a1300); and ‘any feathered vertebrate animal’ (from a1225). Another set of widely observed processes are those of amelioration and pejoration; for example, in Old English, prætig meant ‘cunning, crafty’ but from just before the middle of the 15th century we find it used, in particular of women or children, with the sense ‘attractive and pleasing in appearance’: the sense history of this term thus provides an example of amelioration. An interesting instance of pejoration is offered by the adjective crafty: Middle English inherited from Old English the senses ‘strong, powerful, mighty’, listed first in the OED but labeled ‘Obs. rare’ (presumably not in the medieval period), and ‘skilful, dextrous, clever, ingenious’. The meaning of the term shifted, however, to ‘Of persons or their faculties, etc.: Skilful in devising and carrying out underhand or evil schemes; cunning, artful, wily’ and ‘Of actions, etc.: Showing craft or cunning’. The time lines showing first and last usage, as derived from the OED (s.v. crafty adj.), look like (3): (3) 1. Strong, powerful, mighty: c893; 1340 2. Skilful, dexterous, clever, ingenious (of persons or their faculties, etc): 971–1877 (of things, actions, etc.: showing skill or cleverness; skilfully wrought): a1000–1599 3. In bad sense (of persons or their faculties, etc.): skilful in devising and carrying out underhand or evil schemes; cunning, artful, wily: 1386–1852 (of actions, etc.): Showing craft or cunning: a1225–1855 –

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The MED (s.v. craftī adj.) adds a little more detail about the individual senses, but tells essentially the same story (4): (4) 1. Strong, powerful: ?a1300 2. (a) Skillful, clever, learned: c1150(OE)–a1475(?a.1430) (b) Skillfully done or made; intelligent, learned, subtle: a1375–a1500 (c.1386) (c) according to the rules of an art or science, artful, scientific: ?c1425– c1450(1369) 3. (a) Skilled in a trade or craft; skilled workman, artisan, mechanic, builder, designer; also fig: c1275(?a1200)–(1463–4) (b) A member of a gild; esp., one of the master craftsmen: c1400 (c1378)–a1525(?1474) (c) Showing craftsmanship, well-built, well-made, workmanlike: c1275 (?a1200)–c1600(c1350) (d) Requiring skill, difficult: c1450 4. Sly, cunning, tricky, deceitful; – of persons or actions: c1225 (?c1200)–1607(?a1425) The meaning history of this term points to the role of pragmatics in semantic change. We find pragmatic considerations in play in the area of the replacement of vocabulary where register (the sense that speakers have that a term has attached to it the prestige associated with the language from which it has been borrowed) is the motor for change. This idea is a powerful one; we shall return to it when we come to look at the structure of the lexicon, but it is also worth considering it in relation to semantic change. The various classifications of shifts in meaning, such as amelioration and pejoration, offer a sense of order in handling meaning change; it has been noted, however, that because they operate with selective and abstracted data and disregard the mechanisms of change, these classifications cannot claim a place in a history of the language (Burnley 1992: 487; see also Schendl 2001: 29–30). More recently, more overarching arguments for regularity in semantic change have been made. The changes undergone by the term crafty look as if they were motivated by speakers through a process of the pragmatics of the conventionalizing of implicatures. The implied meaning when the term was used in conversation would seem to be that someone who is clever is in a position to ‘get one over’ on you, and is someone to be wary of. Conventional implicatures arise when certain conventional meanings which have become attached to certain words in a culture do not have to be inferred from the conversational context: here, crafty shifted from having the sense of physical strength, to being intellectually able, to the use of that ability to trick others. This

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process seems to support arguments that there are several unifying threads in recurring patterns of semantic change. One of these threads is the tendency for meanings to undergo subjectification – they come to express grounding in the speaker or writer’s perspective – and, ultimately, intersubjectification – they come to express grounding in the relationship between speaker/writer and addressee/reader (cf. Traugott and Dasher 2002; Traugott, Chapter 7).

2.2 Collocation-based studies Some areas of the lexicon have acted as prompts to investigations which focus on collocation as a means of discovering more about meaning, register, and the attitudes of speakers in the ME period. These are not exactly semantic field studies, which we will consider below in relation to the structure of the lexicon of Middle English and the effects of extensive borrowings in the latter part of the ME period. The authors of studies focusing on collocation are not interested in examining all the lexical items in use to express a particular concept. Rather, such investigations offer onomasiological and semasiological investigations of conceptualization and word meaning in use in Middle English, often in the works of one particular writer. One area which has come under particular scrutiny within ME lexical and semantic scholarship is that of the language of dreaming, and this topic offers a representative example of this particular approach. An early study of the vocabulary of dreaming in Middle English gives a flavor of the scholarship of the time; it concludes that in ME there was a greater variety of words than in Old English, and that the ‘dream’ of dreme and dremen arrived around 1250 and supplanted earlier words during the period 1350 to 1400. A few ME terms occur rarely: reuelacioun, aperans, shewynge, oracle, metels, dremeles, fantom, and miracle. Three nouns are used frequently: sweven (< OE), vision (Romance loan), and dreme (whether from Old English or perhaps from another source or influenced by Old Norse draumr, dreymir). Verbs are: swefnian, meten, and dremen. Ehrensperger (1931) argues that there appears to be no distinction between either the nouns or the verbs of dreaming in terms of shades of meaning and it remains mysterious as to exactly how and why dreme and dremen came to supplant earlier terms. More recently we find examinations of the same set of terms, some explicitly based on Ehrensperger’s (1931) work. Scholars have traced the development of specific words from Old English onward and demonstrated that fundamental changes took place in the vocabulary of dreaming during the ME period. In a common move, a great many scholars have considered Chaucer’s usages in this area. Chaucer’s vocabulary is said to have looked forward in that, in comparison

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with his contemporaries, he used the noun drem proportionately more than the older noun sweven but both he and Gower use the verb meten (said to be older) twice as readily as the ‘newer’ dremen. However, the reasons for lexical change still remain mysterious: all words deriving from OE swefn- and mæt- disappear, and are replaced by drem- in Middle English; perhaps meten had too many homonyms and sweven was ambiguous (Fischer 1996). A literary study that attempts to capture the nuance of the choice of dream terminology comments on Chaucer’s lexical choice at one particular moment in his poem Troilus and Criseyde. Deploying philology to argue against the views of most critics of the poem that the scene of Troilus’s presumed inactivity in his bedroom represents the end of his solipsism and the beginning of his conversion to the ethos of devotion, Moore (1998: 50) suggests that Chaucer’s use of the verb meten in this scene makes the reader interpret Troilus “not as a self-absorbed daydreamer but as someone in deep, focused, creative discovery”. The most recent work on the ME dream vocabulary takes a more corpus-based approach. Łozowski (2005) begins by observing that establishing meanings of words is a basic task as well as a major challenge for ME semantics. His study attempts to carry out detailed analyses of contextual variation in order to uncover Chaucer’s use of the two dream verbs, meten and dremen, and demonstrate Chaucer’s subtle and intentional attempts to keep the two terms apart. Drawing on cognitive semantics, Łozowski argues that, as their development in both Old English and Middle English indicates, meten and dremen cannot be reduced to any common-denominator (componentially-delimited) type of denotation and presented as “cognitive synonyms”. Equally, they cannot be differentiated simply in terms of (prototype-based) radial categories and thus given as differently profiled configurations of one and same set of attributes (Łozowski 2005: 125). Łozowski (2005: 129) first examines distributional and functional differences, including such features as there being no personal mætan vs. no passive swefnian, and only accusative objects for swefnian vs. only human subjects for mætan. Close analysis of 70 contexts in Chaucer, Gower’s Confessio Amantis, and Langland’s Piers Plowman reveals no evidence for Burnley’s (1989: 36) inclusion of dremen among the verbs that “are frequently used by Chaucer in impersonal constructions”: the only two impersonal uses of dremen in Chaucer are Sir Thopas line 787 (“Me dremed al this nyght”) and The Romaunt of the Rose line 51 (“That it was May, thus dremed me”). Łozowski also disproves the suggestion by Fischer that although Chaucer had extensive knowledge of dreams “he did not employ this knowledge to use the vocabulary at his disposal to make fine semantic distinctions” (Fischer 1996: 255; Łozowski 2005: 128). Furthermore, Chaucer was no more progressive in using dremen than Gower, nor was he prepared to use dremen in the sense ‘have a sleeping vision’. So, although “Chaucer points

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forward while Gower points backwards”, as suggested in Ehrensperger (1931) with regard to the dream nouns (sweven and drem), both authors use the “older” verb meten twice as readily as the “newer” dremen. Moreover, rather than the simple quantitative meten/dremen ratio, what really stands for the newer trend in the use of dream verbs is the from-impersonal-to-personal shift and in that respect, Chaucer, with his frequent uses of meten in impersonal constructions, lags behind not only Gower, but also Langland (Łozowski 2005: 131–132). These approaches to the ME lexicon of dreams and dreaming offer a sense of the questions that linguists (and literary critics) are asking in the face of our distance from speakers of Middle English and the difficulties associated with gaining an understanding of the connotations, range of associative meanings, and register of the vocabulary for those speakers. It has been pointed out that our evidence for the range of registers which were available in the vernacular during the late medieval period is limited: we have to make do with the written materials which have survived the vagaries of time, or with interpreting the discussions of contemporary commentators. Scholars of the period do not have the advantages available to present-day dialectologists and sociolinguists; many groups in society were illiterate, and this means we have no direct access to their language (Smith 2006: 125). The problem is nicely delineated by Diller (2005: 111) in his work on Chaucer’s emotion lexicon: having offered a definition for emotion, he comments that the definition offered is “unashamedly modern”. The task is to identify those cases when a ME word refers to what would be called an emotion or emotions in general in the 21st century; the expectation is that there may be no ME term coterminous with our modern word emotion. One of the first challenges to addressing this potential anachronism is that the meaning of ME mood is identical neither with that of Modern English (ModE) emotion nor with that of ModE mood. Emotion is, linguistically speaking, somewhat like illness: we do not say that somebody’s illness changed (e.g. from whooping-cough to pneumonia) any more than we would say that their emotion changed (e.g. from wrath to mercy). On the other hand, most speakers of Modern English seem to find it acceptable to say that somebody’s mood changed, just as their temperature or their complexion might change. There also seems to be a “criterial” or “expected” feature “not caused by an antecedent” which for many speakers is present in ModE mood but was absent in ME mood and which the OED fails to note (Diller 2005: 113). Quotations from Chaucer’s Boece and Troilus and Criseyde indicate that there are bound to be times when the pigeon-holing of a word-token into a lexical sense becomes arbitrary. The lexicographer has to live with such arbitrary decisions. The historical linguist, who wants to reconstruct the intuitions of native speakers of bygone ages, should be more interested in the relationship between the senses

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and the principles that lead from one sense to the next (Diller 2005: 117). As we shall see in the next section, however, historical lexicographers struggle with this issue just as historical linguists do.

2.3 Historical lexicography and lexicology This chapter is not primarily concerned with Middle English as a literary language; nevertheless, as the word studies discussed above make clear, understanding the lexis of Middle English generally involves readers, texts, and historical dictionaries. The MED’s early editors were aware of the two possibilities for their historical dictionary: that it should serve as a repository of information about the language as language, or function as a glossary of printed texts in Middle English (Adams 2002: 106). Kurath, who led the dictionary project from 1946 until 1961 and oversaw the first publication, appears to come down on the side of the MED’s being a storehouse of information about Middle English as a language variety, rejecting the possibility of its functioning as an inventory of glosses for lexical items in texts as inappropriate to a large-scale dictionary. He also suggests that including glosses of particular usages would cause the dictionary to give inappropriate weight to individual construals of lexical meaning, which he distinguishes from distinct meanings. Lewis (the final editor of the completed MED) is clear that the guiding editorial principle of the dictionary in the latter years of the project was to try to “capture the generality” of the language variety, but adds that the intention was that the dictionary should, at the same time, give the reader as much help as possible with difficult quotations and with subtleties of meaning (Lewis 2002: 81). Applying the information found in the historical dictionaries to the lexical items as used within texts, however, is not always straightforward. An examination of the verbs in the clauses which make up the bedroom scenes in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight offers some indications of the dilemmas (see Sylvester 2010). In the final bedroom scene, there is only one clause which seems to encode a material process intention (that is, an action undertaken deliberately) in which Gawain is the actor: his refusal of a ring that Lady Bertilak attempts to give him. The clause in question runs: Bot þe renk hit renayed (line 1821). It seems possible that Gawain accomplishes the rejection of the proffered ring by uttering a formula of refusal; that is, he might have done it by means of a verbal rather than a material process. Turning to the MED, we find that the verb reneien is defined as having two senses: the first has to do with forsaking, renouncing, or recanting religious beliefs (orthodox or heretical), or refusing to acknowledge one’s king or master. The second, for which this moment in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

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provides one of the citations, is 2(a) to refuse (a gift); refuse an invitation from (sb.). Included within the definition are also (b) to forsake (an activity, a state); abandon (a place), refuse a mission to; (c) to retract (a pledge). There is also a figurative sense: (d) to withdraw (one’s heart) from (devotion to sb.). With the exception of the first two senses under (b), all of these activities seem most likely to be accomplished by words or even, in the case of (d), by thoughts. Perhaps we can assume that Gawain makes a gesture of refusal on the grounds that Lady Bertilak is represented as handing the ring to Gawain (4): (4) Ho raȝt hym a riche rynk of red golde werkez, Wyth a starande ston stondande alofte Þat bere blusschande bemez as þe bryȝt sunne; Wyt ȝe wel, hit watz worth wele ful hoge Bot þe renk hit renayed, (lines 1817–1821) ‘She offered him a precious ring worked of red gold with a sparkling stone set above that shone with beams like the bright sun. Know well, it was worth a great deal. But the man refused it’. A recent translation of the poem has ‘She offers him a ring’ but the idea that Lady Bertilak actually gives the ring to Gawain rather than just offering it to him is supported by the MED’s citation of the relevant line from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in illustration of sense 4(a) of the verb rechen: To hand (sth. to sb.), give; grant (a kingdom or dwelling to sb.); also, give (sb. a kiss). Here the evidence for the meaning of a lexical item in one part of the dictionary seems to clash with the sense of another lexical item in a context in which they co-occur. This is not to say that the definitions proposed in the MED are incorrect in any way. Its editors are aware that some quotations are ambiguous and, like the OED, the MED uses a caveat like “(sometimes) difficult to distinguish from sense such and such (and vice versa)”, with variations such as “some quots. difficult to distinguish from those in sense such and such” or “difficult to distinguish from sense such and such to which some quots. may belong”; others include “may belong to”, “could be construed as”, “the precise gloss is highly contextual” (see Lewis 2004: 150). Familiarity with Middle English creates sensitivity to the semantic associations suggested by recurring collocations and colligations: as Hoey (2005) shows, lexical items may be primed to co-occur with other lexical items, and they may also be primed to occur in, or with, particular grammatical functions. Finally, however, as the editors of the MED note, Middle English often presents nuances of meaning which are almost impossible to capture in a formal definition but which a reader can perceive in the quotations. Such nuances are often vaguely sensed rather than perceived. They may seem so much like mere subjective

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impressions that an editor would hardly venture to include them in a definition, yet they can be very important (Kuhn 1982 [1976]: 36).

3 Structure of the lexicon The lexicon of Middle English differs considerably from that of Old English. The answers to the questions of what the lexicon of Middle English is made up of, and how it came to differ from that of its predecessor, involve the two main strategies for the introduction of new words: word formation (the creation of new words out of the existing resources of a language) and word borrowing (the introduction, in the form of different types of loans and calques, of terms originating in other languages). Of course, blending of these two strategies can occur; for instance, some scholars are engaged in the investigation of how far affixes which entered the language via borrowings from French, for example, were integrated and became productive in Middle English (see, as a case in point, Lloyd 2005 on the nominal suffixes ‑ment, ‑ance/‑ence and ‑ation).

3.1 Word formation Over the past century ME word formation has received relatively little scholarly attention (Ciszek 2008). The two methods of word formation which are of greatest importance in Middle English are compounding and derivation. Many compounds are formed from pre-existing syntactical groups, and so at a certain point in their development, fluctuation may occur between their interpretation as compounds or syntactic groups. The boundary between compounds and derivations may also be unclear; for example, the suffix ‑ly is related to the OE noun lic, meaning ‘form, shape, body’ and in earlier Germanic it had been a free morpheme frequently used to create noun compounds.

3.1.1 Compounding Despite the fact that compounding was less fertile than in the OE period, many of the OE types of compounding continued to be productive. Noun compounds were numerically the commonest in Old English, and many of these types continued to be productive. Those of the N + N type were especially frequent and the ME period sees the formation of a number of examples which survive up to the present day, including bagpipe (OED records this as first used by Chaucer in his description of

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the Miller in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, though the MED has a predating; the term certainly first appeared in the ME period), bedchamber, birthday, bloodhound, schoolmaster, and swordfish. Nouns compounded from ADJ + N in the ME period are blackberry, blackboard, grandfather, highroad, highway, and shortbread. Some new types of compound noun emerged during the ME period, most notably those in which a verbal stem is completed by a nominal which, in the underlying sentence would have acted as the subject of the verb; for example, leap-year (for fixed festivals, the year ‘leaps’ a day). In the 14th century, a type where the second element was an agent noun and the first the object of the underlying verb, which had been present in Old English but had died out, became newly productive; for example, moneymaker (1297), housebreaker (1340), soothsayer (1340), law-maker (1380). Exocentric compounds (in which the denotation of the compound noun is not a subset of either the determiner or the head, but is included within the sense of a more general conception) developed considerably in Middle English. An example is provided by burnwater ‘smith’. Copulative compounds (in which it is not clear which element is the grammatical head since both elements refer equally to the referent) are represented in Middle English by a few 13th-century noun formations; for example, kayserr-kinng (Ormulum), staneroche (Vices and Virtues). Compound adjectives include a type in which the first of two adjectival elements modifies a second, making fine distinctions in sense impressions, e.g. icy-cold, red-hot (1375), lukewarm (1398), light-green (1420). Combinations of a noun and past participle became productive again in the 14th century; for example, moss-grown (1300), woe-begone (1470), moth-eaten (137), book-learned (1420). Adjectival compounds formed with the past participle as head also include a type in which the determiner is an adjective or an adverb. Most extant examples date from the 14th century, such as new-born (1300), highborn (1300), and new-sown (1375). In Middle English all these types continued, but they began to be redistributed into inseparable PARTICLE + V compounds (understand, overtake); phrasal VER BAL AL BASE + PARTICLE (take up, write up); and derived verbs consisting of VERB nominal compounds of the two types (outcry, write-off). Among many examples of co-existing compound and particled verbs are flee out (1300) and outflee (1325) ‘expel, banish’; hente out (c.1400) and outhente (1450) ‘grasp, seize’, etc. The compound forþferan, which was an OE euphemism for ‘to die’, continues with this sense until the end of the 14th century, but then develops a new sense ‘to set out’, presumably re-adopting its original sense from the particled verb fare forth, recorded from 1225 onwards. This emphasis on the particled verb as the focus of derivation is symptomatic of the change which took place during the 15th century by which formation of verbs became concentrated on the production of particled verbs, and compound verbs were no longer productive as a type of word forma-

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tion. The derivation of agentive nouns from particled verbs, such as Chaucer’s reference to Troilus as “holder up of Troye” also belongs to the turn of the 14th and 15th centuries (see Marchand 1969; Burnley 1992; Kastovsky 2006).

3.1.2 Derivation It has been suggested that Middle English is the starting point of a development which resulted in a restructuring of the English word-formation system through borrowing from French and Latin. This led to a system with two derivational strata, a native and a foreign one, although these partly overlap. The former is word-based and base-invariant, whereas the latter is at least partly stem-based and exhibits morphophonemic alternations of the base; for example, with ‑able we find word-based allow-able, understand-able and also stem-based charit-able, navig-able, etc. The alternative forms in ‑ate and ‑acy, as in pirate ~ piracy, obstinate ~ obstinacy, and in ‑ant ~ ‑ancy, as in infant ~ infancy were adopted in Middle English from French. The origin of these non-native patterns was the borrowing of individual lexical items which were derivationally related in the source languages; for example, allow ~ disallow, arm ~ disarm, chain ~ enchain. Once a number of such pairs had been borrowed, a derivational relationship could also be established in English which could then be extended to new formations which may not have had parallels in the source language. This process is likely to have begun with individual analogical formations, leading to a pattern which was productive on a larger scale (see Kastovsky 2006). Productivity, however, is still a controversial concept in word formation in general and in historical linguistics in particular (Ciszek 2008). It has been pointed out that for languages which are accessible only from texts, the establishment of synchronic productivity presents a problem because the main criteria for the establishment of productivity – introspection, elicitation, and acceptability judgements of neologisms – are not available. Such languages may be considered in terms of “analyzability”. This term refers to a situation in which paradigms of related forms (for example verb/noun/adjective) appear, and it becomes possible for users of the language to distinguish base from affix (Kastovsky 1985: 228–229). Non-native, especially French, patterns were assumed to have become productive fairly early. It has been argued, however, that the Romance suffixes did not become productive in the ME period at all (Dalton-Puffer 1996). Other scholars suggest late Middle English as the starting point for such productivity, especially for prefixation, when apparently a critical mass of borrowings and analogical formations had accumulated to get the derivational processes going (see Burnley 1992: 447–450). In view of the number of prefixes and suffixes entering the English language in

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Middle English according to Marchand (1969), the increase in productivity must have been gradual and certainly varied from affix to affix (Kastovsky 2006). In the ME period many OE prefixes had become unproductive or disappeared, paving the way for borrowing from French and Latin. The reversative sense of the prefix un-, which had been connected with ond‑ and on‑ in Old English, was developed; the MED cites unclose ‘to open’ used by the Gawain poet and by Gower in the sense ‘open’ or ‘unlock’ and by Chaucer in the sense ‘of a flower: to spread out, bloom’. A number of prefixes appear in Middle English, often filling semantic gaps in the English derivational system; for example arch‑, co‑, dis‑ (though this remained stylistically differentiated from the rest of the lexis until Lydgate’s use of the Latin form distrust [1430], en‑, in‑, mis‑, non‑, re‑, and vice‑ (see Kastovsky [2006: 251], where examples of usage are offered). Middle English was better supplied with derivational suffixes. Of the forty or so which existed in Old English, about three-quarters persisted into Middle English, and they were joined by numerous additions from foreign sources. The suffix -ful, which was originally used to form adjectives from abstract nouns, now also formed adjectives from verbal bases; e.g., forgetful (1382), weariful (1454). Suffixes from all the major sources of foreign influence achieved a limited productivity in Middle English. French and Franco-Latin are the most prolific sources of foreign derivational suffixes, e.g., ‑age and ‑ard. The latter entered the language via loans like buzzard and bastard and became productive as a pejorative suffix with English bases by the 13th century as evidenced by shreward (1297), dotard (1386) (see Burnley 1992; Kastovsky 2006 offers more detail and examples). Foreign sources which were of great importance to word formation in Middle English played an equally important role in phrase creation. French, in particular, contributed a large number of phrasal idioms of which verbal phrases especially have proved productive. The structure of such phrases usually consisted of a verbal operator followed by an abstract noun or adverbial phrase; thus: do homage, do mischief, do justice, make complaint, make moan, etc. They are especially common from the second half of the 14th century. A parallel tendency exists in verbal phrases based on the verbal operator get: phrases such as get grace, get mercy and get leave are recorded from 1300 onwards. The major contribution of this verb is, however, in a series of expressions with locatives: many of the type get away from, get up and get out occur in the ME period (see Burnley 1992).

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3.2 Lexical borrowing and word field studies One difficulty with attempting to analyze the semantics of derivations is that almost any ME noun on an Old French base could have been adopted holistically, even if its date of adoption is later than that of the related verb. Arguments about the very concept of borrowing as applied to the language situation in medieval England suggest that even words obviously unanalyzable in English might have been analyzable to bilingual users acquainted with their simplex forms in French, which would facilitate conditions for learning new words (see Lloyd 2005). Although language contact in the ME period is properly the subject of another chapter, discussions of the formation of the ME lexicon makes it clear that it is not possible to speak of the lexis of Middle English without touching on the subject of word borrowing. It has been observed that the lexical stock of languages may contain a considerable proportion of words borrowed from one or more other languages and the historical record can help us infer which words were borrowed, from what language, and approximately when, but there is no unequivocal way of deciding when a lexical item from one language that is used during discourse in another language – whether by a single speaker, or repeatedly in a community – should be considered a loanword (Poplack and Sankoff 1984: 99). The case of French in England following the Norman Conquest provides a clear example of the difficulties involved in distinguishing between lexical borrowing, interference, convergence, shift, relexification, etc. Many scholars now accept the view that AngloNorman, at first a minority language in England, became a language of education and law in widespread use throughout the 13th and 14th centuries, casting doubt on the status of many French words as borrowings from continental French in Middle English. It has been argued that both French and Latin had been developing in an English society on English soil for hundreds of years, independently of either Rome or Paris in the general field of imaginative literature and also in a wide spectrum of administrative and technical texts (Rothwell 2000: 214). We may also wish to distinguish the type of borrowing which simply fills a gap from that which becomes productive in the borrowing language. This issue goes to the heart of what has been described as a central problem in the history of both lexis and grammar; that is, the question of whether it is the “availability” (for mechanical, extralinguistic, or extrasystemic reasons) of new forms that causes semantic shifts, by differentiation from them of older forms, or whether it is the prior shift of the old form to a new meaning (by extension and limitation) which creates the “need” for a new form (Samuels 1972: 67). Thus, discussion of word borrowing leads directly to questions about the structure of the lexicon, an issue which is particularly pertinent to Middle English, the

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vocabulary of which is thought to be almost double that of Old English, between a quarter and a third of terms being loanwords. In his study of the lexical fields Boy/Girl-Servant-Child in Middle English, Diensberg (1985) explores the restructuring of these lexical fields in the ME period, pointing out that native words were largely replaced by Romance loans; native words which did not die out often shifted to the periphery and acquired pejorative meaning. A further example of perceived gaps in the language in the ME period is provided by McIntosh (1996) who notes that during the 15th century, heads of established families in English market towns and villages expressed growing concern with certain forms of social misconduct and found the habits of thoughts and expression with which they had grown up inadequate to identify, describe, and attack perceived new threats to their village or town. McIntosh examines the records of 178 courts that enjoyed public jurisdiction, spanning nearly every county for which good rolls survive for the period 1370 to 1599. She considers groups of offences and notes the interplay between jurors’ attitudes, words, and actions and those of the surrounding culture, observing that several of the most common Latin descriptors of scolding, including objurgator/‑trix and garrulator/‑trix, do not specify the type of spoken offence. Arguably, it is impossible to make valid generalizations about how new words enter the lexicon unless whole semantic fields are taken into account rather than individual lexemes only. We need diachronic examinations of the lexis associated with particular conceptual constructions in order to address the questions of how and why lexical change begins and continues. An example is provided by Fischer (1989) in his diachronic examination of the lexis which is associated with the seasons of the year and the lexis denoting the action of taking as husband and wife. He makes use of a lexical diffusion model to describe the lexical changes on the way from the prevailing use of wed to the prevailing use of marry, and from ae(w) ‘law’ to lagu ‘law’ and explains the loss of harvest ‘autumn’ and ae(w) ‘law’ as following on after the introduction of French loanwords. This kind of study, and a host of investigations of semantic fields, such as those examining the color terminology in the ME period (for example Burnley’s [1976] study “Middle English Colour Terminology and Lexical Structure” and Biggam’s “Aspects of Chaucer’s Adjectives of Hue” [1993]) suggest that the time when lexical studies were criticized for dealing only with individual lexemes and being atomistic is at an end.

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4 Summary Our understanding of Middle English comes from many sources and is not simply a matter of reading the texts that survive from the period. The proper interpretation of the semantics of Middle English comes largely from the work of historical lexicographers. We almost certainly derive our sense of what is and is not part of the lexicon of Middle English from the editors of the MED, who observe that Old English gradually turned into Middle English during the late 11th and early 12th centuries, and no matter where we draw the line between these two stages of English, we will be involved in contradictory situations. Some of our understanding is drawn from external histories which point out that Middle English consists of four different linguistic strata: monolingual native speakers of English (usually members of the lower social ranks), speaking local dialects with no supraregional standard; a geographically but also socially distinct group which lived in the former Danelaw area, where we still have to reckon with partial ScandinavianEnglish bilingualism in the 11th and early 12th centuries, ending with the loss of Scandinavian as a means of communication but massive borrowing of basic vocabulary; those who mainly or exclusively used French in oral communication, usually members of the nobility (with the eventual learning of English, probably resulting in considerable bilingualism); speakers and writers of Latin, which had remained in use as the language of the Church and of scholarship (where it was also used as a spoken medium) and of public records. It is this lexicon, drawn from so many sources, which proved such a flexible instrument for Gower, Langland, the Gawain poet, Chaucer and all the other creative writers and administrators of the ME period whose texts are left to us.

5 References Adams, Michael. 2002. Phantom dictionaries: The Middle English Dictionary before Kurath. Dictionaries 23: 95–114. Biggam, C. P. 1993. Aspects of Chaucer’s adjectives of hue. Chaucer Review 28: 41–53. Burnley, David. 1976. Middle English colour terminology and lexical structure. Linguistische Berichte 41: 39–49. Burnley, David. 1989. The Language of Chaucer. Houndmills: Macmillan. Burnley, David. 1992. Lexis and semantics. In: Norman Blake (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. II. 1066–1476, 409–499. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ciszek, Ewa. 2008. Word Derivation in Early Middle English. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Dalton-Puffer, Christiane. 1996. The French Influence on Middle English Morphology. A CorpusBased Study of Derivation. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Diensberg, Bernard. 1985. The lexical fields boy/girl-servant-child in Middle English. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 86: 328–336. Diller, Hans-Jürgen. 2005. Chaucer’s emotion lexicon: Passious and affeccioun. In: Ritt and Schendl (eds.), 110–124. Ehrensperger, E. C. 1931. Dream words in Old and Middle English. Papers of the Modern Language Association 46: 80–89. Fischer, Andreas. 1989. Aspects of historical lexicology. In: Udo Fries and Martin Heusser (eds.), Meaning and Beyond: Ernst Leisi zum 70. Geburtstag, 71–91. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Fischer, Andreas. 1996. Dream theory and dream lexis in the Middle Ages. In: Jürgen Klein and Dirk Vanderbeke (eds.), Anglistentag 1995 Greifswald: Proceedings of the Conference of the German Association of University Teachers of English 17, 245–257. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Hoey, Michael. 2005. Lexical Priming: A New Theory of Words and Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kastovsky, Dieter. 1985. Deverbal nouns in Old and Modern English: From stem-formation to word-formation. In: Jacek Fisiak (ed.), Historical Semantics – Historical Word-Formation, 221–261. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Kastovsky, Dieter. 2006. Vocabulary. In: Richard Hogg and David Denison (eds.), A History of the English Language, 199–270. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kay, Christian, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels, and Irené Wotherspoon (eds.). 2009. Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary With Additional Material from A Thesaurus of Old English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kuhn, Sherman M. 1982 [1976]. On the making of the Middle English Dictionary. Dictionaries 4: 14–41. Kurath, Hans, Sherman M. Kuhn, John Reidy, and Robert E. Lewis. 1952–2001. Middle English Dictionary. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/ Lewis, Robert E. 2002. The Middle English Dictionary at 71. Dictionaries 23: 76–94. Lewis, Robert E. 2004. Aspects of polysemy in the Middle English Dictionary. In: Julie Coleman and Anne McDermott (eds.), Historical Dictionaries and Historical Dictionary Research: Papers from the International Conference on Historical Lexicography and Lexicology, at the University of Leicester, 2002, 149–156. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Lloyd, Cynthia. 2005. Experience or experiment? Some distinctions between French nominal suffixes in Middle English. In: Ritt and Schendl (eds.), 179–195. Łozowski, Przemysław. 2005. Polysemy in context: Meten and dremen in Chaucer. In: Ritt and Schendl (eds.), 125–143. Marchand, Hans. 1969. The Categories and Types of Present-Day English Word-Formation. A Synchronic-Diachronic Approach. 2nd edn. Munich: Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung. McIntosh, Marjorie K. 1996. Finding language for misconduct: Jurors in fifteenth-century local courts. In: Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace (eds.), Bodies and Disciplines: Intersections of Literature and History in Fifteenth-Century England, 63–86. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press. Moore, Marilyn Reppa. 1998. Who’s solipsistic now? The character of Chaucer’s Troilus. Chaucer Review 33: 43–59. Owen-Crocker, Gale R., Louise Sylvester and Cordelia Warr. 2006–. Lexis of Cloth and Clothing in Britain c.700–1450. http://lexisproject.arts.manchester.ac.uk/; last accessed 18 January 2017. Poplack, Shana and David Sankoff. 1984. Borrowing: The synchrony of integration. Linguistics 22: 99–135.

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Proffitt, Michael (ed.). 2000–. The Oxford English Dictionary. 3rd edn. online. Oxford University Press. www.oed.com Ritt, Nikolaus and Herbert Schendl (eds.). 2005. Rethinking Middle English: Linguistic and Literary Approaches. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Rothwell, William. 2000. Aspects of lexical and morphosyntactical mixing in the languages of medieval England. In: D. A. Trotter (ed.), Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain, 213–232. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Samuels, M. L. 1972. Linguistic Evolution with Special Reference to English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schendl, Herbert. 2001. Historical Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Jeremy J. 1996. An Historical Study of English: Function, Form and Change. London: Routledge. Smith, Jeremy J. 2006. From Middle to Early Modern English. In: Lynda Mugglestone (ed.), The Oxford History of English, 120–146. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sylvester, Louise. 2010. The roles of reader construal and lexicographic authority in the interpretation of Middle English texts. In: Margaret E. Winters, Heli Tissari, and Kathryn Allen (eds.), Historical Cognitive Linguistics, 197–220. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Tolkien, J. R. and E. V. Gordon (eds.). 1967. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Rev. by N. Davis. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs and Richard Dasher. 2002. Regularity in Semantic Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Elizabeth Closs Traugott

Chapter 7: Pragmatics and Discourse 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Introduction 116 Information structure and word order change 117 Auxiliaries 118 Degree modifiers and focus particles 120 Pragmatic markers 121 Speech acts 123 Politeness strategies 124 Pragmatic and discourse properties of genres and text-types Register 127 Middle English as a period of transition 128 References 129

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Abstract: Among changes in the Middle English period that involve pragmatics, two stand out in particular because of their significant effects on the later history of English. One was the shift from information-structure-oriented word order in Old English to “syntacticized” order in Middle English; this in turn led, at the end of the period, to new strategies for marking topic and focus in special ways. The second change was the development of auxiliary verbs in contexts where implied abstract temporal, modal, or aspectual meanings of certain concrete verbs became salient. The period is also characterized by the appearance of a large set of new discourse types, from romances to drama, scientific writings, and letters. These give a partial window into differences between oral and literate styles at the time.

1 Introduction Work on pragmatic and discourse factors in Middle English differs from such work on Old English for two main reasons: internal linguistic changes, and the emergence of new discourse types or genres that require methodologies different from those in Old English. Linguistic changes that have received particular attenElizabeth Closs Traugott: Palo Alto (USA)

DOI 10.1515/9783110525328-007

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tion from the perspective of pragmatics are changes in word order, and the development of auxiliaries. Most important among the new genres in the early period were romances and chronicles like Sir Orfeo, King Horn, and Layamon’s Brut. Most were based on French models, and although these narratives had some similarities with OE epics, they had different conventions. Later in the period there were drama, personal and business letters, vernacularized scientific works, and several other text types. Issues of pragmatic markers, speech acts, and the orality-literacy continuum dominate much of the research. The data bases used have been primarily electronic corpora. These include most notably the ME part of The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts (Rissanen et al. 1991), and the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC) (Nevalainen et al. 1998). Individual texts that have received particular attention from the perspective of pragmatics and discourse factors include Chaucer’s works and the Paston Letters.

2 Information structure and word order change It is generally accepted that word order in Old English was predominantly verbfinal with verb-second in main clauses, while word order from early Middle English on is largely verb-medial, and syntactic verb-second was mostly lost by the end of the period. Still debated is the question why and how these changes came about. Arguments have been put forward highlighting structural factors such as loss of case morphology, changes in the status of personal pronouns, prosody changes, and parameter shifts, or sociolinguistic factors, such as the influence of Scandinavian (for some views see Taylor and van der Wurff 2005; Fischer and van der Wurff 2006). The word order shift to verb-medial has been interpreted as a change from syntax governed largely by information structure factors such as topic, focus, contrastive topic, referent accessibility, animacy, etc., to syntax mainly governed by syntactic relations such as subject – predicate (e.g. van Kemenade and Los 2006; van Kemenade 2009). Van Kemenade has proposed that this kind of change also affected subclauses, as evidenced by word order patterns associated with adverbial markers such as þa and þonne ‘then … when’ and the position of personal pronouns. She regards the steep decline in early Middle English of þa and þonne in subclauses as evidence of a reorganization of relatively paratactic into hypotactic clause structure. Questions that arise with respect to van Kemenade’s analysis include to what extent þa and þonne in subclauses should be understood to exemplify a) marking of the contrastive topic and of the boundary of “given” information, or b) general inferential meaning such as is found in Present-day English (Schiffrin 1992). Another is how the decline of these

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markers ties in with the text-organizing function of when in its early stages (see Sections 5 and 9 below). First constituents in verb-second languages are not restricted, so “any constituent can appear as unmarked, old information” (Los 2005: 274). The decline of syntactic verb-second in main clauses is followed in later periods by the restriction of syntactic subjects to unmarked topics (in the sense of what the clause is about, and of givenness). Los hypothesizes that with the loss of verb-second, old information could be expressed in English only by subjects, and the development of passive to-infinitival “exceptional case marking” was developed in late Middle English as one strategy to expand ways to create subjects (Los 2005: 274). An example, as in (1), is: (1)

and ye can, axe the probate of my fadyrs wyll to be geuyn yow (Paston Letters [Davis 1971] 338, ll. 41–42; Los 2005: 246) ‘if you can, ask-for the probate of my father’s will to be given to you’

Building on work by Los, Seoane (2006) hypothesizes that “long passives” (passives with by-phrases) contributed to the rise of this new restriction on subjects. While her focus is on Early Modern English, she argues that in Late Middle English and Early Modern English triggers for the reorganization of the first constituent of the clause are pragmatic factors such as given-new and the degree of definiteness of the subject and the by-phrase, together with syntactic factors such as end-weight. Semantic factors that are significant in Present-day English, such as animacy and human features, played no role in Late Middle English.

3 Auxiliaries What have been called “pragmatic” approaches to modality have principally drawn on two factors: the speech act functions of modals, and implicatures or invited inferences. Gotti (2005) investigates the use of shall and will in Middle English from the perspective of their speech act function, specifically whether they express prediction, prophecy, or assurance. He regards these as pragmatic functions since they pertain to contextual elements of the speech event. One of the most detailed studies of the emergence of auxiliaries in Middle English from the perspective of implicatures is Danchev and Kytö’s (1994) analysis of the rise of be going to in the very late ME period and its conventionalization as an auxiliary by about 1700. Another is Eckardt (2006: Chapter 4), which builds on their work. Danchev and Kytö point to the multiple interpretations that many examples can be given. These are what would now be considered “bridging” examples, i.e.

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examples in which at least two meanings are possible, but one is “only contextually implicated” (Evans and Wilkins 2000: 549): in this case intentional future is implicated, motion is semantically coded. The famous example from the Monk of Evesham in (2) has long been thought to be the first where intentional future is clearly implicated by the motion-with-a-purpose construction: (2)

Therefore while thys onhappy sowle by the vyctoryse pompyse of her enmyes was goying to be broughte into helle for the synne and onleful lustys of her body (1482 Revelation to the Monk of Evesham; Danchev and Kytö 1994: 61) ‘Therefore, while this unhappy soul by the victorious spectacles of her enemies was going to brought into hell for the sin and unlawful lusts of her body’

The Monk’s revelation was translated from Latin. To this example may be added another, slightly earlier, translation, this time from Arabic, (3): (3) Also ther passed a theef byfore alexandre that was goyng to be hanged whiche saide O worthy king saue my lyf for I repente me sore of my mysdedes. (1477 Mubashshir ibn Fatik, Abu al-Wafa' [11th century], Dictes or sayengis of the philosophhres; Early English Books Online) ‘Also there passed a thief before Alexander that was going to be hanged who said “O worthy king, save my life, for I repent me very much for my misdeeds”’ Like (2), this example is passive, hence the agentivity associated with go as a motion verb and the purposiveness associated with to are demoted. Nevertheless, both examples suggest that motion was intended: in (2) the soul is, according to medieval beliefs, roaming the streets, and in (3) the thief is said to have been ‘passing’ in front of Alexander. So both subjects (soul and thief) were en route, though not intending to be brought into hell, or hanged; the intention rested with their captors. Krug discusses the appearance in Middle English of want ‘lack’, borrowed from Old Norse with impersonal syntax. He too shows “context-induced inferencing” (or “bridging”) from ‘lack’ to ‘desire’ in Middle English, but emphasizes that the desiderative, pre-modal meaning was not semanticized until the 18th and 19th centuries (Krug 2002: 142–143). A hitherto largely unstudied modal verb construction is the topic of Kytö and Romaine (2005). Be/have like to + V ‘imminently likely to V’ began to be used in Late Modern English as an “avertive” modal auxiliary marking “action narrowly averted”. Kytö and Romaine show that the new meaning developed in syntactic-semantic contexts including past tense, conditional if

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or but, and infinitive verbs with semantically negative “prosody” (preferred semantic collocation, see Stubbs 1995). They also discuss the role of invited inferencing, specifically the implicatures of counterfactuality and narrowly averted eventhood, in these contexts, as illustrated by (4): (4) if he had abedyn at hom he had be lyke to have be fechid owte of his owyn hows, for the peple þer-abowgth is sore mevod with hym. (1453 Paston Letters; Kytö and Romaine 2005: 3) ‘if he had stayed at home he would have come close to being fetched out of his own house because the people in those parts are very upset with him’

4 Degree modifiers and focus particles The historical study of degree modifiers with reference to their pragmatics goes back at least to Stoffel (1901). Degree modifiers include “intensives” (also known as “boosters”) (e.g. very, purely, even) and “downtoners” (e.g. rather, pretty, quite). They answer ‘how much, to what extent?’ and scale their heads. This means they typically collocate with gradable, or unbounded adjectives (Paradis 1997). They derive from lexical items with less scalar, often more concrete, meanings (very < ‘tru(ly)’, even < ‘exact(ly)’, ultimately < ‘even(ly), smooth(ly)’, and rather < ‘sooner’) (Traugott 2006). In several cases (e.g. very, even) they derive from “particularizers” or “restrictors” that can only occur with bounded heads (e.g. exactly, completely in Present-day English) (Nevalainen 1994; Paradis 2000). Many boosters developed in the EModE period, especially those derived from qualitative adverbs, such as terribly (Peters 1994), but some developed in Middle English. In this period their status as adjectives or adverbs is often unclear. There was also significant reorganization within the set of available boosters. Méndez-Naya (2007), for example, discusses the development in Middle English of right as an intensifier. While it was favored in the later ME period over two intensifiers that were inherited from Old English: wel ‘well’ and swiþe ‘very’, it competed with a third, ful. Right won out in Early Modern English but then declined (193) and became specialized to an honorific (e.g. right honorable, þe right excellent high and mighty prince) (204). Méndez-Naya notes that in ME right has primarily positive semantic prosody and occurs with bounded totality markers like completely, and suggests it originates in ‘exactly, precisely’ (205). The term “intensifier” has been used not only to refer to degree adverbs that scale their heads up but also for “focus particles” which activate a scale for their heads. These heads are typically nominal, not adjectival, as in Only John came (see König and Siemund 1999; Eckardt 2006). Focus particles implicate alterna-

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tive values, but restrict the head to just one of these. Among “intensifiers” that meet this criterion, self has received much attention. In He himself praised me/He praised me himself, himself focuses or excludes others than the referent (in this case the subject) from consideration, In English the reflexive (He praised himself ) is derived from this intensifier use. The distinction between the focus and reflexive -self began to be worked out in Middle English (see Vezzosi 2007 for pragmatic arguments concerning this development). Prior to Middle English the reflexive was expressed by the unmarked personal pronoun. Vezzosi (2007: 253) argues that “Because of its meaning as an intensifier, himself in argument position could be stylistically exploited to convey authors’ subjective judgements or opinions on the action and/or actors”. In Middle English it was also used “to establish the topic of a narrative episode, […] to signal a new or unexpected topic, […] to characterize action as undesirable or condemnable” (250). She cites (5) to show the contrast with the neutral alternative him. In (5), hine seolf can only be understood as identifying Arthur: (5) He [Baldolf] hafde iþohte bi nihten mid seouen þusend cnihten To riden uppen Arður ær þe king wore war And his folc afeollen and hine seolf aquelle (c.1200 Layamon Brut 870–873; Vezzosi 2007: 251) ‘He had thought he would come upon Arthur at night with 7000 knights before the king realized it, destroy his army and kill him himself’ [not kill himself!]

5 Pragmatic markers The class of pragmatic markers or “discourse particles” (Fischer 2006) is large and has been classified in many ways. According to Fraser (2006: 189) “These expressions occur as part of a discourse segment but are not part of the propositional content of the message conveyed, and they do not contribute to the meaning of the proposition per se”. The foundations of research on the historical development of pragmatic markers in English were laid in Brinton (1996). Here particular attention is paid to expressions that perform “salient event marking (i.e. foregrounding) and narrative segmentation (i.e. episode-boundary marking)” (268– 269). In Middle English such expressions include bifel ‘it happened’, gan ‘began’, whan ‘when’, anon ‘at once’, and such epistemic parentheticals as I gesse ‘I guess’. Episode-marking with the impersonal bifel, which persisted from Old English, marked main clauses, and served an orienting function. It was replaced in later Middle English by episode-marking of subordinate clauses with whan

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‘when’, which served a primarily framing function. This is seen as symptomatic of a redistribution of discourse functions associated with syntactic reorganization (179, 278). Gan is shown to be more foregrounding than anon, and I gesse is analyzed as a hedge, with strongly interpersonal function. A larger repertoire of pragmatic markers is discussed in Brinton (2006). In addition to the markers mentioned above, the following are discussed with examples from ME: whilom ‘once upon a time’, methinketh ‘it seems to me’, and the epistemic parenthetical (þæs/as) I wene ‘as I think’. I think is among the most extensively studied pragmatic markers in English. It competed with and eventually replaced the impersonal epistemic expression, methinketh/ methinks ‘it seems to me’ (Palander-Collin 1999). Brinton (1996) argues that epistemic parentheticals originated not in main clauses, but in as-parentheticals like ME as I guess, as it thynketh me ‘as seems to me’. Comment clauses more generally are the topic of Brinton (2008). Here she shows that say ‘seeking response/attention’ is one of the few that developed in earlier Middle English. Most comment clauses developed in late Middle English, including as it were, as you see, I dare say, I say ‘expression of emphasis’. Brinton concludes that construction grammar is a particularly appropriate framework for the analysis of comment clauses as it captures the alignment of individual instances of grammaticalized clauses with sets of clauses with similar properties (Brinton 2008: 256). Adverbs that originated in epistemic manner adverbs and came to be used in Middle English as intensifiers, and then as signals of the global structure of new episodes, are discussed in Lenker (2007). These include certes ‘certainly’, certeyn(ly), forsoothe ‘truly’, iwis ‘truly’, soothly ‘truly’, and trewely (82). Drawing on Grice’s (1989 [1975]) maxims and invited inferences, Lenker proposes that overuse of epistemic adverbials, especially such as occurs in clause-initial position, violates the maxims of quality (‘Do not talk about the veracity of the proposition unless there is some doubt about it’), and quantity (‘Do not make your contribution more informative than is required’). However, cooperation is preserved because invited inferences suggest that “truth or factuality has to be found on another than the propositional or lexical level”, i.e. at the level of textual organization (Lenker 2007: 100). Reformulation markers are investigated with respect to their functions as well as their forms in Late Middle English in Pahta and Nevanlinna (1997). While and and or have consistently been used in most text-types from earliest times, markers like that is (to say), namely are fairly common only in formal or technical writing (168). Their main function was paraphrase, and explanation of forms that are foreign or dialectal.

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6 Speech acts There has been considerable discussion of methodologies for diachronic speechact analysis in general (e.g. Arnovick 2006; Kohnen 2008), and for identifying the kinds of discursive traditions revealed by medieval texts. As part of a larger project on the history of speech acts in the history of English (Jucker and Taavitsainen 2008), Jucker (2000) investigates forms of verbal aggression in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. He points out that Chaucer’s insults intersect with two strands of research: on the one hand, profanity and oaths, which are associated with religious discourse, and on the other hand, flyting, or ritualized verbal dueling, which is associated with secular interlocutors, such as knights. While slander is potentially truth-conditional, insults are not. In the Canterbury Tales insults are shown to be more personal than flyting, and more dangerous to interpersonal relationships. The article addresses the way in which such speech acts can be used as fictional devices that occur at several levels within the complex framing of the Tales. The levels can be classified as direct (e.g. the Miller insults the Reeve, the Host the Pardoner, etc. in the external frame), embedded (e.g. Palamon insults Arcite in the Knight’s Tale, as part of the narrative), mediated (e.g. narrative-internal insulting in the Friar’s Tale is intended to affect the Summoner), and indirect (e.g. the Friar addresses all pilgrims and introduces his tale of a Summoner in a way that indirectly insults the pilgrim Summoner). While cursing and swearing are relatively easy to identify in expressions such as by God, by Jhesus Christ, insults are harder to identify. Jucker proposes that reactions by the target appear to be the best cues to insults. Rudanko (2004) analyzes the role of threats in Chaucer’s wooing scenes, and suggests that speech act theory helps articulate the complexity of ways in which consent was perceived at the time. In another study of how Chaucer manipulates a particular type of speech act, in this case the “book curse”, Arnovick (2000) shows how he coopts a speech act for metalinguistic purposes in The House of Fame. The “book curse” is a commonplace of medieval texts, usually designed to claim ownership and curse anyone who does not treat the book well, e.g. by desecrating it, or copying it poorly. In The House of Fame it is used, Arnovick argues, to confer ironic import, help the audience suspend disbelief, and project themselves into Chaucer’s dream world. Pakkala-Weckström (2002) addresses the critical problem of how to understand Dorigen’s “rash promise” in Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale, a promise that almost destroys her, her husband, and her would-be lover Aurelius. Pakkala-Weckström examines Aurelius’s failure to live up to the standard of the courtly lover, and suggests that Dorigen’s speech acts are trumped by her husband’s honor and the value of trouthe ‘solemn promise’, as understood in the context of the genre of the

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romance. By contrast, Arnovick suggests that the Tale is about “interpretation” in “three oral realms – linguistic, legal, and folk” (Arnovick 2006: 173–174). While the studies mentioned above address highly vocal expressiveness, Arnovick (2006) explores the discursive function of silence in Biblical tradition and monastic practice, and Hiltunen (2003) and Green (2007) draw attention to practices of silence versus institutionally sanctioned talk in both spiritual and secular contexts. Hiltunen interprets instructions to the anchoresses in Sawles Warde in terms of Gricean conversational maxims. Green, on the other hand, questions the appropriateness of conversational maxims for institutional and group settings. These and other works on speech acts are neophilological in orientation, combining linguistic analysis with textual interpretation. We may note that much work on speech acts in Middle English has drawn on Grice’s maxims, which highlight logic and cooperation in conversation. To the extent that these acts are aggressive, contesting, and impolite, they flout these maxims, or are more directly related to Keller’s (1994 [1990]) dynamic maxims, which concern social interaction and identity formation. However, to date, the latter do not appear to have impacted work on Middle English directly.

7 Politeness strategies Speech acts are inextricably intertwined with issues of politeness. Other linguistic domains that intersect with politeness include pragmatic markers (I guess), nominal forms of address (lord, barn ‘child, youth’, caytif ‘wretch, scoundrel’), and second person pronouns (þu, ye with singular reference [T/V forms]). The first of these is discussed in e.g. Brinton (1996) (see Section 5), the second in e.g. Honegger (2005), and the third in e.g. Blake (1992). Blake (1992: 537) cautions against too facile acceptance of Skeat’s (1867: xlii) claim that “thou is the language of a lord to a servant, of an equal to an equal, and expresses also companionship, love, permission, defiance, scorn, threatening; whilst ye is the language of a servant to a lord, and of compliment, and further expresses honour, submission, entreaty”. In other words Blake argues against too strict a view of a “power semantic” (Brown and Gilman 1960) in the use of T/V pronouns, as does Burnley (2003). The extent to which ye was used to signal social distance may vary according to genre (romances, for example, favor ye), author, or text. Burnley discusses the rejection of the T-form by certain religious groups, particularly in Europe, and warns that because we do not know to what extent Chaucer was aware of or cared about humanistic debates on address forms in Italy and France, we cannot fully assess his usage with certainty. More positively, Jucker (2006) argues that Chaucer uses address forms in ways that show social status and the

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characters’ relationships to each other, but primarily they index momentary status attained in the course of interactional negotiation. If thou was favored in certain religious groups, by the later ME period, ye/you appears to have become the norm at least among the middle class. Bergs (2004) shows that there are no uses of T-forms in the Stonor Letters (1290–1483) or the Plumpton Letters (1433– 1551). Only a scattering is found in the Cely Letters (1472–1488), and only in letters by the elder Cely to his son when the latter was young; under 1% is found in the Paston Letters (1421–1503). Bergs (2004: 134–135) suggests that use of V-pronouns may be a characteristic of letters as a text-type in Middle English.

8 Pragmatic and discourse properties of genres and text-types Here “genre” is understood to refer to macro-level characterizations of text-types, e.g. romance, drama, and “text-type” to more specific sub-categorizations of genre (however, genre and text-type are often used interchangeably in the literature on Middle English). For discussion of the variety of ways in which the terms genre, text-type and register (see Section 9) are used, see Diller (2001). Drawing attention to the fact that some text-type labels may refer to very different text-types across time, Taavitsainen (1993) shows how a set of features such as “affective mood” can be used to identify differences among subgenres and styles in later medieval texts, and to test subgenre classification in corpora such as The Helsinki Corpus (Rissanen et al. 1991). “Affective” forms include personal pronouns, question-words, private verbs of emotion and states of perception. Statistical analysis is used to show that in the romances affective features appear primarily in direct speech. While this may hardly be surprising, it serves as a methodological caution: text-types may be internally highly diverse, or overlap: “The only reliable starting point for research on Middle English genres is with the individual texts themselves” (Taavitsainen 1993: 195). Kohnen (2001: 122) suggests that the period 1300–1600 “may be called the period of text types” in that one can trace the facilitation of the spread of specific constructions such as Latin-based adverbial uses of the –ing participle as in (6) across text-types as they became vernacularized: (6) he sawe soules hange þerin, crying, wayling and morning for wo, peyn and sorowe (Advent and Nativity Sermons [Powell 1981]: 78; Kohnen 2001: 118) ‘he saw souls hang therein, crying, wailing and mourning for woe, pain, and sorrow’

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Drawing on Haugen’s (1972) distinction between elaboration and codification in standardization, he proposes further that text type-dependent development should be regarded as elaboration; codification comes with text-independence in the later period (Kohnen 2001: 121–122). Among text-types discussed in some detail in recent work with respect to their distinctive discourse characteristics are instructional “how to” documents (Carroll 2003), medical recipes (Almeida and Carroll 2004; Mäkinen 2004), wills (Del Lungo Camiciotti 2002), and catalogs of tracts, doctrinal disputations, and statutes (Peikola 2003). Vernacularization of scientific texts, modeling on Latin and Arabic, and the professionalization of English are among topics discussed in Taavitsainen and Pahta (2004), and metalinguistic conventions for letters in Nevalainen (2001). Del Lungo Camiciotti (2007) addresses the refashioning of saints’ lives from hagiographic text to narrative in the late 14th and 15th centuries, using the example of Bokenham’s Legendys of Hooly Wummen (1447). She shows how represented dialog is used in ways analogous to contemporary genres such as devotional treatises and drama (2007: 288) to structure the narrative and at the same time “create involvement in narrated events by dramatizing” (2007: 297). Some studies involving text-types start with particular linguistic constructions, or sets of constructions, and discuss the extent to which they are used in specific text-types. For example, basing her analysis on the HC and other corpora, Kytö (1997) details the gradual increase of the use of perfect have + past participle at the expense of be + past participle with verbs of transition and motion like come, go, arrive until the late 1700s when have came to predominate. The main linguistic factors are shown to include “action/process uses, durative, iterative and conditional verb contexts” as well as presence of a complement (70). Text-type factors in Late Middle English show that the have-perfect was used on a continuum extending from highest in fiction (40%), through diaries (37%), sermons (24%), private letters (10%), to least in drama (10%), and zero in scientific writing. No significant differences were found regarding orality or informality. In their study of “central modals” from the late 14th to the late 17th century, Gotti et al. (2002) investigate which modals were most frequent in the text-types represented in HC. Their findings are that shall occurs with unusually high frequency in Rules, where the modal expresses obligation, and in religious treatises and Biblical texts, where it mainly expresses future, or God’s will. May and might are most frequent in non-private letters. Whereas philosophy shows an above-average use of may, narrative and history favor might. While may and might occur in primarily formal texts, can and could appear in more speech-based texts, such as dialogues in the Canterbury Tales, and sermons (330). Code-switching and “macaronic” usage, in which two or more languages are mixed in a fairly stylized way, occur in many ME texts. In Middle English, Latin

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was the “high” variety of religion and scholarship, French ranked at the middle level (until it became largely restricted to law in the 14th century), and English the “low” variety. Schendl (2001) exemplifies the structural characteristics of syntactic code-switching in ME poetry. Given the monologual nature of this poetry, he hypothesizes that the function of switching may have been practice in writing poetry, indexing membership in the educated class, and language play. Bergner (1998) associates the use of Latin in the mystery plays with aureate style, in part because it is limited to characters who consistently speak with authority, such as God. Where other text-types are concerned, it may play a different role. Pahta (2004) identifies code-switching in medical texts with specialized terminology, intertextuality (quotations), taboo topics, and formulaic tags such as Latin probatum est ‘it has been tested’ to attest to the value of recipes. Wright (2005) discusses the development of Anglo-French vocabulary and affixes in England, as exemplified by business letters, and tracks correlations between use of Anglo-French and centralization of commerce in London. She suggests that the development of Standard English in later centuries was a side-effect of these ME changes in patterns of commerce.

9 Register Since the vast majority of ME texts were intended to be read aloud as well as silently (e.g. sermons), or were dictated (e.g. letters by women), categories like “speech-based” (e.g. sermons, homilies) vs. “non-speech-based” (scientific texts, philosophical works, travelogues letters) are ultimately not very useful in Middle English (or earlier), even though texts in the HC (Rissanen et al. 1991) are coded for these factors. Many researchers have therefore turned to the oral-literate or informal-formal continuum (see e.g. Tannen 1982; Biber and Finegan 1997). However, because orality and literacy are inter-related prior to the crystallization of genre and text-types (Wårvik 2003), the “continuum” should not be thought of as linear. Oral habits left a mark on the composition of texts, and the texts “are full of idiosyncrasies and incoherences, with gaps, anomalies of grammar, and incoherent discourse patterns” (Taavitsainen and Fitzmaurice 2007: 19) that do not appear in texts on either end of the oral-literate continuum, but rather suggest emergent practices (Arnovick 2006; Del Lungo Camiciotti 2007). Sikorska (2000) argues that oral and written discourses are interdependent in The Book of Margery Kempe (c.1450). Highlighting the tension between author, scribe, and audience that Kempe must have been trying to overcome when she composed her book, Sikorska hypothesizes that, being secular, Kempe used third person narrative to maintain distance and project modesty in order to legitimate her visions. These

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might be considered to be on the literate end of the continuum. However, Kempe also uses “oral” expressions such as interjections (A, good Lord) and discourse markers like gan and anon. Her use of whan ‘when’ is similar to that suggested for Middle English by Brinton (1996), i.e. text-organizing, but also should be understood as primarily iterative (‘whenever’); it suggests “general truth”, or “her recognition of a situation recently described” (Sikorska 2000: 404). In the later periods of English, drama is often thought of as a site where historians of English might find some evidence for colloquial or spoken language. However, as Culpeper and Kytö (2000) show, speech is represented and filtered in drama even in the EModE period, and therefore cannot be taken as direct evidence for speech. In Middle English the conventions of drama do not favor realistic speech. Bergner (1998) characterizes the speech in the mystery plays as being of two types. One is “vertical” speech spoken by God, Jesus, Mary and other characters of biblical authority. These characters give information, foretell, preach, interpret, and harmonize, often in monologues. The diction is “aureate”, with Latin code-switching or Latinate vocabulary. The other type is “horizontal”, spoken by persons of generally low birth, such as the shepherds and the soldiers. Their speech is short and appears spontaneous, marked by interjections, interruptions, and flyting. While Noah, his wife, and the shepherds engage in such speech in the early parts of the plays in which they appear, when Noah converses with God or when the shepherds arrive at the manger, they adopt a more vertical style. The two styles complement each other, “[o]ne form of speech being justified in its existence only through the presence of the other” (Bergner 1998: 82). Again, what are often considered literate and oral cues are interdependent.

10 Middle English as a period of transition Lass (2000) points to some of the absurdities of periodization, especially of the notion “Middle” when “Modern” (“our period”) is forever expanding. He does, however, conclude that “there are apparently suites of characters that define” Middle English (35). He mentions phonological and morphological factors, and word order. To these we might add some pragmatic and discoursal factors. Most notable is the gradual alignment of topic with subject and givenness (but not animacy, see Section 2) as the syntacticization of word order proceeded, specifically the shift toward a greater distinction between main and subordinate clauses (hypotaxis). At the same time, the forms and functions of markers of discourse relations underwent some significant changes (Section 5). Entrenchment in the system for the most part did not occur until the EModE period, followed by further modification, e.g. the association of animacy with topic. Practices and conven-

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tions of writing also changed throughout Middle English as new genres were borrowed and as increasing vernacularization occurred, whether of the Bible or of scientific texts.

11 References Álvarez, Alicia Rodríguez and Francisco Alonso Almeida (eds.). 2004. Voices on the Past: Studies in Old and Middle English Language and Literature. Spain: Netbiblo, S. L. Almeida, Francisco Alonso and Ruth Carroll. 2004. A new proposal for the classification of Middle English medical texts. In: Álvarez and Almeida (eds.), 21–33. Arnovick, Leslie K. 2000. Whoso thorgh presumpcion … mysdeme hyt: Chaucer’s poetic adaptation of the medieval “book curse”. In: Taavitsainen et al. (eds.), 411–424. Arnovick, Leslie K. 2006. Written Reliquaries: The Resonance of Orality in Medieval English Texts. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bergner, Heinz. 1998. Dialogue in the medieval drama. In: Raimund Borgmeier, Herbert Grabes, and Andreas H. Jucker (eds.), Anglistentag 1997 Giessen Proceedings, 75–83. Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag. Bergs, Alexander T. 2004. Address pronouns in Late Middle English. In: Álvarez and Almeida (eds.), 127–138. Biber, Douglas and Edward Finegan. 1997. The linguistic evolution of five written and speechbased English genres from the 17th to the 20th centuries. In: Matti Rissanen, Ossi Ihalainen, Terttu Nevalainen, and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), History of Englishes: New Methods and Interpretations in Historical Linguistics, 688–704. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Blake, Norman. 1992. The literary language. In: Norman Blake (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. II. 1066-1476, 500–540. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brinton, Laurel J. 1996. Pragmatic Markers in English: Grammaticalization and Discourse Functions. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Brinton, Laurel. 2006. Pathways in the development of pragmatic markers in English. In: van Kemenade and Los (eds.), 307–334. Brinton, Laurel J. 2008. The Comment Clause in English: Syntactic Origins and Pragmatic Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, Roger and Albert Gilman. 1960. Pronouns of power and solidarity. In: Thomas Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language, 253–276. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Burnley, David. 2003. The T/V pronouns in later Middle English. In: Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker (eds.), Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems, 27–45. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Carroll, Ruth. 2003. Recipes for laces: An example of a Middle English discourse colony. In: Hiltunen and Skaffari (eds.), 137–165. Culpeper, Jonathan and Merja Kytö. 2000. Data in historical pragmatics: Spoken interaction (re)cast as writing. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1: 175–199. Danchev, Andrei and Merja Kytö. 1994. The construction be going to + infinitive in Early Modern English. In: Kastovsky (ed.), 59–77. Davis, Norman (ed.) 1971. Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century. Vol. XX. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Del Lungo Camiciotti, Gabriella. 2002. Performative aspects of late medieval English wills. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 3: 205–227. Del Lungo Camiciotti, Gabriella. 2007. Discoursal aspects of the Legends of Holy Women by Osbern Bokenham. In: Fitzmaurice and Taavitsainen (eds.), 285–305. Diller, Hans-Jürgen. 2001. Genre in linguistic and related discourses. In: Diller and Görlach (eds.), 3–43. Diller, Hans-Jürgen and Manfred Görlach (eds.). 2001. Towards a History of English as a History of Genres. Heidelberg: Winter. Eckardt, Regine. 2006. Meaning Change in Grammaticalization. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Evans, Nicholas and David Wilkins. 2000. In the mind’s ear: The semantic extensions of perception verbs in Australian languages. Language 76: 546–592. Fischer, Kerstin (ed.). 2006. Approaches to Discourse Particles. Amsterdam/Oxford: Elsevier. Fischer, Olga and Wim van der Wurff. 2006. Syntax. In: Richard Hogg and David Denison (eds.), A History of the English Language, 109–198. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fitzmaurice, Susan and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.). 2007. Methods in Historical Pragmatics. Berlin/ New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Fraser, Bruce. 2006. Towards a theory of discourse markers. In: Fischer (ed.), 189–204. Gotti, Maurizio. 2005. Prediction in Middle English: A comparison between shall and will. In: Ritt and Schendl (eds.), 196–215. Gotti, Maurizio, Marina Dossena, Richard Dury, Roberta Facchinetti, and Maria Lima (eds.). 2002. Variation in Central Modals: A Repertoire of Forms and Types of Usage in Middle English and Early Modern English. Bern: Lang. Green, Eugene. 2007. Patterns of seeking and breaking silence in earlier English. In: Christopher M. Cain and Geoffrey Russom (eds.), Studies in the History of the English Language III. Managing Chaos: Strategies for Identifying Change in English, 215–229. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Grice, H. Paul. 1989 [1975]. Logic and conversation. Studies in the Way of Words, 22–40. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press. Haugen, Einar. 1972. Dialect, language, and nation. In: J. B. Pride and Janet Holmes (eds.), Sociolinguistics: Selected Readings, 97–111. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hiltunen, Risto. 2003. Telling the anchorite code: Ancrene Wisse on language. In: Hiltunen and Skaffari (eds.), 57–76. Hiltunen, Risto and Janne Skaffari (eds.). 2003. Discourse Perspectives on English. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Honegger, Thomas. 2005. ‘Wyʒe welcum iwys to this place’ – and never mind the alliteration: An inquiry into the use and forms of address in two alliterative ME romances. In: Ritt and Schendl (eds.), 169–178. Jucker, Andreas H. 2000. Slanders, slurs, and insults on the road to Canterbury: Forms of verbal aggression in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. In: Taavitsainen et al. (eds.), 369–389. Jucker, Andreas H. 2006. “Thou art so loothly and so oold also”: The use of ye and thou in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Anglistik 17: 57–72. Jucker, Andreas H. and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.). 2008. Speech Acts in the History of English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kastovsky, Dieter (ed.). 1994. Studies in Early Modern English. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Kemenade, Ans van 2009. Discourse relations and word order change. In: Roland Hinterhölzl and Svetlana Petrova (eds.), Information Structure and Language Change: New Approaches to Word Order Variation and Change in the Germanic Languages, 91–118. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Kemenade, Ans van and Bettelou Los. 2006. Discourse adverbs and clausal syntax in Old and Middle English. In: van Kemenade and Los (eds.), 224–246. Kemenade, Ans van and Bettelou Los (eds.). 2006. Handbook of the History of English. Oxford: Blackwell. Keller, Rudi. 1994 [1990]. On Language Change: The Invisible Hand in Language. Brigitte Nerlich (trans.). London: Routledge. Kohnen, Thomas. 2001. Text types as catalysts for language change: The example of the adverbial first participle construction. In: Diller and Görlach (eds.), 111–124. Kohnen, Thomas. 2008. Tracing directives through text and time: Towards a methodology of corpus-based diachronic speech-act analysis. In: Jucker and Taavitsainen (eds.), 295–310. König, Ekkehard and Peter Siemund. 1999. Intensifiers as targets and sources of semantic change. In: Andreas Blank and Peter Koch (eds.), Historical Semantics and Cognition, 237–257. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Krug, Manfred G. 2002. Emerging English Modals: A Corpus-based Study of Grammaticalization. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Kytö, Merja. 1997. Be/have + past participle: The choice of the auxiliary with intransitives from Late Middle to Modern English. In: Rissanen, Kytö, and Heikkonen (eds.), 17–85. Kytö, Merja and Suzanne Romaine. 2005. “We had like to have been killed by thunder and lightning”: The semantic and pragmatic history of a construction that like to disappeared. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 6: 1–35. Lass, Roger. 2000. Language periodization and the concept “middle”. In: Taavitsainen et al. (eds.), 7–41. Lenker, Ursula. 2007. Soþlice, forsoothe, truly – communicative principles and invited inferences in the history of truth-intensifying adverbs in English. In: Fitzmaurice and Taavitsainen (eds.), 81–105. Los, Bettelou. 2005. The Rise of the To-Infinitive. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mäkinen, Martti. 2004. Herbal recipes and recipes in herbals – intertextuality in early English medical writing. In: Taavitsainen and Pahta (eds.), 144–173. Mazzon, Gabriella (ed.). 2007. Studies in Middle English Forms and Meanings. Frankfurt: Lang. Méndez-Naya, Belén. 2007. He nas nat right fat: On the origin and development of the intensifier right. In: Mazzon (ed.), 191–207. Mubashshir ibn Fatik, Abu al-Wafa'. 1477. Dictes or sayengis of the philosophhres. Early English Books Online. See eebo.chadwyck.com Nevalainen, Terttu. 1994. Aspects of adverbial change in Early Modern English. In: Kastovsky (ed.), 359–380. Nevalainen, Terttu. 2001. Continental conventions in early English correspondence. In: Diller and Görlach (eds.), 203–224. Nevalainen, Terttu, Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, Jukka Keränen, Minna Nevala, Arja Nurmi, and Minna Palander-Collin. 1998. Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC). Department of English, University of Helsinki, https://www.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/varieng/ corpus-of-early-english-correspondence. Also http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/ corpora/CEEC/ceecs.html; last accessed 6 January 2017.

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Pahta, Päivi. 2004. Code-switching in medieval medical writing. In: Taavitsainen and Pahta (eds.), 73–99. Pahta, Päivi and Saara Nevanlinna. 1997. Rephrasing in Early English: The use of expository apposition with an explicit marker from 1350 to 1710. In: Rissanen, Kytö, and Heikkonen (eds.), 121–183. Pakkala-Weckström, Mari. 2002. Have her my trouthe; – Til that myn herte breste: Dorigen and the difficulty of keeping promises in the Franklin’s Tale. In: Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, Minna Nevala, Arja Nurmi, and Matti Risannen (eds.), Variation Past and Present: VARIENG Studies on English for Terttu Nevalainen, 287–300. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Palander-Collin, Minna. 1999. Grammaticalization and Social Embedding: I THINK and METHINKS in Middle and Early Modern English. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Paradis, Carita. 1997. Degree Modifiers of Adjectives in Spoken British English. Lund: Lund University Press. Paradis, Carita. 2000. It’s well weird: Degree modifiers of adjectives revisited: The nineties. In: John M. Kirk (ed.), Corpora Galore: Analyses and Techniques in Describing English: Papers from the Nineteenth International Conference on English Language Research on Computational Corpora (ICAME 1988), 146–160. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Peikola, Matti. 2003. The catalogue: A late Middle English Lollard genre? In: Hiltunen and Skaffari (eds.), 105–135. Peters, Hans. 1994. Degree adverbs in Early Modern English. In: Kastovsky (ed.), 269–288. Powell, Susan (ed.). 1981. The Advent and Nativity Sermons from a Fifteenth-Century Revision of John Mirk’s Festial. Heidelberg: Winter. Rissanen, Matti, Merja Kytö, Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, Matti Kilpiö, Saara Nevanlinna, Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen, and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg. 1991. The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts. http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/HelsinkiCorpus/; last accessed 6 January 2017. Rissanen, Matti, Merja Kytö, and Kirsi Heikkonen (eds.). 1997. English in Transition: Corpusbased Studies in Linguistic Variation and Genre Styles. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Ritt, Nikolaus and Herbert Schendl (eds.). 2005. Rethinking Middle English: Linguistic and Literary Approaches. Frankfurt am Main: Lang. Rudanko, Juhani. 2004. “I wol sterve”: Negotiating the issue of a lady’s consent in Chaucer’s poetry. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5: 137–158. Schiffrin, Deborah. 1992. Anaphoric then: Aspectual, textual, and epistemic meaning. Linguistics 30: 753–792. Schendl, Herbert. 2001. Code-switching in medieval English poetry. In: Dieter Kastovsky and Arthur Mettinger (eds.), Language Contact in the History of English, 305–335. Frankfurt: Lang. Seoane, Elena. 2006. Information structure and word order change: The passive as an information-rearranging strategy in the history of English. In: van Kemenade and Los (eds.), 360–391. Sikorska, Liliana. 2000. Hir not lettyred: The use of interjections, pragmatic markers and whan-clauses in The Book of Margery Kempe. In: Taavitsainen et al. (eds.), 392–410. Skeat, Walter W. 1867. William of Palerne: To which is Added a Fragment of the Alliterative Romance of Alexander. London: Bungay. Stoffel, C. 1901. Intensives and Down-Toners: A Study in English Adverbs. Heidelberg: Winter. Stubbs, Michael. 1995. Collocations and semantic profiles: On the cause of trouble with quantitative studies. Functions of Language 2: 23–56.

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Taavitsainen, Irma. 1993. Genre/subgenre style in Late Middle English. In: Matti Rissanen, Merja Kytö, and Minna Palander-Collin (eds.), Early English in the Computer Age: Explorations through the Helsinki Corpus, 171–200. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Taavitsainen, Irma and Susan Fitzmaurice. 2007. Historical pragmatics: What it is and how to do it. In: Fitzmaurice and Taavitsainen (eds.), 11–36. Taavitsainen, Irma, Terttu Nevalainen, Päivi Pahta, and Matti Rissanen (eds.). 2000. Placing Middle English in Context. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Taavitsainen, Irma and Päivi Pahta (eds.). 2004. Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tannen, Deborah. 1982. The oral/literate continuum in discourse. In Deborah Tannen (ed.), Spoken and Written Language, 1–16. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Taylor, Ann and Wim van der Wurff (eds.). 2005. Aspects of OV and VO word order in the history of English. Special issue of English Language and Linguistics 9. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 2006. The semantic development of scalar focus modifiers. In: van Kemenade and Los (eds.), 335–359. Vezzosi, Letizia. 2007. Himself: An overview of its use in ME. In: Mazzon (ed.), 239–256. Wårvik, Brita. 2003. “When you read or hear this story read”: Issues of orality and literacy in Old English texts. In: Hiltunen and Skaffari (eds.), 113–155. Wright, Laura. 2005. Medieval mixed-language business discourse and the rise of Standard English. In: Janne Skaffari, Matti Peikola, Ruth Carroll, Risto Hiltunen, and Brita Wårvik (eds.), Opening Windows on Texts and Discourses of the Past, 381–399. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: Benjamins.

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Chapter 8: Dialects 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Introduction 134 Previous conceptions of dialectal variation in Middle English 136 A spatio-temporal frame for Middle English “dialects” 137 Reconstructing the dialect continuum for Middle English 140 Dialectal variation in Middle English 145 Dialects and word geography 160 Further prospects 160 References 161

Abstract: This chapter offers a conspectus of the kinds of regional variation to be inferred from the study of the language of Middle English texts. The perspective is that which underlies A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, 1350–1450 (McIntosh et al. 1986) and A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (Laing 2013–). The “traditional” view that there were such things as dialects in Middle English is eschewed in favor of recognizing the “dialectology” of Middle English as a continuum of overlapping feature distributions. The methodology of this approach is briefly outlined. Examples of a set of significant distributions of linguistic features are illustrated cartographically and discussed.

1 Introduction The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of the kind of regionally marked variation to be derived from analysis and interpretation of the language of Middle English texts. The title of the chapter is “Dialects”, but this term requires clarification. The most significant and paradoxical finding of dialect geography has been the non-existence of dialects, the objects which it purports to study. A “dialect” is a construct: a reification of some assemblage of linguistic features, defined according to criteria established by the dialectologist. These criteria may be linguistic, extra-linguistic, or some combination of these two kinds. (For more Keith Williamson: Edinburgh (UK)

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detailed discussion see Benskin 1994.) Identification of dialects is premised (at least partly) on the interpretation of linguistic variation distributed across geographical space. “Middle English” has traditionally been defined as a set of “dialects” in the sense that the language is characterized by a high degree of variation, and a considerable number of linguistic variants can be identified as regionally marked. The issue is how this regional variation can best be determined and understood given the complex nature of the extant data: an accidentally surviving corpus of manuscript texts, dating from the mid-12th century to the mid-15th century about whose producers we have little or no direct knowledge or information in most cases. If we want to have a realistic categorical conception of “dialect” for Middle English, we can consider each scribal text as one. However, in many cases even that would be too simple a characterization of the language of the text (see further Benskin and Laing 1981; Laing 2004; Laing and Williamson 2004). A (Middle English) dialect can be considered to be some assemblage of diatopically coherent linguistic features which co-occur over all or part of their geographical distributions and so delineate an area within the dialect continuum. Adding or taking away a feature from the assemblage is likely to alter the shape of this area: addition might reduce the area’s size, subtraction, increase it. Any text which contains that assemblage of features can be considered as having its provenance within that area. Linguistic variation across space exists because languages undergo change as a natural consequence of use and transmission from generation to generation of speakers. A linguistic change takes place in a community and subsequently becomes disseminated through time and across space as the next generation of speakers and neighboring communities adopt the change. A “dialect continuum” emerges from the language contacts of speakers in neighboring communities as they share some features, but not others. A continuum is thus made up of a set of overlapping distributions of linguistic features with varied geographical extents – some extensive, some local. A continuum is not static and is constantly shifting more or less rapidly through time. The primary data for Middle English is written language. From the Norman Conquest of England until the middle of the 12th century, there are few surviving original compositions written in English. When written English begins to appear again, it is being reinvented. This reinvention takes place locally. New orthographic systems are formulated with greater or lesser degrees of consistency and economy to reflect, at least in part, regional, local, and even individual spoken varieties. And, as will be seen in the evidence discussed later, written symbols themselves may exhibit regional variation independent of reference to that of underlying spoken forms.

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2 Previous conceptions of dialectal variation in Middle English The earliest systematic attempts at defining ME dialects were the studies of Oakden (1930) and Moore et al. (1935). Oakden’s study was driven by an interest in the localization of the original manuscript versions of certain alliterative poems. It was also partly an attempt to improve on earlier work by Serjeantson (1927) to define what the characteristic linguistic features of the West Midlands were. Oakden has a list of linguistic “points” which he describes “of some dialectal value in localising texts, and particularly those of the fourteenth century”. His points are based on etymological characters and lump together a number of words or morphemes under a single “point”. His map shows isoglosses to indicate “the approximate boundaries of these features […] The map may then be used as a key for localising a document of a particular period with a considerable degree of accuracy” (Oakden 1930: 9). Moore et al. (1935) arrived at a basic conception of ten regional varieties of Middle English: Kentish, Southern, South-east Midland, North-east Midland, South-west Midland, South-central West Midland, North-central West Midland, North-west Midland, Central East Midland and Northern. These were defined according to eleven discriminants. These divisions provided a basic architecture for the dialect map of England and underpinned the study of linguistic variation in Middle English for many years. Both of these studies present their information with a categorical cleanness that hardly begins to capture the complexity of the linguistic variation to be found in the linguistic witnesses – the texts. Gillis Kristensson’s linguistic-geographical studies of the largely onomastically-coded vernacular forms in the Lay Subsidy Rolls have provided a valuable further insight into the diatopic diversity of Middle English (Kristensson 1967, 1987, 1995, 2001a, 2001b) and present a much more nuanced picture, albeit the tendency to map etymological categories and to define boundaries of distributions by isoglosses results in a degree of sanitization of the data. There are also problems in the reliability of his sources – London-made copies of local texts – and in how much the names that Kristensson used for his data might have been altered by the copyists and perhaps not actually representative of local forms. (On this see McClure 1973. For citations of reviews of Kristensson 1967, see Kristensson 1987: ix–x, n. 2, and for his responses, p. ix seq.) Yet, none of the above mentioned studies offer any representation of language on a map that could be described as a dialect per se. Rather, however much the authors try to define boundaries, what emerges is a set of overlapping geographical distributions of linguistic characteristics. With the publication of A

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Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, 1350–1450 (McIntosh et al. 1986 and of A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, 1150–1325 (Laing 2013–) the complexity of linguistic variation throughout the Middle English period has been made apparent in unprecedented detail. Both these works have taken radically different approaches to the study of the dialectology of Middle English from those of the previous studies mentioned.

3 A spatio-temporal frame for Middle English “dialects” The conception of Middle English dialects offered here is informed largely by the methodology used to create LALME and LAEME and the results published in these enquiries. The geographical bounds for our study may be defined as England in the late Middle Ages (albeit its northern bounds with Scotland and its western bounds with Wales were not entirely static in this period). However, ME “dialects” are not solely a diatopic matter. There is also a crucial diachronic dimension. Quite when Middle English began and ended has been a matter of debate among historians of English (for an interesting discussion, see Kitson 1997). In particular, the question of defining a temporal boundary between “Middle” as opposed to “Old” English has generated much discussion. (For discussion of the notion “Middle” and references, see Lass 2000.) This matter is further complicated by the lack of surviving texts composed in English of the mid-11th century to the mid-12th century as opposed to later copies of Old English texts. The opposition between Old English and Middle English has been portrayed as one between language types: Old English is characterized by a more complex morphology and flexible word-order; Middle English is characterized by loss of most of the declensional and (to a lesser extent) conjugational morphology and by more rigid word-order; also, the lexis of Middle English contains a heavy borrowing of words from Old French following the Conquest, replacing or bringing about the re-referencing of their Old English equivalents. In fact, Old English was well on the way to a simpler morphological structure by the 11th century. What emerges as Middle English in the extant texts of the 12th century (lexical disturbance aside) is a continuation of this process. At the other end of the ME period, marked linguistic variation in the written language is giving way to an emergent normative variety which is spreading geographically through the mid and later 15th century. Regional diversity in the written language is smoothed out, first in the South and Midlands and later in the North.

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Of course, languages are constantly in transition and in examining the “dialects” of Middle English we are examining one period of transition defined by changes in the nature of surviving textual artefacts: texts which are demonstrably not-Old English at one end and texts which are demonstrably not-Standard(ized) at the other end. Through the ME period, linguistic change is observable in and deducible from the evidence of the texts. The direct sources of the linguistic information for Middle English are provided by the written forms found in the extant texts. For the spoken language, we can infer only from the evidence of the orthography of the texts and from reconstructive techniques based on the direct evidence of speech in the modern period. The regional variants which are characteristic of Middle English did not arise ex nihilo. And, if they largely vanish from the written record in the Early Modern period, they (and their developments) did not do so from the spoken language. The regional variation of the Late Modern period (as recorded notably in Alexander Ellis’s [1869–89] On Early English Pronunciation, Vol. V, and in Joseph Wright’s [1898–1905] English Dialect Dictionary for the 19th century, and in the Survey of English Dialects for the 20th century [Orton et al. 1962–71]) are the later developments of the spoken regional varieties of Middle English. See Dietz (1989) for a comparison of the distribution of linguistic features between the medieval and modern periods. That Old English was more varied in writing than the West Saxon literary texts of the 10th and 11th centuries would suggest is evident from the English to be found in charters, whether contemporary, or later copies preserving the Old English text, as Peter Kitson has demonstrated (Kitson 1993, 1995). For present purposes, the matter is not so much when and for what reasons one may wish to argue that Middle English began and ended, as the fact that the period in which the forms found in surviving texts exhibit significant regional variation lasted several hundred years. It will suffice for present purposes to take as the period for discussion here from 1150 to 1475. We have, then, to deal with a period of 325 years. An historical dialectological approach must take into account such time-depth: a proper description of ME regional variation cannot be a synchronic one. In practice, a time-depth has been recognized in Middle English in the bipartite division into Early and Late Middle English, with the division being (variably) somewhere in the first half of the 14th century. Yet, even within these early and late periods, time-depth is an issue that ought to be considered for a proper diatopic interpretation of the linguistic evidence. In the period with which we are concerned, there was considerable linguistic change, notably in the phonology. Some of this is reflected in the orthography. But orthography itself might change too, without implication of phonic change, e.g. the deselection of the Old English letters ‘ƿ’ and ‘ð’. And change in orthographic practice may provide markers of regional differentiation.

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The most marked case is the lack of distinction to be found in Late ME northern texts between and , when such a distinction is to be found in the midland and the southern texts. (See Benskin 1982 for the palaeographical and orthographic history of this development; and see Map 8.6 THEY below for illustration.) Grammars and handbooks that treat substantially of Middle English (most significantly those of Luick [1921], Jordan [1968], Mossé [1968], The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vols. I and II [Hogg 1992; Blake 1989]) have recognized and described linguistic change through the period, particularly in the phonology: Trisyllabic Shortening, Open-Syllable Lengthening, Degemination of Consonants, Loss of final “schwa”, Northern Fronting, the early changes that are customarily bundled under the “Great Vowel Shift”. However, these diachronic developments are placed in relation to the linguistic geography in a broad way, if at all, e.g. as “Northern” (e.g. Northern Fronting) or “West Midland” (e.g. → [ɔ], as the reflex of Grmc. *a before a single nasal or a single nasal plus voiceless consonant). With the exception of The Cambridge History volumes, the major and most-referred-to accounts were written long before the detailed diatopic conspectus offered by LALME. Even within LALME, ostensibly covering the period 1350 to 1450, there is a time-depth which is not explicitly recognized in the data. Apart from the issue of the time-spans of both LALME and LAEME, there are sources used in LALME written before 1350 and after 1450. The maps in LALME are underlyingly diachronically skewed: data collected for the South generally belong to the beginning of the period covered by the atlas, while those for the North belong to the later part. Also, in the South the language of texts was affected earlier by the spreading standard; the bulk of texts containing northern Middle English survive from a later date. What we see on a LALME “dot map” (LALME 1, McIntosh et al. 1986: 305–551) or “item map” (LALME 2, McIntosh et al. 1986) looks like a synchronic presentation of data across geographical space, but in fact the maps contain substantial variation in the dates of the linguistic forms evidenced at the different survey points. In LAEME the geographical coverage provided by the sources is not uniform: extant texts for the North and for the South are scant, while they are quite numerous for the West and East Midlands, but they seem to be totally lacking for the Central Midlands.

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4 Reconstructing the dialect continuum for Middle English When dealing with language from the late Middle Ages all our data come, of necessity, from the written language. Our witnesses for the past stages of the language were writers and copying scribes: we have to deal with “native writers”. Their written output is our only directly available source material. Our evidence comprises bundles of linguistic objects found in texts: Middle English is a “text language” (Fleischman 2000: 34) and a manuscript may contain one or more “text dialects”. Texts, therefore, take the place of the informants who can be questioned directly in a modern survey. The sample of witnesses is accidental – whatever texts have happened to have survived until the present. Unlike in a modern dialect survey, we cannot return to an informant to ask for more examples or for elucidation about a form. We have to infer anything about the spoken language of the writers and copiers of the texts from orthography or from linguistic patterns such as rhyme or alliteration. We also have to contend with different types of witness. The witnesses are not homogeneous in their general character. However, they may be divided into two basic types: (1) primary, being those which provide sufficient extralinguistic evidence to allow a prima facie localization; and (2) secondary, being those which offer valuable linguistic information, but whose provenance is not determinable from any extralinguistic evidence. Typically, primary witnesses are legal documents: charters, dealing with such matters as leases, bonds, and alliances, marriages, testaments, and also record books (ecclesiastical and lay) recording the proceedings of courts and local administrations. As a class, these texts may be termed “local documents” (Benskin 1977, 1981). They offer evidence of local associations through references in their text to persons and places, and they are usually dated. Secondary witnesses are generally literary texts. For the most part these do not offer information about their provenance, albeit there are exceptions (such as Dan Michel’s Ayenbyte of Inwyt in London, British Library, Arundel 57) which allow such texts to be used as primary witnesses. Literary texts are usually copies, which may or may not reflect the language of their copier, and their linguistic provenance therefore has to be discovered through a process of comparison with the language patterns afforded by the primary witnesses. For LALME and LAEME, this was done by a method called the “fit”-technique (LALME 1 McIntosh et al. 1986: 9–12; Benskin 1988, 1991). In the text to be localized is identified a set of linguistic features known to be diatopically salient

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from material already mapped from the primary witnesses or from already localized texts. By progressively eliminating areas of the map where these features do not occur, the provenance of the text may be discovered. One aims to have at the end of the process some single – preferably small – area which has not been eliminated, where only that set of features from the text being fitted occurs as an “assemblage”. Where each feature may have different, albeit overlapping, distributions, the aim of the procedure is to discover a locality where in their areas of distributions they all overlap together. The overlap defines the area of distribution of the assemblage of those features. Thus, any text not yet localized which contains that assemblage is likely to have been written in that area and/or by someone from that area or it is a faithful copy of a manuscript text written in that area and/or by someone from that area.

–

–

How do we obtain linguistic information from the witnesses? Questionnaire Method (QM): we formulate a questionnaire (as for a modern linguistic survey) and record for the set of items the written forms which realize each item as they occur in each text. The result is a “linguistic profile” (LP) for each text. (See Table 8.1.) Tagging Method (TM): we transcribe texts, key them to disk and, with the aid of a computer program, we tag each word and morpheme of the text lexicogrammatically.

The QM is aimed at systematically collecting attestations of a predetermined subset of linguistic items whose forms are believed to show diatopic variation. In the TM, material is collected beyond that required for making dialect maps. But from the corpus created using the TM, diatopically salient material can be mined and because full running texts are recorded, each word and morpheme retains its linguistic context. With the QM, the collected forms are decontextualized. LALME was made using the QM and LAEME and A Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots (LAOS, Williamson 2013–) using the TM. In Table 8.1 are listed the “forms” recorded in three manuscript texts for 28 “items” in the LALME questionnaire (reproduced here with the kind permission of the authors). (Note that in the table I have put the respective sets of singular and plural forms for SHALL and SHOULD in single rows.) In the discussion which follows I will use the following terms: “item”, “form”, and “feature”. An item is a test unit for linguistic comparison. Each question in a linguistic-survey questionnaire to which informants respond is an item. It is a superordinate for a group of forms, which are functionally equivalent. These can be grouped together as being: “the same word”, e.g. , , = SHE; or “the same morpheme”, e.g. , , , = 3P SG PRES IND “ inflection”. In these cases,

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Table 8.1: Exemplar linguistic data from three Linguistic Profiles in A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, 1350–1450, vol. 3 (McIntosh et al. 1986)

ITEMS

SHE HER THEIR THEY THEM NOT

LP 494 London, British Library, Add. MS 25013. Yorkshire, West Riding 399 428

LP 4629 London, British Library, Harley 2390. Norfolk 602 283

LP 7660 Leeds University, Brotherton Library 500. Worcestershire 370 266

scho hir yair ( yaire ) (( yar )) yai yame yaim (( yaim )) noght ( not )

sche hyr here ( here ) here yeir ( here ) yei þei hem (( them )) nouȝth nootȝ notȝ nouȝt nowȝt nattȝ nowthȝ natȝ nat nottȝ nouwȝt ( natt ) -yng -yngg fyrstȝ fystȝ; ye-ffyrstȝ þe-firstȝ affttyr (( afftter )) is (( his )) ben ( arn ) (( harn ben )) chirche ich iche (( eche ))

he (( a )) her ( here ) her here þey he ( heo þei ) hem not ( nout ) (( nouȝt ))

Present Participle -ande -and ( -yng ) FIRST first (( fyrst frist )) AFTER IS ARE

after (( aftyr )) is es are ar ( er arne )

CHURCH EACH

kirke ilk ( ilke-a ilk-a iche-a ) (( ylke )) fire

FIRE FROM MAN MANY MUCH

SHALL SG ; PL SHOULD SG ; PL SUCH WHEN

feyr feer fer ferr fyer ffer ( fyir ) fro from man (mon) (( mon )) man (( man )) mony (( many )) many manyȝe mykel ( mikil mykill mechell meche mykil mikell mikel mechyll mykyl ) (( mochell moche mecyll )) sal (( sall schal )); xall ( xal schall ); sal (sall schal) xullyn xullyn (xall xulle) schuld (( sulde suld )); xulde ( xullde ); schuld (( sulde )) xulldyn xuldyn swilk ( suche ) sweche swiche (( swilke )) ( soche ) when (( wen whan )) qwan quan qwane (qwanne qwann qwanne)

-ynge furst ( furste fyrste ); þe-furste ( þe-firste ) aftur is beþ buþ buth ( but ben ) chyrche ( churche cherche ) vche vch ( vche-a eche ech ech- yche ich- ) fir fuyr ( fyr ) from ( form from fro ) mon mony (( many monye )) mechel meche ( muche )

schal (( chal )); schul schulle (schele) (( schule schullen )) schulde suche ( sych syche ) (( syge )) wen ( wenne )

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Table 8.1: (continued).

ITEMS WHERE WHETHER

WHICH

WORLD

LP 494 London, British Library, Add. MS 25013. Yorkshire, West Riding 399 428

LP 4629 London, British Library, Harley 2390. Norfolk 602 283

LP 7660 Leeds University, Brotherton Library 500. Worcestershire 370 266

whare ( whar whore where ) whether ( wheyer )

qwere qwere qwere– qwethir qweyr qwethir qweyre qwedere qwiche qwich ye-qwiche qwyche

wer were wher

whilk ( ye-whilk ye-whylke whilke ye-wilke wilke ye-whiche wiche weche ) worlde ( worde ) (( word world ))

werld

weþer ( wheþer wer )

þe-weche weche þe-wyche wyche ( þe-whiche whiche þe-wheche wiche )

worlde (( wrolde ))

[Note: Parentheses reflect the frequency of occurrence of the forms as recorded: unbracketed forms have the dominant frequency, forms in () occur “about one third to two thirds as frequently as the dominant form” and forms in (()) “occur about less than about one-third as commonly as the dominant form” (LALME 3, McIntosh et al. 1986: xiv).]

form is more or less equivalent to “the spelling adopted for the word or morpheme”. But an item may also comprise a group of forms having “the same basic meaning”, e.g. til, fort, unto, þat = UNTIL. In this case, form is the equivalent of “the word chosen to express the meaning”. A linguistic feature is a segment comprising all or part of a form, or a set of forms, which realize one or more items: e.g. initial in forms of SHE; for the 3P SG PRES IND inflection; fort-forms expressing the meaning UNTIL. Thus, in Table 8.1, the questionnaire items are listed in column 1. In columns 2 through 4 are listed the forms corresponding to the items in column 1 which were found in texts in the three manuscripts whose designations are given in the column heads. Also given for each manuscript is the county in which the LP has been localized in LALME and the grid reference of its localization.

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4.1 The methodology for LAEME LAEME has been constructed using the transcription-and-tagging method. Complete manuscript texts or extensive samples from very long texts have been transcribed to disk. The transcribed texts are then lexico-grammatically tagged: each word and morpheme is assigned a tag comprising a “lexel” (lexical element) and a “grammel” (grammatical element), e.g. $thought/nOd_YOT

The start of the tag is marked by “$” and the end by the tie “_”, which links the tag to the manuscript word it describes, in this case “YOT”. The lexel for “YOT” is “thought”, which is a modern English gloss. The grammel (separated from the lexel by “/”) is “nOd”, where “n” = “noun” and “O” = “object” and “d” = “direct”. The grammel describes the grammatical category and function of the text-word at the point in the text at which it occurs, so “YOT” here is a noun functioning as a direct object. An example of a stretch of tagged text is: $/P11N+V_*HIC $be/vps11_AM $/AN_A $clerk/n_CLERC $/RTA_YAT $haunt/vps13F_HAUnT+ES $/vps13F_+ES $school/nOd{rh}_SCOLE “I am a cleric that haunts [frequents] [the] school”.

The texts are initially tagged as running text, but from this text, a dictionary version is made. In this “text dictionary”, the words and morphemes are arranged in alphanumerical order by tag and after each form is a frequency count of its occurrence when associated with its tag, e.g. $such/aj SUILC 1 $such/ajOd SUILC 1 $sweet/aj SUYT 1 $sweet/aj-voc SUYTHE 1 $than/cj YAN 4 $that/cj YAT 6 $therefore/av-k YAR-FOR 1 $therein{p}/av-k{rh} YAR-InNE 1 $thing/nOd{rh} YInK 1 $to/im+C *TO 2 TO 2 $to/im+H *TO 1 $to/pr TO 2

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The text dictionaries parallel the Linguistic Profiles in LALME, and from their data, features may be extracted for mapping. More information about the LAEME corpus and the principles of tagging can be found in the LAEME website (Laing and Lass 2008: Introduction, Chapters 3 and 4), and in Laing and Lass (2006). Examples of maps in LAEME can be found by accessing “Maps”. The LPs and text dictionaries are like the completed questionnaires in a modern survey. The items, as a set, are applied to all the witnesses to discover what forms attest each item. In this way, the items elicit a description of the linguistic variation. Because the same items are applied to each witness, they provide a framework for comparison of the materials. However, in a modern survey it is usually possible to obtain responses to all the items in the questionnaire. In reality, a medieval text will lack information for questionnaire items: if any questionnaire item is not attested by any form in a text, then we can have no response. The type of text dictates the measure of response: a long literary text will return a fuller questionnaire than a single-sheet charter or a will. And length of text is not the only factor here: the subject matter inevitably constrains the scope of the vocabulary. The inevitable lacunae across the corpus of LPs compromise the comparability of the data to some degree. That said, in evaluating the lacunae for diatopic purposes, it is better, nevertheless, to follow the maxim that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”.

5 Dialectal variation in Middle English 5.1 Regional differences How do we discover what is regionally marked in Middle English texts? As with a modern linguistic survey, we make maps. By displaying the occurrence of any linguistic feature on a map, we can see the range of its distribution – whether it is found over the whole area of survey, whether it is confined to a small area, or a much larger area, whether its distribution is dense and concentrated or sparse and diffuse, and whether a feature occurs in different areas, geographically separated. The maps reveal to us the varying diatopic saliences of linguistic features. In this section are presented maps which illustrate some key distributions and also different kinds and extents of distribution. The data in the maps are largely from LALME (McIntosh et al. 1986; reproduced with the kind permission of the authors). Materials from LAEME (Laing 2013–) will also be referred to. What is presented is perforce highly selective. The maps have been drawn in such a way as to provide a comparative presentation. The method used also schematizes the distributions somewhat and some comment about the method chosen is required.

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Much of the literature on the dialectology of Middle English and Modern English refers to the distribution of linguistic characteristics in terms of “isoglosses”. In discussions of the relationship between the two periods, the notion of “shift” is invoked (e.g. Fisiak 1983; Dietz 1989): for example, the area of distribution of the modern dialectal reflex(es) of a characteristic such as Middle English /aː/ and /ɔː/ < Old English ā has changed. An isogloss is a cartographic construct, intended to show the geographical boundary between the distributions of two linguistic features. But the isogloss is problematic: it often distorts what typically happens when the bounds of two distributions meet, by sanitizing or idealizing the co-occurrence of the bounds. There is rarely a clear-cut line between the distributions of features. Rather, they may often overlap, so that there are areas when both forms are used to a greater or lesser extent in neighboring communities or used by the members of one community and understood by those of another. Where the boundaries of features meet, we find zones of transition. It is these zones of transition, shifting across space, which define the dialect continuum. In LALME, the “dot maps” and in LAEME and LAOS, the “feature maps” display distributions as patterns of symbols at the locations where features have been attested, without attempting to demarcate the bounds of the distributions. What lies between the survey points is unknown. An isogloss makes assumptions about what is or is not there. To present information about features in the maps for this chapter, I have resorted to a variant of the isogloss – the “heterogloss”. A heterogloss is a line which attempts to demarcate the bounds of the distribution of a single feature. Where the bounds of the distributions of two features meet, there will be two boundary lines – one for each feature. Heteroglosses allow us to see where there are overlaps between the distributions. They still make assumptions, of course, about what is in effect terra incognita. (On the notions of “isogloss” and “heterogloss”, see Chambers and Trudgill 1998; and for an excellent critique of the notion of “isogloss”, see Kretzschmar 2003.) The maps offered here provide simplified pictures of the distributions of the features to be discussed. Nonetheless they capture some of the complexities of patterning. The reader is strongly encouraged to look at the original maps in LALME and in LAEME on which the maps here presented are based. Certain geographical areas are more clearly “dialectal” than others and may admit more or less complex variation within. The North – geographically north and east of a line that could be drawn from North Lancashire to the Humber Estuary – seems clearly defined by a number of linguistic features, although there are variations in the boundaries of their distributions. For Late Middle English, although there is evidence of standard forms, these are less apparent than in the South and Midlands. Early Middle English evidence for the North is not abundant

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and is geographically sparse (see the keymap for LAEME). For the Late Middle English period, more texts are available, especially in the 15th century, in which more documentary texts are available. One of the defining shibboleths for a northern text is whether it contains atype spellings in reflexes of OE ā. LALME collected spellings of these reflexes under an item A, O. Map 8.1 presents heteroglosses for a-type spellings and o-type spellings. (It should be noted that this item was collected only for the Northern part of the LALME survey, covering the North and Midlands.) The distribution indicates a well-defined southern boundary for a-type spellings. The heterogloss runs north-west to south-east from the Ribble, meandering through the West Riding and taking in North Lincolnshire. There are also two coherent islands of a-type forms in East Central Lincolnshire and in South Central Lincolnshire respectively. However, o-types are quite abundant north of the a-heterogloss. First, the northern bounds of the main o-distribution overlap the southern bounds of the a-distribution, so that there is a zone where o- and a-types co-occur. Further, within the area of the a-distribution are areas with o-also. The prevalence of o-type in the North within the a-area cannot be taken to reflect the spoken language. Rather, in most cases they are to be found there because the data are from written texts. The o-type may be prevalent because many of the northern texts are legal documents (hence subject more to contemporary and external linguistic influences, including features of standardization) and show some degree of use of non-northern forms (see the comments below on AT INF and TIL INF ) . While comparison of the medieval and modern boundaries of the a-type might be a feasible exercise, comparison of the o-boundary must be more problematic. In any case, bundling reflexes of OE ā into a single etymological category and mapping the result is not a particularly enlightening exercise. Rather, one would want to map the distributions of each reflex individually and observe any variations in the patterns. Within the North, clear patterns of variation are hard to discern. Many of the northern texts used for LALME are from local documents and so the texts are brief and provide limited evidence with many lacunae for the LALME questionnaire items. The LALME maps for some items conceal some interesting differences between text types. For example, dot map 688 in LALME shows the distribution of AT INF , a nice Northern feature (of Scandinavian origin). However, closer analysis of the kinds of texts in which this occurs, show AT INF to be confined almost exclusively to literary texts and to be almost absent from documents. TIL forms, collected under the LALME item TO INF , occur only sporadically in the local documents (see Williamson 2004: 267–272). This difference may be a product of the earlier date of many of the literary texts. Even if they are later copies, they may preserve earlier forms. Also there may have been a tendency

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Map 8.1: OE ā reflexes spelled with either a or o, e.g. , , , or

amongst 15th-century writers of documents with legal training to eschew what might be considered “marked” or “provincial” forms in their professional writings. Lincolnshire evidences interesting patterns of distribution, sharing many features with the North, but not others. For example, among the salient Northern features, -and for the present participle is to be found across Lincolnshire, but not s(c)ho for SHE. (See Map 8.2 SHE and Map 8.3 Present Participle.) Indeed, some

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northern features may have receded from Lincolnshire in the post-medieval period. For example, Lincolnshire in the medieval period may have fallen within the bounds of the area of Northern Fronting (where OE, ON ō > /øː/ or /yː/, but the affected forms were later replaced from an area where this change did not take place; see Britton 2004). South Lincolnshire seems to be part of the nexus of dialectal complexity that is to be found around The Wash, running through Ely and into Norfolk and South Lincolnshire. Norfolk itself is dialectally complex as evidenced in the LALME materials. There are a number of distinctive local features in this area: qwh– type as reflex of OE hw, where further north qu-, qw- is to be found; spellings which imply /θ(t)/ for /xt/ as reflex of OE -ht, e.g. mith(t) ‘might’, nouth ‘nought’. A distinctive form to be found in Norfolk and in North Suffolk is for the initial consonant in SHALL and SHOULD, e.g. , . A distinctive marker of northern texts are the types swilk SUCH, whilk WHICH and ilk EACH. These have very similar bounds to their southern distributions and take in Lincolnshire. In the case of swilk and whilk, North Norfolk forms part of their distributions, while ilk also takes in south central Norfolk and an area of north central Suffolk. Within the period covered by LALME, the written language of London underwent an evolution, partly shaped in different ways at different periods by immigration from East Anglia and the East and Central Midlands. The stages of development are outlined in Samuels (1963). From London language, influenced by external and internal sources, emerged the standard which was to spread more widely across England, interacting with local forms of language. Note that this should not be termed, as it often is, “Chancery Standard”, for the Chancery used predominantly Latin and such English that it dealt with came into it in texts from different regions of the country. Chancery copies of texts originating in different parts of the country often preserve their regional characteristics of language. The Chancery could not have been, nor was, the crucible for the formation of what became the standard. For a crucial corrective to the “Chancery Standard” fallacy, see Benskin (2004). As it spread across the country, the standard was adopted in varying measure, mixing with more local forms and diluting them. Many texts especially in the South in the 15th century show varying degrees of standardization in their language. A text’s local credentials might depend on forms which are in the minority as compared with the standard forms they might contain (cf. Schaefer, Chapter 11). “Regional standards” or at least conventions could develop. The Central Midlands is dialectally not particularly rich, partly because of a tendency to leveling out of very local features in the extant texts. Many of the surviving texts from this area are Wycliffite and in their production there seems to have been an inclination to avoid highly local forms. In the Early Middle English period, no

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Map 8.2: SHE: scho-, sho-, he(e-, heo-, and hi-types

texts written in English are to be found for this area. The dialectology for this area for the period remains terra incognita. The West Midlands and East Anglia, by contrast seem to be the richest dialect areas for surviving texts. Texts survive in abundant quantity for the West Midlands throughout the Middle English period. Indeed, it seems to have been an important centre in the reinvention of written English. (See Laing and Lass 2008, Introduction to LAEME, and also references therein.) The West Midlands shows a number of distinctive

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Map 8.3: Present participle: types with -and, -end, and –ind

features, uch and euch for EACH, mony for MANY, fuir for FIRE, beoth for BE PRES PL . It was the focus of a great deal of interest in earlier studies, notably those of Oakden (1930) and Serjeantson (1927).

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5.2 Exemplar maps One of the items which shows remarkable variation in its written forms in LALME is the item SHE. The most common type is s(c)he, where she is the standard form. The vowel aside, there is a major distinction between forms with sch- or shand h-. The h-type, of course, retained the Old English initial consonant. The s(c)h-type, with a palatal fricative, may well have developed from forms with initial h- (see Britton 1991). Map 8.2 shows the distributions of h-type with or or and of sch- and sh-types with vowel . The types with palatalized initial consonants are Northern. The sch- and sh-heteroglosses show a similar limit for their distributions with the sh-distribution having a more westward boundary into East Cheshire and slight eastward extension into Lincolnshire. The heo and he(e types are found primarily in the West Midlands and South-west, also extending into South Hampshire and into South-west Sussex. Their distributions show similar limits in the Southern part of their eastern boundaries, but heo extends further north, covering Shropshire. There is a small pocket of he(e type in South-east Suffolk. hi, hy are found in North Kent. A long-recognized division in Middle English is between forms of MANY with o and forms with a for the tonic vowel. Map 8.4 displays heteroglosses for these two types. However, the division is not clear-cut and there is some overlap between the two distributions on the western boundary of many (broken line) and the eastern boundary of mony (solid black line). Indeed, in the South-west Midlands, the many distribution extends as far west as the Welsh Marches, while the mony boundary extends eastward into North Wiltshire. This wide area of overlap between the two types seems to have been present also in the Early Middle English period (LAEME map “unpublished”; but in the revised version users can create a map for this feature). There is also an extensive “island” of the mony type further east, in South-central England. The northern boundary of the many type extends as far North as Westmorland in the North-west and south-eastwards through the North Riding and into the East Riding of Yorkshire; mony forms are also found in the North-east of England – Eastern Cumberland and Durham and Northumberland. In late 14th-century and 15th-century Scots mony is to be found throughout. This North-eastern distribution may well be connected historically to the Scots one. In the LAEME data, there is no evidence of mony type in the Northeast, but this may be due to lack of evidence for the area surviving from the earlier period. In the LALME data, there is a zone between the northern boundary of the many distribution and the southern and western boundary of the mony distribution in the North-east for which no forms for MANY are attested in the sources localized there. This is represented on the map by “?”. The mony / many opposition is cartographically rather complex. A third type for MANY is meny. This

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Map 8.4: MANY: forms with a, o, or e for the tonic vowel

occurs in the South-west, although its distribution extends into Herefordshire and overlaps with the many and mony type distributions there. It extends at its eastmost into the south-west corner of Sussex. Islands of meny are to be found further east, including south-west Essex and south-west Suffolk. The meny type is not evidenced at all in the LAEME data. The personal plural pronouns THEY, THEM, and THEIR are of considerable dialectal interest. Two basic types for each one may be identified: (1) those of Old

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Map 8.5: THEM, THEIR: Northern limits of h-types

English origin, which we can characterize from their initial consonant, /h/; (2) those of Scandinavian origin, the ancestors of the standard forms, with an initial /ð/, with the principal spellings þ, y, or th (others are possible, especially in Early Middle English). The dialectal interest arises, first, from the relative distributions of the types. The second from the spelling of the /ð/ segment in the forms of Scandinavian origin. By the Late ME period the /h/ type was being replaced by the /ð/ type. The Early Middle English evidence shows little penetration south-

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ward by the latter type (LAEME), but by the ME period (as evidenced in LALME), the /ð/ type shows evidence of penetration into the area of the original /h/ type. With THEM and THEIR, the progress is rather diffuse in the South. However, THEY with /ð/ appears widely across the area and overlaps with the /h/ type. This is represented in Map 8.6, where the distribution of /ð/ type with spellings in þ, y is contrasted with the distribution of the /h/ type. (th spellings are not included and are widely scattered anyway.) The northern boundaries of the /h/ distributions of THEM and THEIR are shown in Map 8.5. It is clear that THEY /h/ type has receded much further south and westwards and the /ð/ type for THEY is much more progressive. The distribution of THEY also allows comment on a case of dialectal distribution of written forms: y as against þ. In the representation of /ð/ and /θ/, as well as th, y and þ were used. Where th is to be found widely across the country, there is a geographical division between the use of y and þ. This is evident in Map 31.6 where forms with y are to be found in the north extending southward to Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, and North Derbyshire. y is also to be found in Norfolk. þ is found South of this, but also its distribution overlaps that of y in the southern half of Lincolnshire and in Nottinghamshire and North Derbyshire. The use of y for /ð/ and also for /θ/ arose from developments in scripts in the North and North Midlands. In the formation of the littera þ, so that its figurae became more y-like and came eventually to be identified with those of y. In Older Scots also, y is used commonly for /ð/ and /θ/. y continued to be used to represent high front vowels, of course, even in Northern Middle English and Scots. Middle English exhibited dialectal variation in its morphology. A salient case is that of the present participle as shown in Map 8.3. The standard ‑ing type is to be found geographically widespread in Middle English texts. Of some diatopic significance is the ‑and type, found in the North, Lincolnshire, and over most of Norfolk. There are islands of this type in the North-west Midlands. It is to be found also in Devon, where there seem to have been scribes at work whose language contains some elements which are clearly Northern in origin. Other types are ‑ind and ‑end. All these types are descendents from Old English. The ‑end type is found predominantly in Norfolk, Ely, and Cambridgeshire. There is also an island in Essex and another in North-west Gloucestershire, falling within the main area of the ‑ind type, which is a South-west Midland characteristic. All the types, ‑and, ‑end, and ‑ind, are to be found in the London area, with the ‑ind type widest spread, extending into North-west Kent. The verb BE exhibits dialectal variation in many of its forms. Map 8.7 displays the distributions of variants for forms for the present plural, corresponding to Standard English are. The are type, corresponding to the standard form is widespread. Of dialectal interest is the er type (from Old Scandinavian). This is found in an area delimited in the South by a border running from northern Lancashire,

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Map 8.6: THEY: Northern limits of þ and h and southern limit of y

meandering through the West Riding and looping to take in North and East Nottinghamshire and south and east around the borders of Lincolnshire, so that all of Lincolnshire falls within the er distribution. er extends north to take in most of Cumberland and Westmorland and eastern Durham, but western Durham, eastern Cumberland, and most of Northumberland fall outside, having the ar type, which is shared with Scots. The ben type is found across all of the South and Midlands. Its northern boundary partly intertwines with that of the southern

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Map 8.7: The present plural of BE: er, ben, beth, and beoth types

boundary of the er type, creating areas of overlap or transition between the two types. The northern boundary of ben cuts through the centre of Lincolnshire, so that south Lincolnshire falls within both the distributions ben and er. The beth type is found rather further south. Its distribution embraces all of the West Midlands, taking in the eastern half of Shropshire and all of Staffordshire and Warwickshire. In the east, it takes in Essex and Suffolk and part of South Norfolk. A fourth type, beoth, is much more local, covering an area of the West Midlands,

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parts of Herefordshire, Worcestershire, and North Gloucestershire. The beon type (not mapped) is also characteristic of the West Midlands, but encompassing a smaller area, mainly Herefordshire and Worcestershire. The buth type also occurs in the West Midlands, but has a wider distribution into the South-west and the South, taking in South Wiltshire, Hampshire, and Sussex. The present tense indicative endings of Middle English have broad regional distributions: in the South and West Midlands, 3P SG /PL ‑th type; in the Central and West Midlands (including East Anglia) 3P SG ‑th, PL ‑en or ‑e; in the North ‑is ~ ∅ [i.e. no inflection]. The Northern present tense indicative system varies the ending according to the category and adjacency to the verb of the subject. If the subject is not a personal pronoun or if the subject is a personal pronoun but not adjacent to the verb, then the verb is inflected, usually with the ‑is type inflection (but other forms are possible, ‑us, ‑es). If the subject is a personal pronoun and it is adjacent to the verb, then the 1P and 2P SG and 1P , 2P , 3P PL are uninflected, but the 3P SG has ‑is. However, an area, covering South Lincolnshire, Rutland, and Leicestershire, contains a paradigm that uses formally Midland-type inflections, but patterned similarly to the Northern Present Tense Rule: if the subject is not a personal pronoun or is a non-adjacent personal pronoun, the 3P SG and 1P , 2P , 3P PL have ‑eth (i.e. the singular inflection appears to be extended to the plural); if the subject is a personal pronoun adjacent to the verb, then the 3P SG has ‑eth, the plural has the regular Midland ‑en or ‑e. For a full account, see McIntosh (1983). Map 8.8 reflects the history of OE ȳ. It shows the distribution of types of spelling for the LALME item FIRE. The ui-type, found mainly in the West Midlands would seem to reflect the retention of a rounded vowel, although, of course, spellings can remain after phonological change. There are also islands of this type across the South, including south-west Essex. The e- and ei-types reflect the earlier (9th century) change of unrounding, presumably of a mid or mid-high front rounded vowel, /øː/ or /ʏː/, in East Anglia and in Kent. Elsewhere, OE ȳ later unrounded as a high front vowel, /iː/, reflected in such spellings as , . The ei- type may partly be a variant of the e-type or the i-type with an epenthetic vowel before /r/. The i-type is general across the North. It is hoped that the above examples will have given some idea of the patterns of diversity and richness in Middle English dialects.

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Map 8.8: FIRE: ui-, e-, ei-, and ie-types (representing reflexes of OE ȳ)

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6 Dialects and word geography While we have gained much knowledge of geographical variation in orthography and morphology, vocabulary has proved less tractable. Until recently the most extensive study was Rolf Kaiser’s (1937) Zur Geographie des mittelenglischen Wortschatzes. Angus McIntosh had also discussed issues and strategies in dealing with the lexis (McIntosh 1973, 1977). The dialectology of the lexis seemed to pose quite different problems from those of the other levels of analysis: orthography, phonology, and morphology. However, a major study by Richard Dance (2003) has offered a valuable insight into the vocabulary of Scandinavian origin and the interpretation of its dissemination. A more extensively-oriented project for the study of Middle English geography is being carried out by María José CarrilloLinares and Edurne Garrido-Anes (2005–06, 2007, 2008, 2009) at the University of Huelva, Spain. This has already advanced understanding of, and offered solutions to, specific problems of establishing the geography of the vocabulary. The method of Carrillo-Linares and Garrido-Anes is to construct a database in which are recorded the occurrences of a set of words in the different manuscript copies of the same work. Comparison is made to see if a word has been substituted by another at parallel positions in the text or if the text was altered in some other way (e.g. omission, paraphrase) that implies avoidance. But retention need not mean that a word might be dialectally acceptable to a copyist: a word might be substituted in some positions in the manuscript text yet retained in others, especially where it occurs in rhyming or alliterative position and the copyist chose not to seek or could not find an appropriate substitute that would preserve the phonic function of the word. Close examination of the texts and the patterns of distribution of the words is necessary. While the project is still in its early stages, it has already revealed interesting patterns, although the work also shows the treatment of word geography requires special strategies to uncover the diatopic patterning in a reliable way.

7 Further prospects The word-geographical research continues at the University of Huelva, including an extensive investigation of vocabulary in the manuscripts of the Prick of Conscience. In 2013 a revision of LALME was published, and eLALME is a freelyaccessible web version of the atlas. The association of LAEME and eLALME as companion web-sites offers a powerful diachronic as well as diatopic conspectus to the study of Middle English. LAOS too is undergoing a major revision. LAEME has been supplemented by the publication on-line of A Corpus of

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Narrative Etymologies (Lass et al. 2013–), which aims to explain in detail the etymologies of the words recorded in the LAEME corpus. None of these works is in any sense definitive. Rather, they are but the groundwork and support for further investigation into the complexities of regional variants and the processes of change and their dissemination across space and time in the Middle English period.

8 References Benskin, Michael. 1977. Local archives and Middle English dialects. Journal of the Society of Archivists 5: 500–514. Benskin, Michael. 1981. The Middle English dialect atlas. In: Benskin and Samuels (eds.), xxvii–xli. Benskin, Michael. 1982. The letters and in later Middle English and some related matters. Journal of the Society of Archivists 7: 13–30. Benskin, Michael. 1988. The numerical classification of dialect maps. In: Pieter van Reenen and Karen van Reenen-Stein (eds.), Distributions Spatiales et Temporelles, Constellations de Manuscrits, 13–38. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Benskin, Michael. 1991. The “fit”-technique explained. In: Felicity Riddy (ed.), Regionalism in Late Medieval Manuscripts and Texts, 9–26. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Benskin, Michael. 1994. Descriptions of dialect and areal distributions. In Margaret Laing and Keith Williamson (eds.), Speaking in Our Tongues: Medieval Dialectology and Related Disciplines, 169–184. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Benskin, Michael. 2004. Chancery Standard. In: Christian J. Kay, Carole Hough, and Irené Wotherspoon (eds.), New Perspectives on English Historical Linguistics: Selected papers from 12 ICEHL, Glasgow, 21–26 August 2002. Vol. II: Lexis and Transmission, 1–40. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Benskin, Michael and Margaret Laing. 1981. Translations and Mischsprachen. In: Benskin and Samuels (eds.), 55–106. Benskin, Michael and M. L. Samuels (eds.). 1981. So meny people longages and tonges: Philological Essays in Scots and Mediaeval English presented to Angus McIntosh. Edinburgh: The Editors. Blake, Norman (ed.). 1989. The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. II. 1066–1476. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Britton, Derek. 1991. On ME she/sho: A Scots solution to an English problem. NOWELE [NorthWestern European Language Evolution] 17: 3–51. Britton, Derek. 2004. Northern Fronting and the North Lincolnshire reflexes of ME /uː/ and /oː/. Language Sciences 24: 221–229. Carrillo-Linares, María José. 2005–06. Lexical dialectal items in Cursor Mundi: Contexts of occurrence and geographical distribution. SELIM: Journal of the Spanish Society for Mediaeval English Language and Literature 13: 151–178. Carrillo-Linares, María José and Edurne Garrido-Anes. 2007. Middle English lexical distributions: Two instances from the Lay Folks’ Catechism. In: Gabriella Mazzon (ed.), Studies in Middle English Forms and Meanings, 85–100. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

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Carrillo-Linares, María José and Edurne Garrido-Anes. 2008. Middle English word geography: Methodology and applications illustrated. In: Marina Dossena, Richard Dury, and Maurizio Gotti (eds.), English Historical Linguistics 2006. Vol. III: Geo-Historical Variation in English, 67–89. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Carrillo-Linares, María José and Edurne Garrido-Anes. 2009. Middle English word geography: External sources for investigating the field. In: Marina Dossena and Roger Lass (eds.), Studies in English and European Dialectology 135–190. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Chambers, J. K. and Peter Trudgill. 1998. Dialectology. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dance, Richard. 2003. Words derived from Old Norse in Early Middle English: Studies in the Vocabulary of the South-West Midland Texts. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Dietz, Klaus. 1989. Die historische Schichtung phonologischer Isoglossen in den englischen Dialekten. In: Andreas Fischer (ed.), The History and Dialects of English, 295–329. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Ellis, Alexander J. 1869–89. On Early English Pronunciation. 5 vols. London: Asher. Fisiak, Jacek. 1983. English dialects in the fifteenth century: Some observations concerning the shift of isoglosses. Folia Linguistica Historica 4(2): 195–217. Fleischman, Suzanne. 2000. Methodologies and ideologies in historical linguistics: On working with older languages. In: Susan C. Herring, Pieter van Reneen, and Lene Schøsler (eds.), Textual Parameters in Older Languages, 33–58. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hogg, Richard M (ed.). 1992. The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. I. The Beginnings to 1066. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jordan, Richard. 1968. Handbuch der mittelenglischen Grammatik. Vol 1. Lautlehre. Heidelberg: C. Winter. Kaiser, Rolf. 1937. Zur Geographie des mittelenglischen Wortschatzes. Palaestra 205. Leipzig: Mayer & Müller. Kitson, Peter R. 1993. Geographical variation in Old English prepositions and the location of Ælfric’s and other literary texts. English Studies 74(1): 1–50. Kitson, Peter R. 1995. The nature of Old English dialect distributions, mainly as exhibited in charter boundaries. In: Jacek Fisiak (ed.), Medieval Dialectology, 43–135. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Kitson, Peter R. 1997. When did Middle English begin? In: Jacek Fisiak (ed.) Studies in Middle English Linguistics, 221–269. Berlin/ New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Kretzschmar, William A., Jr. 2003. Mapping Southern English. American Speech 78(2): 130–149. Kristensson, Gillis. 1967. A Survey of Middle English Dialects 1290–1350: The Six Northern Counties and Lincolnshire. Lund: University of Lund Press. Kristensson, Gillis. 1987. A Survey of Middle English Dialects 1290–1350: The West Midland Counties. Lund: University of Lund Press. Kristensson, Gillis. 1995. A Survey of Middle English Dialects 1290–1350: The East Midland Counties. Lund: University of Lund Press. Kristensson, Gillis. 2001a. A Survey of Middle English Dialects 1290–1350: The Southern Counties. I. Vowels (except Diphthongs). Lund: University of Lund Press. Kristensson, Gillis. 2001b. A Survey of Middle English Dialects 1290–1350: The Southern Counties. II. Diphthongs and Consonants. Lund: University of Lund Press. Laing, Margaret (ed.). 1989. Middle English Dialectology: Essays on some Principles and Problems. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press.

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Laing, Margaret. 2004. Multidimensionality: Time, space and stratigraphy in historical dialectology. In: Marina Dossena and Roger Lass (eds.), Methods and Data in English Historical Dialectology, 49–96. Bern: Peter Lang. Laing, Margaret. 2013–. A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, 1150–1325 (LAEME). Version 3.2. Edinburgh: © The University of Edinburgh. http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laeme2/ laeme2.html; last accessed 15 February 2017. Laing, Margaret and Roger Lass. 2006. Early Middle English dialectology: Problems and prospects. In: Ans van Kemenade and Bettlou Los (eds.), The Handbook of the History of English, 417–451. Oxford: Blackwell. Laing, Margaret and Roger Lass. 2008. A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English: Introduction. http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laeme2/laeme_intro.html; last accessed 15 February 2017. Laing, Margaret and Keith Williamson. 2004. The archaeology of Middle English texts. In: Christian J. Kay and Jeremy J. Smith (eds.), Categorization in the History of English, 85–145. Amsterdam /Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Lass, Roger. 2000. Language periodization and the concept “middle”. In: Taavitsainen (eds.), 7–41. Lass, Roger, Margaret Laing, and Rhona Alcorn. 2013–. Corpus of Narrative Etymologies (CoNE). Webscript by Keith Williamson. Version 1.1. http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/CoNE/CoNE. html Luick, Karl. 1921. Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache. Vol. 1. Leipzig: Tauchnitz. McClure, Peter. 1973. Lay subsidy rolls and dialect phonology. In: Folke Sandgren (ed.), Otium et Negotium. Studies in Onomatology and Library Science presented to Olof von Feilitzen, 188–194. Stockholm: P. A. Norstedt & Söner. McIntosh, Angus. 1973. Word geography in the lexicography of medieval English. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 211: 55–66. [repr. in Laing, 1989, 86–97.] McIntosh, Angus. 1977. Middle English word geography: Its potential role in the study of the long-term impact of the Scandinavian settlements upon English. In: Thorsten Anderson and Karle Inge Sandred (eds.), The Vikings, Proceedings of a Symposium of the Faculty of Arts of Uppsala University, June 6–9, 1977, 124–130. Uppsala: University of Uppsala. [repr. in Laing, 1989, 98–105.] McIntosh, Angus. 1983. Present indicative plural forms in the later Middle English of the North Midlands. In: Douglas Gray and E. G. Stanley (eds.), Middle English Studies presented to Norman Davis, 235–244. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 235–244. [repr. in Laing, 1989, 116–122.] McIntosh, Angus, M. L. Samuels, and Michael Benskin. 1986. A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, 1350–1450 (LALME). Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press / Edinburgh: Mercat Press. See also eLALME http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/elalme/elalme.html; last accessed 15 February 2017. Moore, Samuel, Sanford B. Meech, and Harold Whitehall. 1935. Middle English dialect characteristics and dialect boundaries. Essays and Studies in English and Comparative Literature. University of Michigan Publications in Language and Literature 13: 1–60. Mossé, Fernand. 1968. A Handbook of Middle English. James A. Walker (trans.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Oakden, J. P. 1930. Alliterative Poetry in Middle English: The Dialectal and Metrical Survey. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Orton, Harold. 1962–71. Survey of English Dialects. The Basic Material. 4 vols. Leeds: University of Leeds/E. J. Arnold.

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Samuels, M. L. 1963. Some applications of Middle English dialectology. English Studies 44: 81–94. [repr. in Laing, 1989, 64–80.] Serjeantson, M. S. 1927. The dialects of the West Midlands. Review of English Studies 3: 54–67. Taavitsainen, Irma, Terttu Nevalainen, Päivi Pahta, and Matti Rissanen (eds.). 2000. Placing Middle English in Context. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Williamson, Keith. 2002. The dialectology of “English” north of the Humber, c.1380–1500. In: Teresa Fanego, Belén Méndez-Naya, and Elena Seoane (eds.), Sounds, Words, Texts and Change. Selected Papers from 11 ICEHL, Santiago de Compostela, 7–11 September 2000, 253–286. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Williamson, Keith. 2013–. A Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots, Phase 1: 1380–1500 (LAOS). Version 1.2. http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laos1/laos1.html Wright, Joseph. 1898–1905. The English Dialect Dictionary. 6 vols. London: H. Frowde.

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Chapter 9: Language Contact: Multilingualism 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Introduction 165 Language contact and change 166 Multilingualism in the Middle English period Specific research questions 169 Linguistic levels 172 Conclusion 181 References 181

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Abstract: The complex linguistic situation in the ME period, with widespread multilingualism and initial diglossia, has led to frequent contact-induced changes on all linguistic levels of English. The present chapter starts with a brief discussion of the relation between language contact and change and of the changing nature of ME multilingualism; then some specific research questions are introduced, such as the controversial issue of ME creolization, the frequent use of code-switching in medieval texts, and the possible Celtic influence on English. The remaining sections deal in some detail with contact-induced change on the various linguistic levels: while foreign lexical influence is well established, contact-induced structural changes are more controversial, since here a native origin is often equally possible. In many cases, especially of syntactic change, a polygenetic origin seems more plausible than a monocausal explanation. In any case, the extensive restructuring of Middle English cannot be explained without close linguistic contact.

1 Introduction Speech communities hardly ever exist in isolation but have multiple contacts with other speech communities, with speakers of other languages and dialects, or with a culturally important “book” language. English has experienced a large number of such contacts with different ethnic and linguistic groups throughout its history. From the beginning of their settlement, the Anglo-Saxons had contacts with Herbert Schendl: Vienna (Austria)

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speakers of Celtic languages, followed by contacts with Latin as the mainly written language of Christianity and culture, and with the spoken Scandinavian languages (here referred to as Old Norse). Since the linguistic results of the early contacts with Celtic and Old Norse only surface in ME texts, they are included in this discussion of ME language contact. For the ME period, intensive contact with French is one of the most obvious features, though Latin also extended its role into new domains (see Townend 2006). Additionally, there was trade-related contact with Low German and Low Dutch. However, not all ME dialects nor their speakers experienced language contact to the same extent, and we also find extensive interdialectal contact, resulting e.g. in the spread of Northern and East Midland features into Southern dialects. Even a superficial comparison of Old and Middle English reveals dramatic linguistic changes: Old English was an inflected and largely synthetic language with a predominantly Germanic lexicon. By the end of the ME period, English had lost much of its inflectional morphology, had become predominantly analytic, had undergone numerous syntactic changes, and had substantially enlarged its vocabulary. Contact-induced change played an important, though partly controversial, role in this extensive restructuring of Middle English.

2 Language contact and change Contact-induced change in general presupposes some degree of bilingualism or, in the case of dialects or closely related languages, mutual intelligibility. In situations of no or limited literacy, language contact predominantly happens in oral communication, as in the case of Celtic or Old Norse, and partly with French. Contact with Latin, on the other hand, primarily involved a written language of culture. The extent to which language contact triggers or reinforces change strongly depends on extralinguistic factors like the social prestige of and speakers’ attitudes toward a language, the intensity of contact, and the number of bilinguals. Foreign linguistic items may enter a language through borrowing or they may result from interference, often linked to imperfect learning. Contact-induced changes such as the attrition of inflectional morphology, however, do not necessarily lead to the importation of foreign features (for details, see Thomason 2001: Chapter 4). There is wide agreement that every linguistic feature can be borrowed under specific circumstances, though the probability of borrowing depends on various factors, an assumption which has led to the establishment of borrowing scales claiming, e.g., that non-basic vocabulary is borrowed before basic vocabulary, superficial phonological features, and grammatical features

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(Thomason 2001: 69–71). However, social and pragmatic factors, such as attitudes or imperfect learning, may overrule possible linguistic factors. Under specific circumstances, intensive language contact may result in a specific form of mixed language, such as a creole. Another contact phenomenon is shift to another language, which frequently entails language death. This led to the disappearance of Old Norse as well as to the adoption of English by the socially dominant, but numerically inferior elite of French speakers. Both languages, however, have left their traces in the English language. (See also Hickey 2010, Part II.)

3 Multilingualism in the Middle English period Throughout the ME period, England was a multilingual country, though individual bi- or multilingualism was never a general phenomenon and was very much socially and geographically conditioned. The geographical and social distribution of languages as well as their functions and status fundamentally changed over time. In the early part of the period we find a diglossic situation, in which different languages were predominantly used in specific domains. A description of this highly complex and changing situation has evidently to remain sketchy. Latin and French were the prestigious High languages during most of the period; the former was particularly used in religion, scholarship, education, literature, and administration, while the latter started as the language of the politically and socially dominant group and soon extended into domains such as literature, administration, and law, but lost its position in most of these towards the end of the period (see Kibbee 1991). English, on the other hand, began as the Low vernacular mainly spoken by the illiterate majority, but increasingly extended its functions, becoming the dominant language in most domains by late Middle English. The Celtic languages mainly survived in the fringes of Britain (see, however, Section 4.3), while the speakers of Old Norse had largely shifted to English by the late 11th century. In the first century after the conquest, Latin dominated as the written language of religion, scholarship, and literature as well as of the majority of official and legal documents, while texts in the two vernaculars are still relatively rare. French was the first language of a powerful minority, whose highest ranks were largely monolingual, while lower first-language speakers of French soon shifted to English, most likely after a period of bilingualism. A number of firstlanguage speakers of English acquired French as a second language, but the majority, especially illiterate farmers and craftsmen, only spoke local varieties of English.

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For political reasons new groups of continental French speakers came to England around the middle of the 12th and the early 13th centuries. At this time the descendants of the Anglo-Norman conquerors were increasingly shifting to English; in the ensuing political tensions, language issues began to play a role, and some knowledge of English was more and more regarded as a proper mark of being English. The loss of Normandy (1204) furthermore severed the close ties of the nobility with France and affected the status of French, which had increasingly become a taught, but socially still highly prestigious second language. The functions of the written languages became more diverse from the middle of the 12th century on. In literature, French was preferred over English till the middle of the 13th century, mainly due to its role as the European language of culture; here as in most other domains English rapidly gained ground from the early 14th century onwards, a development furthered by the Hundred Years War. Latin dominates in religion and scholarship, and partly in administration, where English and French start to be increasingly used as well, while French is established as the language of the legal system. The extent of English-French bilingualism in the 13th century is a matter of controversy, though by now English was widely known among the French-speaking gentry and many educated English speakers seem to have known some French. By the end of the 13th century, English had become the first language even for the vast majority of English-French bilinguals (for an earlier dating, see Townend 2006: 67). Though the general decrease of French is mirrored in a number of contemporary parliamentary decrees, French and Latin continued to be used next to the now-dominating English by professional scribes in various fields of administrative written discourse, such as official letters, petitions, and the Rolls of Parliament, into the first half of the 15th century. Thus, language shift to English in administration was a slow process, with a long period of multilingual usage upheld by a class of professional multilingual clerks. The final victory of English was also furthered by demographic and social changes: the growing urbanization up to the middle of the 14th century produced a wealthy English-speaking merchant class, while epidemics of the plague reduced England’s population by at least one third around the middle of the 14th century, leading to a shortage of labor and thus indirectly increasing the social prestige of English.

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4 Specific research questions 4.1 Middle English – a creole? The contact-induced changes of Middle English are in general attributed to intensive borrowing but there have also been claims that extreme language mixing led to a type of new language (cf. Thomason 2001: 10): in such a view, Middle English (or some of its varieties) has variously been called a mixed language, a creole or a koiné. The controversial “creole hypothesis”, first advanced in the late 1970s (e.g. Bailey and Maroldt 1977), claimed that a creolization of English resulted either from the intimate contact between English and French in the south, or from that with Old Norse in the Danelaw. This is widely rejected now (see Trotter, Chapter 12), both because of the different sociohistorical situations in the ME period and in “classical” creolization contexts, and of the different linguistic outcome in Middle English: in spite of far-reaching regularization and simplification of ME grammar, there is neither complete loss of inflections, nor widespread loss of grammatical categories; Middle English even extended and reinforced certain grammatical categories (cf. Görlach 1986). To explain the specific contact-situation in the Danelaw, Thomason and Kaufman (1988: Section 9.8) developed a model of “Norsification” of the northern Midland dialects of English, claiming that a fine-tuned concept of borrowing sufficiently explains this contact situation. Alternative explanations propose the development of an “Ausgleichssprache” between English and Old Norse, with neutralization of grammatical categories which differed in the two languages. Dawson (2003) interprets this process as koineization of two closely related, most likely mutually intelligible languages in the context of intensive direct speaker interaction.

4.2 Bilingualism and code-switching A large number of texts from the ME period are multilingual and mix two or three of the main languages, often within the same sentence. Such mixed-language texts neither reflect imperfect competence nor “corrupt” language, as claimed in earlier times, but are best accounted for as instances of written code-switching, a phenomenon well-known from many multilingual societies. Since code-switching is regarded as an important mechanism for contact-induced change (Thomason 2001: 129–136), these mixed texts not only illustrate the interaction between different languages in performance, but also provide important evidence for the working of ME linguistic contact.

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Code-switching occurs in a variety of ME text types and genres, such as sermons, scientific and medical texts, business accounts, legal texts, and letters; furthermore in literary texts, such as “macaronic” poems, drama, and travel accounts. In most cases, code-switching either fulfils specific textual functions (e.g. emphasis, quotation, reiteration) or acts as a specific mode of discourse, as in example (1) below. The multilingual authors and scribes that wrote and copied such texts were certainly using these different languages on a regular basis, and their notion of a distinct or foreign language may have differed from our modern one (see Schendl 2002a; for a specific type of language mixing in medieval business writing see Wright 2011). The following samples illustrate switching into English in two non-literary text types, a Latin sermon and a French letter. Text (1) shows extensive intrasentential switching, a common feature in late ME sermons (see Halmari and Regetz 2011). (1)

Sermon: De celo querebant (early 15th century; Wenzel 1994: 274–275): Domini gouernouris most eciam be merciful in punchyng. Oportet ipsos attendere quod of stakis and stodis qui deberent stare in ista vinea quedam sunt smoþe and lightlich wul boo, quedam sunt so stif and so ful of warris quod homo schal to-cleue hom cicius quam planare. Quidam subditi sunt humiles and buxum, et de facili volunt corigi; […] ‘The lord’s governors must also be merciful in punishing. They should take notice that of the stakes and supports that should stand in this vineyard, some are smooth and will easily bend, others are so stiff and so full of obstinacy that a man will split them sooner than straighten them out. Some subjects are humble and obedient and will be easily corrected; […]’

Even more frequent is intersentential switching as illustrated in the French letter to Henry IV under (2). Here the switches into English carry a more personal and urgent note and seem to reflect the “we” code as opposed to the “they” code of the High language, French (see Schendl 2002b). (2)

Letter: Richard Kingeston to Henry IV (1403): Qar, mon tresredoute Seigneur, vous trouverez pour certein que si vous ne venez en vostre propre persone pour attendre [apres] voz rebelx en Galys, vous ne trouverez un gentil que veot attendre deinz vostre dit Countee. War fore, for Goddesake, thinketh on ȝour beste Frende, God, and thanke Hym as He hath deserved to ȝowe; and leveth nought that ȝe ne come for no man that may counsaille ȝowe the contrarie; for, by the trouthe that I schal be to ȝowe ȝet, this day the Walshmen supposen and trusten that ȝe

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schulle nought come there, and there fore, for Goddeslove, make them fals men. […] Tresexcellent, trespuissant, et tresredoute Seignour, autrement say a present nieez. Jeo prie a la Benoit Trinite que vous ottroie bone vie ove tresentier sauntee a treslonge durre, and sende ȝowe sone to ows in help and prosperitee; […] ‘For, my most dread Lord, you will find for certain that, if you do not come in your own person to await your rebels in Wales, you will not find a single gentleman that will stop in your said county. Wherefore, for God’s sake, think on your best friend, God, and thank Him, as He hath deserved of you; and leave nought that you do not come for no man that may counsel you the contrary: for, by the truth that I shall be to you yet, this day the Welshmen suppose and trust that you shall not come there, and therefore, for God’s love, make them false men. […] Most excellent, most mighty, and most dread Lord, I know nothing besides at present. I pray the Blessed Trinity to give you good life, with most complete good health, very long to endure, and send you soon to us in help and prosperity; […]’

4.3 The Celtic hypothesis The issue of Celtic linguistic influence has attracted new attention in recent years, with claims that a number of Celtic structural features have survived in English (for a state-of-the-art report see Filppula et al. 2008). This has been supported by new historical and archaeological insights into the Anglo-Saxon conquest, and by preliminary studies of the genetic profile of Britain (cf. Filppula et al. 2008: 12– 18). In this view, the invasion of Britain was a rather slow penetration of Germanic settlers into Celtic areas, with a continuity of Celtic settlement even in central parts of Britain. These historical facts support more intensive linguistic contacts, which is also compatible with the numerous surviving topographical names and with the proportion between Celts and Anglo-Saxons, which is estimated between 5:1 and as much as 50:1 (Filppula et al. 2008: 15). Traditionally, the imbalance between the large number of French loan words in English and the small number of medieval Celtic loans (see, however, Section 5.1.3) has been explained by the low status and small number of Celts in central England and the hostile relations between Celts and Anglo-Saxons. More recently, however, the scarcity of Celtic loan words has been linked to the relative status of the involved languages, with Celtic being the substrate language, and Old English the superstrate. Superstrate languages seem to mainly influence the

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lexicon of their substrate language(s) (cf. the large number of French loans after the Norman Conquest), while substrate languages affect their superstrate mainly on the grammatical level; accordingly, we should expect structural influence of the substrate Celtic languages on the superstrate Old English. This must have happened during the Celts’ shift to English within a few generations after the conquest, at least in the eastern and southern areas of Britain, a process involving imperfect learning. This scenario is compatible with the delayed emergence of most assumed Celtic features in ME texts, since they would first have entered a low variety of the spoken language and not the OE standard (cf. Section 5.1.2 for the similar delayed first attestation of Old Norse lexical loans).

5 Linguistic levels This section presents the main contact-induced changes with an emphasis on features which entered the standard language, though some purely dialectal features will also be looked at. Many of the changes resulting from contact with Old Norse are first recorded in Northern and Midland dialects, and slowly spread southward and partly into London as a result of dialect contact and demographic shifts. After a discussion of lexical borrowing, the most widespread and straightforward type of borrowing, the more controversial contact-induced changes on the structural levels will be dealt with. In many cases of assumed structural borrowing, language-internal, native factors have also been proposed as possible causes of change, especially by mainstream linguistics, while contact linguistics has, like earlier philological approaches, emphasized the importance of linguistic contact for linguistic change. Part of this ongoing controversy is linked to the question whether one looks for monocausal explanations of change or accepts that multiple causation, where foreign influence triggers or supports a native development, should also be considered as contact-induced change. The present survey will also list controversial cases of structural borrowing, since disregarding these would give a distorted picture of the dynamic research in contact linguistics. For reasons of space the often complex argumentation in these controversies cannot be addressed here.

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5.1 Lexical borrowing The vocabulary of English mirrors the history of its linguistic contacts to a large extent. While the attested OE vocabulary amounts to about 25,000 to 30,000 lexemes, with only about 3% of mostly Latin borrowings, the Middle English Dictionary (Kurath et al. 1952–2001) lists about 60,000 lexemes, 25% to 30% of which are loans. This dramatic increase is closely linked to the extensive borrowing from French, Latin, and Old Norse. There are various reasons for these lexical borrowings, especially the high social and cultural prestige of French and Latin and the intimate contact between English and Old Norse as two closely related languages of similar status, but also lexical gaps, particularly in the case of cultural borrowing and the advance of learning. The extensive mixture of Germanic and Romance lexemes in Middle English affected the structure of semantic fields and led to numerous quasi-synonyms according to levels of formality, style or register, such as profound (Fr.) vs. deep or ill (ON) vs. sick. In many cases, one of the etymologically divergent quasi-synonyms eventually fell out of use or changed its meaning: thus ME em ‘uncle’ (< OE ēam), led ‘person, nation’ (< OE lēod(e)), etc. were finally replaced by the French loans uncle, people, while sky (ON ‘cloud’) took over part of the original meaning of native ME heven (OE ‘sky, heaven’); OE cēapman ‘merchant’ was in its general meaning replaced by Fr. merchant, but survived with a restricted meaning in chapman and as a personal name. Quite a number of ME loans survived only in dialects or fell out of use during the period. (For a detailed discussion of ME vocabulary, see Burnley 1992.) On the textual level, the distribution and frequency of loans in ME texts often differ according to text type and provenance: ON loans tend to occur more frequently in Northern and Midland texts, French loans in Southern texts; Latin or French loans are often more frequent in certain genres and in translations from these languages than in original English works.

5.1.1 French and Latin loans A clear distinction between French and Latin loans is often problematic: Old French spelling is sometimes largely identical to that of the Latin source, while in other cases, the Latin spelling was changed to reflect integration into Middle English, such as allegory (ME allegorie < Lt. allegoria) or desk (ME deske < Medieval Lt. desca); finally, many apparent Latin or French words were actually coined in England on the basis of productive word-formation patterns using foreign lexical material (see Section 5.1.4). From a semantic point of view, Latin loans tend to be

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more learned than French ones, a reflection of the different status and functions of the two languages, though we also find double borrowing of cognates from French and Latin resulting in ME doublets, many of them surviving in modern English, such as (the first form is from French): loyal – legal; declension – declination; straight – strict (cf. Burnley 1992: 434). The huge number of French and Latin loans not only changed the structure of the English lexicon but also affected the phonological and morphological systems of English to some degree (see Section 5.2). With an estimated 10,000 items, French is the main source for ME lexical borrowing. However, borrowing started slowly, with fewer than 1,000 French loans attested before 1250, especially in “higher” fields like religion, the court, and literature (nativity, mercy; countess, chancellor, noble; story, rhyme). From about 1250 onwards, borrowing steadily increased, reaching its climax in the 14th century; i.e. most French loans entered English during the language shift from French to English. These later loans occur in many additional semantic areas where French was prestigious, such as administration, fashion, social life, food, medicine, and learning (see under [3]), but also in core areas of everyday life. Thus, we find French terms for tradesmen and artisans (butcher, barber, tailor), kinship terms (aunt, uncle, nephew, niece), including hybrids such as grandfather, grand-daughter, and face as a body-part term. French loans are, however, rare in shipping and seafaring, as well as in farming (though farm itself is from French), which possibly reflects the lower prestige of these fields. (3) Government, administration, law: government, state, parliament, treaty, tax, county; justice, court, crime, judge, complaint; to accuse, arrest, seize Military: army, navy, peace, enemy, battle, soldier Religion: religion, prayer, faith, temptation; divine, devout; to preach, repent Fashion: fashion, dress, coat, button, jewel, pearl; blue, brown Food: dinner, appetite, taste, bacon, venison, pork, sausage, salad; to roast, boil, fry Social life: music, conversation, chair, lamp, wardrobe The above differentiation of two chronological strata of loans has traditionally been linked to different varieties of French, with the early group deriving from Anglo-Norman French, and the later as imported from the prestigious Central French. This seems supported by phonological correspondences in loans reflecting Anglo-Norman (AN) and Central French (CF) phonology, such as AN initial /k/ before /a/ against CF palatalization to /t∫/ as found in modern doublets like catch (< AN cachier) vs. chase (< CF chacer), cattle vs. chattel(s), but also in different spellings of the same word in Middle English, like canchelers (1066) vs.

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chanceleres (1300); calange (1225) vs. challenge (1300); equally, AN /w/ vs. CF /ɡ/ in originally Germanic loans, e.g. warden (1225) vs. guardian (1466); reward (1315) vs. regard (1430). This traditional view about two etymologically distinct chronological strata has, however, been criticized by Rothwell (1998); by providing text-based linguistic and historical arguments he shows that these phonological differences are not used consistently in ME texts and that many supposed continental loans are not only attested earlier in England than in France, but also differ semantically, facts he attributes to the ongoing lexical productivity of Anglo-French. Latin loans, predominantly taken from the written language, are relatively rare before the middle of the 14th century, but become frequent from then until the end of the period. They occur in all domains where Latin was widely used, such as religion, administration, medicine, and different branches of science, e.g., astronomy, botany, and chemistry. Some examples from these fields are aggravate, cause, client, contempt, conviction, desk, diaphragm, explicit, formal, legitimate, major, necessary, promote, psalm, substitute (see Burnley 1992: 432– 433). Borrowing is also furthered by the great number of translations from Latin, where Latin words are frequently taken over, and by the increase in the production of English texts. Particularly important were the Wycliffian writings and Bible translations, which introduced more than 1,000 Latin words. In the late 14th and 15th centuries, Latinisms were increasingly used for stylistic reasons to make a writer’s style more elevated; this so-called “aureate diction” uses rare and unknown Latin words and is based on classical Latin rhetorics (Burnley 1992: 434). While traditionally borrowing from Latin has been seen as less extensive than from French, recent studies have found evidence for “a slight predominance of Latin” (Vezzosi 2012: 1709).

5.1.2 Old Norse Most ON loans entered the spoken language of the Danelaw in the OE period, but first appeared only in ME texts. Estimates of their number greatly vary, but about 900 have survived in standard Present-day English (Kastovsky 2006: 223). Due to the sociohistorical context of the contact situation (see Section 4.1), ON loans occur in most areas of everyday life and most word classes: nouns (awe, birth, dirt, kettle, leg, sister), adjectives (awkward, flat, happy, weak), verbs (call, crawl, raise, want), but even function words such as pronouns (they, them, their, see Section 5.2.2; both, same), prepositions (till, fro) and conjunctions (though). About 600 more have survived in regional dialects, e.g. kirk ‘church’, benk ‘bench’, kist ‘chest’, trigg ‘true’. ON words either slowly replaced a native one, at least in the

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standard language, such as egg/ey†, sister/soster†, taken/nimen†, or the ON and the native word became semantically differentiated resulting in doublets like skirt (< ON skyrta) vs. shirt (< OE scyrte), scatter vs. shatter; the latter two pairs also show the regular phonological correspondence between ON /sk/ and OE /ʃ/; further correspondences are ON /k/, /ɡ/ against OE /tʃ/, /j/, as in dike vs. ditch, kirk vs. church, give, get, whose voiced stop shows ON influence, replacing the OE forms with /j/ (cf. ME yeven/yiven ‘give’). The close relationship between Old English and Old Norse, however, makes some etymologies controversial. There are also some instances of semantic loans from Old Norse, such as earl, dream, whose meanings derive from ON jarl ‘chief’ and draumr ‘dream vision’, replacing the original meanings ‘man, warrior’ and ‘joy’ of their OE cognates.

5.1.3 Minor sources The number of Celtic loans first attested in Middle English is – with 83 items listed in the Middle English Dictionary (Kurath et al. 1952–2001) – larger than traditionally claimed (not to mention the numerous place-names), e.g. birling ‘a kind of boat’, commorth ‘a gathering’, laggen ‘make dirty’, mallok(e) ‘cursing’ (see Filppula et al. 2008: 128 and n. 58). Almost as many were borrowed from Low Dutch and Low German, such as trade, shore, mate, clock (den Otter 1990). Furthermore, there are some originally Greek, Arabic, and Persian words, mostly borrowed indirectly via other languages.

5.1.4 Word formation The extensive borrowing of complex foreign lexemes from French and Latin (see Section 5.1.1) also affected ME word formation and finally “led to a system with two derivational strata, a native and a foreign one” in late Middle or early Modern English, though it is still controversial when the foreign patterns became fully productive (Kastovsky 2006: 250–251). Many OE prefixes died out or became unproductive in Middle English, while a large number of French and Latin prefixes were borrowed as part of individual complex lexemes, such as dis- (disobey, dispraise), in-/im- (ineffable, impossible), en- (engender), frequently together with their base forms obey, praise, etc. New formations first combined these foreign prefixes only with foreign bases, but in late Middle English we also find new hybrid formations with native bases, which seem to point to the beginning productivity of these patterns (e.g. enthrallen), see Burnley (1992: 447–449). The question of productivity is even more difficult with

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the numerous imported Romance suffixes: some of these never became fully productive, such as ‑ive, ‑ate, while others were used in new hybrid formations from the 14th century on, e.g. ‑age (barnage ‘infancy’, 1325), ‑ess (shepherdess, 14th century), ‑able (eatable, 1483). The development of phrasal verbs such as farenn forþ, commenn off, particularly from the 12th century on, is most likely due to the model of Old Norse, though French and native influence have also been proposed (cf. Fischer 1992: 386; Kastovsky 2006: 223). Phrasal verbs increasingly replaced the native prefixed verbs such as utgon, utfaran ‘go out’, often after a period of coexistence, also affecting English syntax.

5.2 Structural borrowing As stated above, foreign influence on structural changes is much more difficult to establish than lexical borrowing, and there has been a great deal of controversy in this area, especially with syntactic change. Discussions have been strongly influenced by underlying general assumptions, and mainstream historical linguistics has preferred language-internal motivations of change over the working of language contact, while the latter has been favored by philologically or sociolinguistically oriented scholars (see Danchev and Kytö 2001: 40). In recent years a slight change in attitude has been noticeable, compare, for example, the accounts of English historical syntax in Fischer (1992) and in Fischer and van der Wurff (2006), and multicausal explanations are increasingly accepted. For a comprehensive and balanced discussion of possible Celtic influence on ME grammar including areal linguistic considerations, see Filppula et al. (2008).

5.2.1 Phonology Contact-induced phonological change is clearly visible in the prosodic system of Middle English, where the Romance stress rule introduced through the numerous loans from French and Latin came to co-exist with the inherited Germanic stress rule with primary stress on the first syllable of the lexical root. While the latter assigns primary stress from the “left-hand word-edge”, the Romance rule “counts from the right-hand word-edge” (Lass 2006: 67–68; Ritt, Chapter 3). The coexistence of the two systems is frequently reflected in ME stress variation in Romance loans, such as dívers vs. divérse, but also in the stress assignment in derivationally related patterns such as hístory – histórian/históric (cf. Kastovsky 2006: 252).

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Foreign influence on ME segmental phonology is rather small. The ME phonemization of the voiced fricatives /v, z/, which were allophones of /f/ and /s/ in Old English and did not occur in initial position, is at least partly due to the new French/Latin loans with initial /v, z/, which led to the development of new minimal pairs like ferry vs. very (< Fr. verrai), seal vs. zeal (< Fr. zèle); this development may have been facilitated by initial fricative voicing in native Southern ME dialects (still reflected in PDE fox vs. vixen) (cf. Lass 1992: 59, 2006: 62). In the vowel system, the borrowing of the two “distinctly non-Germanic” diphthongs /oi/ and /ui/ from French (joy, puison) is surprising, as they have no native parallels or sources (Lass 1992: 52).

5.2.2 Morphology One of the main structural differences between Old and Middle English is the attrition of inflectional morphology, which is linked to the typological change to a predominantly analytic language (for details see Thomason and Kaufman 1988: 277–282; Görlach 1986). This development had already started in Old English as a result of Germanic stress, but its strong presence in early ME dialects of the Danelaw area points to the important role the Old Norse–English contact played in this change, though Celtic substratum influence via increased initial stress has been repeatedly proposed as well (Filppula et al. 2008: 71, 121–122). The extensive language-internal restructuring of ME syntax, such as word order changes and extension of periphrastic constructions has also to be seen against the background of this morphological attrition. A contact-induced change strongly affected the different forms of the personal pronoun of the third person plural, where the OE h-forms (hie, hira, him) were supplanted by the ON forms with þ/th- (cf. they, their, them). These forms slowly spread south to London, with Chaucer already having they, but still using native her(e), hem (Lass 1992: 120). The extension of one into a generic pronoun in the 15th century replacing ME man has been linked to the model of French on (Fischer and van der Wurff 2006: 116). Furthermore, French (and indirectly Latin) influence led to the pragmatically motivated extension of the native plural pronouns yee, you as polite singular address forms; these were restricted to upper-class use around 1300 but became unmarked by the end of the period (Lass 2006: 96–97). The widespread simplification and loss of verb inflection which started in the north and slowly spread south in Middle English was largely due to contact with Old Norse, though supported by native developments (Thomason and Kaufman 1988: 278–281). Direct ON influence is seen in a number of borrowed morphemes

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such as the Northern present participle ‑and (< ON ‑andi), the infinitive marker at, the present plural form are, and possibly the third person singular present ‑s (Thomason and Kaufman 1988: 293–295). A morphosyntactic feature found in ME Northern and Midland dialects is the “Northern Subject Rule”, i.e. the absence of present plural ‑s with verbs in contact position with subject pronouns, resulting in Children sings vs. We/you/they sing and plays. Both the rise of the construction in ME Northern dialects and a parallel construction in Celtic (Brythonic) languages point to a possible Celtic substratum origin (Filppula et al. 2008: 42–49).

5.2.3 Syntax Foreign syntactic influence may trigger or reinforce the development of a construction that already exists in embryo in the receiving language or for which a structural need arises, while constructions which are foreign to a language have been – though controversially – claimed to “have no possibility of gaining a footing in it” (Sørensen 1957: 133). Thus, contact-induced syntactic change is difficult to detect and even more difficult to prove, though certain criteria, such as type of contact, geographical distribution of features, and their occurrence in translated texts may help in the decision. Many of the proposed contact-induced syntactic changes are highly controversial, especially those of Old Norse and Celtic origin, while Latin and French influence have in general been more widely accepted. In most of the controversial cases discussed below, a polygenetic origin seems more likely than a monocausal explanation, both for the first appearance and the sometimes dramatic increase of a construction with a parallel in a contact language. Contact-induced syntactic changes seem to differ according to the status of the donor language, the type of contact, and language shift. The High languages Latin and French often seem to have served as direct or indirect models for English, while the – more controversial – Celtic substratum influence is more likely due to imperfect learning in the course of the Celts’ shift to English, and ON features result from the intimate contact between Old Norse and English in the Danelaw area (see Section 4.1 and Section 4.3). There are a few changes in the ME noun phrase where the rise and spread of a native construction seems to have been reinforced particularly by French influence. Among these is the postposition of adjectives after nouns, especially with learned French adjectives which often show French plural marking, as in other goodes temporels, though Latin influence may also have contributed in specific cases (Fischer 1992: 214; Sørensen 1957: 148). The replacement of the inflected

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genitive by the of-genitive phrase is undoubtedly of native origin, but its enormous increase in Middle English “may have been helped along by the parallel French construction with de” (Fischer 1992: 226; Fischer and van der Wurff 2006: 118). Even more foreign influence has been proposed for the verb phrase. A still unresolved controversy is the appearance of the historical present in later Middle English, being variously attributed to Latin or French influence or a popular native development (see Fischer 1992: 242–244; Sørensen 1957: 143). Even more hotly debated is the origin of the progressive form (see Denison 1993: 397–408), whose frequency in early Middle English is as low as in Old English, but strongly increases in late Middle English, particularly in northern texts. In the controversy about its origin and continuity from Old English, both formal and functional arguments have been brought forward. Fischer (1992: 253–255) acknowledges possible Latin influence on the OE form, but sees “far less evidence for the influence of French or – even less – Celtic on the development of the construction in Middle English” (253), while Fischer and van der Wurff (2006: 136) mention the possibility of a Celtic substratum. The most extensive argumentation in favor of a Celtic substratum of the progressive is found in Filppula et al. (2008: 59–72), who emphasize the close parallels between the English and Celtic (Brythonic) construction. (With this feature, a polygenetic origin also seems attractive, and at least the further functional extension of the progressive is a language-internal development [cf. Fischer and van der Wurff 2006: 136–137]). A similarly complex problem is the origin of “periphrastic do”, which is now predominantly seen as having originated in Middle English from the native full verb do, especially in its causative or anticipative function (Fischer and van der Wurff 2006: 154–155, Denison 1993: 256–264). Fischer (1992: 269) claims that possible Celtic or French influence is “no longer generally upheld” or “usually ruled out”, respectively, except for a possible indirect French influence on causative do (Fischer and van der Wurff 2006: 154; see also Denison 1993: 274–283). However, after extensive discussion of all available evidence, Filppula et al. (2008: 59) conclude that there is a strong case for Brythonic influence. As for subordinate clauses, the ME rise of the “accusative-plus-infinitive” (as in We believe this to be wrong) from about 1400 is a widely accepted case of Latin syntactic influence, though its implementation was enabled by the establishment of VO order (see Fischer and van der Wurff 2006: 193–195; Sørensen 1957: 138139). Finally, in the complex development of the different wh-relative pronouns, Latin and French seem to have strengthened a language-internal tendency (Fischer 1992: 299–301). In regard to word order, “verb-second” in declarative clauses generally decreases in Middle English, but is quite consistently used in 13th century north-

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ern texts from areas with heavy Scandinavian influence; however, the overall reduction of verb-second in Middle English has also been attributed directly or indirectly to French and Scandinavian influence, as has the change from OV to VO word order, though their further spread was certainly due to and linked with other native developments (Kroch and Taylor 1997; Fischer and van der Wurff 2006: 184–187, 193–194). The above discussion is in no way complete, and numerous other syntactic features have been claimed to be at least partly due to foreign influence, such as the early ME development of the for to + infinitive to express purpose (Scandinavian and French, cf. Danchev and Kytö 2001; Fischer and van der Wurff 2006: 180), it-cleft sentences (Celtic substratum, cf. Filppula et al. 2008: 75–84), etc. The material presented here should, however, have shown the dynamic research carried out in this field in recent years.

6 Conclusion The multiple language contacts in medieval England have left numerous traces on the different linguistic levels of English and are at least partly responsible for the dramatic changes in the vocabulary and grammar of Middle English. Most of the linguistic results of the early contacts with speakers of Celtic and Old Norse only surface in texts from the ME period, while those due to French and Latin are more directly observable. The dramatic effects of borrowing on the lexicon of Middle English are rather uncontroversial, whereas contact-induced changes on the structural levels are more controversial, since a foreign feature may only have reinforced a linguistic tendency already present in English. In any case, contactinduced change has to be approached in the sociohistorical context of the various languages in contact, and both extralinguistic and linguistic factors must be taken into account in order to arrive at a balanced view of the role which extended language contact has played in the extensive restructuring of Middle English.

7 References Bailey, Charles-James N. and Karl Maroldt. 1977. The French lineage of English. In: Jürgen M. Meisel (ed.), Langues en Contact – Pidgins – Creoles – Languages in Contact, 21–53. Tübingen: Narr. Blake, Norman (ed.). 1992. The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. II. 1066–1476. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burnley, David. 1992. Lexis and semantics. In: Blake (ed.), 409–499.

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Danchev, Andrei and Merja Kytö. 2001. The Middle English “for to + infinitive” construction: A twofold contact phenomenon? In: Dieter Kastovsky and Arthur Mettinger (eds.), Language Contact in the History of English, 35–55. Frankfurt: Lang. Dawson, Hope C. 2003. Defining the outcome of language contact: Old English and Old Norse. Ohio State University Working Papers in Linguistics 57: 40–57. den Otter, A. G. 1990. Lekker scrabbling: Discovery and exploration of once-Dutch words in the online Oxford English Dictionary. English Studies 71: 261–271. Denison, David. 1993. English Historical Syntax: Verbal Constructions. London: Longman. Filppula, Markku, Juhani Klemola, and Heli Paulasto. 2008. English and Celtic in Contact. New York: Routledge. Fischer, Olga. 1992. Syntax. In: Blake (ed.), 207–408. Fischer, Olga and Wim van der Wurff. 2006. Syntax. In: Hogg and Denison (eds.), 109–198. Görlach, Manfred. 1986. Middle English – a creole? In: Dieter Kastovsky and A. Szwedek (eds.), Linguistics across Historical and Geographical Boundaries. In Honour of Jacek Fisiak, 329–344. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Halmari, Helen and Timothy Regetz. 2011. Syntactic aspects of code-switching in Oxford, MS Bodley 649. In: Schendl and Wright (eds.), 115–153. Hickey, Raymond (ed.). 2010. The Handbook of Language Contact. Malden, MA/Oxford: WileyBlackwell. Hogg, Richard and David Denison (eds.). 2006. A History of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kastovsky, Dieter. 2006. Vocabulary. In: Hogg and Denison (eds.), 199–270. Kibbee, Douglas A. 1991. For to Speke Frenche Trewely. The French Language in England, 1000–1600: Its Status, Description and Instruction. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kroch, Anthony and Ann Taylor. 1997. Verb movement in Old and Middle English: Dialect variation and language contact. In: Ans van Kemenade and Nigel Vincent (eds.), Parameters of Morphosyntactic Change, 297–325. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kurath, Hans, Sherman M. Kuhn, John Reidy, and Robert E. Lewis (eds.) 1952–2001. Middle English Dictionary. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/ m/med/ Lass, Roger. 1992. Phonology and morphology. In: Blake (ed.), 23–155. Lass, Roger. 2006. Phonology and morphology. In: Hogg and Denison (eds.), 43–108. Rothwell, William. 1998. Arrivals and departures: The adoption of French terminology into Middle English. English Studies 79: 144–165. Schendl, Herbert. 2002a. Mixed-language texts as data and evidence in English historical linguistics. In: Donka Minkova and Robert Stockwell (eds.), Studies in the History of the English Language. A Millennial Perspective, 51–78. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Schendl, Herbert. 2002b. Code-choice and code-switching in some early fifteenth-century letters. In: Peter J. Lucas and Angela M. Lucas (eds.), Middle English from Tongue to Text, 247–262. Frankfurt: Lang. Schendl, Herbert and Laura Wright (eds.). 2011. Code-Switching in Early English. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. Sørensen, Knud. 1957. Latin influence on English syntax. Travaux du cercle linguistique de Copenhague 11: 131–155. Thomason, Sarah G. 2001. Language Contact. An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Thomason, Sarah G. and Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Townend, Matthew. 2006. Contacts and conflicts: Latin, Norse, and French. In: Lynda Mugglestone (ed.), The Oxford History of English, 61–85. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vezzozi, Letizia. 2012. English in contact: Latin. In Alexander Bergs and Laurel J. Brinton, English Historical Linguistics: An International Handbook, Vol. 2 1703–1719. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter Mouton. Wenzel, Siegfried. 1994. Macaronic Sermons. Bilingualism and Preaching in Late-Medieval England. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Wright, Laura. 2011. On variation in medieval mixed-language business writing. In: Schendl and Wright (eds.), 191–218.

Janne Skaffari

Chapter 10: Language Contact: French 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Introduction 184 On the varieties of French in the history of English 186 External history: the English and the French in contact 187 Internal history: contact-induced linguistic changes 192 Summary 198 Appendices 199 References 201

Abstract: The French language can easily be regarded as the most important source of foreign influence in the history of English, especially if English lexis is considered. This chapter recounts the thousand years of English-French language contact and outlines the relevant contact-induced changes in English. A brief look at Central French, Anglo-Norman, and Law French is followed by a discussion of the external history of contact situations involving English and French. The medieval insular phase receives the most attention, particularly the onset and early developments, with particular emphasis on questions of bilingualism, the length of the contact period, and the role of French as a superstratum language. The chapter subsequently presents an overview of the linguistic changes caused or motivated by contact with French: while the considerable growth of Middle and Modern English lexis due to lexical borrowing has often been explored, there are also changes observable on the other levels of language, perhaps less obvious and often more uncertain.

1 Introduction The history of language contact between English and French stretches across a period of approximately one thousand years. Throughout this time the type and intensity of contact have varied: on the one hand, there is the contact period following 1066, which influenced medieval English on a massive scale, but on the other hand, there are also smaller-scale contact situations in, for example, presJanne Skaffari: Turku (Finland)

DOI 10.1515/9783110525328-010

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ent-day Quebec, the Canadian province officially monolingual in French. Such current interaction may influence the parlance of numerous English-speakers, but it is unlikely to alter the conventions or resources of English on a more general level. Discussions of English in contact with French have typically had a medieval focus, highlighting the Middle English period from the Norman Conquest in the late 11th century to the onset of the Renaissance in the 15th century – and particularly the mid-to-latter part of this period. However, language contact with French was by no means over when the influence of Latin on English was reinforced by the Renaissance; nor had it commenced with the Conquest. Still, it is difficult to avoid giving prominence to the Middle Ages, as the era is marked by remarkable changes in the English language – particularly its lexis – hailing (at least to some extent) to influences from French. While the history of English in contact with other languages tends to be associated with social and political upheavals following invasions in pre-modern times and colonization and migration in modern times, the issue at large extends beyond such interpersonal and inter-community contacts often initiated by the use of force. There is no doubt that language contact is essentially speaker contact (e.g. Milroy 1992: 199), but the “learned” type of contact – not requiring speakers of two (or more) different languages to be present in the same physical setting, but rather mediated by texts – should not be ignored either. This is clearly most evident between Latin and various European vernaculars, including English. A further point to acknowledge is that French – contributing so significantly to the history of English – is not just today’s Standard French and its immediate predecessors, but more accurately a group of varieties or dialects of French; this heterogeneity is not unlike that of English in the British Isles in the Middle Ages or, indeed, around the world today. The most relevant varieties in question are the insular Anglo-Norman of the French-speakers settling in England after the Conquest (and of their descendants), and Parisian Central French, which plays an important role within the broader scheme of language contact. The main objective in what follows is to recount the history of English in contact with French and provide an outline of the linguistic consequences of such language contact. We begin with a brief look at the “Frenches” interacting with English (Section 2). The following, lengthier section (Section 3) discusses the external history of contacts between speakers of the two languages. Since it is not feasible to discuss all phases and aspects in the same detail, the pre-modern insular phase receives, by necessity, the most attention. Finally, Section 4 focuses on the linguistic outcome of these contact situations, primarily the lexical changes. While the Germanic language of the Anglo-Saxons contained very few loans from other languages, French influences on English vocabulary begin to appear from the 11th century onwards.

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2 On the varieties of French in the history of English The two main varieties of French relevant here represent the areas in which they were used: the Anglo-Norman of England and the Central French of the Paris region. Other names for these varieties also occur in the literature, for example Anglo-French and Parisian French, or francien. The terminology used for the French of medieval England is not unproblematic (see Wogan-Browne 2009: 1–10). The French language spoken in Paris or Île-de-France has been regarded as the most prestigious variety of the language since the 12th–13th centuries (Lodge 1993: 95–104). It exerted a considerable influence on English from the first half of the 13th century onwards, but unlike Anglo-Norman, the primary conduit for borrowing from Central French appears to have been the written medium. The connections with Central French were maintained through literature imported from the continent, although we also find Anglo-Norman literature from the 12th century. According to many scholars (most notably Rothwell, e.g. 1998), the role of Central French in the expanding Middle English lexicon has been overestimated at the cost of Anglo-Norman, a variety which was, until quite recently, regarded as “[t]he black sheep of the family” among the varieties of French (Trotter 2003: 427). Anglo-Norman is a descendant variety of the French spoken by Norman invaders in the late 11th century, who were not, however, a linguistically or ethnically homogeneous group. Indeed, Norman or Old Northern French was itself a product of language contact; it was a variety of French influenced by the Scandinavian language of the Viking troops who had settled in Normandy only a century or two prior to the conquest of England. As a language of England, AngloNorman became even more different from the French of Paris, as it was directly influenced by English lexis and phonology: Anglo-Norman from the 13th century onwards displays the use of some English-derived words (Rothwell 1983), and the different pronunciation – stigmatized in contrast with “proper” Parisian French – has been perpetuated by Chaucer’s reference, in his Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, to “the scole of Stratford atte Bowe” in whose manner the Prioress spoke her full, fair, and elegant French. For the transmission and grammar of AngloNorman, see Ingham (2012). Anglo-Norman was the everyday variety of French in direct, spoken contact with Middle English throughout much of this period, and it served as an important source of loanwords. As a “Language for Specific Purposes”, Law French can further be identified as a variety of French used in medieval and early modern England. French was used in English courts of law from the 13th century onwards, originally also as a

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variety spoken in legal proceedings, but serving almost exclusively as a language of record in later years. The vocabulary of Law French was increasingly influenced by both Central French and English. Its grammar was simplified and lost the elegance and subtlety of “proper” French, but as the language was typically used by Englishmen with aspirations of professional careers in law – rather than by native-speakers of any variety of French – this kind of structural wearing down is hardly surprising. Kibbee (1991: 32) actually describes the language training of legal practitioners around 1300 as entailing “for the most part, memorization of formulae in Law French”. The quality of this variety of French aside, the legacy of Law French, with its formulae and jargon, can still be found in Present-day English legal terminology, with bailiff, culprit, defendant, plaintiff, and attorney general, for example, all bearing witness to Law French.

3 External history: the English and the French in contact 3.1 Medieval and beyond For a long time prior to the rule of French-speaking Normans in England, (the) English and (the) French were neighbors separated merely by the English Channel, which was frequently crossed by people from both linguistic communities in the interests of commerce, politics, diplomacy, and religion. Linguistically, the most prominent pre-Conquest connections with Normandy across the Channel have been attributed to King Edward the Confessor (c.1003–1066), the son of Ethelred the Unready and Emma, the daughter of the Duke of Normandy. By the time Edward ascended the English throne in 1042, he had spent most of his life in exile in Normandy, and as king he had Normans serve in his court and appointed Norman men to important positions – much to the dismay of Anglo-Saxon earls. Edward’s rule is often identified in scholarly literature as the key context facilitating the introduction of the earliest loans from French; the immediate source of influence may indeed have been the Normans of his court. Which specific words actually qualify as the earliest pre-1066 loans has been debated at length, but chancellor, castle, and prison certainly appear to belong here (more examples will be presented in Section 4.1). Further work on this topic is needed, as scholarly interest in the sprinkling affecting late Old English appears to have been overshadowed by the influx of loans into Middle English. The next name to emerge in the discussion of medieval contact history is William, Duke of Normandy, who was one of the men competing for the English

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throne after the death of Edward the Confessor (whose grandfather was William’s great-grandfather). Guillaume invaded England in the autumn of 1066, overcame his English opponent in the Battle of Hastings in October and was crowned King of England in December. The center of William I’s rule was in the south-east, but Norman rule gradually spread to north and west as well. To strengthen his position the Conqueror reformed government and taxation, and his Norman followers supplanted the Anglo-Saxon aristocrats. The French-speaking noblemen and administrators were thus at the heart of the sociolinguistic conquest which ousted English from court and government for generations. The presence of French in post-Conquest England is a topic of continued interest and debate: who knew French; what was French used for; and how long was the period of contact? We shall return to these questions in Section 3.2, but first consider some onomastic evidence: French influence can also be traced through personal and place names. While approximately just one tenth of the towns established by the 13th century signaled French influence in their names (Clark 1991: 281), the impact is more directly visible in personal names: French-derived names, such as William, were used by the relatively higher classes in the south of England in the 12th century, and by peasants in the next (Clanchy 2014: 39). In addition to using this kind of evidence, the linguistic situation of England can of course also be approached through comments made by medieval writers. Certainly, no history of English in contact with French is complete without this famous quote from The Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester (c. 1300): Þus com lo engelond · in to normandies hond · & þe normans ne couþe speke þo · bote hor owe speche · & speke french as hii dude atom · & hor children dude also teche · So þat heiemen of þis lond · þat of hor blod come · Holdeþ alle þulke speche · þat hii of hom nome · Vor bote a man conne frenss · me telþ of him lute · Ac lowe men holdeþ to engliss · & to hor owe speche ȝute · Ich wene þer ne beþ in al þe world · contreyes none · Þat ne holdeþ to hor owe speche · bote engelond one · Ac wel me wot uor to conne · boþe wel it is · Vor þe more þat a mon can · þe more wurþe he is. ‘Thus came England into Normandy’s hand, and the Normans could only speak their own language, and speak French as they did at home and had also taught their children. So that nobles of this land, who come from their blood, retain all the same language that they received from them, since unless a man knows French, he is thought little of. But humble men hold to English and to their own language even now. I think that in the whole world there are no countries that do not keep their own language, except England alone. But people know well that it is good to master both, because the more a man knows the more honored he is.’ (my translation, JS)

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The above citation recognizes the multilingual situation in medieval England and highlights the utility of language learning. A lack of language skills would nevertheless have been extremely common among the lower social classes, to which the majority of the population belonged: most people had little access to those echelons of society that required a command of French. On the other hand, generations of kings of Norman descent managed without speaking English. The need for a change in the official use of French can be seen in an act of Parliament from 1362, which ordered English to be spoken in courts of law, instead of French – the language in which this “Statute of Pleading” was itself written. English-language documents were indeed sparse until that time, but they became common in the 15th century (McIntosh et al. 1986: 40). For Middle English as a language of literature, the late fourteenth century was also an important time, with the works of such great writers as Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland – also known for their use of French loans. Literary texts provide ample evidence of French influence, but so do also non-literary texts, which have received increasing attention of late. Laura Wright (e.g. 2005) has studied business discourse in the late Middle English period, emphasizing its typical mixed-language usage, wherein English, French, and Latin are all visible in the same texts – even in the same clauses. Such material indicates that the presence of two vernaculars in medieval England, along with the effect of Latin as the language of record, led to considerable code-switching, both in writing and in speech. The transition from Middle to Early Modern English coincided with – and was prompted by – a series of major extralinguistic events, most notably the introduction of the printing press to England by William Caxton. In addition to the onset of English book production, English Reformation and the Renaissance had an impact on the position of vernacular English and on the language itself; all of these were also reflected in the role of French in England. Kibbee (1991: 94) provides a brief summary: Caxton, the great standardizer of written English, also began the printing of works on French, as England saw an increasing demand for such instructional materials for learning French, the language of law, international business and culture. The Reformation boosted this process, as the suppression of monasteries gave the gentry an opportunity to buy formerly monastic land and property; such wealthy families would then seek to mark their social standing by, for example, receiving education in French, which could be offered by the handsome supply of continental Protestants settling in England. While the Reformation thus reinforced English-French contacts on British soil, with Huguenots (French Protestants) relocating in London and the southeast, the cultural force of the Renaissance worked in another direction, with the “rebirth” of classical culture serving to enhance the role of Latin. The role and

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influence of French vacillated with the political climate, marked by conflicts between the two countries and, moreover, within Britain itself; these include the Anglo-French Wars, the English Civil Wars (1642–1651) between the supporters of monarchy and Parliament, and the subsequent Restoration of the monarchy. French did remain an international prestige language and thus also influenced English, although such contact may perhaps be regarded as primarily cultural or learned, rather than interpersonal. Population movements have, however, also brought English and French into contact with one another since the Middle Ages. The introduction of English to the New World dates back to the 16th century and the Age of Discovery, and as France began to establish colonies in America at roughly the same time, EnglishFrench interaction continued on another continent. Toponymic evidence of French influence survives in many areas in the United States (e.g. Detroit, Maine, Vermont), but the best-known French settlements in North America are in Canada and the Mississippi River valley. Canadian French, spoken by a fifth of Canada’s population, is, alongside English, a national language of the country and the only official language in the province of Quebec; the two languages are thus in constant contact. In the United States, it is worth noting the varieties of French spoken by five per cent of the population in the state of Louisiana, a former French colony. While both Louisiana and Canada provide interesting settings for code-switching and other language-contact phenomena, the scope of the present chapter does not permit a further discussion of these or other post-medieval contact situations beyond this point.

3.2 Contact-linguistic considerations The actual type of contact situation in question has a bearing on the influence it is likely to have on the language(s) involved, but there is considerable uncertainty regarding various factors deemed useful for determining the intensity of the language contact in post-Conquest England, such as the level of bilingualism, the number of French-speakers, and even the duration of the contact period (cf. Thomason and Kaufman 1988). There also exists notable variation in the estimates addressing some of these matters, which is partly due to the fact that different scholars seem to measure different things. This is a consequence of the varied ways in which some of the key concepts may be understood. The question of bilingualism is a case in point. First of all, who counts as a bilingual person? Is it someone growing up in a bilingual family and acquiring two languages from birth, or do we also include people who have learnt to use another language – to some extent – in addition to their first language? Second,

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whose bilingualism do we mean? While the increasing bilingualism of the Normans is often emphasized by researchers, the French skills of (some of) the English should not be ignored either, as words and structures need not necessarily be borrowed directly from the native speakers of the source language. The number of French-speakers in post-Conquest England is another important factor. Estimates of the number or proportion of Normans in England are precisely that – estimates based on limited historical evidence alongside sometimes faulty logic. As the influence of French on English lexis was extensive, this was previously taken to mean that the number of Normans in the country must also have been large (this is typical of the early estimates on Viking settlers as well). Since there is no census on which we can depend to provide firm facts, little accuracy is possible. Recently, Carpenter (2003: 4) has suggested that the approximate number of Normans across post-Conquest England was 8,000 – a much lower figure than some earlier estimates (e.g. Prins 1952: 22). The next point of contention is the period during which spoken EnglishFrench contact occurred in medieval England. The Conquest is known to have brought a wide range of people into England, and not only aristocrats and clergy. The usefulness of English and the sheer feasibility of remaining monolingual would have inevitably varied between the different echelons of Anglo-Norman society, with the highest ranks able to hold on to French for the longest period of time. After the Conquest, many landowners had possessions on both sides of the English Channel, but when the continental lands were eventually lost, French skills became less than essential for the population remaining in England. The loss of Normandy in 1204 was thus an important turning point, although French may well have been in active use by the upper classes in England long after the very early 13th century. This is nevertheless the latest point at which AngloNormans must have acquired English skills and thus become bilingual. This has been discussed by numerous scholars, for example Berndt (1976) and Short (1992). As for the English-speaking population, acquiring French was neither possible nor necessary for the majority, but there was a need in the increasing administration for bilingual “civil servants”, which made French an important tool for social advancement. Skills in both French and English were not uncommon in the (upper) middle and upper classes, as the quotation in Section 3.1 testifies. Such discussion of bilingualism further invites the question of language shift. Scholars writing on the linguistic situation in post-Conquest England frequently express their astonishment at how the Norman powers that be gave up their native French and shifted to English. In fact, it is not unusual that the speakers of a minority language shift to the language of the majority within a span of three generations: a case in point is immigrant workers adopting the language of their

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new country. Nevertheless, while this is the normal pattern witnessed when the shifting minority has a low political, social, and economical status, it is less common for the elite to shift to the language of the relatively powerless group – as was the case with the French-to-English shift. Despite the apparent vagueness of some of the estimates seen above, there is however one important fact about the medieval contact situation upon which everyone agrees: the intensity of contact and the impact of one language on the other are influenced by the position of the French-speaking Normans in England during what Lutz (2002: 148) calls “forced linguistic contact”. The “new” language was introduced and spoken by a politically and socially superordinate group, which according to Thomason and Kaufman (1988) is another factor – in addition to differences in population size – contributing to cultural pressure in contact situations. In this particular setting, with a less than overwhelming number of Normans, the difference and distance in social position impacted on cultural pressure and, consequently, strengthened the influence of French on English. As a superstratum language, French had prestige, and it was therefore an attractive source of loans; and when the people of Norman descent became bilingual and eventually shifted to English, the features they brought from their French into the target language were lexical (e.g. Winford 2003: 35). Thomason (2010: 37) observes that this has been regarded “as an extreme case of (superstrate) shift-induced interference”, typically more lexical than structural (phonological and grammatical), but she also notes the connection between the wealth of French-derived words in Middle English and Norman bilingualism.

4 Internal history: contact-induced linguistic changes Contact situations may lead to a variety of linguistic changes, such as the replacement of, and/or addition to, elements of (at least) one of the languages involved. Such changes most typically apply to vocabulary. Lexical changes are the least controversial topic in contact linguistics: the adoption of words from a source language to a recipient language is often relatively easy to observe for contemporary speakers and subsequent scholars alike. The easiest word class to borrow from and into is that of nouns, and the English loans from French are no exception to this well-established principle: indeed, more than half of the common nouns used in the first paragraph of this chapter can be traced back to French.

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4.1 Lexical changes In her classic book on foreign lexical influences on English, Mary Serjeantson (1962 [1935]) devotes 66 pages to “The French Element”, while the role of Latin – which she otherwise regards as the most significant source language changing the lexis of English – receives a notably shorter treatment. Numerous other scholars have further attempted to capture an overall picture of lexical borrowing from various languages in the history of English. Let us consider some of these, before studying selected examples of loans from French. The lexical expansion of English through borrowing from French presented an attractive object for quantitative studies throughout the 20th century. The first of such explorations – and possibly still the best-known – was published by Otto Jespersen in 1905 [1954], followed by Albert C. Baugh in 1935, Fernand Mossé in 1943, and subsequent scholars up to the present. Many scholars have based their diachronic assessment of the French element in English lexis on samples derived from the Oxford English Dictionary, and the results have become the mainstay of the description of French loans in numerous histories of English. Julie Coleman (1995) provides a summary of these studies, assessing their methods and limitations and adding to the discussion a study of four semantic fields, partly based on the Oxford English Dictionary. When the accounts by Jespersen, Baugh and Mossé are compared, it appears that the peaks of French lexical influence coincide at 1250–1350. The French loans attested in early Middle English texts from before this period have recently been studied by Skaffari (2009). In the early modern period, the early 16th century stands out among the fifty-year periods – albeit with somewhat lesser peaks. According to Coleman, French-derived forms peak between 1250 and 1400, while the semantic developments of the loans and their contribution to native word formation are most clearly visible somewhat later, between 1300 and 1500. The findings of three more researchers can further be mentioned here. In the 1551–1700 period, Esko Pennanen (1971) identifies the three decades up to 1620 as particularly active in borrowing from French. Another quantification of the lexical influence of French draws on samples from the Middle English Dictionary: Xavier Dekeyser (1986) reviews the extent of French loans in Middle English in relation to native neologisms and words borrowed from other languages, and locates the summit of French influence in the first three quarters of the 14th century. From the last quarter of the 12th century to the third quarter of the 14th, French was a more important source of loanwords than Latin. This pattern is very similar to what Philip Durkin (2014: 258–261) discovered in the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Interesting as these dictionary-based explorations can be, they may nonetheless be skewed to a similar extent as the data they are based on: the major

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dictionaries have traditionally focused on the works of major authors, which tend to be overrepresented at the expense of other texts, especially non-literary writing. Differences in sampling and counting can also lead to variation in the results, although more recent studies often provide more sophisticated methodological and statistical analysis. As quantitative and corpus-linguistic methods develop, the often-quoted estimate that Middle English borrowed some 10,000 words from French (Baugh 1935: 93) and the less known calculation proposing an influx of circa 15,000 to 20,000 loans between 1000 and 1900 (Pennanen 1971: 23–24) may yet be adjusted and become more precise. As for the words themselves, there are various lists available in both textbooks aimed at undergraduates and studies intended for a more scholarly audience; see for example Baugh and Cable (2013: 163–172) for a textbook account, Serjeantson (1962 [1935]) and Durkin (2014) for overviews of the French lexical element in English, Burnley (1992) for French loans in Middle English, Nevalainen (1999) for French influences on Early Modern English vocabulary, and Schultz (2012) for 20th-century loans. None of the above focuses on the Anglo-Saxon period, however, at the end of which some loans were adopted into Old English. Estimating that approximately forty words have been proposed as possible pre1066 loans from French, Gneuss (1993: 135–136) suggests that the most convincing – if not fully certain – items to be classified as “genuine pre-Conquest loans from French” are cule ‘monk’s cowl’, prut ‘proud’ and the less frequent capun ‘capon’, castel ‘castle’ (not the Latin-derived meaning ‘village’), flanc ‘flank’, iugelere ‘magician’, leowe ‘league’ (measure of distance), paper, rocc, and sot ‘foolish’. Other examples include clerc, fals, market, and tresor. These early loans are a very small subset of French-derived words in English compared to the later, medieval and modern loans. As the latter are too numerous for a detailed discussion, a brief overview and a list of examples will have to suffice here. Instead of simply copying from earlier selections of French-derived words in English, a short new list has been created for the present chapter by sampling the Chronological English Dictionary (Finkenstaedt et al. 1970). This resource, well-known among historical lexicologists, arranges the words of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Trumble 2007) in a chronological order (as per the first attestation of each item), accompanied by a concise etymological classification. To create a fresh collection of examples, one word of French origin was extracted from each ten-page section in the Chronological English Dictionary, which yielded a set of 130 examples. The origins of these items in the sample were double-checked against the most recent information available in the Oxford English Dictionary online. The outcome is a cross-section of French-derived words in the history of English, listed in full in Appendix 1, Section 6.1. Nouns are by far the largest group of items on the list: their number is almost twice the sum of

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verbs and adjectives. The account does not contain any grammatical words, which are generally rare among the French-derived words in English. To complement this short list, Appendix 2, Section 6.2, contains those of Serjeantson’s (1962 [1935]) French loans whose origin is confirmed by the revised entries available in the Oxford English Dictionary online. The semantic or lexical fields traditionally associated with French words include, for example, government, fashion, and food, i.e. aspects of life primarily dominated by the elite who spoke French – the superstratum language – as their first or second language. Sociolinguistically, this looks like a clear case of prestige borrowing or change from above, although such an interpretation is an oversimplification and certainly does not apply to all English-French contacts (for example, it is unlikely that Huguenot artisans held a prestige status in London around 1600). Such sociolinguistic concerns aside, we can now tentatively arrange the semantic classification by Serjeantson, focusing on the Middle English loans from French, into five main groups – society, business, action, mind, and matter – in Table 10.1. Table 10.1: Semantic groups and Serjeantson’s classification Group

Serjeantson’s classes

Society

persons, rank law and social relations military finance buildings shipping physical action, appearance, faculty, etc. hunting states of mind, qualities, etc. mental action other abstractions writing, learning, painting and other arts religion medical

Business

Action Mind

Matter

clothes, textiles, etc. household and other objects food nature miscellaneous

The original classification faces problems related to overlapping fields: for instance, many of the words listed under “persons” could equally well be analyzed

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as belonging to “religion”, “law and social relations”, etc. This is typical of semantic classifications and difficult to avoid. As for the Chronological English Dictionary sample, the main categories of Table 10.1 are represented by for example ligeance (Society); accountant, heritor (Business); mutiny (Action); bounty ‘goodness, kindness’, gloze, saint (Mind); ermine, grillade, stew, taffeta (Matter).

4.2 Influences mediated through lexical borrowing French words did not only expand English lexis but also mediated other features of the source language into the recipient language. Worth noting are both morphological influences (derivational affixes) and phonological influences, which are nonetheless a minor consequence of language contact compared to the thousands of words which entered the vocabulary of English. The sample from the Chronological English Dictionary manifests the influence of French on English word formation, especially on the derivation of abstract words. Many of the words listed in the dictionary as French in origin represent a combination of a French root with a Romance suffix (although there may not be a corresponding polymorphemic word in French), for example jovialize, mentality, anilic, functionary, assonantal, frontage, and enviable. Native suffixes are also attested in hybrid forms, such as jointy and adhesiveness. While these items represent Modern English, there are also Middle English forms, exemplified by the several attestations of -ion, -ic, ‑ous, -ant and -ette within items adopted, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, as “simple”, morphologically unanalyzed words from French. Medieval derivational morphology has been explored by Christiane Dalton-Puffer, who in 1996 published a volume on native and French-derived suffixes across Middle English texts. Her diachronic study shows that while a number of suffixes attested in Middle English are indeed Frenchderived, the influence was not particularly strong, and the borrowed suffixes were neither as productive nor as frequent as the native ones. Common Romance endings in the Middle English words contained in Dalton-Puffer’s material include the noun suffixes -acioun, -aunce, -our, the verb suffix -ify, and the adjectival suffix -able. As for prefixes, some French loans also contained forms similar to Latin prefixes and thus provided support for the establishment of these affixes in English. In the dictionary sample, distrain (v.) is an example of this. Moreover, the sounds and stress patterns of French words were sometimes copied into the English loans. New diphthongs (/oi/, /ui/) thus appeared in English via some of the French-derived words, such as the Middle English joint in the above-mentioned adjective jointy; similarly, the consonant phoneme realized at the end of rouge (/ʒ/) is, like the late Middle English loanword itself,

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a French import. A famous example of phonological influence from French is the distinction discernible between the initial consonants of, for instance, fine and vine. In the Middle English period, allophones of the same Old English phoneme (the intervocalic [v] and the word-initial [f]) split from each other and emerged as separate phonemes; a similar process of phonemicization may be observed between /s/ and /z/. Patterns of word stress also changed as alternatives to the Germanic root-syllable stress emerged in borrowed words.

4.3 Other changes In the preceding sections, we have seen language change primarily as addition to the language system, and also as new perceived contrasts. Change does, however, also imply loss, which may be seen in another area influenced by language contact: the English spelling system. The arrival of French speeded the loss of some insular characters which were unfamiliar on the continent. Thus ash , wynn , yogh , eth and thorn were eventually replaced by other letter forms or their combinations, for greater conformity with continental writing. The influences of French (and Latin) are manifested not only in the changing symbols but also in orthographical trends. In the earlier Middle English period, the frequent re-borrowing from French of words which had already been adopted from Latin into late Old English led to etymological confusion and to re-spelling of older loans after the French model; hence for instance procession, a Latinderived noun attested in Old English, was spelt processioun in Middle English. Later, the opposite process can be observed, with Latinate forms being used in English words of French rather than Latin origin. A case in point is adventure, which had a mere -v- rather than -dv- in its Middle English form. Moving from words and smaller units to various types of collocations of words, we find further influences from French: there are plenty of examples of phrases modeled after French structures, such as do justice, have mercy on, make peace, take leave, if you please, by heart, and without fail. The chronological account of such structures by Prins (1952) begins with the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, reaching a first peak in Ancrene Wisse and later a more remarkable peak towards the end of the 14th century. On the higher levels of language, we often encounter more controversy than certainty. Of French influences on English grammar, Mustanoja (1960) observes – in the classic Middle English Syntax – the imitation of French models in some verb forms and pronominal expressions. The verb constructions possibly showing at least some French influence range, according to him, from some present particip-

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ial expressions to the historical present tense. In the second-person pronouns, grammar intersects with the pragmatics of politeness: after the French model (tu vs. vous), the plural ye came to be used also as a singular pronoun (instead of thou), for the sake of politeness on the one hand, and for the maintenance of differences in rank on the other. Perhaps the most controversial attempts to explain the structural changes in the history of English involve the concept of creolization: could (Middle) English be regarded as a creole? A creole is a nativized mixed language typically developing from a simplified contact language, a pidgin, which can emerge in a contact situation between at least two languages. While the English-Norse contact has received prominence in many of these proposals, the influence of French has also been brought up in this discussion, most notably by Bailey and Maroldt (1977). Despite its appeal as, at least, a sociolinguistic puzzle for language historians, the creolization hypothesis has now basically been abandoned (see e.g. Danchev 1997), although some structural changes in English can be attributed to French influence (see also Trotter, Chapter 12). Finally, it must be noted that language contact did not only influence language, but also literature and culture: Medieval literature in French served as a model and as a source of inspiration. It also provided source texts for translation; examples start from Wace’s Anglo-Norman Roman de Brut, the basis for the important early Middle English text known as Layamon’s Brut. French texts thus influenced the style and genres of writing in English; this is where historical linguistics meets literary scholarship.

5 Summary The influence of English-French language contact on the lexis of the former language in the last millennium can hardly be overestimated: the contact not only led to lexical borrowing on a very large scale, but also to concomitant if relatively minor changes or adjustments in morphology and phonology. French further provided a potential model for some new phrasal and grammatical structures, and may have accelerated certain changes already under way, which is not untypical of major language contact situations. While great progress has been made, for example, in the study of French-derived lexis in English, more precise and detailed information is yet to be discovered through the use of large historical corpora – but also through careful scrutiny of individual texts. We still need research into the diffusion of loanwords and other influences from French, as the mere listing of first attestations – characteristic of many of the early studies – is hardly sufficient any more.

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A further asset for future studies will be a sharper focus on the languageexternal circumstances of contact and change. Bringing together both linguistic and sociohistorical concerns in a contact-linguistic approach to language contact situations and their consequences is not without its problems, however, due to the scantiness of reliable historical evidence. More recent connections between French and English also deserve more attention from linguists.

6 Appendices 6.1 Appendix 1 The French-derived words of the Chronological English Dictionary (Finkenstaedt et al. 1970) sample are contained in the lists below. Most of the items can be accepted as French loans without hesitation, while some have less certain etymologies. There are, in addition, some English-French hybrids in the data as well. Nouns (83): Pre-1500: accountant, alembic, azimuth, bounty, commend, congregation, dais, ermine, gloze, heritor, idiotry, ligeance, market, metropole, mound, pawn, precedence, session, stew, taffeta, urchin, verge 1500 to 1800: accession, adage, affiliation, alchemist, allocation, clavier, coparcener, cornelian, cull, dementia, dilatatory, disaster, entirety, fend, fragment, frontage, functionary, futurity, gelatine, grillade, isthm, lasket, lunette, mail, marquetry, matelote, mentality, nationalist, nide, oblige, plantage, rail, redan, scapement, seringa, silicle, soar, strangles, tote, truck Post-1800: adhesiveness, canette, cert, chargee, colonnette, décime, dot, elemin, epicondyle, epigone, fertilization, gen, humorism, ingénue, lithotritor, lorgnon, movie, sateen, squirearchy, steeve, substage Verbs (22): Pre-1500: charm, defer, distrain, interfere, rave 1500 to 1800: bottle, entomb, gelatinate, hazardize, jovialize, manoeuvre, mutiny, naturalize, patent, rally, renforce, surview, syllable, vagabondize

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Post-1800: limber, slate, totalize Adjectives (24): Pre-1500: hideous, plat, saint, seditious 1500 to 1800: additional, deposable, divertive, enviable, flatulent, humoral, institutionary, jointy, leavenous, pulmonic, sluicy, tachygraphic, tierce, triple Post-1800: anilic, assonantal, gardenless, lardaceous, maleic, revulsant Adverb (1): a-riot (post-1800)

6.2 Appendix 2 The lists below contain those French loans bolded in Serjeantson (1962 [1935]) whose origin is confirmed by the revisions (draft entries) available in the Oxford English Dictionary online by the end of 2008 (mostly words from the instalments from M to R). Without the duplicates listed in the book, the account contains some 250 words (from late Old English to the twentieth century) with some variety of French listed as the only immediate source language. The spellings, varying from one period to the next, aptly illustrate both the changing fashions and the passing of time, with the more overtly non-English forms of the postmedieval loans. The dates below reflect Serjeantson’s and may need revising, as the Oxford English Dictionary now contains new entries, examples and revised etymologies. Due to Serjeantson’s sampling method, the first half of the Middle English period is over-represented. Serjeantson’s account is a much appreciated resource, which would deserve to be thoroughly updated; it has, in fact, been recently superseded by Durkin (2014). Old English, pre-1100 (2): prisun, prut Early Middle English, 1100 to 1300 (84): cwaer, cwesse, fantesme, feverer, machun, mahimet, mahun, makerel, malisun, manere, marbre, marchaundise, marchaunt, mariner, materie, maugre, maumet, meistrie, menestral, meniver, merci, merciable, mesauentur, meseise, mester, mesure, meyne, mine, miracle, misericorde, montaine, noblesce, nocturne, obedience, offiz, oil, oniche, oreisun, orgeilus, orgul, pacience, pagine, paie, pais, palefrei, paleis, pane, panier, panter, parage, paroschian, pein-

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ture, peire, pelrinage, per, pert, pilegrim, piment, pite, plaid, plaidi, playce, plenere, plente, potage, poure, preche, prechur, preie ‘pray’, preie ‘prey’, preisen, prelat, preoue, press, prince, pris ‘praise’, pris ‘price’, priueement, priuite, propre, proue, pruesse, uoyz, utrage Late Middle English, 1300 to 1500 (48): mace, madame, mademoiselle, male, marchal, marque, masager, masnel, maumetry, mautalent, medle, meintene, mervaile, mesage, minstralcie, nice, noise, nombre, nygremancy, oyniment, page, painim, palmer, paramur, parti, pas1, pase, pauiment, pawe, pavilon, pein, peril, pise, plein, pleint, poisoun, porter, pouerte, poynt, praier, prest, priue, quarter, queint, queintise, quilte, randoun, ransoun Early Modern English, 1500 to 1800 (70): machine, malapropos, manganese, mansard, martinet, matelote, mélange, mêlée, ménage, menagerie, méringue, migraine, minion, mistral, monde, monseigneur, moquette, moraine, morale, mousseline, moustache, muslin, naïve, nom-de-plume, noyau, nuance, ormolu, outré, paduasoy, papier maché, parterre, partisan, pas2, passé, pâté, patois, pavé, paysage, pelisse, perdu, persiflage, piaffe, picnic, pilot, pioneer, piquant, pique, pirouette, pisé, plafond, plat, plateau, platoon, police, pompon, pool, portmanteau, poste restante, potpourri, praline, pratique, promenade, quart, racket, ragout, raisonné, ramekin, rapport, ratchet, razee (Late) Modern English, post-1800 (48): chemisette, macabre, marguerite, marocain, massif, matériel, matinée, mayonnaise, melinite, menu, misére, mitrailleuse, modiste, moiré, morgue, motif, moulin, mousse, nacelle, née, négligé, névé, noisette, nougat, noyade, octroi, parados, parquet, parvenu, passementerie, passe-partout, pébrine, peignoir, physique, picayune, pipette, piqué, planchette, postiche, pourboire, prestige, purée, raconteur, raison d’être, râle, rapprochement, ravine, rayon

7 References Bailey, Charles-James N. and Karl Maroldt. 1977. The French lineage of English. In: Jürgen M. Meisel (ed.), Langues en contact – Pidgins – Creoles – Languages in Contact, 21–53. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag. Baugh, Albert C. 1935. The chronology of French loan-words in English. Modern Language Notes L(2): 90–93. Baugh, Albert C. and Thomas Cable. 2013. A History of the English Language. 6th edn. London: Routledge. Berndt, Rolf. 1976. French and English in thirteenth-century England. An investigation into the linguistic situation after the loss of the Duchy of Normandy and other continental domin-

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ions. In: Aspekte der anglistischen Forschung in der DDR: Martin Lehnert zum 65. Geburtstag, 129–150. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag. Burnley, David. 1992. Lexis and semantics. In: Norman Blake (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. II. 1066–1476, 409–499. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carpenter, David. 2003. The Struggle for Mastery: Britain 1066–1284. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clanchy, M. T. 2014. England and Its Rulers 1066–1307. 4th edn. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Clark, Cecily. 1991. Towards a reassessment of Anglo-Norman influence on English place-names. In: P. Sture Ureland and George Broderick (eds.), Language Contact in the British Isles. Proceedings of the Eighth International Symposium on Language Contact in Europe, Douglas, Isle of Man, 1988, 275–293. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. Coleman, Julie. 1995. The chronology of French and Latin loan words in English. Transactions of the Philological Society 93(2): 95–124. Dalton-Puffer, Christiane. 1996. The French Influence on Middle English Morphology. A CorpusBased Study of Derivation. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Danchev, Andrei. 1997. The Middle English creolization hypothesis revisited. In: Jacek Fisiak (ed.), Studies in Middle English Linguistics, 79–108. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Dekeyser, Xavier. 1986. Romance loans in Middle English: A re-assessment. In: Dieter Kastovsky and Aleksander Szwedek (eds.), Linguistics across Historical and Geographical Boundaries: In Honour of Jacek Fisiak on the Occasion of His Fiftieth Birthday, Vol. I: Linguistic Theory and Historical Linguistics, 253–265. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Durkin, Philip. 2014. Borrowed Words: A History of Loanwords in English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Finkenstaedt, Thomas, Ernst Leisi, and Dieter Wolff. 1970. A Chronological English Dictionary: Listing 80000 Words in Order of their Earliest Known Occurrence. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag. Gneuss, Helmut. 1993. Anglicae linguae interpretatio: Language contact, lexical borrowing and glossing in Anglo-Saxon England. Paper read as Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture, 1992. In: Proceedings of the British Academy 82, 1992 Lectures and Memoirs, 107–148. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ingham, Richard. 2012. The Transmission of Anglo-Norman: Language History and Language Acquisition. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Jespersen, Otto. 1954 [1905]. Growth and Structure of the English Language. 9th edn. Oxford: Blackwell. Kibbee, Douglas A. 1991. For to Speke Frenche Trewely. The French Language in England, 1000–1600: Its Status, Description and Instruction. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kurath, Hans, Sherman M. Kuhn, John Reidy, and Robert E. Lewis (eds.). 1952–2001. Middle English Dictionary. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/ m/med/ Lodge, R. Anthony. 1993. French: From Dialect to Standard. London/New York: Routledge. Lutz, Angelika. 2002. When did English begin? In: Teresa Fanego, Belén Méndez-Naya, and Elena Seoane (eds.), Sounds, Words, Texts and Change: Selected papers from 11 ICEHL, Santiago de Compostela, 7–11 September 2000, Vol. 2, 145–171. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

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McIntosh, Angus, M. L. Samuels, and M. Benskin. 1986. A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, Vol. I. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press (see http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/ elalme/elalme.html). The Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester. 1877. Ed. by William Aldis Wright. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/ cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=cme;idno=AHB1378.0001.001; last accessed 13 July 2017. Milroy, James. 1992. Linguistic Variation and Change: On the Historical Sociolinguistics of English. Oxford/Cambridge: Blackwell. Mossé, Fernand. 1943. On the chronology of French loan-words in English. English Studies 25: 33–40. Mustanoja, Tauno F. 1960. A Middle English Syntax I: Parts of speech. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Nevalainen, Terttu. 1999. Early Modern English lexis and semantics. In: Roger Lass (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. III, 1476–1776, 332–458. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pennanen, Esko V. 1971. On the Introduction of French Loan-Words into English. Tampere: Tampereen Yliopisto. Prins, Anton A. 1952. French Influence in English Phrasing. Leiden: Universitaire pers Leiden. Proffitt, Michael (ed.). 2000–. Oxford English Dictionary. 3rd ed. online. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com Rothwell, William. 1983. Language and government in medieval England. Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur 93(3): 258–270. Rothwell, William. 1998. Arrivals and departures: The adoption of French terminology into Middle English. English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature 79(2): 144–165. Schultz, Julia. 2012. Twentieth Century Borrowings from French to English: Their Reception and Development. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Serjeantson, Mary S. 1962 [1935]. A History of Foreign Words in English. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Short, Ian. 1992. Patrons and polyglots: French literature in twelfth-century England. In: Marjorie Chirnall (ed.), Anglo-Norman Studies XIV: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 1991: 229–249. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press. Skaffari, Janne. 2009. Studies in Early Middle English Loanwords: Norse and French Influences. Turku: University of Turku. Thomason, Sarah Grey and Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Thomason, Sarah. 2010. Contact explanations in linguistics. In: Raymond Hickey (ed.), The Handbook of Language Contact, 31–47. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Trotter, David. 2003. Not as eccentric as it looks: Anglo-French and French French. Forum for Modern Language Studies 39(4): 427–438. Trumble, William R. (ed.). 2007. Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. 6th edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Winford, Donald. 2003. An Introduction to Contact Linguistics. Malden, MA/Oxford: Blackwell. Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn. 2009. General Introduction: What’s in a name: the ‘French’ of ‘England’. In: Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Carolyn Collette, Maryanne Kowaleski, Linne Mooney, Ad Putter, and David Trotter (eds.), Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England c.1100–c.1500, 1–13. York: York Medieval Press.

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Wright, Laura. 2005. Medieval mixed-language business discourse and the rise of Standard English. In: Janne Skaffari, Matti Peikola, Ruth Carroll, Risto Hiltunen, and Brita Wårvik (eds.), Opening Windows on Texts and Discourses of the Past, 381–399. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

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Chapter 11: Standardization 1 2 3 4 5 6

Introduction 205 Standardization(s) and standards 206 Pragmatically focused Middle English varieties From external to internal standards 216 Summary 220 References 220

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Abstract: Middle English is usually seen as the period of English which does not have a supraregional standard because French and Latin fulfil this function. However, at least for the 14th and 15th centuries fairly standardized varieties with dialectally bleached forms may be identified. Yet such varieties may only be regarded as “focused” because codification as the sufficient condition for a standard is still absent. By the 15th century, when English is more extensively used in writing, the norm was mainly that of discourse traditions which were taken over from the French and Latin models as external standards. These provided English with means not only to communicate over a geographically wider area, but also to produce texts in an increasing number of registers as these external standards become internalized in English. Middle English standardizations are hence discussed here as a minimization of variation for supralocal use and as maximation of variability to widen the stylistic functions of the vernacular.

1 Introduction Middle English is traditionally considered to be the standardless period of English. The absence of a standard is all the more a defining quality of Middle English because what we regard to be the “beginning of Middle English” coalesces with the disappearance of the so-called “West-Saxon Literary Standard”, so that Roy Liuzza (2000: 145) could claim that “the end of […] scribal training [in the WestSaxon standard] was the beginning of ‘Middle English’”. Moreover, in the last century of the Middle English period the vernacular is generally supposed to be Ursula Schaefer: Dresden and Freiburg (Germany)

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under way towards Modern Standard English. Situated between the disappearing of one written standard and the slow emerging of a new standard, Middle English therefore “exhibits by far the greatest diversity in written language of any period before or since” (Milroy 1992: 156). The reasons for this linguistic scenario lie in the specific language situation resulting from the cultural impact of the Norman Conquest on the one end and the rapidly increasing use of English in writing for various purposes on the other. This chapter is structured in such a way that Section 2 discusses different concepts of the notions “standardization” and “standard” as they are applicable to Middle English. Section 3 subsequently discusses “standardized varieties” of English which have been identified mainly on the ground of unified spellings, and, in the 14th and 15th centuries, also in terms of the spread of dialectally bleached forms which could function supralocally. Section 4 then concentrates on the extensive and intensive elaboration of written English in the 14th and 15th centuries. Section 5 gives a brief summary of the main aspects addressed in the chapter.

2 Standardization(s) and standards In general the idea of standardization is based on a concept of fixing and fixity of what would otherwise vary more or less freely. As the prime – and for a long time sole – means of fixing (a) language, writing potentially produces such models that minimize variation. However, writing is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for such a specific variety to emerge because it seems to take further socio-pragmatic motivations and textualization efforts for a standard variety to become established. Under “socio-pragmatic” shall be subsumed such standardizing moves that modify written language to serve a wider geographical range of communication. By “textualization efforts” I refer to orientation towards standards already established by existing literate models that will be called “discourse traditions”, a notion specifically apt to account for the unique literary communicative space of the period under consideration. As shall be seen, the former moves reduce variation while the latter efforts enhance variability.

2.1 Standardization for de-localized communication Sandved (1981: 31) programmatically states that “the term ‘standard language’ is essentially a socio-linguistic term” applying to “any form of written English […] regarded as a model worthy of imitation by people belonging outside the geograp-

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hical area or social group within which this variety arose” (italics in the original). Inferring a social gain – such as “prestige” – for people “outside […] a social group” who imitate the variety in question is as simple as it is hard to substantiate. In contrast, one may assume, it is much easier to identify the gain of imitating a variety used in a geographically different area. Although Sandved does not explicitly say so, he seems generally to have spelling in mind, and in particular that spelling which was seemingly developed by “the Chancery” in the 15th century and copied in the province. The readiest assumption is that 15th-century “imitators from outside” had realized the communicative profit of using a spelling norm which evens out dialectal differences. This idea is further elaborated by Jeremy Smith (1992, 1996, 2000), who has also heuristically specified the notion of a “standard variety” – with standard in adjectival use – in that he distinguishes “standardized” from “standard” phenomena. He suggests the notions “standard” (ADJ ) or “fixed” to relate to a prescriptive, codified variety, and “standardized” or “focussed” to relate to a norm at which speakers or writers (may) aim (Smith 1996: 65–66). According to Smith (2000: 136), in the late Middle English period “standardization” brings about the “evolution of […] a colourless regional usage”, which, in his terminology, functions as a “focus” rather than a “standard”. With specific regard to the 15th-century adoption of “Chancery English” spelling, he states that this catered to the “demand for more broadly diatopic communicative efficiency” (2000: 136) and thus is pragmatic in nature. All in all, much scholarly effort has been spent on identifying some contemporary organizing rationale in writing the vernacular. Spelling looms so large in these efforts that the establishment of other non-regional norms, such as evenedout dialectal differences on the level of grammar, are usually fused with spelling norms proper, as is the case in Samuels’s “Types I–IV” (cf. Samuels 1989 [1963]; Smith 1996: 66–73; cf. also Section 3.2 and Section 3.3 below). To these belong the spread of the present participle ending -ing and the th-forms of the thirdperson plural pronouns originally borrowed from Old Norse. However, in the last decade or so the research on further Middle English grammatical developments that inform Modern English and subsequently Modern Standard English has considerably increased, as will be seen in Section 3.4. Moreover, the heuristic scope has been widened by taking into acccount the discursive environment in which historical linguistic developments in general and those towards Modern Standard English in particular are couched (see the contributions in Diller and Görlach [eds.] 2001).

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2.2 Standardization through elaboration In a publication on the development of the scientific register in late Middle and early Modern English, Irma Taavitsainen (2001: 185) states that for scientific writing in English the “foreign model of Graeco-Roman writing provided a standard, which can be seen as the norm towards which vernacular writing tended”, and that this norm influenced “both the macrostructures of discourse and the microlevel of linguistic features”. These observations are true not only for English scientific writing, but may be extended to other kinds of discourse traditions. The notion “discourse tradition” as it has been suggested by Peter Koch and Wulf Oesterreicher (1994: 589) loosely covers “Textsorten, Gattungen, Stilrichtungen, Gesprächsformen” (‘text types, genres, styles, conversational forms’). Thus conceived, the notion is heuristically profitable because it helps to conjoin two important aspects which have to be taken into consideration when studying the reestablishment of English in writing: (1) the fact that “textualization” (Verschriftlichung) of a language never happens in terms of the “entire” language, but proceeds along the lines of “discourse traditions of distance” (Koch and Oesterreicher 1994: 594; for the notion “(language of) distance”, see Koch and Oesterreicher 2012); (2) that the massive “(re‑)textualization” of English unfolded in a communicative space in which the literary languages French and Latin had their established functions and manifested stable “discourse traditions of distance”. As discourse traditions are, in principle, independent of an individual language (Koch and Oesterreicher 1994: 589), they may “travel”, as it were, between languages and thus, in Taavitsainen’s words, act as models or norms for the “macrostructures of discourse and the microlevel of linguistic features” (Taavitsainen 2001: 185) in different languages. A prime example for such a discourse tradition would be the so-called “curial style” which has been identified by Burnley in insular Latin, French, and English writings (cf. Burnley 1986, 1989, 2001). The later Middle English striving to match the norms already in existence in the other literate languages may, in Einar Haugen’s (1966: 933) terms, be identified as “elaboration” (Ausbau). “Elaboration” figures as one of the four processes consitutive for a standard language as in Table 11.1: Table 11.1: Haugen’s (1966: 933) standardization parameters

Society Language

Form Selection Codification

Function Acceptance Elaboration

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“Elaboration” enables a language to serve a “maximal variation in function”, while “codification” aims at “minimal variation in form” (Haugen 1966: 931; italics in the original). If we disregard the prescriptive artes dictaminis in Latin and French, which also helped, for instance, the Pastons to compose their “private” letters in the 15th century (Nevalainen 2004; Schaefer 1996), codified prescription as we know it from the 18th century onwards, can, however, not be found in the pre-modern eras of English. As to “selection of some kind of a model from which the norm may be derived” (Haugen 1966: 932; italics in the original), both the Middle English following of norms that serve the de-localization of English, such as spelling and certain grammatical forms, and those that already existed in terms of discourse traditions have to be taken into account. Both are, indeed, “socially” relevant, yet the first compliance with norms is largely pragmatic in nature, and indeed aims at a formal reduction of form. The second, in turn, aims at preserving the function of the already accepted norms in the other literary languages in order to elaborate English through imitating the French (and Latin) models. In this latter kind of standardization, the range of the native linguistic inventory is increased by new forms adding further “variability and expressiveness” (Rissanen 2006: 136). To grasp this increase of forms and means, Koch and Oesterreicher (1994: 589) prefer to speak of “intensive elaboration”, and to call the spread over a larger range of communicative functions “extensive elaboration” (italics added).

3 Pragmatically focused Middle English varieties In terms of specific varieties, various Middle English “standards” have been discussed in the literature. As has been indicated before, these “standards” are largely restricted to (otherwise not codified) spelling norms. Although the first of these varieties to be considered in the present section is relatively early and locally quite restricted, far-reaching claims have been deduced from its existence. The next group of varieties dates into the 14th century and is constituted by scribal “standards” that also comprise the use of specific grammatical forms. The final variety to be treated in this section is the 15th-century “Chancery English” or “Chancery Standard”.

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3.1 The “AB Language” From the first quarter of the 13th century, two Middle English manuscripts have come down to us which contain texts with a “virtually identical language of unusual internal consistency” (Black 1999: 157). One of these texts is a version of the Ancrene Wisse (“Rule for Anchoresses”) preserved in MS Cambridge, CCC, 402, the other is a group of texts preserved in MS Oxford, Bodley 34, usually referred to in the literature as the Katherine Group. Tolkien has dubbed the former text “A” and the latter group of texts “B” (Black 1999: 157). In her edition of the Life of Juliana from MS Oxford (Bodley 34), d’Ardenne (1961 [1936]: 178) generally characterizes the “AB language” as containing “much that was ancient […], and indeed, it may be suspected, purely literary and traditional”. As a matter of fact, when reading these texts it is much more helpful to have a solid knowledge of Old than of Middle English. Yet d’Ardenne mainly sees “close relations […] between the orthography [of “AB”] and that of Old English” which ultimately leads her to the conclusion that “AB” must have directly descended from (West Saxon) Old English (d’Ardenne 1961 [1936]: 178). As Black (1999) has illustrated, such a direct descent is hard to substantiate. Thus, Jeremy Smith (2000) attributed to “AB” at best the quality of a focused variety, and Black (1999: 166) is even more uncompromising by suggesting that “A” and “B” may be the product of one single scribe with an extraordinarily “systematic mind”. The research on “AB” is illustrative of some general features that inform the research on standard English and English standardization on a larger scale. In his attempt to account for the relatively uniform spelling of “AB”, Tolkien had already surmised that the “consistency and individuality of the spelling […] suggests obedience to some school or authority” (Tolkien 1929: 109; quoted in Black 1999: 157). Black (1999: 156) criticizes such “conjectures” (proliferated in textbooks) which work “on the assumption that the [“AB”] language, if it was a standard, must have been developed at a sizeable centre”. The acquisition of an orthography, we tend to infer, is the consequence of formal schooling. Thus, wherever there is such a norm detectable, there must have been a concrete institution that has formally passed this norm on. The most prominent example is that of the so-called “Chancery Standard”, as will be seen in Section 3.3. However, if Black’s hypothesis of a single “AB” scribe is tenable, that of a “school” in which that uniform spelling was trained is void. Last but not least, there is d’Ardennes’s (1961 [1936]: 178) “descent hypothesis”: that is, the claim that there is an unbroken “Anglo-Saxon lineage” of “AB” as “literary idiom” which has its ancestry in the 9th-century Old English glosses of the Vespasian Psalter. D’Ardenne thus positions “AB” in a deep-down, unbroken, teleological history, which, by implication, should hold for the entire

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history of the English language (and literature). Although James Milroy (1996: 180) does not directly refer to d’Ardenne (but to Ancrene Wisse), he criticizes such narratives of continuity as helping “to establish a long history for the language, which can be seen retrospectively as part of the process of legitimization of modern standard English as a powerful symbol of English nationality”. In order to substantiate that English prose had never ceased, Chambers (1932) in his famous piece On the Continuity of English Prose from Alfred to More and his School also claims Ancrene Wisse to be a link between Old and Early Modern English: “[Ancrene Wisse], even if we date it c. 1200, takes us back to a period when the tradition of pre-Conquest prose was still alive – and its forward links are even more important than its links with the past” (Chambers 1932: xcviii). In the terminology introduced earlier in the present chapter, we could translate Chambers’s postulate into saying that “AB” continues and preserves an Old English discourse tradition and passes it on up to the early Modern period. Yet this would be stretching the notion of “discourse tradition” too far and over too long a period in which we would have to surmise the respective tradition to have invisibly hibernated. In sum, “AB” should be regarded as “one of the local [South-west Midland] attempts to reorganize the traditional spelling of the area” with traces of the persistence of “Old English traditions of text-production” (Smith 2000: 130). Any further claims, such as the idea that “AB” is evidence of an institutional effort towards standardization or a link connecting Old and Modern English prose traditions, feed narratives of unbroken continuity. “AB” remains a solitaire in the earlier period of Middle English, when text production in the indigenous vernacular was quantitatively the absolute exception. Yet this situation clearly changed in the 14th and 15th centuries, as will be seen in the following section.

3.2 Samuels’s “Types I–III” Within the research project on Middle English dialects that has finally led to A Linguistic Atlas of Late Middle English and A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, M. L. Samuels in 1963 opened the following prospect of “provid[ing] us with a frame of reference for isolating and classifying those types of language that are less obviously dialectal, and can thus cast light on the probable sources of the written standard English that appears in the fifteenth century” (Samuels 1989 [1963]: 66). In his article Samuels identifies four such types. At present I will refer only to “Types I-III” because to “Type IV”, known as “Chancery English”, some scholars have attributed so much importance that it is worthwhile treating it separately.

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Samuels (1989 [1963]: 67) characterizes “Type I” as “difficult to localise”, but finally suggests that it is “a standard literary language based on the dialects of the Central Midland counties”. It is found in Wycliffite texts, which were produced in large quantities until 1430. “Type II”, which chronologically precedes Type I, is located by Samuels (1989 [1963]: 70) in the “greater London area”. Eight 14thcentury manuscripts – among them (part of) the Auchinleck Manuscript (c.1330) – show features of this type. “Type III” is considered by Samuels “as representative of London English of 1400” (1989 [1963]: 71). Among others it is the language of Chaucer, of one of the Piers Plowman manuscripts, and of Hoccleve (Samuels 1989 [1963]: 70). As Type III is considerably different from the earlier London Type II, Samuels (1989 [1963]: 70) concludes “that the London dialect changed suddenly and radically in the fourteenth century”. This change is usually attributed to increasing migration from the Central Midlands and East Anglia to London (Benskin 1991: 77). Benskin characterizes the linguistic result of this continuing migration as a “largely colonial dialect” developing “from the common core variants of diverse immigrant speech” (Benskin 1991: 78). This deregionalized variety is thus not brought about by the scribal evening-out of dialectal variation in writing, but rather reflects in writing a kind of koinëization that has evolved in the spoken language of the capital. Both the last quotation from Samuels and Benskin’s characterization of Type III make it clear that these “Types” have been identified not only in terms of relatively unified sets of spelling. Thus, the London Type II has the “traditional” present participle endings ‑ande/‑ende/‑inde in the earlier 14th century, while the Chaucer manuscripts in Type III have ‑yng (Samuels 1989 [1963]: 70), which testifies to a further supralocalization of the ‑ing variant. Similarly Chaucerian they vs. Type II þai/hij testifies to the ultimate exclusion of older hij (< OE hi) from the norm in favor of the originally Old Norse form. These remarks are in order because in the literature the “Types” suggested by Samuels are mostly treated as “mere” spelling foci. Thus, Smith somewhat confusingly treats the “Types” in one publication in a chapter on “Orthography” (Smith 1992: 55–57), in another publication in a chapter on “Change in writing system” (Smith 1996: 68–71). Nevertheless, Smith also sees in these focused varieties the interplay of the growing “literacy in the vernacular” and the attempt to overcome the “communicative dysfunctionality of massive diatopic variation” (Smith 2000: 135), be it graphic or morphological in nature. The peak of this supraregional “bleaching” was allegedly reached in the 15th century with the so-called “Chancery Standard”, to which we turn next.

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3.3 “Chancery English” For various reasons Samuels’s (1989 [1963]: 71) “Type IV” which he has called “Chancery Standard” deserves a subsection of its own. This type “consists of that flood of government documents that starts in the years following 1430 […], and it is this type, not its predecessors in London English, that is the basis for modern written English” (Samuels 1989 [1963]: 71). Again the criteria for identifying this “standard” are spelling styles and the use of specific (grammatical) forms. Regarding “Chancery English” as the direct ancestor of “modern written English”, if not “Modern Standard English”, has very much become the received wisdom, and one may surmise that Type IV exercises such an attraction for scholars studying the beginnings of Modern Standard English because it can be connected directly to a powerful institution – and ultimately to the king. Apart from Samuels who first proposed the name, various publications by John H. Fisher (among them those gathered in Fisher 1996) have contributed to assigning “Chancery English” this eminent place. However, this claim has meanwhile come under critical scrutiny. In his 1977 article on “Chancery English and the Emergence of Standard Written English” Fisher relativizes the link between “Chancery English” and Modern Standard English by conceding that “Modern English is not Chancery English”; yet he postulates that “Chancery English of the early fifteenth century is the starting point for this evolution [towards Modern English], and it has left an indelible impression upon the grammar, spelling, and idiom of Modern English” (Fisher 1996 [1977]: 64). Although administrative written English of the 15th century may indeed have been an important path in the geographical spread of linguistic phenomena (cf. Section 4.2 below), scholars have spotted weak points in Fisher’s reasoning which very much downsize the all-encompassing claim for “Chancery Standard”. For one thing, the very notion “Chancery Standard” is regarded by Benskin (1991: 79) as “a considerable misnomer” possibly induced by the German Meißener Kanzleisprache, which was Martin Luther’s model variety. As Benskin (1991: 79) and Ormrod (2003: 785) have made clear, as of 1417 the English documents under consideration were issued by the Signet, that is, the King’s Secretary’s Office and later by the Privy Seal Office. These are, however, not to be identified with “the Chancery”. Moreover, Benskin states that the relatively small number of clerks working in the king’s offices were not trained “in the households of Chancery” (Benskin 2004: 35, 1991: 81). And yet another misunderstanding which Benskin uncovers is that of claiming the scribes to have been “subject to deliberate control” (Benskin 2004: 33). Last but not least, Ormrod rejects that Henry V might have had any conscious language policy which could have

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contributed to the establishing of English in general and “Chancery English” in particular as “the language of the administration” (e.g. Fisher 1996 [1992] or Richardson 1980; cf. my criticism in Schaefer 2008). Thus, both philological and historical research invalidate the claim that Henry V ever made “a dynamic and decisive contribution to the wider development of standard English during the fifteenth century” (Ormrod 2003: 785). Moreover, this “language of the administration” lacks Haugen’s main feature of a standard, namely that of “maximal variation in function” (Haugen 1966: 931), a quality which Modern Standard English, of course, has obtained. Therefore, we must agree with Laura Wright’s statement that it is “[…] not adequate to suggest that this diversity of function [of Modern Standard English] could have arisen solely from Chancery documents” (Wright 1994: 113). Apart from the functional limitations of “administrative English” in the 15th century, another important aspect about “the language of the administration” has to be kept in mind. English was not the language of the administration, but rather the minor partner of French and Latin. As Benskin (2004: 38) unmistakably states: “Chancery Standard was Latin, and save for nine years during the Commonwealth, it remained so until 1731, when for official purposes it was abolished altogether by Act of Parliament”. In terms of the factor “discourse tradition”, this emphasizes that putting “Chancery English” into place means situating it in the multilingual discourse community concerned with the production of adminstrative texts. Further detailed research into that “flood of [English] government documents that starts in the years following 1430” (Samuels 1989 [1963]: 71) may, in other words, be really profitable if we regard “Chancery English” as evidence for the attempts to provide the English language with new means of expression – albeit within the obvious functional limits of that variety. Studies such as Rissanen’s (e.g. 2000, 2002), give interesting evidence of English as taking shape in a trilingual workshop. This idea shall be further pursued in Section 4 below. At present we need to return once more to Haugen’s process of “acceptance” as an integral part of standardization, as we look into supra-localized phenomena which are not covered by Samuels’s four types.

3.4 Supralocalized linguistic phenomena “from below” Section 3.2 mentioned that Samuels’s “Types I–IV” also include grammatical phenomena such as the southward spread of Old Norse th- forms at the expense of the indigenous h- forms for the personal and the possessive pronoun of the third person plural. With the knowledge as to what ultimately made it into Modern English, such forms can be considered as a development from dialectally

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restricted to “standardized” forms in terms of options for the process of “selection” and subsequent “acceptance”. In contrast to phenomena whose status changed from “dialectally restricted” to “supralocal”, other grammatical phenomena that must have contributed to de-localized communication deserve our attention. Looking into such phenomena gears the perspective away from “standard” or “standardized” varieties as a product and concentrates on linguistic developments that ultimately also inform the Modern standard. To identify steps in this process, Nevalainen has suggested a very useful heuristic concept that helps to translate Haugen’s parameter of “acceptance” into a gradual process of changing communicative practice (cf. Nevalainen 2000: 333) which results in supralocalized use. I shall name only a small selection of such grammatical phenomena. The first is -ly as the de-adjectival adverbial marker going back to adverbially used Old English adjectives with -lic. According to Nevalainen’s (2006: 124) corpus data, the pattern was already established in the period between 1350 and 1420, and in Modern English this has become the systematic norm. The second is the distribution of “Genitive vs. the of-construction” (Nevalainen 2006: 119–20). This variation is, of course, the result of the typological change of English from (prevalently) synthetic to (prevalently) analytic triggered in the transition from Old to Middle English (cf. Wełna, Chapter 4; Smith, Chapter 5; Trotter, Chapter 12). Yet while all other case markers or remnants of them quickly vanished in Middle English, genitive ‑s has been preserved to date. According to the results discussed by Nevalainen (2006: 119–20), the use of the prepositional phrase rapidly outstrips that of the inflected form in the later 14th century. Another field for which we must infer both change “from below” and supralocalizaton is that of the Scandinavian lexical loans (cf. Schendl, Chapter 9). While the late medieval lexical influx from French and Latin is repeatedly discussed in the literature, the Scandinavian lexical contributions have received much less attention when discussing the Late Middle English input to Modern (Standard) English. Besides the obvious lexical contributions from Old Norse like sky or skirt, Old Norse-derived Modern English nouns such as fellow or law and verbs such as call and dwell are today register-neutral, and probably already were so in Chaucer’s time (Smith 1992: 64). The fact that such “everyday” words have been borrowed at all is usually attributed to the adstrate contact situation in the Danelaw in the later 9th and during the 10th century. Moreover, the fact that these words spread to the South is attributed to the general Anglian influence on London English (cf. Thomason and Kaufman 1988: 302–304), which has already been considered for Samuels’s Type III (see above, Section 3.2). As the etymological project of the LAEME is not yet completed (in 2017), we can only assume how the reduction of variation beween Scandinavian loans and their English semantic

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equivalents proceded. Here things may turn out to be much more complicated than we would want to have them. Thus, a brief check of the entries for the verb call in the Middle English Dictionary (Kurath et al. 1952–2001) gives a quotation from St. Margarete, one of the early 13th century texts from the Western Midlands in the “AB Language” (see Section 3.1 above), as the oldest entry in the synonymous twin-collocation clepien & callen (MED, s.v. callen, def. 1c). About 180 years later, Chaucer still uses clepe alongside calle. In a later 13th-century version of the St. Margaret legend also from the Western Midlands, felaw (from ON felagi; MED, s.v. felau(e), def. 1a) seems to have the same semantic range as fere (from OE gefera; MED, s.v. fere, def. 1a), and so do both forms a hundred years later, for instance, in Gower’s Confessio Amantis (MED, s.v. felau(e), def. 1a and fere, def. 1a). These few samples, which are anything but representative, already show, for one thing, that by the end of the 14th century the competition between Old Norse and indigenous English forms is not yet decided in London usage. Moreover, where both are used, they seem to be on an equal footing registerwise. The contact situation between English and French (cf. Skaffari, Chapter 10) but also with Latin, was, in turn, very different, and so was, grosso modo, the turnout of loans from French (and Latin) with regard to lexical variation in terms of nouns, verbs and adjectives. Moreover, by way of borrowing and calquing, new prepositions, adverbs and conjunctions were established in English, considerably increasing its syntactic versatility, as will be illustrated in the following section.

4 From external to internal standards With the exception of “AB” as an extremely localized “standard”, the standardizations discussed in Section 3 concentrated on the striving for supralocalizations in spelling and specific grammatical forms that seem to have mainly served pragmatic purposes in that they made transdialectal communication in writing easier. Nevertheless, “prestige” as the motive for following a specific model has been adduced more or less prominently to “explain” the respective “standardization”. “Prestige” is, in turn, also often put forward when it comes to assessing the relation between Middle English on the one side and Latin and French on the other. Latin and French have been identified as fulfilling “some of the functions of a standard language in Britain” (Görlach 1990a [1988]: 17), while Middle English is considered “a typical case of a language of low prestige” (Görlach 1990b [1986]: 74) at the time. According to Fisher (1996 [1992]: 22), matters dramatically changed after Henry V had written his first missive in English in August of 1417, but this certainly draws too simple a picture of how and why English in the 15th century started to develop into a multi-purpose language in writing.

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The so-called “Statute of Pleading” of 1362 – which is so often judged as having considerably raised the status of English – indeed mandates that English be the (spoken) language of pleading at court. Yet it does so in French – and in the complicated left-branching syntax of “courtly style” – because, at the time, French was the language in which royal statutes where published; and it also regulates that the pleas be “entered and enrolled” in Latin, because this was the language of permanent record. This throws light on a functional distribution of the available languages: if we want to interpret this distribution in terms of “prestige”, it may be wiser to deduce “prestige” from the functions of the discourse traditions rather than from the individual languages as such. The functional distribution, in turn, can be attributed to the way in which Latin and French were already “elaborated” to serve various functions in writing, and simultaneously to the fact that this was not yet the case for English. In short, it could be reasoned that the “restricted use” of Middle English indicates “that means of expressing complicated syntactic patterns were not sufficiently well developed” (Görlach 1990a [1988]: 21). This very general assessment should, however, be specified in order to be able to retrace which steps improved the syntactic capabilities of English. As has been stated before, languages, for one thing, enter the literary realm along the paths of discourse traditions (Koch and Oesterreicher 1994: 594; see Section 2.2 above). Moreover, we need to take into account that written discourse traditions were obviously firmly established in England in both Latin and French. In view of these observations we may infer that those discourse traditions realized in Latin and French constituted norms to be aimed at in English as well. This is conceptualized here as the adoption of “external standards” in English which, when they have finally left their orginal discourse-traditional habitat, become “internal standards”. As substantial research within this heuristic framework is only slowly beginning, the following selective remarks have to suffice in order to illustrate which results this approach to standardization may still provide in the future.

4.1 Elaboration of open-class lexis As has been indicated, on a large scale French may be considered the supralocal standard in the 13th and 14th centuries (Burnley 1989: 35), because it could serve a wide range of functions. In that sense Burnley (1989: 36) has stated that French is “a source of supra-dialectal lexis” in English. Instead of generally associating French in England with “prestige” and identifying this as the reason for lexical borrowings into English, we should rather suppose that the taking-over of lexical

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material from French (and Latin) to English was, once again, a matter of “specific-purpose” (con-)texts, and thus of discourse-traditional norm compliance. Subsequently such borrowings must have lost their “technical” marking and could simply serve supralocal communication. By the time of Chaucer, early borrowings – such as the often-quoted prison – which mainly came from the field of administration, have obviously become integral unmarked elements of the “systematic norm” (cf., e.g., Smith 1992: 61–62). Borrowings of this kind need, however, to be distinguished from that large number of loans which later inform the lexicon of Modern English and which obviously entered the linguistic system from written French or Latin (cf. Görlach 1990b [1986]: 74) in the late Middle English period. Again it seems a moot question to ask how “prestigious” these newly arriving loans actually were. In addition, one must be skeptical about claims that authors like Chaucer intentionally borrowed a large number of words from French and Latin to give English “a formal and intellectual character […] by deliberate artifice” (Catto 2003: 36). Instead it is interesting to watch what has become of these loans in Modern English, because there are apparently some such loans – like commence – that have never made it into the “immediate” informal register, but rather retain “a distinct stylistic significance even in modern English” (Smith 2006: 128). Although it must be doubted whether any theory of borrowing can be developed to allow valid predictions of what may and what may not enter the informal register, a historical retracing of individual lexical histories in terms of discourse traditions would certainly be quite fruitful, at least to account for some such items.

4.2 Syntactic elaboration Similar observations of register-distribution can be made with loans that have contributed to the inventory of free grammatical morphemes with their “[…] emergence and grammaticalisation patterns of new prepositions and adverbial subordinators borrowed from French or Latin and adopted to the gradually developing Southern Standard in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries” (Rissanen 2006: 133). For the time being, Modern English because, notwithstanding and during may serve as examples. As a partial calque of French à cause (de), Middle English because (of) was already grammaticalized by the age of Chaucer (Rissanen 2006: 138). In terms of register, because is today clearly favored in conversation, and in terms of frequency as adverbial subordinator it ranks second after if and before when (Biber et al. 1999: 842). In contrast, notwithstanding which translates Fr. nonobstant/

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Lt. non obstante in legal/administrative texts of the 15th century (cf. Rissanen 2002; Weber 2010) has never lost its “legalese” touch, so that it is today still qualified as “formal and rather legalistic in style” (Quirk et al. 1985: 706). The catchword “legalese” takes us back to the alleged role of “Chancery” – or rather “administrative” – English. Recollecting Wright’s (1994: 113) statement that it is “[…] not adequate to suggest that this diversity of function [of Modern Standard English] could have arisen solely from Chancery documents”, we need to take into account that the number of “government documents” in English after 1430 may only be great when considered in isolation. Unfortunately, the Parliamentary Rolls of Medieval England (PROME), which are now electronically available (Given-Wilson et al. 2005), for various reasons do not allow one to quantify the shares of English, French, and Latin in this corpus. In any event, French and Latin are still high in quantity. What PROME does, however, allow is a look into the side-by-side administrative use of all three languages, and it is this more or less simultaneous use which should be seen as the decisive clue to the extensive and intensive elaboration of written English. In her recent book on the Ausbau of late Middle English, Beatrix Weber (2010) has illustrated how individual elements like Fr./Lt. durant- and its English semicalque during occur in specific collocations in all three languages (Weber 2010: 121–135 and 178–181), so that it may be surmised that initially Fr./Lt. durantwas not only calqued, but was “transferred” in more or less frequent lexical combinations. Subsequently, the former present participle, grammaticalized into a preposition, could be combined freely, and is now register-neutral, while, as has been said above, the English calque notwithstanding, for instance, remains register-marked. It needs to be repeated that our knowledge of the syntactic elaboration of late Middle English through borrowing and calquing is only slowly unfolding. Nevertheless, we may assume that by conceptualizing the increase of syntactic versatility in late Middle (and early Modern) English as discourse-traditional norm compliance, we will gain further insight into the specific conditions of a rising written standard that shifts from “specific purpose” to an “all-purpose” use. Many of the relevant phenomena will, however, remain restricted to the written “language of distance” (Koch and Oesterreicher 2012), for which they ultimately developed in Latin and French and were then taken over into English.

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5 Summary The communicative space of post-Conquest medieval England was trilingual for a long time, and by the late 15th century this situation had not yet come to an end. Nevertheless, the use of English in writing substantially increased in quantity as well as in its functional range. While in the first two centuries of Middle English standardizations are, at best, locally – or even individually – restricted, English texts from the 14th and the 15th centuries show attempts supralocally to extend the written vernacular’s use by following diatopically neutralized norms of spelling, grammar, and lexis. By reducing dialectal variability, these are standardizing moves toward a “minimal variation in form” (Haugen 1966), although this was not yet achieved by formal codification. While such standardizing developments reduced variation, the extensive elaboration to achieve a “maximal variation in function” demanded increased variation, or rather variability. This type of standardization, and hence normcompliance, aimed at the discourse-traditional norms already available in the literary languages French and Latin. Late Middle English was thus re-established in writing with the help of both Latin and French norms rather than merely substituting for these literary languages. Last but not least, it has been seen at various points in this chapter that it does not take physically existing institutions such a school, an administrative center, a poeta laureatus (cf. Horobin, Chapter 15), or even a king to trigger and sanction standardizations. Standardizations rather establish themselves in terms of norm-oriented communicative practices (cf. Nevalainen 2000: 333), and in Middle English such practices reduced variation to serve supralocal purposes, and enhanced variability to serve cross-register versatility.

6 References Benskin, Michael. 1991. Some new perspectives on the origins of standard written English. In: J. A. van Leuvensteijn and Johannes B. Berns (eds.), Dialect and Standard Language: In the English, Dutch, German and Norwegian Language Areas; Seventeen Studies in English or German [proceedings of the Colloquium “Dialect and Standard Language”, Amsterdam, 15–18 October 1990], 71–105. Amsterdam: North-Holland. Benskin, Michael. 2004. Chancery Standard. In: Christian Kay, Carole Hough, and Irené Wotherspoon (eds.), New Perspectives on English Historical Linguistics. Selected Papers from 12 ICEHL, Glasgow, 21–26 August 2002. Vol. II. Lexis and Transmission, 1–40. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad, and Edward Finegan. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Longman.

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Black, Merja. 1999. AB or simply A? Reconsidering the case for a standard. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 100: 155–174. Burnley, John David. 1986. Curial prose in England. Speculum 61: 593–614. Burnley, John David. 1989. Sources of standardization in later Middle English. In: Joseph B.  Trahern, Jr. (ed.), Standardizing English: Essays in the History of Language Change. In Honor of John Hurt Fisher, 23–41. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press. Burnley, John David. 2001. French and Frenches in fourteenth-century London. In: Dieter Kastovsky and Arthur Mettinger (eds.), Language Contact in the History of English, 17–34. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Catto, Jeremy. 2003. The making of the language 1370–1400. Past & Present 179: 24–59. Chambers, R. W. 1932. On the Continuity of English Prose from Alfred to More and his School. An Extract from the Introduction to Nicholas Harpsfield’s Life of Sir Thomas More edited by E. V. Hitchcock and R. W. Chambers. London: Oxford University Press (for the Early English Text Society). D’Ardenne, S. R. T. O. (ed.). 1961 [1936]. Þe Liflade and te Passiun of Seinte Iuliene. (Early English Text Society, 248.) Oxford: Oxford University Press. [First published in the Bibliothèque de la Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres de l’Université de Liège (fsc. LXIV) 1936.] Diller, Hans-Jürgen and Manfred Görlach (eds.). 2001. Towards a History of English as a History of Genres. Heidelberg: Winter. Fisher, John H. 1996 [1977]. Chancery and the emergence of standard written English. In: Fisher, 36–64. [First published in Speculum 52, 1977.] Fisher, John H. 1996 [1992] A language policy for Lancastrian England. In: Fisher, 16–35. [First published in PMLA 107, 1992.] Fisher, John H. 1996. The Emergence of Standard English. Knoxville, KY: The University of Kentucky Press. Given-Wilson, C. P., P. Brand, A. Curry, R. E. Horrox, G. Martin, W. M. Ormrod, and J. R. S. Phillips (eds.). 2005. The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England. Scholarly Digital Editions. http:// www.sd-editions.com/PROME/home.html; last accessed 3 January 2017. Görlach, Manfred. 1990a [1988]. The development of Standard Englishes. In: Görlach (ed.), 9–64. Görlach, Manfred. 1990b [1986]. Middle English – a creole? In: Görlach (ed.), 65–78. Görlach, Manfred (ed.). 1990c. Studies in the History of the English Language. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag. Haugen, Einar. 1966. Dialect, language, nation. American Anthropologist 68: 922–935. Koch, Peter and Wulf Oesterreicher. 2012 [1985]. Language of immediacy – language of distance: Orality and literacy from the perspective of language theory and linguistic history. In: Claudia Lange, Beatrix Weber and Göran Wolf (eds.), Communicative Spaces: Variation, Contact, and Change. Papers in Honour of Ursula Schaefer, 441–473. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. [English translation by Franz H. Bäuml and Ursula Schaefer of: Sprache der Nähe – Sprache der Distanz. Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im Spannungsfeld von Sprachtheorie und Sprachgeschichte. Romanisches Jahrbuch 36 (1985): 15–43]. Koch, Peter and Wulf Oesterreicher. 1994. Schriftlichkeit und Sprache. In: Hartmut Günther and Otto Ludwig (eds.), Schrift und Schriftlichkeit. Writing and Its Use, 587–604. (HSK 10.1.) Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Kurath, Hans, Sherman M. Kuhn, John Reidy, and Robert E. Lewis. 1952–2001. Middle English Dictionary. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. http://quod.lib.umich. edu/m/med/

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Liuzza, Roy. 2000. Scribal habit: The evidence of the Old English Gospels. In: Mary Swan and Elaine M. Treharne (eds.), Rewriting Old English in the Twelfth Century, 143–165. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Milroy, James. 1992. Middle English dialectology. In: Norman Blake (ed.), The Cambridge History of English. Vol. II. 1066–1476, 156–206. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Milroy, James. 1996. Linguistic ideology and the Anglo-Saxon lineage of English. In: Juhan Klemola, Merja Kytö, and Matti Rissanen (eds.), Speech Past and Present. Studies in English Dialectology in Memory of Ossi Ihalainen, 169–186. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Nevalainen, Terttu. 2000. Processes of supralocalisation and the rise of Standard English in the Early Modern period. In: Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero, David Denison, Richard M. Hogg, and C. B. McCully (eds.), Generative Theory and Corpus Studies. A Dialogue from 10 ICEHL, 329–371. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Nevalainen, Terttu. 2004. Letter writing. Introduction. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5: 181–191. Nevalainen, Terttu. 2006. Fourteenth-century English in a diachronic perspective. In: Schaefer (ed.), 117–132. Ormrod, W. Mark. 2003. The use of English: Language, law, and political culture in fourteenthcentury England. Speculum 78: 750–787. Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman. Richardson, Malcolm. 1980. Henry V, the English Chancery, and Chancery English. Speculum 55: 726–750. Rissanen, Matti. 2000. Standardisation and the language of early statutes. In: Laura Wright (ed.), The Development of Standard English 1300–1800. Theories, Descriptions, Conflicts, 117–130. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rissanen, Matti. 2002. Despite or notwithstanding? On the development of concessive prepositions in English. In: Andreas Fischer, Gunnel Tottie, and Hans Lehmann (eds.), Text Types and Corpora. Studies in Honour of Udo Fries, 191–203. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Rissanen, Matti. 2006. On the development of borrowed connectives in fourteenth-century English: Evidence from corpora. In: Schaefer (ed.), 133–146. Samuels, M. L. 1989 [1963]. Some applications of Middle English dialectology. In: Angus McIntosh, M. L. Samuels, and Margaret Laing (ed.), Middle English Dialectology. Essays on Some Principles and Problems, 64–80. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press [first published in English Studies 44, 1963]. Sandved, Arthur O. 1981. Prolegomena to a renewed study of the rise of Standard English. In: Michael Benskin and M. L. Samuels (eds.), So Meny People, Longages and Tonges. Philological Essays in Scots and Mediaeval English Presented to Angus McIntosh, 31–42. Edinburgh: Benskin & Samuels. Schaefer, Ursula. 1996. The Late Middle English Paston Letters: A grammatical case in point for reconsidering philological methodologies. In: Jürgen Klein and Dirk Vanderbeke (eds.), Anglistentag 1995 Greifswald, 313–323. Tübingen: Niemeyer Schaefer, Ursula. 2008. “Your Maiestee aue fause Frenche enough” – or: Did Henry V have a language policy? In: Anja Müller-Wood (ed.), Texting Culture – Culturing Texts. Essays in Honour of Horst Breuer, 43–58. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag. Schaefer, Ursula (ed.). 2006. The Beginnings of Standardization: Language and Culture in Fourteenth-Century England. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

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Smith, Jeremy J. 1992. The use of English. Language contact, dialect variation, and written standardisation during the Middle English period. In: Tim William Machan and Charles T. Scott (eds.), English in Its Social Contexts. Essays in Historical Sociolinguistics, 47–68. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Jeremy J. 1996. An Historical Study of English: Function, Form and Change. London: Routledge. Smith, Jeremy J. 2000. Standard language in Early Middle English? In: Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen, Päivi Pahta, and Matti Rissanen (eds.), Placing Middle English in Context, 125–139. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Smith, Jeremy J. 2006. From Middle English to Early Modern English. In: Linda Mugglestone (ed.), The Oxford History of English, 120–146. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taavitsainen, Irma. 2001. Language history and the scientific register. In: Diller and Görlach (eds.), 185–202. Thomason, Sarah Grey and Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language, Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tolkien, J. R. R. 1929. Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad. Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association 14: 104–126. Weber, Beatrix. 2010. Sprachlicher Ausbau: Konzeptionelle Studien zur spätmittelenglischen Schriftsprache. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Wright, Laura. 1994. On the writing of the history of Standard English. In: Francisco Fernández, Miguel Fuster, and Juan José Calvo (eds.), English Historical Linguistics 1992. Papers from the 7th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics. Valencia, 22–26 September 1992, 105–115. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.  

 

David M. Trotter

Chapter 12: Middle English Creolization 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Introduction 224 The creolization hypothesis 225 Language acquisition problems 230 Changes in Middle English 230 The post-Conquest language situation Summary 236 References 237

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Abstract: This chapter broadly rejects the creolization hypothesis put forward by Thomason and Kaufman (1977). At the same time, it recognizes deficiencies in standard accounts of the relationship between Middle English and Anglo-French, and reviews the current state of research on this topic. In addition, since at least some of the external circumstances which could have led to creolization existed, and creolization did not take place, the chapter discusses why that might have been so.

1 Introduction This chapter will focus on the problem of creolization in Middle English, with particular emphasis on Anglo-French (the traditional term “Anglo-Norman” has here been replaced by “Anglo-French”. “Anglo-Norman” implies that the French brought to England was “Norman” (which it was not in all cases). The use of “Anglo-French” is intended to be diachronically and geolinguistically neutral: it means simply “French as used in England”. The fact that this chapter does not discuss Anglo-French outside England (i.e., in the rest of the British Isles), should not be taken to mean that the language was not also in use in those areas. For the history of English, though, it is clearly England which is most important). It will reject the hypothesis itself, whilst recognizing that there are also defects in many of the traditional accounts of the relationship between Middle English and AngloFrench, which are only now, belatedly, beginning to be corrected in the standard David M. Trotter †: Aberystwyth (UK)

DOI 10.1515/9783110525328-012

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literature. Some of what has been said about creolization helps to shed light on the processes of language contact which must have occurred after 1066: the creolization hypothesis is still a useful starting-point for an analysis of how the merger between Anglo-French and English took place. In much which is still being written on the history of medieval English, the specialist scholarship from the Anglo-French perspective has not been taken into account. Even in quite recent publications, Middle English scholarship continues to recycle a history of Anglo-French to which Anglo-French specialists would no longer subscribe. A particular example is the persistence of the traditional “serial monolingualism” model (Trotter 2006b), according to which Anglo-Saxon gives way to AngloFrench, pending the revival of Middle English, with each language succeeding the other. Born out of the 19th-century nationalist ideology which accompanied and prompted the emergence of philology in England and elsewhere (Trotter 2006c), this model ignores the reality of the long-term coexistence of languages, and of language contact. Prominent amongst the areas in which language contact, going far beyond the limited “cultural borrowing” model, is evident, are (a) wholesale lexical transfer, (b) language mixing, (c) morphosyntactic hybridization, and (d) syntactic/idiomatic influences.

2 The creolization hypothesis The hypothesis that Middle English underwent creolization through contact with Anglo-French is a little over thirty years old. Its classic formulation is in the 1977 article by Bailey and Maroldt. The position adopted has not been generally accepted, and a series of influential studies appear, at least for the time being, to have demolished the idea. Görlach (1986) and Danchev (1997) have written devastating rejoinders. Whilst the creolization hypothesis seems to be, if not dead and buried, at any rate in a state of long-term cryogenic suspended animation, it is perhaps relevant to reflect on why creolization did not in fact take place when at least some of the circumstances existed which could have allowed it to do so. Let us, however, first review the situation which existed after the Norman Conquest. A small number of invaders (numerical estimates vary, but they cannot ever have been more than a very small minority of the total population of England), speaking a different language from that in use amongst the inhabitants of the country, were immediately in contact with the indigenous population, whose language, presumably, the invading army did not speak. By definition, that army, and subsequent reinforcements and colonists, were the social, political, and economic elite. If numerically unimportant, they had sociolinguistic

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prestige, associated with power, on their side. There is some new DNA evidence, for the Anglo-Saxon period, that an elite incoming group could (in that historical case) have enjoyed an evolutionary advantage over native Britons which would have meant that their influence (both on the gene pool, and possibly on language) might have been disproportionate to their numbers (Thomas et al. 2006). However, such evidence is problematic (it presupposes sufficiently distinct DNA for the groups concerned), and it is not likely to be available for the Anglo-French invasion (since in all probability, the Normans, by virtue of their Scandinavian ancestry, had the same DNA haplogroup as the Anglo-Saxon elite in England). The Normans rapidly took over positions of power and authority, displacing locals, and making their own appointments further down the hierarchy of Church and state alike. Information is limited, but it is clear that (despite a legal distinction between Normans and Englishmen for at least the earlier period of the Middle Ages: Garnett 1985), there was intermarriage, typically involving Norman men marrying English women. For this, and indeed daily life, to have been feasible implies one of a number of scenarios: (a) English speakers learnt French, (b) French speakers learnt English, or (c) a creole emerged. The creolization hypothesis depends on the third of these three options, but what occurred was a combination of the first two options. Unless the term “creolization” is used so loosely as to be little more than a synonym for influence because of language contact, certain specific features must be present. These include the type of language situation which obtained in medieval England; but that is a necessary, not a sufficient, condition. Creolization often though not always entails, as a preliminary phase, the evolution of a pidgin. Pidgin languages are nobody’s native (mother) tongue; they are (typically) much simplified. Even Bailey and Maroldt do not claim that any such pidgin existed in medieval England; indeed, they explicitly reject it (Bailey and Maroldt 1977: 22, 28–29). The subsequent process whereby a pidgin becomes a creole involves its use as a mother tongue (thus, in the next generation), and, usually but not indispensably, development, normally from the source language, to meet an expanded language’s expanded needs. It is often although not invariably the case that it is some form of the invader’s language which forms the distant startingpoint of the pidgin and hence the creole; another possibility is the emergence of an “interlanguage”, by definition new (Danchev 1997). None of these processes appears to have taken place in medieval England and it is thus hard to argue that creolization (as understood by the experts: see, still, Whinnom 1965, 1971, 1977) ever took place. Ultimately, had French been learnt by the English-speaking population, then English (as the successor of Anglo-Saxon) could have disappeared, a hypothesis memorably and provocatively aired in 1889:

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Peu s’en est fallu pourtant que l’idiome porté en Angleterre par les Normands de Guillaume le Conquérant ne soit devenu la langue commune du Royaume uni. Si l’effort si manifeste au XIIIe siècle et dans la première moitié du XIVe siècle s’était poursuivi pendant une cinquantaine d’années, si l’effroyable guerre de Cent ans n’était venue diminuer les relations entre la France et l’Angleterre, ou, en tout cas, en modifier la nature, l’anglais, réduit déjà à l’état de patois, se serait éteint peu à peu. Les conséquences de ce fait, qui paraissait probable au temps où écrivait Higden [Ranulph Higden, author of the Polychronicon, midfourteenth century], eussent été incalculables, et il est à croire qu’elles eussent été profitables à l’humanité. ‘However, the language brought over to England by the Normans led by William the Conqueror only narrowly avoided becoming the common tongue of the United Kingdom. If the very clear efforts made during the thirteenth and the first half of the fourteenth centuries had been continued for another fifty or so years, if the devastating Hundred Years War had not come along to undermine the relationship between France and England, or at any rate, to change the nature of that relationship, English, already reduced to the status of a dialect, would bit by bit have died out. The consequences of such a development, which seemed likely at the time when Higden was writing, would have been immeasurable, and it may be believed that they would have been to the benefit of mankind.’ (Toulmin Smith and Meyer 1889: lvii).

In most cases, apparently, the incoming Anglo-Normans (not all of whom were necessarily of high social status) clearly learnt English. Some Englishmen, equally, clearly learnt French. Not only was Anglo-French of considerable social and economic benefit within England, it was also the means of access to French, to France (where, in the 12th century, the English kings controlled more territory than did their French counterparts), and to the wider, European world. Right through the Middle Ages, French in its various forms was, after Latin, the international language: acquiring Anglo-French was thus a major advantage. It has been aptly described as the “bridge” between England and Europe (Short 2007: 25). A further complication arises, as far as the documentary record is concerned, because, as Clanchy (2012) has so brilliantly explained, there is no necessary connection between the language spoken and the languages of record in use either on a given occasion, or more generally. Anglo-French records of a discussion do not necessarily mean that there was a discussion in Anglo-French. Indeed, it has recently been tantalizingly suggested (Ingham 2009) that in some manorial records, the existence of apparently isolated Middle English words as single-lexeme switches (in Anglo-French embedded in Latin matrix documents) is explicable only if they are interpreted as vestiges of instructions originally delivered in English, but largely (though not unfailingly) transposed into AngloFrench when written down. After the Conquest, Anglo-Saxon (hitherto a flourishing literary, religious, and indeed documentary language) largely disappears from sight, to be replaced by Anglo-French, although still present in isolated texts and fragments found in a surprising number of manuscripts (Da Rold 2006). The

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pre-Conquest written languages, Latin and Anglo-Saxon, thus give way, after the Conquest, to Latin and Anglo-French. This state of affairs, in addition to the already considerable difficulties in determining the reality of language use anywhere in the Middle Ages, means that we can infer even less than usual from the extant documentary evidence. And of course, with the emergence in particular of an increasingly documentary society during the 13th century, and with the growing need for written records in (especially) the towns, Anglo-French spread downwards through society, and was used as a language of record at almost all levels at which records were kept. This, in turn, presupposes the development of a class of professional writers, many of whom, already by the end of the 12th century, would no longer have been (if they ever had been) native speakers of AngloFrench. The rapid development of writing is thus, amongst other things, a mechanism whereby a number of Englishmen, who were presumably mainly monoglot in English (Short 2009), not only came into contact with, but in many cases were required to develop some competence in, Anglo-French. This may even have been true in the countryside, where the evidence for the use of French is thinner on the ground and where, indeed, French was probably much less used than in the towns (Short 2009: 245; but cf. Rothwell 2010; and for a discussion of possible Anglo-French influence on English dialects). For a convenient, accessible, and predictably well-informed summary of the sociolinguistic history of Anglo-French, we may turn to William Rothwell, long-standing general editor of the Anglo-Norman Dictionary and undoubtedly the scholar best qualified to comment. What he has to say (see below) runs directly and consistently counter to the picture painted by the studies of both Bailey and Maroldt (1977), and Thomason and Kaufman (1988) (cf. also the well-informed introduction in Short 2007). As Rothwell himself points out (1998: 149), those who advocate creolization and those who oppose it contrive to use the same evidence to argue for diametrically opposed positions. This is how Rothwell presents the situation: The basic difficulty with Anglo-French is that it was one of the three languages of postConquest medieval England, whose relationship to each other changed imperceptibly but inexorably over nearly four centuries. Anglo-Latin gradually lost ground to Anglo-French in its role as the official language of record at both national and local level, whilst Middle English emerged over time from being a predominantly spoken language to take over from the two others in the fifteenth century as the acknowledged national language, both spoken and written. This simple summary statement, however, hides a complex linguistic interplay brought about by the continuously evolving social situation in Britain and on the continent for many decades after the Conquest. In the first place, the role of Middle English for over two centuries after 1066 cannot be determined with any precision in the absence of an adequate body of surviving recorded evidence before the fourteenth century, although it was there all the time in the background as the spoken vernacular of the majority of the population, despite many of them using

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French and/or Latin in their writings. Secondly, Anglo-French was not merely the language of the conquerors, destined to decline and eventually wither as the French component of the population dwindled from one generation to the next and was gradually absorbed into an anglophone society. […] The enduring links between France and the offshore island were not broken by the loss of Normandy in 1204, nor did they persist only in the form of military incursions […] French civilization did not stop at Calais or Dieppe, but was carried over into England on parchment and by word of mouth, as is demonstrated by translations of numerous Biblical works into Anglo-French, the production of a range of botanical and medical texts based on European works and the presence in France for long periods of cosmopolitan scholars from England like Adam of Petit Pont, John of Garland and Alexander Nequam, whilst, on the other hand, as late as the fourteenth century, the French chroniclers Jehan le Bel and Froissart were certainly not ignorant of the corresponding lettered class in England. At the same time thriving trade links with the countries on the mainland of Europe were similarly conducted in French, the medieval language of commerce in western Europe. […] Within the confines of England the various aspects of the machinery of government, at both national and municipal level, religious as well as secular, functioned in Britain largely through the medium of French until the fifteenth century. (Rothwell 2006/2017)

To summarize the consensus amongst Anglo-French specialists: for maybe a century or so after the arrival of the Norman invaders, Anglo-French (a conglomerate – better, a variegated mosaic – of a whole range of northern French dialects) would have been in use as a spoken language amongst the elite, and amongst those whom they brought with them (not all of whom were members of that elite: see the Bayeux Tapestry). In parallel, Anglo-Saxon would have continued as the spoken language of the mass of the population. That situation gave way during the course of the 13th century neither to the disappearance of French, nor to a complete severance of England and Normandy, but to a position whereby AngloFrench, fully established as a documentary language, began increasingly to be acquired as a second language by a population whose mother tongue would by then have been almost exclusively English. We should not forget that these processes in fact affected only a small minority of the overall population, which would never have been anything other than monoglot English (and of course completely illiterate) throughout the entire period. There are, then, in this changing situation, several variables. The first concerns the distinction, already alluded to above, between spoken and written language. The second (also already mentioned) concerns the mode of acquisition of the language or languages concerned. In the same volume as that in which Bailey and Maroldt’s paper originally appeared, Brigitte Schlieben-Lange published a methodologically interesting discussion of creolization in the emergence of the Romance languages. She emphasized (Schlieben-Lange 1977: 97) the need for distinctions between written and spoken languages, and between different modes of language-acquisition, to be borne in mind (in the case of her study, cautioning against careless comparisons

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between creolization, for example in the West Indies, and the emergence of Romance vernaculars in Western Europe). The lesson is equally applicable to the position in medieval England, but it is only too rarely applied.

3 Language acquisition problems It is, or should be, self-evident that the acquisition of Anglo-French as a second language for professional purposes, perhaps predominantly for use in writing (although see Ingham 2009), is a different process from the learning of the same language as a mother tongue. It is perfectly possible to imagine a situation where quite competent Anglo-French could have been written by Englishmen incapable of speaking the language. This is precisely how modern languages were taught in Britain until, and in some cases well beyond, the middle of the 20th century. The acquisition process may not have been all that dissimilar: modern languages were taught until relatively recently essentially as though they were classical languages, helped no doubt by the fact that the grammatical terminology deployed was and in some cases still is, substantially that of classical Latin. Medieval municipal officials might well have been educated in a similar way, and indeed the evidence is that (to some extent) they were. They attended grammar schools. From the extant teaching materials, it is clear that Latin was always in the background and often in the foreground of the instructional process. Latin was a language which they were also required to manipulate in writing, although presumably virtually never in speech. So the model was certainly there; the mechanisms for transmitting the language as an essentially written medium were well established; and the process must in many cases have had remarkably little to do with what we think of as normal language contact. Equally different again would have been the process involved in the acquisition of (predominantly, if not exclusively spoken) English by a member of the minor Norman nobility who required competence in the language in order to converse with either his English wife, or his senior local officials.

4 Changes in Middle English A second aspect of the creolization discussion (in addition to the availability of the necessary linguistic, demographic, and social context) is whether we may identify, in Middle English after the Norman Conquest, changes which are compatible with what is normally understood by, and characteristic of, the process of creolization. In other words, does the subsequent linguistic evidence

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support post factum the hypothesis that creolization took place? Here, unfortunately, as has been pointed out by Rothwell (1996), neither the proponents of the creolization hypothesis nor those who have sought to undermine it display sufficient first-hand knowledge of linguistic and social linguistic realities in medieval England. Nearly all those who have written on the topic are specialists either in creolistics, or in the history of English. None has a thorough, first-hand knowledge of Anglo-French, which is clearly one of the languages involved whether (as Bailey and Maroldt 1977 rather curiously suggest) because Middle English is the product of the impact of English on Anglo-French or, a little more plausibly, if Anglo-French is thought to be the source of creolizing influence exerted on English. This second interpretation, of the two, certainly seems better to fit the linguistic facts: overwhelmingly the most important aspect of cross-language influence between Anglo-French and English is the impact of the former on the latter, most strikingly in terms of lexis. In structure, English was not substantially altered, or at least, was only altered in ways consonant with developments which were already under way. The pattern of lexical influence (which includes idioms), but of only restricted impact in syntax and morphology (and for that matter, phonology), seems more consistent with the hypothesis that it was Anglo-French which influenced English, rather than the converse. Significant changes other than to lexis are restricted to the emergence in English of new diphthongs like /oi/ and /ui/ (Diensberg 1985), and perhaps the enormous productivity of Frenchderived suffixes appended to native English stems to generate new nouns and adjectives on the models of (for example) -age (passage, carriage, poundage, average) or -ity (enmity, charity, parity, sanctity). But if (as seems likely) these suffixes entered English attached to French words, this is less a case of derivational morphology than an aspect of lexical borrowing. It is regrettable that the best-known response to the creolization hypothesis (Thomason and Kaufman 1988) should be so defective in its acquaintance with primary data. For obvious reasons, the study has mainly attracted the attention of Anglicists, and as a result, it was not until Rothwell (1998) that a critique informed by an adequate knowledge of Anglo-French was produced. Thus, the assertion by Thomason and Kaufman that “[i]t can in no way be considered reasonable to suppose that any of the conditions of pidginization, creolization, or language mixture existed between English and French in the Middle Ages” (Thomason and Kaufman 1988: 309) is likely to raise, at the very least, eyebrows, for anyone with any real knowledge of the historical and sociolinguistic situation (cf. Rothwell 1998: 149). The basis of the assertion appears to be that French began to be given up (by French speakers) by “1235 at the latest”, the date being presumably that just before the arrival of Eleanor of Provence (Thomason and Kaufman 1988:

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308). It is further claimed that “[t]here is no reason to suppose that any large proportion of native English learned French between 1066 and 1250; after that point they had no reason to do so”. These statements are (as Rothwell observes) unsubstantiated and unsupported, for the simple reason that there is no support for them in the historical evidence: it in fact flatly contradicts them. “French” (i.e., Anglo-French) continued in use and was learnt right through the later Middle Ages – or at any rate, teaching materials exist, which we must assume were used, although regarding whose efficacy we know little. That the statements just quoted are at variance with such facts does not stop them being repeated verbatim by recent scholarship (Fennell 2001: 130). Comments like this also appear to ignore any distinction between spoken and written language and (perhaps of even greater significance) to disregard the difference between a mother tongue and an acquired second or even (conceptually) “foreign” language. Yet none of the discussion about the sociolinguistic situation in medieval England makes any sense unless such fundamental distinctions are borne in mind.

5 The post-Conquest language situation In terms of the cultural status of the two vernacular languages at the time of the Conquest, we are much better informed about the indigenous language, AngloSaxon. It had a long and distinguished tradition of use in all sorts of contexts, and was certainly a fully functional language in its own right, occupying, in parallel with Latin, many of the roles which (in a diglossic model) would be associated with a “high” language. About Anglo-French, we can be much less certain. Its origins are not very well known beyond the obvious assumption that the invaders will have brought with them whatever (varied) northern Gallo-Romance dialects they spoke at home in Normandy, north-eastern, and western France – regions across which we do know that there was, already, significant variation. It is a striking fact, too, that what was in effect the last significant Germanic invasion into Romance-speaking territory (taking the form of sporadic, then more regular military incursions, followed by the subsequent grant to and colonization of Normandy by Duke Rollo) should have been followed by so limited a linguistic impact in France. Indeed, in general terms the contrast between France and England throughout the post-Roman period, and even before, is one which raises some interesting questions (Trotter 2013). Just as Latin became universal in Gaul, it had almost no impact in Britain. Anglo-Saxon ousted British, but even Frankish, the most influential Germanic language in Gaul, contributed very little. The Normans, originally Norsemen, established themselves in Normandy, and within a

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century and a half had apparently so far assimilated some form of Norman GalloRomance that they were able subsequently to export it to both Sicily (1063) and England (1066). The Vikings, Norsemen by another name, were meanwhile taking over substantial quantities of northern and eastern England, and contributing extensively (via their influence on certain dialects) to what would in due course become the English language. But that, as far as we can tell, is really all that is known about the pre-history of Anglo-French. It has to be assumed (although medievalists, curiously, often forget this; cf. Rothwell 1998: 149) that the language brought over in 1066 was geographically and socially varied. What we do not have is much in the way of evidence of what that language was like, and even if we did have evidence, it would of necessity be written, and that might well be of limited use. There are no Norman texts much before 1100, and in practice, we have Anglo-French texts almost as early as anything from Normandy, and almost as early as anything from anywhere in France. A high proportion of extant manuscripts of the earliest continental French literary texts are also Anglo-French (the most famous case being that of the Chanson de Roland) and this further complicates the issue, since it means that even apparently straightforward “French” literary evidence survives in Anglo-French scribal garb (Howlett 1996). The number of pre-Conquest documents which are extant in any Northern French variety does not get into double figures. Yet what we do know is that, almost literally as soon as they landed in England, the conquering Normans set about writing in their own language. The reasons include (no doubt) a desire to impose their own culture, to enhance William’s claim to the English throne by emphasizing the continuity of practice with Anglo-Saxon, as well as the simple fact that there already existed (unusually in the Romance world, but common enough in Germanic lands) a tradition in England of vernacular writing. But what the use of Anglo-French does suggest is that, to the invaders, their language was, like Anglo-Saxon, a distinguished and appropriate vehicle for writing, in other words, like Anglo-Saxon, a “high” language in diglossic terms. In the case of Anglo-French England, two languages and cultures met, with alongside them a third, which was shared by both sides, namely Latin. Under those circumstances, it was logical that the language of the invaders should become the language of administration, and that the language of the (obviously far more numerous) invaded, should, as it were, go underground, persisting as a spoken (but increasingly low) variety, and only leaving very limited traces in the documentary record of the period between the Conquest and the 13th century.

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5.1 Lexical transfer What, then, were the results of this language contact? I mentioned above four main consequences: wholesale lexical transfer, language mixing, morphosyntactic hybridization, and syntactic/idiomatic influences. “Lexical transfer” has been preferred here over the (traditional) term “borrowing”, simply in order to emphasize the extent to which the process cannot readily be described within the parameters of what is typically meant by borrowing. Implicit in that idea is either a deficit in the target language, or the perception that a borrowed, foreign word is desirable and prestigious. It is not at all clear that either of these factors are significant in the history of the transfer of Anglo-French lexis into Middle English. Contrary to what is often implied, and even explicitly stated, in many handbooks of the history of English, we should assume that Anglo-French served as the route of transmission; it would be, to say the least, surprising if English users had looked overseas for words which were readily available at home (Rothwell 1998: 152–153). The proximity of Anglo-French ensured a massive influx of new terminology, in many cases adding to rather than replacing native words. In addition to the relatively well-known examples in the world of administration, law, literature, and so forth, there is a substantial transfer into lower, even vulgar, registers of English of everyday words of Anglo-French origin (bugger, bastard, etc.: Rothwell 1996), suggesting that the process, and indeed the underlying language contact, must have been more thorough, and deeper, than is often supposed. A second, but no less important, process is that whereby Middle English words have developed independently from continental French. This has been copiously documented in an impressive series of substantial articles by Rothwell, and does not need to be rehearsed in extenso here. Examples are the series dungeon ~ donjon, moat ~ motte. The English senses of these words, where dungeon and moat are below ground level (whereas donjon and motte are above) derived from developments which took place in Anglo-French before being carried over into English (see The Anglo-Norman Dictionary, AND; http://www.anglonorman.net/gate/). In charting the chronology of the process, we are again at the mercy of the documentary evidence. The key period of lexical transfer appears to be the 14th century; but that may be, as much as anything else, because of the explosion of available documentation in both Anglo-French and, more particularly, Middle English at that time. In other words, the real dates of the transfers may not be the dates at which they are documented. Some evidence that this is not so is available in the form of English surnames, of Anglo-French origin (Rothwell 1998: 160), and indeed in the capacity of some early Middle English texts to generate hybrids from Anglo-French and Middle English (forpreiseð; propreliche; priveiliche from Ancrene Wisse, Trotter 2003a: 97).

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5.2 Language mixing The catch-all term “language mixing” is here used to refer simply to the considerable range of mixed-language documents which survive from the later Middle Ages. In some, the base or matrix language is apparently Latin; in others, AngloFrench, and as time goes on, increasingly, Middle English. These documents clearly, in part, bear witness to the type of wholesale lexical transfer just discussed, which amounts to no less than the wholesale merger of two lexical sets, that of Anglo-French and that of Middle English. But the process goes far beyond that. Quantities of medieval documents survive in (often heavily abbreviated) medieval British Latin, into which have been inserted substantial numbers of Anglo-French or Middle English terms, usually of course substantives; analysis of this material is complicated by the abbreviation system, which may even have been designed to ensure that the language of the documents was flexible, and that words could have been read in more than one language (Wright 1996; Wright 2000: 150–151, quoting the case of the form candel’, amenable to being read in more than one language, as either English or a Latin genitive plural depending on how the final contraction l’ is construed), but also by the fact that in the later period (that is, after around 1350) the distinction between Middle English and Anglo-French is increasingly hard to draw. As is apparent from even a cursory perusal of the Middle English Dictionary (Kurath et al. 1952–2001) it is by no means always clear whether a given word, listed as Middle English but first attested in an Anglo-French context, actually is Middle English, or is perceived as an Anglo-French borrowing. At this distance in time, inevitably, metalinguistic information of this type is hard to come by. It can be exceptionally difficult to determine the exact status of the word in such a context: and indeed, it may be that the modern assumption that we can even try to differentiate between languages which (lexically) were by then so closely related, is misguided. So, for example, a notionally English word of Anglo-French origin (e.g. pendant) may be identified as Middle English, even if it first occurs in an Anglo-French text and would thus (to an Anglo-French specialist) be uncomplicatedly but indisputably Anglo-French: “.ij. yerdropes iij. petitz Ropes febles ij. pendantz pour lez polankrez ij. Junkes febles et en partie wastez un Cranelyne feble un baill’ un Spogeour un Mast pour le Batell’ un Anker pour le Batell” (Trotter 2006a: 79). The decision to allocate pendant to Middle English is essentially arbitrary, and based on a supposition (also arbitrary) that a distinction may be established between “Anglo-French” and “Middle English” at the level of lexis. This seems at best suspect when dealing with Middle English words of Anglo-French provenance. There is a case, too, for arguing that mixed-language documents are the documentary equivalent of bilingual individuals, both evidence of language contact and

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linguistic transfer, and the mechanism by which they were effected (cf. Vidos 1960).

5.3 Morphosyntactic hybridization This may, in some ways, be regarded as a combination of the two phenomena which have just been examined. Sometimes referred to (Romaine 1995: 56; Trotter 2003a) as “loanblends”, morphosyntactically hybrid forms are those where Anglo-French and Middle English elements combine: taskewerk, for example (Rothwell 2000: 227–228). Why this phenomenon is of particular importance is because of what it tells us about the extent and depth of language contact. Clearly, in order for one language to adopt the morphology of another, a more thoroughgoing level of contact is required than is needed for the simple acquisition of discrete substantives by one language from the other. In terms of derivational morphology, what this amounts to is that (for example) the Anglo-French suffix -age has become productive in English. This implies assimilation (phonetically and conceptually), as well as a sufficient understanding of morpheme boundaries to enable words to be appropriately accommodated to the new suffix. It is difficult to imagine this happening without a sufficient number of sufficiently bilingual individuals. It does not necessarily follow that this bilingualism involved the spoken language, since it is presumably possible to envisage a situation in which adequate familiarity with the written languages would have allowed scribes to acquire and then to apply the morphological rules required.

6 Summary The contact between Anglo-French and Middle English was extensive and the impact of Anglo-French was considerable, particularly on lexis. Contact and impact are part of, but not the same as, creolization. A massive importation of Anglo-French does not make the resulting language any less English and it does not (just because creoles are relexified) justify the term “creolization”. Nevertheless, what took place is far more than “borrowing”: the process was one of the wholesale mergers of two formerly discrete lexical sets, to the point where it can often be difficult (in e.g. the 14th century) to decide which language a given word embedded in (say) a Latin text belongs to. Creolization did not occur in (or to) Middle English because there was no need for it: medieval England was happily multilingual, and had no need (or incentive) to turn two (or three) languages into one.

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7 References Bailey, Charles-James N. and Karl Maroldt. 1977. The French lineage of English. In: Meisel (ed.), 21–53. Clanchy, Michael. 2012. From Memory to Written Record. England 1077–1307. 3rd edn. London: Edward Arnold. Danchev, Andrei. 1997. The Middle English creolization hypothesis revisited. In: Jacek Fisiak (ed.), Studies in Middle English Linguistics, 79–108. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Da Rold, Orietta. 2006. English manuscripts 1060 to 1220 and the making of a resource. Literature Compass 3: 750–766. Diensberg, Bernhard. 1985. Untersuchungen zur phonologischen Rezeption romanischen Lehnguts im Mittel- und Frühneuenglischen. Die Lehnwörter mit mittelenglisch oi/ui und ihre phonologische Rezeption. Tübingen: Günter Narr Verlag. Dor, Juliette. 1994. Langues française et anglaise, et multilinguisme à l’époque d’Henri II Plantagenêt. Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 38: 61–72. Fennell, Barbara. 2001. A History of English. A Sociolinguistic Approach. Oxford: Blackwell. Garnett, G. 1985. ‘Franci et Angli’: The legal distinction between peoples after the conquest. Anglo-Norman Studies 8: 109–137. Görlach, Manfred. 1986. Middle English – a creole? In: Dieter Kastovsky and Aleksander Szwedek (eds.), Linguistics across Historical and Geographical Boundaries. In Honour of Jacek Fisiak, Vol. I: Linguistic Theory and Historical Linguistics, 329–344. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. Howlett, David. 1996. The English Origins of Old French Literature. Dublin: Four Courts Press. Ingham, Richard. 2009. Mixing languages on the manor. Medium Aevum 78: 80–97. Kurath, Hans, Sherman M. Kuhn, John Reidy, and Robert E. Lewis. 1952–2001. Middle English Dictionary. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/; last accessed 3 January 2017. Meisel, Jürgen M. (ed.). 1977. Langues en contact – Pidgins – Creoles – Languages in Contact. Tübingen: Günter Narr Verlag. Romaine, Suzanne. 1995. Bilingualism. 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell. Rothwell, William. 1996. The Anglo-French element in the vulgar register of Late Medieval English. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 97: 423–437. Rothwell, William. 1998. Arrivals and departures: The adoption of French terminology into Middle English. English Studies 79: 144–165. Rothwell, William. 2000. Aspects of lexical and morphosyntactic mixing in the languages of medieval England. In: Trotter (ed.), 213–232. Rothwell, William. 2006/2017. Anglo-French and the AND. The Anglo-Norman On-Line Hub. 2nd edn. London: MHRA. http://www.anglo-norman.net/sitedocs/A-FandAND.shtml; last accessed 12 July 2017. Rothwell, William. 2010. Husbonderie and manaungerie in later medieval England: A tale of two Walters. In: Richard Ingham (ed.), The Anglo-Norman Language and its Contexts, 44–51. Woodbridge: York Medieval Press. Schlieben-Lange, Brigitte. 1977. L’origine des langues romanes – un cas de créolisation? In: Meisel (ed.), 81–101. Short, Ian. 2007. Manual of Anglo-Norman. London: Anglo-Norman Text Society. Short, Ian. 2009. Anglici loqui nesciunt: Monoglots in Anglo-Norman England. Cultura neolatina 69: 245–262.

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Thomas, Mark, Michael P. H. Stumpf, and Heinrich Härke. 2006. Evidence for an apartheid-like structure in early Anglo-Saxon England. Proceedings of the Royal Society 273: 2651–2657. Thomason, Sarah Grey and Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley/Los Angeles/Oxford: University of California Press. Toulmin Smith, Lucy and Paul Meyer. 1889. Les contes moralisés de Nicole Bozon. Paris: SATF. Trotter, David (ed.). 2000. Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Trotter, David. 2003a. The Anglo-French lexis of the Ancrene Wisse: A re-evaluation. In: Yoko Wada (ed.), A Companion to ‘Ancrene Wisse’, 83–101. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Trotter, David. 2003b. Not as eccentric as it looks: Anglo-French and French French. Forum for Modern Language Studies 39: 427–438. Trotter, David. 2006a. Language contact, multilingualism, and the evidence problem. In: Ursula Schaefer (ed.), The Beginnings of Standardization: Language and Culture in Fourteenth-Century England, 73–90. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Trotter, David. 2006b. Si le français n’y peut aller: Villers-Cotterêts and mixed-language documents from the Pyrenees. In: David Cowling (ed.), Conceptions of Europe in Renaissance France: Essays in Honour of Keith Cameron, 77–97. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi. Trotter, David. 2006c. Une et indivisible: Variation and ideology in the history and historiography of French. Revue roumaine de linguistique 51: 359–376. Trotter, David. 2013. Une rencontre germano-romane dans la Romania Britannica. In: Emili Casanova and Cesáreo Calvo Rigual (eds.), Actas del XXVI Congreso Internacional de Lingüística y Filologia Romániques, Vol. 1, 441–446. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Vidos, B.E. 1960. Le bilinguisme et le mécanisme de l’emprunt. Revue de linguistique romane 24: 1–19. Reprinted in: Vidos 1965: 295–310. Vidos, B.E. 1965. Prestito, espansione e migrazione dei termini tecnici nelle lingue romanze e non romanze. Problemi, metodo e risultati. Florence: L. S. Olschki. Whinnom, Keith. 1965. The origin of the European-based creoles and pidgins. Orbis 14: 509–527. Whinnom, Keith. 1971. Linguistic hybridization and the ‘special case’ of pidgins and creoles. In: Dell Hymes (ed.), Pidginization and Creolization of Languages, 91–115. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whinnom, Keith. 1977. The context and origins of lingua franca. In: Meisel (ed.), 3–18. Wright, Laura. 1996. Sources of London English: Medieval Thames Vocabulary. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wright, Laura. 2000. Bills, accounts, inventories: Everyday trilingual activities in the business world of later medieval England. In: Trotter (ed.), 149–156.  

 

 

 

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Chapter 13: Sociolinguistics 1 2 3 4 5

Introduction 239 Data in Middle English 241 Approaches to Middle English sociolinguistics Summary 257 References 257

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Abstract: This chapter describes and discusses the state-of-the-art in historical sociolinguistics, particularly when applied to Middle English. It suggests that all three domains of modern sociolinguistics, i.e. correlational and interactional sociolinguistics and the sociology of language, can be fruitfully employed in the study of Middle English, despite the fact that the Middle English period can indeed be very challenging with respect to language internal and external data. However, contrary to Labov’s claim that historical sociolinguistics is the art of making best use of bad data, it is shown that sociolinguistic studies in Middle English (and other periods) can also provide perspectives which ideally complement findings for Present-day English. In particular, the study of linguistic innovation, actuation, and diffusion across individual speakers’ lifetimes and across generations provides valuable new insights.

1 Introduction The Middle English period is a “middle” period also with regard to historical sociolinguistics. In some respects the sociolinguistics of Middle English is like modern sociolinguistics, since this appears to be the first period of English when we have enough linguistic and social data that warrant correlational and interactional analysis for at least some groups of society, or some discourse styles. There is even some data about the sociology of language. This is not to say, of course, that these studies are not possible for the time before Middle English. Studies like Toon (1983), Lenker (2000), and Gneuss (1971), among others, have shown that even Old English offers some very interesting viewpoints for historical socioAlexander Bergs: Osnabrück (Germany)

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linguistics. With the ME period, however, we see a significant increase in both sociological and linguistic material. This is also illustrated by the design of the Helsinki Corpus (Rissanen et al. 1991) (see Table 13.1). Table 13.1: Data in the Helsinki Corpus (Rissanen et al. 1991) Sub-period OLD ENGLISH I –850 II 850–950 III 950–1050 IV 1050–1150 Total MIDDLE ENGLISH I 1150–1250 II 1250–1350 III 1350–1420 IV 1420–1500 Total EARLY MODERN ENGLISH, BRITISH I 1500–1570 II 1570–1640 III 1640–1710 Total

Words

%

2 190 92 050 251 630 67 380 413 250

0.5 22.3 60.9 16.3 100.0

113 010 97 480 184 230 213 850 608 570

18.6 16.0 30.3 35.1 100.0

190 160 189 800 171 040 551 000

34.5 34.5 31.0 100.0

The ME period has the largest section with more than 600,000 words. However, the Early Modern English period is more balanced in its three subperiods. And yet there is no reason to think that the sociolinguistics of Middle English is anywhere near modern sociolinguistics, as it still lacks a vast amount of data on a number of aspects. So, for example, there are very few texts written by women and the “lower classes” (which, for the ME time is an anachronistic concept, of course, see Bergs 2012). Both these groups of speakers are united in the fact that women and members of the “lower classes” were usually illiterate in the Middle Ages. Graff (1987) estimates that only about 10% of the male population in the late Middle Ages was literate. For the female population we can assume something like 5% literacy in general. However, we also need to keep in mind that these figures varied considerably, depending on the place of living (urban literacy was higher) and social group (cf. Cressy 2006). Nevertheless, it can be argued (see Bergs 2005) that historical sociolinguistics is not “the art of making the best use of bad data” (Labov 1994: 11), but that it offers some very helpful and innovative insights into language variation and language change. One example of these would be the focus on individual speakers and their personal language use over

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long periods of time. In this chapter, I will first give a brief description of the data that is available in the Middle English period for sociolinguistic analyses. After that, I will present a look into the three major strands of sociolinguistics, i.e. correlational sociolinguistics, interactional sociolinguistics, and sociology of language, and their usability and applicability in the Middle English period. In this part, the aim is to integrate general theoretical and methodological issues with actual exemplary case studies. A final section summarizes the major findings.

2 Data in Middle English Probably one of the most popular sources for Middle English data is the Helsinki Corpus (Rissanen et al. 1991). The number of words in the individual sub-periods, however, already shows that the ME period must not be regarded as very homogeneous. On the contrary, as can be seen from Table 13.1 above, Section I, 1150– 1250, contains c.18% of the data, Section II, 1250–1350, about 16%, Section III, 1350–1420, 30% and Section IV, 1420–1500, 35%, i.e. about twice as much as Section II, even though it is 20 years shorter than Section II. Why is that so? We probably have to look into social history in order to explain this uneven distribution. The Norman Conquest took place in 1066. With this military strike the ruling class of Britain literally changed over night and Norman French became the language of many official purposes (cf. Trotter, Chapter 12). Simultaneously, we may assume that the country was still in a great deal of turmoil, even after the conquest. This means that people probably wrote fewer texts in English and that many manuscripts may also have been lost in postwar troubles. From about the middle of the 14th century onwards, we see a revival of the English language. In 1362, for example, the “Statute of Pleading” stipulated that “all Pleas which shall be pleaded in [any] Courts whatsoever, before any of his Justices whatsoever, or in his other Places, or before any of His other Ministers whatsoever, or in the Courts and Places of any other Lords whatsoever within the Realm, shall be pleaded, shewed, defended, answered, debated, and judged in the English Tongue, and that they be entered and inrolled in Latin” (Statute of Pleading, 1362, 36 Edw. 3, [Stat. 1], ch. 15 [Eng.], cf. Mellinkoff 1963: 111–112) – for the very simple reason that people did not know enough French anymore. So eventually we see a significant increase in our English language data over time between 1100 and 1500. Simultaneously, our data become more diverse, i.e. we find more genres and female authors entering the scene. The first dramatic pieces that we still have today stem from 12th and 13th century France (Querolus by Vitalis de Blois, La Jeu de Robin et Marion by Adam de la Halle), the first English dramatic pieces such as Mummings, Miracle, Morality and Mystery Plays did not

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appear before the 14th century, it seems. One of the first chivalric romances, imported from France, is the late 13th century Havelok the Dane. Some of the first women writers were Marie de France (12th century), Julian of Norwich (mid 14th century), and Margery Kempe (late 14th century), cf. Arnovick, Chapter 14. One of the most pressing problems for us today, however, is that we need to distinguish between authors and scribes. As has been pointed out before, only very few people in the Middle English period were actually literate. Many people who did not know how to read or write employed scribes (either family members or professional scribes) to write down their thoughts. Sometimes even literate people preferred the services of others. The documents which were not written by the authors themselves may have been created through multiple techniques: they could have been written (a) in real, online dictation, (b) through dictation with asynchronous writing (the scribes first listened to the speakers and then composed the documents from memory), (c) maybe also as products of the scribes themselves who were only provided with keywords and intentions. And, finally, sometimes literate authors would even draft their documents and let professional scribes finish their jobs by finalizing the manuscripts (cf. Clanchy 2012). This would not be a major problem, of course, if we were not looking at this from a sociolinguistic point of view. In sociolinguistics we try to bring social factors into some sort of correlation with linguistic facts. If we cannot be sure who actually produced the linguistic facts, scribes or authors, it is very hard to establish social facts. In some cases, we actually do know the scribes, in other cases we don’t. Either the author or the scribe of a given text can be known, or both, or neither of them. If neither of them is known, the text is completely anonymous. One such text is the 13th century monastic manual Ancrene Wisse). If both scribe and author are known, we usually know quite a few details about the development of the text or manuscript in question. One example would be Chaucer as the author, and Adam Pinkhurst as the scribe of the Consolation of Philosophy or possibly even the Canterbury Tales. And there are of course cases where we know the author, but not the scribe. William Langland is the author of Piers Plowman, but we do not know who the scribe of Corpus Christi College, MS 201(F) was. We don’t know the author of the Brut, but we know the scribe and translator John Shirley, who composed the copy in Harvard MS English 530 (fol 180v). But then we also need to keep in mind that “knowing” is a relative concept. We know a lot about John Shirley and his life, but only comparatively little about the person Adam Pinkhurst, and even less about the thousands of “Hand A”s and “Hand B”s who riddle our manuscripts. So, even scribal identification does not necessarily mean that we have sufficient sociological data on these people. It goes without saying that the same applies to authors: while we have quite a few Chaucer biographies, there is only little to say about William Langland.

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Where does that leave us? Back to square one: the art of making the best use of bad data? Not necessarily. Even if we do not know all the details of some author’s or scribe’s life, one can still try to locate these people in their social and cultural environment.

3 Approaches to Middle English sociolinguistics Modern English sociolinguistics can also be useful in the study of Middle English. In the following, each of the three major current approaches (correlational and interactional sociolinguistics as well as sociology of language) will be discussed in an individual section.

3.1 Correlational sociolinguistics Correlational sociolinguistics essentially seeks to uncover any relationship (correlation) between language internal variables – e.g. certain forms of pronunciation, morphological phenomena, or syntactic patterns – and independent language external variables – e.g. gender, class, education, age, or ethnicity. Such a correlation is usually expressed statistically. This in turn means that enough data, both language internally and externally, has to be available in order to reach statistical significance for the specific findings. Correlational sociolinguistics is interesting for historical sociolinguistics, and particularly Middle English, as long as certain social factors and gender are not concerned. We do not have sufficient statistical data and evidence for gendered language use in Middle English. There are a few female authors, such as Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich (cf. Barratt 2010). Their data, however, are not enough for any statistically significant analysis. It is only towards the end of the ME period, i.e. after about 1400, that we find more linguistic material to warrant comparisons between male and female language use. Similarly, the use of the concept of social class must be seen as an anachronism (see Bergs 2012). Social historians are still not entirely sure when the rise of the class concept in English really took place, but most would agree that medieval society was organized in estates or orders rather than “modern” classes (cf. Horrox and Ormrod 2006). This in turn means that our helpful modern division of lower versus middle versus upper class (as in, e.g., Trudgill 1974; Cheshire 1982; Labov 1972, and following) does not apply to Middle English. Rather, one would have to look for corresponding medieval concepts, such as social rank, estate, or order (see Raumolin-Brunberg and Nevalainen 1996, 2003 for an extensive discussion). However, since

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there is good reason to believe that at least some of the currently relevant factors may also have been operative in some form in the Middle Ages, or even at all times, it would be interesting to investigate them. But even secondary evidence from literature is extremely rare. Chaucer scholars, for example, are still fascinated by the fact that Chaucer used dialect features (i.e. regional, not social variants) in only one of his tales, the Reeve’s Tale, where features of Northern English can be found. Virtually all of his other speakers, no matter what their social background may be, are usually seen as “unmarked” in the linguistic sense. This is also not extremely surprising, considering the fact that standardization was not very strong in the Middle English period. In the 14th and 15th centuries we recognize four different types of incipient standards (see Samuels 1963): Type I: Type II: Type III: Type IV:

Wycliffite language, associated with John Wycliff and his followers, the Lollards. This type mostly represents Central Midlands language. London/Essex language as represented in the Auchinleck manuscript. London language, as exemplified by Chaucer’s language (in the Ellesmere manuscript) Official government language, i.e. the “Chancery Standard”.

Smith (1996: 69) points out that only Types I and IV seem to have spread outside their respective areas and can therefore be regarded as something like modern written standards. However, their status is still nowhere near what we today would call a standard (cf. Smith 1992: 56–57; Schaefer, Chapter 11). This means that in Middle English there was no measuring pole, no objective standard for gauging the language use of individual speakers and speaker groups. There may have been implicit norms of language used in Coseriu’s (1975) sense, but these again usually do not necessarily reflect the conscious evaluation of forms and uses. So we rather need to operate with norms of language use in Coseriu’s sense: what speakers actually and normally do in their linguistic performance can count as the baseline against which the individual’s behavior can be measured. All this does not mean, then, that correlational studies are impossible due to the lack of independent, external data, although Labov (1994: 11) not too long ago claimed that historical sociolinguistics essentially is “the art of making the best use of bad data”. As has been pointed out before, historical sociolinguistics can certainly not compete with present-day approaches, but it can develop interesting and relevant insights. This, however, requires some adjustments and re-keying of certain aspects, such as the use of independent variables. Bergs (2005) for

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example utilizes the tool of social network analysis to arrive at a correlational analysis of late Middle English morphosyntactic variation. The basic claim is that even though there is not enough representative data from different social groups for the time, there can be enough data from individual speakers. These speakers live and interact within and across various social networks. These network structures are usually measured in density (i.e. their number of ties) and multiplexity (i.e. the complexity of the individual relationships). Network structures may correlate with the specific linguistic behavior of individuals. Present-day studies such as L. Milroy (1987) and J. Milroy (1992a, b, c) have shown that, on average, dense, multiplex networks correlate with conservative (dialect) language use, while loose-knit, uniplex network structures rather correlate with innovation and change towards the linguistic standard. So, for example, if in a given network most people use ‑th for the third person singular present, this may be the group norm (NB in a non-prescriptive sense!). A speaker in the network who clearly prefers ‑s for this function then deviates from the norm/baseline and we may ask if this deviation is facilitated or even made possible by other network structures or a particular lifestyle that this speaker may have. Bergs (2005) investigates three different morphosyntactic variables: plural pronouns (traditional hem/here versus modern them/their), relativizers (the rise of modern wh-structures), and the development of light verb constructions (e.g. give a kiss, have a bath). The database is the 15th century collection of Paston Letters, a corpus of about 240,000 words written between 1421 and 1503 by various members of the Paston family (Davis 1971). For these we have ample social and biographical data available so that a reconstruction of the family network plus network structures that go beyond the family is feasible. The study shows that there is no clear and simple correlation between network structures and language use, but that within comparable groups of speakers, such as the second generation of family members, clear trends can be observed. The more open and uniplex the network structures of a given family member, the more likely this speaker is to use innovative language forms, and the denser and more multiplex their networks, the more conservative speakers tend to be. However, the concrete language use of individual speakers differs intra-individually depending on the variable that is investigated (the more salient and noticeable a form, the less likely it is to change), and on socio-pragmatic contexts. So one complicating factor is that speakers use certain variants not only because of their network structures, but also when they accommodate and dissociate, i.e. when they address a particular person (e.g. conservative language use with superiors) or when they want to achieve certain goals (e.g. conservative language use in letters to parents, asking for money and support). This makes a strict analysis just in terms of network structures more difficult. For that reason, it seems sensible to

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assume a kind of “variability potential” of individual speakers which depends on their network involvement. A second complicating factor is time. While present-day studies usually focus on one single point in time when analyzing network structures and language use, the Paston study describes and analyzes more than 40 years of language use in one single speaker. During that time we not only see language change in the individual, but also changes in network structures. Figure 13.1 shows the language use of John Paston III between 1461 and 1503. Throughout this time, he has both traditional hem and innovative them available. He begins with a strong preference for the traditional form, but then gradually loses this until he only uses the innovative form after 1479. While the development generally seems to have been gradual, we see a significant drop around the year 1470. It is roughly at that time that his language use seems to have shifted, not only with regard to the pronoun forms, but also in other variables, e.g. the spelling of instead of and instead of . All this can probably lead back to the fact that around the year 1470 we see some events in his life such as a visit to Bruges, the death of his father, and his wooing for Lady Boleyn’s daughter, which may have affected his network structure and social behavior. 16 14

hem them

12 10 8 6 4 2

14 6

1 14 62 14 64 14 65 14 67 14 68 14 69 14 70 14 71 14 72 14 73 14 74 14 75 14 76 14 77 14 78 14 79 14 80 14 84 14 92 15 03

0

Figure 13.1: John Paston III’s use of hem and them over time

Similar phenomena could also be observed with other speakers, such as John’s mother Margaret, who only began to use innovative language forms after her husband had died in 1466. So, on the one hand we see clear generational shifts between three generations of speakers (see Figures 13.2 and 13.3): generation I is

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conservative and predominantly uses traditional hem and here almost exclusively; generation II is neither innovative nor conservative and uses both modern and old forms; generation III reverses the situation of generation I and clearly prefers modern them and uses their almost exclusively. On the other hand, John Paston III is a member of the third generation and shows the individual diachronic development which we just described; i.e. he gradually loses the older forms and replaces them with modern ones. In other words, the generational pattern is not clearly reflected in the individual development, and vice versa. 100% 7 80%

199

272

60%

them hem 40%

22 304

20% 72 0% Generation I

Generation II

Generation III

Figure 13.2: Third person plural pronouns them versus hem in three generations of Pastons

All these are complicating factors for network analyses since they require a diachronic “movie” perspective on networks and language variation rather than a “snapshot” one which we usually use in contemporary studies. Still, long-term quantifiable diachronic data also allows us, perhaps for the first time, to look into the linguistic development of individuals across their lifetime. Theoretical questions attached to this include the problem of language change after first language acquisition, and, of course, the interdependence of language internal and external factors. We know only very little about the events that lead to changes in language use in the individual, and even less about how the changing language of the individual speaker ties in with language changes in the community, and thus the language as a whole. So, contrary to what Labov claimed, one could say that, given the right re-keying of questions and methodologies, correlational analyses in historical linguistics, can give us valuable new insights into the language system, its use, and change, even going back as far as the Middle Ages.

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1

80% 111 60% 146 15

their here

40%

20%

66 4

0% Generation I

Generation II

Generation III

Figure 13.3: Third person plural pronouns their versus here in three generations of Pastons

3.2 Interactional sociolinguistics There is probably less consensus about how to define interactional sociolinguistics, but I believe it is fair to say that it very broadly deals with “speech as social interaction” (Hudson 1996: Chapter 4). Needless to say, there is no clear-cut boundary between interactional sociolinguistics thus construed, pragmatics, or discourse/conversation analysis. Topics that we commonly find here include language and social identity, i.e. facework, power, and solidarity, male versus female language behavior, taboo, and swearing, to name but a few. These are usually investigated in interactional sociolinguistics not from a quantitative, but rather from a qualitative point of view. So, whereas correlational approaches might ask how often male or female speakers use multiple negation, interactional approaches would rather be interested in how the social role of men and women manifests itself in speech patterns, such as the use of hedges, politeness markers, indirect speech acts, or offensive vocabulary. There is a continually growing body of literature that looks at Middle English from an interactional sociolinguistic point of view. The problem here, however, is that there is hardly any authentic, natural, vernacular data to work with. As a consequence, most studies investigate issues such as swearing, politeness, or verbal dueling in Middle English literature. Burnley (2003), Bergs (2004), and Jucker (2006) offer investigations of the T/V pronouns in (late) Middle English literature, Honegger (2003) looks at forms of address in Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale, Jucker (2010) examines (im-)politeness in Middle English, Pakkala-Weck-

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ström (2002) offers a study of the language of seduction in three fabliaux. Promises and curses are, among other issues, the topic of Arnovick’s (2006) monograph that aims at tracing orality and spoken performance in Old and Middle English. In the following, one exemplary study from the perspective of interactional historical sociolinguistics will be presented. Jucker (2000) presents an analysis of verbal aggression in the late 14thcentury Canterbury Tales. He distinguishes between three roles in acts of verbal aggression: speaker, addressee, and target, and four main types of aggression: direct, embedded, mediated, and indirect. Jucker claims that Chaucer “uses a large range of stylistic means to depict verbal aggression. Name-calling, sexual innuendo, scatology, and animal imagery are particularly common” (Jucker 2000: 369). Another important distinction introduced here is that between slanders or slurs and insults. While the former can at least theoretically be tested in terms of truth conditions, the latter are merely about hurting somebody, without any regard to the truth of the utterance. Insults, therefore, can only be identified by the reaction of their target. If the target shows that he or she is hurt or offended, the utterance may have been an insult. Since sometimes reactions are described in literature, the researcher may have to speculate about the possible outcome of such an exchange. One example (1) of an open and direct insult with the appropriate reaction is the following scene, quoted in Jucker (2000: 377): (1)

I rede that oure Hoost here shal bigynne, For he is moost envoluped in synne. Com forth, sire Hoost, and offre first anon, And thou shalt kisse the relikes everychon, Ye, for a grote! Unbokele anon thy purs. ‘I take it that our host here shall begin, For he is most enveloped in sin. Come forth, Sir Host, and offer first at once, And you shall kiss every one of the relics, You, for a groat! Unbuckle your purse at once’ (?1400 Pardoner’s Tale, VI 941–945; my translation)

This invitation to kiss the (bogus!) relics provokes the addressee, Harry Bailly, to react most violently and offended. He answers with a counter-insult (2) (quoted in Jucker 2000: 379–380, 384): (2)

“Nay, nay!” quod he, “thanne have I Cristes curs! Lat be,” quod he, “it shal nat be, so theech! Thou woldest make me kisse thyn olde breech,

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And swere it were a relyk of a seint, Though it were with thy fundement depeint! But, by the croys which that Seint Eleyne fond, I wolde I hadde thy coillons in my hond In stide of relikes or of seintuarie. Lat kutte hem of, I wol thee helpe hem carie; They shul be shryned in an hooges toord!” ‘“No, no!” said he, “then I have Christ’s curse! Let be,” said he, “it shall not be, so may I prosper! You want to make me kiss your own old breech, And swear it were a relic of a saint, Though it is soiled with your excrement! But, by the cross which Saint Helen found, I wish I had thy balls in my hand Instead of relics or of sanctuaries. Let’s cut them off, I will help you carry them; They shall be shrined in a hog’s turd!”’ (?1400 Pardoner’s Tale, VI 946–955; my translation) This counter-insult consists not only of a statement (the relics are nothing but old and stained underpants), but also of a highly offensive scatological wish or request. In reaction to this, the Pardoner is simply lost for words (3) (quoted in Jucker 2000: 385): (3) This Pardoner answerde nat a word; So wrooth he was, no word ne wolde he seye ‘To this, the pardoner answered not a word; So shocked was he, no word did he wish to say’ (?1400 Pardoner’s Tale VI 956–957; my translation) Jucker (2000: 380) rightly points out that literature is indeed very helpful here. Chaucer not only tells us that the Pardoner falls silent; he also gives the reader the reason why. In real life we would have to include non-verbal behavior, such as noises or facial expressions in our analysis, and would perhaps even have to ask explicitly for reasons. Here, again, historical sociolinguistics has certain advantages over present-day approaches. Insults such as the one given above may be either direct, embedded, or mediated. Embedded insults can be witnessed when one character insults another character in tale. Mediated means that not only one character is the target but also the pilgrims who listen to the tale. Indirect insults are very

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similar to embedded and mediated insults, but can also occur in the narrative passages. The examples given above also illustrate some of the stylistic means that Jucker identifies in the insults. On the one hand, we have the stained underpants. On the other, Bailly wants to see the Pardoner’s testicles cut off and enshrined in a hog’s turd. Jucker (2000: 384) suggests that scatological references like these still sound very offensive to modern ears. However, many other insults in Middle English are based on expressions like “olde cherl” or “false theef”. These, just like curses “by God” or “by Seint John!”, do not really show the same strength today as they probably did in the 14th century. Here, the concrete socio-cultural context of the time must be taken into account. Thus, Taavitsainen (1997) claims that swearing in the Old English period mostly was based on the Anglo-Saxon heroic code, whereas in Middle English religion played a more important role, as does sexuality in the Modern English period. Thus we might suspect that every age and every culture has its specific way of swearing, despite the fact that some general trends can probably be found at all times (religion, sexuality, and bodily functions/fluids being the most common domains of taboo, cf. Allan and Burridge 2006).

3.3 Sociology of language The sociology of language investigates what kind of effect language and language use can have on society, and how far language and language use is shaped by society and societal constraints. Some topics here are multilingualism, codeswitching and language choice, standardization and prescriptivism, literacy, language ideologies, and language and power. It is fairly obvious that the time between 1066 and 1476 (or 1100 and 1500, broadly speaking), with all its sociohistorical events, offers many interesting and important topics for the perspective of the sociology of language. The most obvious, perhaps, is language choice and multilingualism in the wake of the Norman Conquest (cf. Schendl, Chapter 9). But equally one might also look into the beginning of standardization in the 14th and 15th centuries (cf. Schaefer, Chapter 11), or the loss of the medieval system of the three estates, and the rise of the middle class together with growing urbanization, and their consequences on the language system. How many people and what kind of people did speak what language? What function was associated with what language? And why did English succeed in the end? All these are questions that can and need to be answered from the viewpoint of sociology of language. In the following, I will present three major case studies from this point of view in order to illustrate the approach in general and its potential: language choice (Section 3.1.1), standardization (Section 3.2.2), and the rise of the middle class (Section 3.3.3).

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3.3.1 Language choice Let us begin with the question of language choice. After the Norman Conquest, there were at least three languages available in England: English, Latin, and Norman French. After about 1400 one might even subdivide English into two types: English dialects and “standard” English (on the rise of the latter, see Section 3.3.2 below). There is an ongoing debate about which speakers used or at least knew which languages (cf. Trotter, Chapter 12; Skaffari, Chapter 10). From what we know today, it seems likely that most of the French-speaking aristocracy did not speak or know English. And vice versa, most English-speaking commoners probably knew little or no French. The few groups that knew French and English were the interpreters, “latimiers”, more or less high ranking court officials, and some clergymen. This situation seems to have changed over time. Burnley (1992: 424) reports that from the 12th century onwards more and more French speakers tried to learn English and that there is even some rare evidence such as Heloise de Moreville allegedly calling out to her husband in about 1145: “Huge de Moreville, ware, ware, ware, Lithulf heth his swerd adrage!” (‘Huge de Moreville, beware, Lithulf has his sword drawn!’). But French and Latin certainly remained the languages for serious and technical conversations as well as official documents until about the end of the 13th century. Therefore, the (early) ME period is characterized by something like diglossia with French for “high purposes” and English for “low”. Görlach (1999: 462) develops a very illuminating diagram that summarizes the situation from the earliest days of English to the modern period (Figure 13.4). He analyzes the use of French, Latin, English dialects, and “standard” English in four major varieties of English: law documents, poetry/literature, scholarly texts, and spoken language. Obviously, French and Latin were dominant (but not exclusive) in legal contexts. English dialects and Latin were used alongside a smaller proportion of French in poetry and literature, while scholarly texts were written almost exclusively in Latin and to some degree in French. English dialects were the variety of choice in the spoken channel. Note that for basically all functions, except for spoken language, Standard English took over from about 1400 onwards, reaching exclusiveness in the middle of the 16th century.

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English dialects French

Law documents

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English dialects Poetry, literature

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Figure 13.4: English dialects, Latin, French and Standard English in four major varieties of English (Görlach 1999: 462; reprinted by kind permission of Cambridge University Press)

3.3.2 Standardization The discussion in Section 3.3.1 naturally leads to the question of language development and ideologies. When and how and why did Standard English develop? Numerous studies have looked into this process in great detail (Stein and TiekenBoon van Ostade [eds.] 1993; Wright [ed.] 2000; Fisher 1995; Schaefer, Chapter 11), so what follows can only be a rough sketch of the first, early phase of this development. Haugen (1972) discusses four steps in standardization processes: selection, codification, acceptance, and elaboration. One particular variety of a given language must be selected as the future standard. This variety needs to be functionally elaborated, i.e. made suitable and available for all communicative functions, for example from informal conversation to religious service and from poetry to textbooks on nuclear physics. Further, standard languages require codification; i.e. they need to have prescriptive grammar books and dictionaries.

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Finally, the speakers of the language eventually need to accept this new standard as their new standard language. While there is no standard in Middle English in the modern sense, we can still trace at least the beginnings of all of these steps in the Middle English period. The fact that English, rather than French, was chosen as a language for England, does not seem to have been a very conscious decision. It went hand in hand with the elaboration of the functions of English. As Burnley (1992: 428) points out: the grammar teacher John of Cornwall introduced English as the language for the schools in 1349. At the same time, there were attempts at Oxford and Cambridge to “save” the French language. The English parliament officially recognized English alongside French and Latin in 1362 and began to record parliamentary debates in English in 1386. From the early 15th century onwards we witness the use of English in the Chancery, and with it the development of the so-called Chancery Standard in written English. Religious writings in English, including translations of the Bible (another important step in the development of standard languages), can be found from the 14th century onwards. Conscious efforts at standardizing (written) English can certainly be pinpointed in the 15th century. Caxton introduced the moveable-type printing press in 1476 and discussed varieties of English in his Eneydos, for example. Eventually, he chose the language of London and Westminster as the most widely understood varieties for his books. This, then, might be seen as one of the first steps of choosing a variety of English as the future standard. Codification is another matter. Apart from a few bilingual French-English dictionaries that were produced from the mid-13th century onwards, there are virtually no grammar books or dictionaries before the 16th century. Furthermore, we have hardly any evidence that shows that people thought in categories such as “good” or “bad” language use before that time. What we do find in Chaucer are some comments on regionalisms (in the Reeve’s Tale), but these cannot be understood as comments on proper and improper English. Similarly, we have no evidence about the acceptance of English (and the English of the South-east as the variety of choice!) as such. Again, we may assume that this was a gradual process and that discussions of these matters did not become popular before the 16th and 17th centuries.

3.3.3 The rise of the middle class and urbanization As has been mentioned before, the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern period are times not only of great linguistic, but also of great social changes. The medieval organization of society gradually disappeared and was replaced with our modern class system. At the same time, we see an increase in population and

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population movement, and the rapid growth of larger cities and urban areas. These changes had some noticeable and interesting impact on the English language, both implicitly (by enabling certain developments) and explicitly (by motivating certain changes). Numerous historical studies, such as Britnell (1993), Horrox (1994), and Horrox and Ormrod (2006), present helpful analyses, and some very helpful summaries can also be found in Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg (1996, 2003). Essentially, what we see is the dissolution of the system described in the anonymous 13th century treatise on the laws and customs of England, entitled Bracton. This text distinguishes people in terms of their being free or not, their having powers over others and/or themselves, their being spiritual or secular leaders, and their being in arms to protect the King and other royalty. The whole system clearly echoes the earlier threefold distinction between warriors, workers, and those who pray. The main point, however, is that there was very little mobility built into the system. Simplifying drastically one could say that those who were born peasants, serfs, or villeins, remained peasants, serfs, or villeins throughout their life without any real hope of leaving this situation by working hard enough. This changed at least from the 13th century onwards. The gradual growth of cities and mercantile operations, together with the ever-increasing strength and power of the guilds and a new “social awareness” (documented, inter alia, by writings such as Piers Plowman or the Lollard treatises, and culminating, maybe, in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381) ultimately led to the development of a new system with more or less permeable social classes, and, most importantly, a fairly wellto-do and influential middle class. This class is characterized not so much by hereditary rights and noble blood, but rather by money, education, influence, networks, and social aspirations. These people often constitute what has been called the group of “social aspirers”. But why is that important for the language? On the one hand, these social developments – i.e. the population movements to the cities (cf. Keene 2000) and the development of the middle class – enabled (implicitly) the mechanisms of sociolinguistics as we know them today. Social network structures changed and led to supraregional standardization, the awareness of good and bad language as a marker of social distinction developed, and the middle classes became educated and literate and turned into a powerful driving source of linguistic change (and stability). At the same time, at least one change has been immediately connected with the rise of the middle class: the loss of the ye (you)/thou distinction in the second person singular pronoun. This mostly took place in the Early Modern period, but again we see clear signs of it already in late Middle English (cf. Bergs 2004; Jucker 2006; Mazzon 2000). In the beginning, ye/you and thou were clearly distinguished by their socially determined functions. Ye/you was a plural pronoun and was used among socially high

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ranking individuals or to address social superiors. Thou was a marker of solidarity among less powerful people and was also used by the high ranks in addressing the low ranks. What we then witness is the pragmaticization of these two forms: instead of only signaling social functions, the two forms may be utilized by speakers when they want to express respect or contempt. When lower rank speakers use you in addressing each other (or higher rank towards lower rank) this shows to some degree distance and respect; if a lower rank speaker addresses a higher rank speaker with thou, however, this is usually a sign for contempt and disrespect. Interestingly, the late Middle English Paston Letters do not really show this distinction anymore. In 250,000 words we find only 15 occurrences of thou versus c.2,500 of you. Most speakers who should have been addressed with thou receive “polite” you (cf. Bergs 2004, 2005). Note that this situation is different again 150 years later, during Shakespeare’s time. Shakespeare uses the two pronoun forms extensively to signal pragmatic effects (cf. Finkenstaedt 1960; Jucker 2000; Busse 2002). It might be possible that for Shakespeare, these two forms were already quite marked and archaic and thus also available for poetic and dramatic effects and purposes. It has been assumed that the loss of thou is directly linked to the rise of the middle class in the late Middle Ages. With the rise of the middle class, and the blurring of social distinctions, one could not be sure anymore how to address people correctly. It was not only nobility that commanded respect, but also other social ranks, like the new mercantile working class. Even worse, earlier external markers of class membership (like consumption laws) gradually disappeared and left speakers wondering. As early as about 1450 we find evidence for these changes (and complaints about them): It was observed that, in spite of consumption laws, labourers and servants were dressing in more expensive cloth. One preacher of the early fifteenth century was dismayed that a ploughman who would once have been satisfied with a white kirtle and russle gown was now to be seen as proudly dressed as a squire. Peter Idley, writing about 1445–1450, grumbled that ‘a man shall not now ken a knave from a knight’ (Britnell 1993: 169).

Thus, to be on the safe side when talking to each other, people probably opted for the polite form you so that they did not risk being offensive in any way. Eventually, then, the usefulness of thou declined and it gradually went out of use. Thus, there is a direct link between actual changes in social structure and certain linguistic developments. One might even want to speculate about in how far the linguistic situation played a role in the developments (in a feed-and-bleed relationship, maybe, i.e. the social changes led to linguistic changes which in turn may influenced social structures).

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4 Summary This chapter has described some of the major approaches to Middle English sociolinguistics. In the initial discussion of some general theoretical and methodological issues, it was pointed out that historical sociolinguistics, particularly when it is dealing with fairly early language stages, may need some basic rekeying of established concepts and methods of present-day sociolinguistics. However, it was also claimed that this need not necessarily be a deficit. On the contrary, historical sociolinguistics, particularly in the Middle English period, with its wealth of linguistic variability, can offer new and interesting insights which would be difficult to gain in contemporary studies. In particular, the study of the linguistic individual in society, and that of linguistic developments across long time spans was regarded as most promising. Following this, the paper discussed the three major strands of sociolinguistics, i.e. correlational and interactional sociolinguistics, and the sociology of language in their particular applicability to and relevance for Middle English. The exemplary case studies show that all three approaches can lead to interesting results and valuable insights, not only from a diachronic, but also from a synchronic perspective. It also became clear, however, that all three approaches have their limitations: the correlational approach certainly needs to cope with the limited availability of language external data, the interactional approach needs to critically discuss the representativeness of data culled from literature, and the sociology of language crucially rests on the availability and reliability of studies from other fields, such as history and historical sociology. Nevertheless, the ME period is still essentially terra incognita for the historical sociolinguistics and future studies will have to explore this domain further.

5 References Allan, Keith and Kate Burridge. 2006. Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Arnovick, Leslie K. 2006. Written Reliquaries: The Resonance of Orality in Middle English Texts. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Barratt, Alexandra. 2010. Continental women mystics and English readers. In: Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing, 240–255. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bergs, Alexander. 2004. Address pronouns in late Middle English. In: Alicia Rodríguez-Álvarez and Francisco Almeida Alonso (eds.), Voices on the Past. Studies in Old and Middle English Language and Literature, 127–138. Chicago/La Coruña: IPG/netbiblio.

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Bergs, Alexander. 2005. Social Networks and Historical Sociolinguistics. Studies in Morphosyntactic Variation in the Paston Letters (1421–1503). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Bergs, Alexander. 2012. The Uniformitarian Principle and the risk of anachronism in language. In: Juan M. Hernández-Campoy and J. Camilo Conde-Silvestre (eds.), The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics, 83–101. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Britnell, Richard H. 1993. The Commercialisation of English Society, 1000–1500. Cambridge/ New York: Cambridge University Press. Burnley, David. 1992. Lexis and semantics. In: Norman Blake (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. II. 1066–1476, 409–496. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burnley, David. 2003. The T/V pronouns in later Middle English literature. In: Taavitsainen and Jucker (eds.), 27–46. Busse, Ulrich. 2002. Linguistic Variation in the Shakespeare Corpus: Morpho-syntactic Variability of Second Person Pronouns. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Cheshire, Jenny. 1982. Variation in an English Dialect: A Sociolinguistic Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clanchy, Michael T. 2012. From Memory to Written Record, England 1066–1307. 3rd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coseriu, Eugenio. 1975. Sprachtheorie und allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft. München: Fink. Cressy, David. 2006. Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press Davis, Norman (ed.). 1971. Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Finkenstaedt, Thomas. 1960. You and Thou. Studien zur Anrede im Englischen. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Fisher, John H. 1995. The Emergence of Standard English. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Gneuss, Helmut. 1971. The origin of Standard Old English and the Æthelwold’s School at Winchester. Anglo-Saxon England 1: 63–83. Görlach, Manfred. 1999. Regional and social variation. In: Roger Lass (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. III. 1476–1776, 459–539. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Graff, Harvey J. 1987. The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture and Society. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Haugen, Einar. 1972. The Ecology of Language: Essay by Einar Haugen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Honegger, Thomas. 2003. “And if ye wol nat so, my lady sweete, thanne preye I thee, […]”. Forms of address in Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale. In: Taavitsainen and Jucker (eds.), 61–84. Horrox, Rosemary. 1994. Fifteenth-century Attitudes. Perceptions of Society in Late Medieval England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Horrox, Rosemary and W. Mark Ormrod, 2006. A Social History of England 1200–1500. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hudson, Richard. 1996. Sociolinguistics. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jucker, Andreas H. 2000. Slanders, slurs and insults on the road to Canterbury: Forms of verbal aggression in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. In: Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen, Päivi Pahta, and Matti Rissanen (eds.), Placing Middle English in Context, 369–389. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Jucker, Andreas H. 2006. “Thou art so loothly and so oold also”: The use of ye and thou in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Anglistik 17(2): 57–72. Jucker, Andreas H. 2010. “In curteisie was set ful muchel hir lest”: Politeness in Middle English. In: Jonathan Culpeper and Dániel Z. Kádár (eds.), Historical (Im)politeness, 175–200. Bern/ Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Keene, Derek. 2000. Metropolitan values: Migration, mobility and cultural norms, London 1100–1700. In: Wright (ed.), 93–114. Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Labov, William. 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change: Internal Factors. Oxford: Blackwell. Lenker, Ursula. 2000. The monasteries of the Benedictine reform and the ‘Winchester School’: Model cases of social networks in Anglo-Saxon England. European Journal of English Studies 4: 222–238. Mazzon, Gabriella. 2000. Social relations and forms of address in the Canterbury Tales. In: Dieter Kastovsky and Arthur Mettinger (eds.), The History of English in its Social Context, 135–168. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Mellinkoff, David. 1963. The Language of the Law. London: Pluman. Milroy, James. 1992a. Linguistic Variation and Change: On the Historical Sociolinguistics of English. Oxford: Blackwell. Milroy, James. 1992b. Social network and prestige argument in sociolinguistics. In: Kingsley Bolton and Helen Kwok (eds.), Sociolinguistics Today, 146–162. London: Routledge. Milroy, James. 1992c. A social model for the interpretation of language change. In: Matti Rissanen, Ossi Ihalainen, Terttu Nevalainen, and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), History of Englishes: New Methods and Interpretations in Historical Linguistics, 72–91. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Milroy, Lesley. 1987. Language and Social Networks. 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell. Nevalainen, Terttu and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg (eds.). 1996. Sociolinguistics and Language History: Studies based on the Corpus of Early English Correspondence. Amsterdam/Atlanta GA: Rodopi. Nevalainen, Terrtu and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg. 2003. Historical Sociolinguistics: Language Change in Tudor and Stuart England. London: Longman. Pakkala-Weckström, Mari. 2002. The discourse of seduction and intrigue: Linguistic strategies in three fabliaux in the Canterbury Tales. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 3: 151–173. Rissanen, Matti, Merja Kytö, Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, Matti Kilpiö, Saara Nevanlinna, Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen, and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg. 1991. The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts. http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/HelsinkiCorpus/ Raumolin-Brunberg, Helena. 1996. Forms of address in early English correspondence. In: RaumolinBrunberg and Nevalainen (eds.), 167–181. Samuels, Michael L. 1963. Some applications of Middle English dialectology. English Studies 44: 81–94. Smith, Jeremy J. 1992. The use of English: Language contact, dialect variation, and written standardisation during the Middle English period. In: Tim William Machan and Charles T. Scott (eds.), English in its Social Contexts: Essays in Historical Sociolinguistics, 47–68. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Smith, Jeremy J. 1996. An Historical Study of English: Function, Form and Change. New York: Routledge. Stein, Dieter and Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (eds.). 1993. Towards a Standard English, 1600–1800. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Taavitsainen, Irma. 1997. Genre conventions: Personal affect in fiction and non-fiction in Early Modern English. In: Matti Rissanen, Merja Kytö, and Kirsi Heikkonen (eds.), English in Transition: Corpus-based Studies in Linguistic Variation and Genre Styles, 185–266. Berlin/ New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Taavitsainen, Irma and Andreas H. Jucker (eds.). 2003. Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Toon, Thomas E. 1983. The Politics of Early Old English Sound Change. New York: Academic Press. Trudgill, Peter. 1974. The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wright, Laura (ed.). 2000. The Development of Standard English: Theories, Descriptions, Conflicts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Leslie K. Arnovick

Chapter 14: Literary Language 1 2 3 4 5

Introduction: the notion of Middle English literary language 261 Early Middle English poetry and prose: alliterative legacies from Old English 263 Middle English texts 268 Summary 289 References 290

Abstract: The notion of literary language proves problematic when it is applied to the Middle English written corpus. While the literary language of Old English did not die entirely with the Conquest, being maintained in a different guise in the alliterative poetry and prose of Middle English, the breach had an inestimable affect on vernacular tradition. Even when the corpus is apportioned by discrete periods of time, a range of textual languages characterize each stage of Middle English. The disparate nature of textual forms and stylistic features becomes apparent in a chronological survey of the period’s important texts. In the absence of literary language per se, the styles represented in ME writings become the more logical object of study. Select written styles are thus exemplified. This chapter seeks to formulate generalizations about translation as a central form of ME writing and looks at the colloquial language of Corpus Christi plays as representatives of vernacular writing. If a self-consciously literary language does not manifest itself in English until very late in the medieval period, its arrival may be glimpsed in the style of some of the writing reviewed here.

1 Introduction: the notion of Middle English literary language The notion of literary language proves problematic when it is applied to the ME written corpus. The interruption of an English literary tradition by the Norman Conquest is one reason for this. So, too, is a different concept in later medieval culture of what constitutes literature. The great variety of the writings we possess Leslie K. Arnovick: Vancouver (Canada)

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further complicates the idea. Norman Blake locates the difficulty of identifying a specifically literary language in the broad range of texts that comes down to us: “[a]s is true of any period in English, there exists a highly literary style at one end of the spectrum and an equally clear non-literary style at the other end, but in between there are so many gradations that it is difficult to draw a precise boundary between them” (1992: 500). One of the most striking features of ME literature, taken as a body of work, is, moreover, the linguistic variety it displays. Dialectal differences figure into this impression, as do scribal practices, including the discretion scribes exercised in varying vocabulary and word forms. Medieval writers and scribes were not constrained by the standardization that would occur within the Modern English period, and the literary dialect of Old English was long forgotten. Jeremy Smith likens the variation common in written English of the medieval period to “the degree of variation of the kind now more generally associated with speech” (2009: 149). Synchronic variation in all realms of the grammar is compounded by diachronic changes within a group of texts spanning hundreds of years (roughly 1100–1500). Even when we apportion the corpus by discrete periods of time we find a range of textual languages within each stage of Middle English. The multiplicity of language and textual form resonates within the medieval world-view. Specifically, linguistic and stylistic variety in ME writings seems consistent with contemporary understanding of literature. Unlike our philosophical construct, the post-Conquest notion is more in keeping with the sense of literature’s Latin source, namely littera, ‘that which is written’ (Blake 1992: 500). In other words, the medieval English idea is far more capacious and inclusive than our own. One signal of this is the status of literary documents in the Middle Ages. Manuscripts do not distinguish between these contents. What we now classify as literary texts are not typified by presentations or formats different from those of non-literary texts (Blake 1992: 500). If the language associated with ME literary texts does not necessarily differ from that of non-literary texts, as it does today, it follows that there is a difference in kind between literary language then and now. The phenomenon whereby “literature” identifies itself as such, through marked, self-consciously styled, special language arose only toward the end of the medieval period. Such literary self-consciousness did characterize OE literature, but the line of a continuing tradition was disrupted by the Norman invasion. Correspondingly, we find no contemporaneous discussion of rhetorical strategies that demarcate a literary style from that of any other style of writing. As a result, Blake concludes, no basis exists for formulating a theory of literary language (1992: 502). Few other methods of apprehending literature and literary language have been fruitful so far. Manuscript studies, in particular, the analysis of scribal practices, may someday offer

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insights into distinguishing forms of language. While scribes may well have treated different kind of texts in particular ways, there is still not sufficient study of the subject. Neither, at this stage in the current scholarship, can we say that certain kinds of glossing practices typify literary, as opposed to non-literary, texts (Blake 1992: 505). For numerous reasons, in summary, description of ME literary language is a thorny pursuit. From our point of departure today, given what we know and what we do not know, we embark on a somewhat questionable undertaking when we seek literature in the first place. If the assumptions underlying our quest are problematic, perhaps it is necessary to redirect our efforts. In the absence of literary language per se, the styles represented in ME writings become the more logical object of study. Even here, we must proceed with caution.

2 Early Middle English poetry and prose: alliterative legacies from Old English A chronological survey provides a context for the examination of literary styles as they develop over time. With the Conquest, the Germanic tradition of metrical composition gave way to new poetic models; Anglo-Saxon alliterative poetry did not outlive its social and linguistic contexts. The very real demarcation in modes of versification that followed upon the Invasion can be attributed linguistically, “to the clash between the prosodies permitted or required by an outdated poetic canon and the impossibility of such rhythms in contemporary speech” (Minkova 2003: 10). When alliterative verse was next seen in England, it was, therefore, much altered from the earlier form. Two distinct manifestations of poetry characterized by heavy alliteration occurred in medieval England, first in the wellknown guise of the 14th-century Alliterative Revival. As we shall see, stylistically these works allude to the Anglo-Saxon tradition without employing its actual techniques of oral composition. Long before this Revival, early in the ME period, however, another, distinct kind of alliterative writing, in poetry and in prose, gained currency. Just as the Alliterative Revival hearkened back to older practices while departing from it, so, too, there was a difference in kind between OE and early ME alliterative verse. Despite the rupture, the parallels between Anglo-Saxon poetry and alliterative works of the 12th and 13th centuries are striking. While little poetry written in English survives from the period immediately following the Conquest, the earliest extant compositions are alliterative: the Worcester Cathedral fragments of The Soul’s Address to the Body (c.1100, West Midlands), Layamon’s Brut (1189–1205,

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West Midlands), and The Proverbs of Alfred (c.1175, South-west) (Minkova 2003: 14). Any hypothesis about the connection between OE alliterative verse and the alliterative verse of the 12th and 13th centuries is mitigated by a scarcity of evidence and the impossibility of reconstructing the historical circumstances that create and preserve poetry (Minkova 2003: 14). To Minkova, the evidence that remains is highly suggestive of some form of continuity. Analogous traditions of alliterative poetry seem to bridge the divide that separates the literary cultures of Old and Middle English. An excerpt from the Brut illustrates early ME alliterative style. The following passage recounts King Arthur’s dream about the fall of Camelot (1): (1)

Toniht a mine slepe, þer Ich læi on bure, Me imætte a sweuen; þeruore Ich ful sari æm. Me imette þat mon me hof uppen are halle, Þa halle Ich gon bistriden swulc Ich wolde riden. Alle þa lond þa Ich ah, alle Ich þer ouersah; And Walwain sat biuoren me; mi sweord he bar an honde. Þa com Moddred faren þere mid unimete uolke; He bar an his honde ane wi-ax stronge. He bigon to hewene hardliche swiðe, And þa postes forheou alle þa heolden up þa halle. Þer Ich iseh Wenheuer eke, wimmonnen leofuest me; Al þere muche halle rof mid hire honden heo todroh. Þa halle gon to hælden and Ich hæld to grunden, Þat mi riht ærm tobrac. Þa seide Modred: “Haue þat!” Adun ueol þa halle, and Walwain gon to ualle, And feol a þere eorðe; his ærmes breken beine. And Ich igrap mi sweord leofe mid mire leoft honde And smæt of Modred is hafd þat hit wond a þene ueld. And þa quene Ich al tosnaðde mid deore mine sweorede And seoððen Ich heo adun sette in ane swarte putte. And al mi uolc riche sette to fleme, Þat nuste Ich under Criste whar heo bicumen weoren. Buten miseolf Ich gon atstonden uppen ane wolden, And Ich þer wondrien agon wide ʒeond þan moren. Þer Ich isah gripes and grisliche fu ʒeles (Brut ll. 13982–14006; Brook and Leslie [eds.] 1963)

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‘Tonight as I was sleeping, where I was lying in my chamber, There came to me a dream which has made me most depressed: I dreamed someone had lifted me right on top of some hall And I was sitting on the hall, astride, as if I was going riding; All the lands which I possess, all of them I was surveying, And Gawain sat in front of me, holding in his hands my sword. Then Modred came marching there with a countless host of men, Carrying in his hand a massive battle-axe. He started to hew, with horrible force, And hacked down all the posts which were holding up the hall. I saw Guinevere there as well, the woman I love best of all: The whole roof of that enormous hall with her hands she was pulling down; The hall started tottering, and I tumbled to the ground, And broke my right arm, at which Modred said ‘Take that!’ Down then fell the hall and Gawain fell as well, Falling on the ground where both his arms were broken, So with my left hand I clutched my beloved sword And struck off Modred’s head and it went rolling over the ground, And I sliced the queen in pieces with my beloved sword, And after that I dropped her into a dingy pit. And all my fine subjects set off in flight, And what in Christendom became of them I had no idea, Except that I was standing by myself in a vast plain, And then I started roaming all around across the moors; There I could see griffins and really gruesome birds’ (Rosamund Allen [trans.]; David and Simpson [eds.] 2006: 125) There is no doubt – as this passage makes clear – that the alliterative poetry of early ME differs considerably from that of Old English. Its reliance on syllable counting proves only one way in which the later form of alliteration deviates from “classical” Anglo-Saxon rules for versification (Minkova 2003: 16). In Brut, we generally find two stressed syllables in each half-line, both of which are coupled through alliteration, for example (cf. l. 13994). As ME poetry developed, certain kinds of verse types with corresponding poetic compounds disappeared. The density of elaborately coined compounds was lost, while kennings became rare (Blake 1992: 509). Resolution is an artifice that does not survive the Conquest (Minkova 2003: 19). These devices are thus absent in Brut, as the sample indicates. Alternatively, new patterns for alliteration emerged (e.g. the tendency to alliterate on initial vowels, vowel- /h- alliteration, f- /v- alliteration); all were innovations based on changes in the contemporary language (Minkova 2003: 19).  

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Assonance in line 13989 of Brut was possible in the new genre, for instance: He bar an his honde ane wi-ax stronge ‘Carrying in his hand a massive battle-axe’. Yet even the discontinuity evident in Middle English can be subsumed into a larger tradition. “After a period of retrenchment alliterative poetry emerged as a vigorous and inspired artistic activity, well adapted to the changed language” (Minkova 2003: 16). Considerable vocabulary originating in Old English was maintained in the Worcester fragments; the French loans found elsewhere in the lexicon had not yet replaced words recorded there by the end of the 12th century (Blake 1992: 509). The fact that the Brut, based on an Old French source, relies on English formulaic phrases traceable to Old English also speaks to the viability of the popular mode (Minkova 2003: 14–15; Blake 1992: 509–512). On the one hand, this poem lacks features prominent in OE verse such as kennings and litotes, as well as the variation of language and the stylistic ornamentation common in the early canon. True apposition occurs once in the twenty-five lines cited above: Wenheuer …, wimmonnen leofuest me ‘Guinevere …., the woman I love best of all’ (l. 13992). Major syntactic units also terminate at the end of the line rather than at the caesura, as they do in Old English (Blake 1992: 510): e.g. l. 14002, And al mi uolc riche sette to fleme ‘And all my fine subjects set off in flight’. On the other hand, epic formulas, having antecedents in OE poetry, are added to the end of a line of verse to finish the sentence started there without contributing new information (Blake 1992: 510). The second half-line of line 13990 is merely adverbial, for example: Modred hews, ‘with horrible force’ hewene hardliche swiðe. Opportunities for alliteration in the Brut had broadened to include verbs, adverbs, and pronouns, in addition to the main lexical words, nouns and pronouns, on which Old English relied. Alliteration of [s] falls on the adverb, seoððen ‘after’, and the verb sette ‘set’, in line 14001. The two half-lines were usually linked by alliteration, though rhyme was employed as well (Blake 1992: 510). Tobrac ‘broke’ rhymes with þat!, ‘that’, connecting the two half-lines of line 13995, at the same time larger cohesion was affected by alliteration throughout the line: þat … þa … þat!. Weighing the evidence en masse, Minkova observes that when poetry in English reemerges, alliteration “persists as an important organizing principle of verse”, despite the new metrical models adopted from the continent (Minkova 2003: 14). A second factor corroborates the notion of poetic continuity, namely, that alliteration continued as a dominating principle in what is called the rhythmical prose of the early ME period (Minkova 2003: 14). Stylistic features in Layamon’s Brut resemble, if not replicate, features of OE prose works by Ælfric and Wulfstan, as Blake (1969) has established. Blake (1969: 120) labels this form of verse “rhythmical alliteration” to distinguish it from the OE metrical form (cf. Minkova 2003: 14). He hypothesizes that alliterative poetry and alliterative prose are clo 

 

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sely related, differing in their rhythmical assumptions, not in kind (Blake 1992: 513). Given that these prose texts survive in copies dating from the 11th and 12th centuries, it is likely that they exerted influence on ME writing. Blake infers a direct line of continuity in which alliterative composition moves from one genre to another and back again: “Classical Old English poetry may have generated Ælfrician prose. In turn, its Middle English successor may have generated the recreation of alliterative poetry. At first this poetry was of the type found in the Brut, but later in the ME period it developed towards more regular alliteration” (Blake 1992: 513). Alliterative prose thus acts as a graft to reconnect the poetic tradition. Third, despite the limited presence of alliterative poetry in the historical record, we may infer its more widespread composition when the practicalities of manuscript production are taken into account. Minkova reminds us that monastic scriptoria favored the production of Latin and French manuscripts; the copying of English poems was a “special purpose activity” (Pearsall 1977: 90; quoted by Blake 1977: 16). As Minkova (2003: 15) deduces, “[w]hat was interrupted for about a hundred years after the Norman Conquest in England was thus not familiarity with, exposure to, or composition of some form of verse, but the access of English speakers to formal authorial and scribal privileges”. Much of the popular poetry in circulation must have escaped the velum page. Derek Pearsall confronts the lack of material evidence head on, arguing against an inexplicable reversion to the past: “[i]t does not matter that we cannot trace direct lines of descent […] We find instead, at the beginning of the fourteenth century new varieties of alliterative writing […] which bear continued witness to the inherent strength of the alliterative continuum” (Pearsall 1977: 84; quoted by Minkova 2003: 16). Indirectly, then, the nature of the record itself supports a continuity hypothesis. That poetry in English was a popular form and a popular pastime is central to its survival in England. After the Conquest, when a powerful minority who used Latin and French lived alongside a majority of English speakers, the sociolinguistic situation continued to nurture English traditions. A regard for things English, along with its numerous speakers, cannot be dismissed in reconstructing literary styles for Middle English. While it is doubtful that poetry composed before the Conquest, especially in documentary form, was known to new generations of English people, English and its traditions persist (cf. Blake 1992: 508). The deliberate use of English, regardless of subject matter, must not be underestimated. Even if literary preferences changed, the introduction of rhyme and syllablecounting did not overshadow the linguistic potential for an alliterative model of versification, because English is, after all, a stress-timed language (Minkova 2003: 19). A metrical form incorporating Germanic patterns would have been most the accessible choice for the monolingual English-speaking majority (Minkova 2003: 18). Furthermore, as Minkova (2003: 15) argues, the re-invention of

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alliterative verse in the 14th century is “likely to have drawn upon a lingering perception of alliteration as an appropriate poetic device”. Indeed, by the first half of the 14th century, when written records increased, alliterative verse flourished (Minkova 2003: 18). Minkova (2003: 16) cannot see that this new poetry arose independently of “the inherited appreciation of the mnemonic and artistic power of alliteration”. We may conclude this discussion of 12th- and 13th-century alliterative literature by remarking on one implication of its mixed prosody. Perhaps in its metrical hybridity lies the germ of truly literary language. Early alliterative poetry and prose is marked with a semblance of self-awareness of its power as English. Albeit merely inchoate in the alliterative poetry of early Middle English, this sensibility would flower into the self-consciously literary language apparent by the Early Modern period in works such as Spenser’s Faerie Queene.

3 Middle English texts Although aspects of a native English tradition remained, especially in alliterative poetry and prose, the invaders’ French (and Latin) exerted their influence on the genres and styles of English writings throughout the medieval period. A Manual of the Writings of Middle English offers a guide to extant texts and genres (Hartung and Burke Severs [eds.] 1969–93). For the scholarship on these works, see the annotated bibliography published by Burnley and Tajima (1994). Literary traditions from elsewhere in Europe, both classical and vernacular, made their mark, as well. At the height of the Middle Ages, English poets were composing in a kind of rhymed metrical verse borrowed from French. Plot conventions and narrative structure were imported from Italy. Fabliaux and folk stories were transported across the Channel. A vibrant tradition of writing in the ME vernacular coalesced. The range of textual forms and stylistic features found in Middle English becomes apparent in reviewing some of the period’s important texts. Following a chronological overview, I exemplify select written styles. Because the works of major authors like Chaucer and Gower are well known and may be studied in this volume and elsewhere in depth (see Horobin, Chapter 15), this chapter emphasizes the works of their contemporaries in order to illustrate the language of Middle English literature. After this sampling, I attempt to make some generalizations about translation as a central form of ME writing and look at the colloquial language of Corpus Christi plays as representatives of explicitly vernacular writing.

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3.1 Early Middle English literature During the 12th and early 13th centuries, fresh copies of OE prose works were made and new prose works were composed. A notable prose piece is the devotional work from the West Midlands, Ancrene Wisse or ‘Guide for Anchoresses’ (c.1225), a monastic rule written for three aristocratic women who leave the secular world to live the contemplative life. Although an extensive mixture of French and Old Norse loanwords appear in this text, borrowed vocabulary is used with familiarity. The style is colloquial and sounds spoken, but its alliteration reveals a more poetic or literate register: Hope halt te heorte hal, hwet-se þe flesch drehe; as me seið, ʒef hope nere, heorte tobreke ‘Hope keeps the heart healthy, whatever the flesh may suffer. Without hope, it is said, the heart would break’ (see Hasenfratz [ed.] 2000 from which this quotation is taken; on the language of the manuscripts containing the text, see further Tolkien 1929). The language of Ancrene Wisse is closely related to several other works within the so-called St. Katharine group (also from the West Midlands) and may have shared an intended audience. Early instances of saints’ lives, popular throughout the Middle Ages, appear alongside other didactic works in the St. Katharine group. Stories of the martyrdoms of Saints Margaret, Katherine, and Juliana probably had a general lay audience as well as a religious one, for their narratives appeared in English at a time when Latin and French dominate in this genre (Newhauser 2009: 41). Among early ME prose works we also find the treatise, The Wooing of our Lord, and a series of associated prayers in rhythmic prose (altogether known as the Wooing group, from the West Midlands). Poetry from this early period was both sacred and secular. We have already mentioned The Soul’s Address to the Body, The Proverbs of Alfred, and Layamon’s Brut. From the 12th century we find the Ormulum (c.1170), a work of biblical exegesis, composed in metrical verse by the monk, Orm (or Ormin). Orm’s Northeast Midland pronunciation is clearly represented through strict poetic meter and a system of phonetic orthography. Secular lyrics, in the form of the speech contest, Owl and Nightengale (South West), date from the end of the century (1190–1200). The 13th century brings the early romances, King Horn (1225), from the South-east Midlands, Havelok the Dane (c.1280–1300), a North-east Midlands text having a mixture of dialect features, and Sir Orfeo (c.1300), from the Southwest Midlands. Highly formulaic and conventionalized, these metrical romances represent popular versions of courtly counterparts. Lacking the literary sophistication common to their French models, these poems reveal a vernacular perception of romantic form and content. In general, several features of early ME literary style are noticeable in the poetry and the prose of this transitional period. The vocabulary that typified Old

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English, namely compounds and heroic lexis, is not present, nor is the variety of diction that was common prior to the Conquest (Blake 1992: 514). In the ME works, doublets take the place of the large word hoard and adjectives are introduced to modify nouns. Instead of variation, repetition of the same word throughout the text achieves cohesion. In the passage from Layamon’s Brut cited above, the word, hall, occurs four times in twenty-five lines, while sword, is repeated three times. OE poetry, in contrast, relies on apposition. To complement sword, for example, the poem, Beowulf, employs phrases like ‘best of weapons’ and ‘patterned blade’. Brut similarly lacks Germanic kennings for sword like ‘bloodworm’, ‘icicle of blood’, ‘wound-hoe’, ‘onion of war’, or ‘leek of war’ (all attested in Norse poetry). Words, phrases, and clauses are linked by and (e.g. note nine cases of its use line-initially in the Brut passage) while alliteration often reinforces unity within and between clauses. Stylistically, early texts also depend on the rhetorical conventions of their time (Blake 1992: 515).

3.2 Later Middle English literature 3.2.1 Prose Religious material flourished from the 14th century onwards, with the circulation of devotional texts written both by clergy and lay theologians. By the end of the medieval period, a Bible in English appeared alongside works offering spiritual direction. Practical guides for public worship attracted English readers, as well. All such publications intended for an English audience marked the prolonged erosion of Latin’s claim to Christian subject matter. Early among instructional works is the moral treatise, Handlyng Synne (1303), an adaptation of a French manual, by Robert Mannyng (North-east Midlands). From c.1300 we find the Cursor Mundi (‘Runner of the World’), an anonymous religious poem written in the Northern dialect. Cursor Mundi subsumes the history of the world into the history of human salvation. Recognizing the value of the vernacular in spreading the message, its author announces that þis ilk bok es translate into Inglis tong/ to rede for the love of Inglis lede,/ Inglis lede of Ingland,/ for the commun at understand (‘This book is translated into the English tongue as advice for the love of English people, English people of England, for all to understand’). Important religious works in prose also survive from the 14th century. The Ayenbite of Inwyt, or ‘Remorse of Conscience’ (1340), is a confessional tract translated or written in ME prose by Michel of Northgate (Kent). Richard Rolle promotes a form of ecstatic mysticism in Form of Living (Northern). He sets out his spiritual advice in 1349 on the occasion of a nun’s moving from the cloister into a

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solitary cell. Around 1393, the English anchorite, Julian of Norwich, records and interprets her “showings” or visions of Jesus Christ in a book its modern editors often entitle, Revelations of Divine Love (East Midlands), a set of sixteen mystical devotions. Julian’s avowed purpose is to pass along the benefits of her showings to other believers, but the book concerns itself primarily with her own experiences (Blake 1987: 387). Written by a priest whose care is for souls more generally, The Cloud of Unknowing is a mystical treatise dating from 1375–1400 (East Midlands). Borrowing a concept from Dionysian mysticism, the unknown author explains that the contemplative must move beyond the realm of thought into “the cloud of unknowing” (Watson 1999: 552). He also confronts what he believes is the tendency for people who read only the vernacular to understand it literally when the content is meant to be taken spiritually, an interpretation appreciated by the more sophisticated readers of Latin (Watson 1999: 552). A spiritual biography of an ambulatory holy woman, The Book of Margery Kempe (Northern), seems to have been composed by a 15th-century priest with the collaboration of its protagonist. Internal evidence demonstrates that he, rather than the illiterate Margery, actually wrote her “autobiography”. Much of the language of The Book has a clerkly or bureaucratic sound to it (e.g. Whan þe seyde Meyr receyued þe forseyd lettyr ‘when the said Margery received the aforementioned letter’, Book 119: 12–13), a style reinforced overall by its clerical preference for rational chronology (Spearing 2010: 93). Patches of heavy alliteration appear in passages grounded in the tradition of Latinate rhythmic prose, the prosodic affect of which a priest may have tried to imitate (Spearing 2010: 93). While The Book dates from 1436–38 and must have been studied at the Carthusian monastery which owned it as an account of affective spirituality, the text in its entirety was not widely known until 1934 (cf. Spearing 2010: 83). Dedication to the life of prayer extends from private devotion to public ritual in another work from this period. The Lay Folks Mass Book (Northern) is a guide to the Mass for English readers who did not understand Latin (2): (2)

And as þis boke techeth, so þow do, For hit is wretyn what þou schalt say, Whane þow schalt rest, whane þou schalt pray Bothe for þe quyke and for þe dede; As þow fyndest wryte, so make thy bede … Vpon thi knees sette the doune; And hew vp thyn herte wyt gode entente (The Lay Folks Mass Book ll. 4–11; Simmons [ed.] 1879)

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‘And as this book teaches, so you should do, For it tells you what you shall say, When you shall rest, when you shall pray Both for the living and for the dead; As you find it written, so make your prayer … Upon your knees, set yourself down; And lift up your heart with good intent’ (my translation). Originally a translation of a French guide to the Mass, subsequent versions circulated between the 12th and 15th centuries. Prayers in general use in English, like the Lord’s Prayer and bidding prayers, were printed in the Mass Book, but because the Church forbade the translation of sacred liturgy into the vernacular, the book paraphrases Latin prayers for laity untutored in the ecclesiastical tongue. The Mass Book interprets the Eucharistic celebration and directs congregants to perform their own devotions at such times as the priest attends the altar. Reliance on this book by church goers points to increases in literacy in English simultaneous with the loss of Latinity. The Oxford professor, John Wyclif, who advocated teaching the laity in the vernacular, is credited with encouraging the translation of the Latin (Vulgate) Bible into English (see an example below in Section 3.3.2). The ME Bible associated with him comes down to us in the Early Version (finished c.1385) and the Later Version (c.1390) in a dialect of the South-east Midlands (both versions may be accessed online in the Chadwyck-Healey collection, the Bible in English [Hammond and Adamson, eds. 1996–2011]); over two hundred and fifty manuscripts from both textual traditions are extant in a variety of dialects. Both versions were accepted as orthodox at the time, despite the later, common misunderstanding that the Church judged them, as Lollardist productions, heretical (Kelly 2010). Just as it contributed to religious reform, the ME Bible had ramifications for the language, encouraging literacy in English. History and social geography were also popular topics in medieval England. Ralph Higden’s chronicle of world history and theology, Polychronicon, was translated by John of Trevisa in 1387 (West Midlands). In publication well into the 15th century, Caxton prints Trevisa’s version in 1482. One topic of interest was the linguistic situation in Britain at the time: Hit semeþ a greet wonder how Englische, þat is þe burþe tonge of Englisshe men and her owne langage and tonge, is so dyuerse of sown in þis oon ilond ‘It seems a great wonder that English, which is the birth-tongue of Englishmen and their own language and tongue, is so diverse in sound in this one island’ (Babington 1869). Another favorite book of the 14th century was the compendium, Mandeville’s Travels (1360). A translation of a French original from the South-east Midlands, the travelogue of a Sir John Mandeville

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recounts the places, people, and customs he experiences on a journey throughout the east. Actually a romance, this adventure quest was meant to inspire curiosity in its audience, making it perhaps the most copied and translated book in the Middle Ages (Chism 2009: 68). Romance is the last genre to enter ME prose, having long been the provenance of poetry, as Cooper (2010: 215) notes. Late in the medieval period we find Morte Darthur, or ‘The Death of Arthur’, c.1470, by Sir Thomas Malory (Northern). His English rendition of Arthurian legend was so well received that Caxton printed the romance in 1485. William Caxton himself contributed to the chivalric renaissance. He translated romances originating in Burgundy, namely, Recuyell of the Histories of Troye and History of Jason, as well as others from French, like Blanchardyn and Eglantine, Four Sons of Aymon, and Paris and Vienne (Cooper 2010: 226).

3.2.2 The language of prose translation Because a substantial portion of extant prose derived from the translation of foreign texts, ME translations merit attention in terms of their literary style (on the politics of translating Latin into the vernacular, see further Watson 1999). English versions of Latin and French texts made by Rolle, Trevisa, Malory, and Caxton illuminate translation practices of the time, including those of the Wycliffites. After surveying these strategies, I examine the Bible as a case in point. Ralph Hanna (2010) identifies three kinds of style – “rough”, “middle”, and “high” – in the translations made by Richard Rolle. The meticulous literalism of Rolle’s prose Psalter is “rough” in style. Often employing non-English syntax, this rendition follows the Latin so closely as to invite the English reader to consult the original. Just such a goal motivates Rolle’s decision to seke no strange Inglis ‘seek no unusual English’ for his Psalter, i.e., to avoid any elaborate or compelling language that would detract from the Latin with its clear supremacy in presenting the Psalms. An English Psalter could even act as a liturgical primer: a reader interested in its content and frustrated with unidiomatic expression was thereby encouraged to “come to the Latin” (Hanna 2010: 26). A “middle style” manifests more elegance of diction and phrasing than that found in the rough translations. Hanna exemplifies Rolle’s “middle style” in Form of Living. The passage contemplates the name of Jesus (3): (3) And whan þou spekes til hym and says “Ihesu” thurgh custom, it sal be in þi ere ioy, in þi mouth hony, and in þi hert melody. For þe sall thynk ioy to here þat name be nevened, swetnes to speke it, myrth and sang to thynk it. If þou

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thynk Ihesu contynuly and halde it stabely, it purges þi syn and kyndels þi hert; it clarifies þi sawle, it removes anger and dose away slawnes, it woundes in lufe and fulfilles of charite; it chaces þe devel and puttes oute drede; it opens heven and makes a contemplatif man. Have in mynde Jhesu, for al vices and fantomes it puttes owte fra þe lover. And haylce oft Mary, bath day and nyght. Mikel lufe and ioy sal þou fele, if þou wil do aftyr þis lare. þe thare noght covayte gretely many bokes; halde lufe in hert and in werke, and þou hase al [done] þat we may say or wryte. For fulnes of þe law es charite; in þat hynges all (108: 4–20; 612–5; Hanna 2010: 27) ‘And when you speak to him and say, “Jesus”, as you are accustomed, it shall be joy in your ear, honey in your mouth, and melody in your heart. For you shall feel joy to hear that name named, sweetness to speak it, mirth and song to think it. If you think “Jesus” continually and hold it firmly, it purges your sin and kindles your heart; it clarifies your soul; it removes anger and does away with sloth. It wounds through love and fulfills by charity; it chases the devil and puts out dread; it opens heaven and makes a contemplative man. Have in mind Jesus: all vices and phantoms it puts away from the lover (of Jesus). And hail often Mary, both day and night. Much love and joy shall you feel if you will follow this teaching. Do not covet numerous books; hold love in your heart and in your work, and you will have done all that we say or write. For charity is the fulfillment of the law. On it all things hinge’. Hanna notes serial presentation and a controlled rush of epithets. Balance is varied in terms of the number of members in each unit, while repetition of detail moves in turn from completeness to incompleteness within these members. Words deriving from foreign and native roots alternate in the vocabulary. If the balance is carefully expansive, the conclusion is nevertheless drawn plainly and directly. The tone grows quieter near the end, members shorten, description is abandoned as the narrator turns directly to the reader, and a generalizing proverb rounds off the passage (Hanna 2010: 27). Rolle’s “high style”, seemingly poised between poetry and prose and between alliterative poetry and septenary verse, has rhythmic cadences and lines embellished with sporadic alliteration and medial and/or end-rhyme (Hanna 2010: 27). Hanna characterizes the high style as a translation of the mannerism of Latin writings. Rolle reserves it for descriptions of the Passion (e.g. “Meditation on the Passion A” and “Ego dormio”) and for incantatory meditations meant to move the reader to ecstasy (Hanna 2010: 27). A preferred technique of John of Trevisa was to translate a single Latin word with two English equivalents (Edwards 2010: 122). In essence he glosses

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his original, relaying its subtlety of meaning. For example, the doublet, boost and array ‘ostentation and arrangement’ renders the Latin noun pompae, while the pairing, iclosed and ihid ‘closed and concealed’ appears in place of the verb tegebatur in his Polychronicon (Edwards 2010: 122). Edwards (2010: 123) suggests that Trevisa employs doublets when he needs to treat technical material but is at loss to find precise equivalents for terms and concepts unfamiliar to him. Sometimes Trevisa resorts to triplets to define difficult lexemes from Latin. Otherwise his tendency is toward amplification rather than variation. Flexible syntax allows him to maintain control over distinctions in subject matter. Fidelity to his source – and its factual and expository purpose – make his presence as a translator unobtrusive; he identifies himself explicitly when he does intrude, and that is only in signed additions to Higden (Edwards 2010: 124). When we look to prose romances, we see opposing styles in the translations of Caxton and Malory. Caxton was responsible for bringing to England from Philip the Good’s court at Burgundy the new fashion of prosified metrical romances (Cooper 2010: 226). Cooper observes that Caxton himself wrote English as if it were French. In French he found eloquence and ornateness in the form of abundant syntactic subordination, a polysyllabic vocabulary, and rhetorical elaboration (Cooper 2010: 224). He relies on the coupling of synonyms, sometimes pairing an English derivative with one from French (e.g. hookes and crochettes ‘hooks and crooks’). His English prose, whether translation or original, is emotive and expansive. In contrast, Malory displays a minimalist style based firmly in the tradition of writing English (Cooper 2010: 224). He naturalizes French romance with paratactic syntax and English vocabulary. His lexis is “Anglo-Saxon”, with the exception of Anglo-French terms that are primarily legal (e.g. assurance), martial, and chivalric (e.g. joust, recreant), or lie embedded in Arthurian context (e.g. siege), as Cooper (2010: 224) shows. A common tendency in these translations suggests a strategy more widely used: in certain translations, single words in Latin or French are rendered into English with doublets to signal the meanings possible for the foreign word. The resulting translation may not have flowed well in English, but it remained faithful to the original. The move from a literal translation to a more natural English requires further judgment on the part of the translator. The survival of successive biblical translations in Middle English allows us to witness the tie between idiomatic English and this interpretative act. The Early Version (EV; c.1385) of the Wycliffite Bible follows the Latin wording and syntax closely, while the Later Version (LV; c.1390) reflects a more idiomatic English. Revisions made to the earlier Bible admit no kind of amplification; nor does the Later Version depart from the style of the original. Consistently, however, the Late

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Version avoids the literalness of the Early Version, as we see in Luke 13.8, from the Parable of the Fig Tree (3): (4) a. Vulgate: Domine, dimitte illam et hoc anno, usque dum fodiam circa illam et mittam stercora. b. EV: Lord, suffre also this yeer, til the while I delve aboute it, and sende toordis. [‘Lord, leave (it) also this year, until I dig around it and spread manure’.] c. LV: Lord, suffre it also this yeer, the while I delve aboute it, and I schal donge it. [‘Lord, leave (it) also this year, while I dig around it, and I shall spread manure’.] The purpose of the Early Version is to convey the Latin construction, to make the Latin recognizable in English. Viable alternatives in meaning are presented in doublets linked with “either” or “or”, as we see in Luke 6.41, example (5): (5) a. Vulgate: Quid autem vides festucam in oculo fratris tui b. EV Sothly what seest thou in thy brotheris iye a festu, othir a mot [‘Truly, (why do) you see in your brother’s eye a rod or a mote?’] c. LV And what seest thou in thy brotheris iye a moot [‘(Why do) you see in your brother’s eye a mote?’] In this way, the Early Version is consistent with, or may have even been inspired by, the kind of rough translation Rolle produced of the Psalter (cf. Hanna 2010: 26). Where the Early Version offers alternative meanings, the later translation offers a single form as an English equivalent. The later translator, who calls himself “Simple Creature”, makes a choice between possible meanings when these exist or proffers his own substitutions when the Latin is ambiguous. He eliminates ablative absolute constructions, for example, which are retained consistently in the Early Version. In doing so, Simple Creature erases potential ambiguities found in the Vulgate Bible. The Bible remains a special case in translation practice because shades of meaning, even ambiguity, might be thought desirable in a book considered sacred. Both versions of the ME Bible would have held value for students at the time, nonetheless. The Early Version is intended for people who know Latin,

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the Late Version for people who do not. Blake (1992: 528) remarks that translations which closely follow the original text seem to have been “relatively unself-conscious” until the mid-14th century. Perhaps to the extent that the Late Version of the Wycliffite Bible departs from the Early Version in order to improve its readability in English, the translation approaches self-consciousness. Certainly the formal content of the Bible requires a suitable medium of conveyance, whether Latin or English. In the Wycliffite translation we witness Middle English standing alone as a language worthy of Scripture. To wrap up this discussion of translation practices, let me turn briefly to an analogue in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Malory’s minimalist style and scarce use of elaboration can be compared with Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee. Out of 923 lines (ll. 667–1889), there is a passage of thirty-five lines, ll. 1612–47, in which Chaucer introduces doublets. (This and subsequent references to Chaucer’s works are taken from The Riverside Chaucer edited by Benson [1987].) In line 1612, for example, Chaucer translates purquoy initially as wherto and why and later as for what cause or enchesoun. Doublets appear suddenly in the context of the rest of the tale, according to Kelly (p.c., 2010). Of these twenty pairings, fourteen are coupled by and, five by or, and one by ne. Among twenty doublets occurring within these thirty-five lines, only three of them are found in Chaucer’s French source (Renaud de Louens). Evidence from poetry therefore suggests that the practice of using doublets to translate single foreign forms may be universalized across genres.

3.2.3 Alliterative poetry Poems belonging to the late ME alliterative canon include Wynnere and Wastoure (1352–1353), from the West Midlands, and Parliament of the Three Ages, a poem difficult to date having Northern dialect features. The manuscript, Cotton Nero A.x (1375–1400) contains four alliterative works: the romance, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the dream vision, Pearl, along with two biblical narratives, Patience and Cleanness. All are written in the North-west Midlands dialect of Middle English by an unknown author. Another important work in this style, the allegorical poem, Piers Plowman, attributed to William Langland, survives in three versions of different lengths, the A (1365–1370), the B (1376–1379), and the C (1381–1390). This group of poems has been said to represent, and therefore to belong to, an Alliterative Revival. Although the model of revival may not best describe the rise of the 14th-century phenomenon, the nomenclature retains some currency. A note about the construct is, therefore, in order. Hanna (1999) finds the term

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“revival” reductive. To his way of thinking, the assumption behind this classification was that alliterative usage “had died and at some later point experienced a quasi-divine resuscitation, and that this return to life comprised a single ‘revival’” (Hanna 1999: 488). Minkova (2003: 19) prefers the term “renewal” rather than “revival” because it corresponds to “the natural way in which languages and cultural traditions continuously replenish themselves at any time”. Alliterative renewal in the 14th century seems all the more plausible in light of the linguistic evidence for earlier ME. It is likely, as we have seen, that some sort of alliterative tradition was inherited from the Anglo-Saxons, was adapted, and was then sustained through the early ME period. Later ME poetry departed even further from the conventions governing OE composition. Certainly the newer poetry affected older styles, but its underlying structures differed from the ancient patterns. Characteristic of the alliterative poetry of the 14th and 15th centuries, for example, was a “common assumption about vocabulary and content which lies behind all the poems” (Blake 1992: 521). Typically the meter demanded at least three alliterating words per line, a requirement that called for an expansive word hoard. As a result, this group of poems contain a vocabulary distinct from the rest of Middle English. This specialized vocabulary employs forms that are archaic elsewhere in the language as well as large inventories of synonyms for basic vocabulary words like man, e.g. beryn, douth, freke, gome, hathelle, lede, segge, and wy (Blake 1992: 522). Dialectal forms are appropriated for the same reason. Whereas OE alliterative poetry met its lexical needs through a large poetic vocabulary that included compounds, through kennings, and through formulas, Middle English relied on collocations of two or more words that can act similarly in the verse, e,g. foule in that frythe ‘bird in the forest’ and hertys and hyndes ‘male and female red deer’ (Blake 1992: 521–522). Similarly, verbs, adverbs, and pronouns alliterate in Middle English where Old English relies primarily on nominals. Nor is alliteration the sole metrical force in ME alliterative poetry, though it dominates in Old English. Pearl, for instance, is heavily alliterative, appearing in twelve-line stanzas which rhyme ababababbcbc. In the seven lines quoted below, Pearl’s father accepts Christ’s will both for his daughter and for himself (6): (6) “O perle,” quoþ I, “of rych renoun, So watz hit me dere þat þou can deme In þys veray avysyoun! If hit be ueray and soth sermoun Þat þou so strykez in garlande gay, So wel is me in þys doel-doungoun Þat þou art to þat Prynsez paye.” (Pearl ll. 1182–1188, Andrew and Waldron [eds.] 2004)

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‘“Oh Pearl”, I said, “of splendid renown, It was so dear to me what you related In your truthful vision; If it be an accurate and truthful speech, That you made in your radiant garland, So I am well in this sorrowful fortress That you are pleasing to that Prince”’. Similarly, a poem like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight constitutes “a mixture of latter-day Germanic verse”, unrhymed verse, and a five-line rhyming “bob and wheel” (Renoir 1988: 176). Finally we must remember that OE alliterative poetry was oral in nature, while the ME corpus was thoroughly written. Whereas the Anglo-Saxon poems represent either records of oral poems or written poems composed through the use of oral-traditional devices, ME verse is not, at its basis, oral, even if the older poetic tradition is evoked in its texts. Yet the poetry deploys structures that seem to hearken back to the oral-poetic devices used in OE poetic composition. While these may no longer be productive in the act of generating the poem, or even truly affective outside of their performative context, they lend an archaic legitimacy to the text being read or recited, to its performance as poetry (cf. Renoir 1988: 169). They provide a veneer of indigenous Englishness. See further Thorlac TurvillePetre (1996) on literature, language, and the construction of national identity. The very literate author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight alludes to oral composition. I schal telle hit as-tit, as I in toun herde,/ with tonge, ‘I shall tell it quickly as I heard [it told] in town with tongue’, the narrator vows, for instance, remembering an oral story-telling tradition, as much as conventional authority, in setting the stage for his romance (Arnovick 2006: 21; Tolkien and Gordon 1967: 31–32; Renoir 1988). Type-scenes are introduced, like that of dressing and arming of the hero before battle, a scene we find enacted before Gawain’s quest for the Green Knight. Sir Gawain’s arrival at Bertilak’s castle may also echo the “hero on the beach” theme found in oral poems like Beowulf. The castle schemered & schon þurʒ þe schyre oke, ‘shimmered and shone through the shining oaks’, just as rays of light typically reflect on the hero’s armor when, disembarking, he arrives at his destination (l. 772; Renoir 1988: 170). Likewise, the moat stands in for the beach and the knights and squires who greet Gawain for the hero’s retainers (Renoir 1988: 170). Without a doubt, as Benson has argued, the poem is “deeply indebted to the tradition of oral verse” (1965: 130; Renoir 1988: 170). In the absence of an active oral tradition, however, we discover “written poetry adorned with an inactive veneer of oral-formulaic rhetoric” (Renoir 1988: 173). Altogether the rhetoric represented a self-conscious allusion to an art by then lost.

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3.2.4 Non-alliterative poetry The three great writers of late Middle English literature chose rhymed isosyllabic meter rather than alliteration as the phonological glue for their verse. After a necessarily too-brief mention of Gower and Lydgate’s works, we look closely at Chaucer for his contribution to the development of non-alliterative poetry in English. John Gower’s long narrative poem, Confessio Amantis (‘The Lover’s Confession’) from 1390–1393, must be mentioned first. Although he also composes poetry in Latin and Anglo-French, Confessio Amantis is written in English, in the dialect of London (with Kentish features). In the following passage we observe Gower’s typical octosyllabic line – the standard English meter before Chaucer – and rhyming couplets (7): (7) And all þis made avant of pride. Good is þerefore a man to hide His oghne pris, for if he speke He may lihtliche his þonk tobreke. In armes liþ non avantance To him which þenkþ his name avance And be renomed of his dede; And also who þat þenkþ to spede Of love he mai him noght avaunte; For what man þilke vice haunte His pourpos schal ful ofte faile. In armes he þat wol travaile, Or elles loves grace atteigne, His lose tunge he mot restreigne, Which berþ of his honour þe keie (Confessio Amantis, Book I, ll. 2647–2661; Macaulay 1900–01) ‘And all this made boast of pride. Good it is therefore for a man to conceal His own reputation, for if he speak He may easily break his reward in pieces. In deeds of arms no boasting is appropriate To him who wants to advance his name And be renown for his deed; And also who wants to prosper Of love he may boast to no avail For whoever practices the same imperfection His purpose shall very often fail

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In deeds of arms he will labor, Or else love’s favor attain His loose tongue he must restrain Which bears of his honor the key’. Romance loans words are numerous (e.g. avantance, haunte, travaile, grace, atteigne, honour), revealing Gower’s mastery of Latin and French as much as the borrowed vocabulary of late Middle English. Gower describes the style as plain, perhaps in keeping with his decision to use the vernacular rather than French or Latin, traditionally (the elite) languages of poetry. In other poets’ hands, a Latinate vocabulary may serve a more formal or elaborate style. The monk and poet, John Lydgate, was much beloved in the 15th century for his Troy Book (1412–1420), Siege of Thebes (1421–1422), Fall of Princes (1431–1438), and many other works (South-west Midlands). Lydgate coins the term auryat, ‘gilded’, to describe his ideal of an elevated, often ornate, poetic diction, often Latinate in origin, suitable for the genre and its subject matter: e.g. adventure ‘adventure’, perfect ‘perfect’ (Blake 1992: 528). Lydgate seems to have modeled his language on the emerging London standard, although his poetry shares characteristics with Chaucer’s particular variety of Middle English (Horobin 2003: 130, 137). Although Chaucer brought French and Italian literary traditions to England, ultimately he demonstrated the literary capacity of the English vernacular as a poetic medium. He writes in the dialect of London. Chaucer’s works include the Book of the Duchess (c.1360), The Romaunt of the Rose (1360–1370), House of Fame (1380), Parliament of Fowls (1382), Legend of Good Women (1385), Troilus and Criseyede (1381–1385), and The Canterbury Tales (1386–1400) (see Horobin, Chapter 15; see also Burnley 1983, Cannon 1998, and 2008. Horobin 2003 compares and contrasts the orthography of the various Chaucer manuscripts, isolating Chaucer’s usage from that of his scribes). Chaucer’s gift to English poetry is the rhymed couplet using iambic pentameter. Rhymed iambic verse became the governing model for centuries following its innovation in the 14th century. To consider this verse form in detail, we must address first its larger context, the prosodic features of non-alliterative poetry in Middle English more generally. Through contact with the Anglo-Normans, a new type of versification, one based on syllable counting instead of alliteration, spread across England. A rhymed isosyllabic iambic line became popular (Minkova 2007: 183). Isosyllabism, the great innovation of ME poetry, is based on the iteration of equal measures or feet across verse lines. It is important to stress that the “long” isosyllabic line of ten (or eleven) syllables is not unique to Chaucer. Eight (or nine) syllable lines (couplets or larger groups linked by end rhyme) were

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the rule in medieval England until Chaucer began to use ten syllables (or five feet per line) in his later poetry. Chaucer borrowed the verse form and anglicized the line by restructuring it rhythmically. Whereas the French line peaked on both the fourth and tenth syllable, for example, Chaucer combined the ten-syllable count with stress alternation: five iambs alternate weak and strong stress (Minkova 2007: 183). Note that inflectional endings containing a vowel are treated as syllables except when final vowels are elided before another vowel and before h when silent or in an unstressed syllable (see further Burrow and Turville-Petre 2005: 5). Line 17 of the General Prologue, The hooly blisful martir for to seke ‘The holy blissful martyr to seek’ illustrates iambic pentameter at its most basic (or unproblematic) operation (Minkova 2007: 190): The hoo ly blis ful mar tir for to se ke W– S W–S W– S W–S W–S (W)

Usually, as it does above in line 17 of the General Prologue, a light syllable precedes each of the stressed syllables in the line (Davis 1987: xliv), example (8): (8) Bifil that in that seson on a day, In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay (General Prologue ll. 19–20; Benson [ed.] 1987) ‘It happened in that season one day In Southwark at the Tabard as I lay’ But, as Norman Davis (1987: xliv) explains, this order of stressed and light syllables is also reversed at times, while even headless (i.e. there is no initial light syllable) lines occur in Chaucer’s poetry. Then, too, more light syllables than are required in regular rhythm sometimes occur. The result is “great freedom and a variety of movement”, when Chaucer alters the rhythm by these and other means in both his five- and four- stress lines (Davis 1987: xliv). (See further Minkova 2007: 188–191 on the rhythmic adjustments Chaucer makes to his iambic pentameter.) Returning to Chaucer’s major poetry, we may now classify his versification. Chaucer rhymes couplets of iambic five-syllable lines in The Legend of Good Women and most of The Canterbury Tales. He also employs the same kind of line in a seven-line stanza (known later as “rime royal”) which rhymes ababbcc in Parliament of Fowls, Troilus and Criseyde, several of the tales told in The Canterbury Tales (i.e. Man of Law, Clerk, Prioress, Second Nun), and in other poems.

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3.2.5 Drama As we have seen, the style that medieval writers adopted determined the language they subsequently employed. Richard Rolle matches the style of his translations to their larger purpose, as do the translators of the ME Bible. Chaucer is adept at fitting the language of his narrators to their literary personalities. Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims (think of the Wife of Bath) delight us for the plain and often earthy language that comes out of their mouths. As a subject of the Trivium, rhetoric was studied and practiced by medieval writers, although the most skillful employ it with great subtlety. Medieval notions of literary style rooted themselves in the discipline of rhetoric. Medieval rhetoricians taught, for example, that letters should be written to their recipients on the basis of their contents and according to the status of their addressee. The ars dictaminis, a manual of epistolary technique, recommended three appropriate styles: high, middle, and low (Ginsberg 1987: 879). When the Host demands that the Clerk use a plain style rather than a learned style in telling his tale, he applies this notion to oral narrative (9): (9) Telle us som murie thyng of aventures. Youre termes, youre colours, and your figures, Keepe hem in stoor til so be ye endite Heigh style, as when that men to kynges write. Speketh so pleyn at this tyme, we yow preye, That we may understonde what ye seye (Clerk’s Prologue ll. 15–20; Benson [ed.] 1987) ‘Tell us some cheerful tale of adventures, Your terminology, your colors [i.e. figures of speech], and your figures [i.e. patterns of thought], Keep them in store until you compose High style, as when men write to kings. Speak so plainly at this time, we pray you, That we can understand what you say’ From the Host’s request we realize that Chaucer recognizes two levels of literary style: high and low (Horobin 2007: 126). A low style was one that everyone could understand, as the Host stipulates, whereas a high style was more appropriate for an elite audience. In contrast with low style, which remains unmarked, high style was marked linguistically. The language of high style is distinguished by a restricted vocabulary and rhetorical figures of speech (e.g. metaphor, synecdoche). These figures included unusual structures or organizations (e.g. anaphora) as well as sound patterns (e.g. alliteration), devices exploited to achieve a

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particular rhetorical effect. High style constituted an elevated form for “enditing”, “composing in writing”, requiring, in other words, a heightened linguistic register that one might use for special situations, like addressing a king (Horobin 2007: 127). The Clerk defers to the Host’s preference. Indeed, the stories told by Canterbury pilgrims often adopt the low style heard in common speech. Low style is no less artistically employed than its counterpart high style by medieval writers. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the dialogue written for the Mystery plays, especially by the so-called Wakefield Master. Although medieval drama is too large of a topic for this essay on ME literary language, the Wakefield plays in the Towneley cycle represent late ME literature at its best. For this reason their language deserves further discussion. Produced by local craft guilds to celebrate the Feast of Corpus Christi, several cycles of “Mystery” pageants come down to us, including those of York (Northern, c.1467), Towneley (Northern, 1450–1500), Chester (North-west Midlands, 1591–1607), and N-town (1468–1500). Within the Towneley cycle, the set of plays ascribed to the Wakefield Master possess a poetic style worthy of elaboration here. These plays are distinguished by the form of their compressed nine-line stanza, interpreted in the edition of Stevens and Cawley (1994) as thirteen lines which follow the rhyme scheme, ababababcddc. See further Stevens and Cawley (1994, Vol. 1: xxix–xxxii) on the manuscript and their rationale for printing the Wakefield stanza with thirteenlines. A colloquial style of dialogue (low style) supports the playwright’s extensive use of anachronism as a literary device. These Corpus Christi plays reenact episodes from the history of the Bible, making relevant its ancient narratives by setting them in medieval time and English place. See Kolve (1966) for an in-depth analysis of the Corpus Christi Plays and their setting. Prosody effects phonological and lexical cohesion in the Wakefield plays. “Secunda Pastorum”, or the “Second Shepherd’s Play”, tells the story of the Nativity. Note that the practice of giving Latin titles to the plays is an old editorial convention; I include them here for readers familiar with that identification. It opens with a 14th-century shepherd lamenting both his state and the cold (10): (10) Lord, what these weders ar cold! And I am yll happyd; I am nerehande dold, So long haue I nappyd; My legys thay fold, My fyngers ar chappyd. It is not as I wold, For I am al lappyd

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In sorrow. (“Secunda Pastorum”, ll. 1–9. All quotations from the Towneley plays, including translations, are taken from Stevens and Cawley [eds.] 1994.) ‘Lord, that these weathers are cold! And I am poorly clothed; I am nearly numb, So long have I napped; My legs, they cramp, My fingers are chapped. It is not as I would wish it, For I am wrapped, In sorrow’. The need for rhyme words presses a varied vocabulary into service, as we see in the first stanza: dold ‘stupid’, for example, is used to rhyme with cold and fold in the a verses, while happyd ‘covered’, nappyd ‘napped’, chappyd ‘chapped’, lappyd ‘wrapped’ rhyme in the b verses. In the stanza immediately following, hamyd ‘hamstrung’, ramyd ‘oppressed’, and handtamyd ‘submissive’ appear in the d verses (“Secunda Pastorum”, ll. 14–26). Alliteration is another prosodic feature the Master employs. It appears most noticeably at the religious and dramatic nexus of “Secunda Pastorum”. The First Shepherd recognizes God himself in the newborn babe (11): (11) Hayll, comly and clene! Hayll, yong child! Hayll, maker, as I meyne, Of a madyn so mylde! Thou has waryd, I weyne, the warlo so wylde (“Secunda Pastorum”, ll. 1024–1029) ‘Hail, comely and clean! Hail, young child! Hail, Maker (as I mean), Born of a maiden so mild! You have cursed, I believe, the warlock so wild [i.e. the devil]’. In parallel fashion, both the Second (12) and Third (13) shepherds acknowledge the Incarnation: (12) 2 Pastor. Hayll, sufferan sauyoure, For thou has vs sought!

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Hayll, frely foyde and flour, That all thyng has wroght! Hayll, full of fauour, That made all of noght! (“Secunda Pastorum”, ll. 1037–1042) ‘Second Shepherd. Hail sovereign savior, For you have us sought! Hail, noble child and flower, That all things has wrought! Hail, full of favor, That made all of nought!’ (13) 3 Pastor. Hayll, derlyng dere, Full of Godhede! I pray the be nere When that I haue nede. Hayll, swete is thy chere! My hart would blede (“Secunda Pastorum”, ll. 1050–1055) ‘Third Shepherd. Hail, darling dear, Full of godhead! I pray you be near When I have need. Hail, sweet is your cheer! My heart would bleed’ The alliteration is pronounced and proves functional in this dialogue. The metrical device connects each of the shepherd’s speeches, demarcating them aurally from the rest of the discourse, in which alliteration is less heavy. Alliteration unifies the discourse on a structural level, as well: the consonants found in the last line of one speech begin the first line of the next speech (14): (14) a. (1 Pastor.) Haue a bob of cherys … (l. 1036) ‘(First Shepherd.) Have a bunch of cherries’ b. 2 Pastor. Hayll, sufferan sauyoure … (l. 1037) ‘Second Shepherd. Hail, sovereign savior’ c. (2 Pastor.) I wold drynk on thy cop, Lytyll day-starne (1l. 1048–1049) ‘(Second Shepherd.) I would drink from your cup, Little day-star!’ d. 3 Pastor. Hayll, derlyng dere, (l. 1050) ‘Third Shepherd. Hail, darling dear’

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Most important, alliteration signals the climax of “Secunda Pastorum” at the Nativity, for the heavily alliterative style elevates the shepherd’s address. Prosody marks the adoration they offer. Alongside the formal constraints of the prosody is a colloquial style of expression which renders sacred subject matter accessible to a lay, often unlettered, audience. Actual-sounding, informal speech makes the subject relevant on a personal level. “I don’t care a pin” (Set I not at a pyn), Noah’s wife, Uxor, responds to daughters-in-law insistent that she board his ark (“Processus Noe cum Filiis”, l. 527). Just as contemporary utterances personalize the narrative, colloquial idiom also inevitably creates anachronism. Anachronism allows the remoteness of the past, the time of biblical record, to collapse into the immediacy of the medieval here and now. In turn, both past and present subsume themselves in turn into God’s universal time. Filled with the resentment of any peasant, the First Shepherd complains that he works so that the gentlery-men ‘gentry’ (“Secunda Pastorum”, l. 26) may thrive (15): (15) Bot we sely husbandys That walkys on the moore, In fayth we ar nerehandys Outt of the doore. No wonder, as it standys, If we be poore, For the tylthe of oure landys Lyys falow as the floore, As ye ken. We are so hamyd, For taxed and ramyd, We ar mayde handtamyd With thyse gentlery-men (“Secunda Pastorum”, ll. 14–26) ‘But we miserable husbandmen That walk on the moor, In faith, we are nearly Out of the door [i.e. destitute]. No wonder, as it stands, If we are poor, For our arable land Lies as fallow as the low-lying land, As you know. We are so hamstrung, Overburdened and oppressed,

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We are made submissive, By these gentry men’. The setting is established with a wink and a nod when the First Shepherd moans, on waking from sleep (16): (16) And I water fastand I thoght that we layd vs Full nere Yngland (“Secunda Pastorum”, ll. 509–511) ‘And I am tottering with hunger Such that I thought we had been lying down Very close to England’ As for the time represented on stage, the use of Latin liturgical language for the purposes of expressive swearing establishes the zeitgeist (17): (17) 1 Pastor. Ressurrex a mortruus! Haue hold my hand. Iudas carnas dominus! I may not well stand. My foot sleeps, by Jesus! (“Secunda Pastorum”, ll. 504–508) ‘First Shepherd. He rose from the dead!. Have hold of my hand. Judas flesh Lord! I may not well stand. My foot sleeps, by Jesus!’ As Stevens and Cawley (1994, Volume 2) note, garbled or corrupted Latin informs lines 504 and 506. Would the irony of ‘Judas flesh Lord!’ or ‘Judas, lord of the flesh!’ as a corruption of the hymn, laudes canas domino, ‘sing praises to the Lord’, be a source of humor for laity as well as clergy watching the performance? Swearing by Jesus in a Nativity play in which Jesus has not yet been born should have garnered a laugh, even while the appropriateness of the utterance for people used to swearing – outside of churches, of course – would let the audience identify with the 1st-century shepherds. This pattern of merging the past action of the narrative with the present of the audience repeats itself later on. Arriving at the stable where the baby Jesus lies, the Third Shepherd addresses him (18): (18) Hayll, swete is thy chere! My hart wold blede

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To se the sytt here In so poore wede, With no pennys (“Secunda Pastorum”, ll. 1054–1058) ‘Hail, sweet is your cheer! My heart bleeds, To see you sit here In so poor clothes, With no pennies’. If pennies were the coin of the realm in England, so, too, they must have been in Nazareth, thirteen hundred years earlier. Moments before offering his gift, the Second Shepherd tells the baby that he wold drynk on thy cop ‘would drink from your cup’, a 14th-century allusion to the chalice from which Christians will drink, when, in the first century setting of the play, the Eucharist has not been established (“Secunda Pastorum”, l. 1048).

4 Summary Colloquial expression, anachronism, and prosody give the Wakefield pageants a style as realistic and profane as it is sacred. Its easy use of spoken vernacular stands in opposition to the unidiomatic language representing Latin in certain translations. In between these extremes is the living mixture of usages and styles we know as ME writing. If we accept the notion that a self-consciously literary language does not manifest itself in English until very late in the medieval period, we nevertheless find its groundwork lain in the style of some of the writing reviewed here. While the literary language of Old English may not have died entirely with the Conquest, being maintained in a different guise in the alliterative poetry and prose of Middle English, we acknowledge the extent of the breach in the many translations from Latin and French that comprise English writing. Let me conclude by returning to the problematic question of ME literary language. We can classify texts by time period and genre and recount stylistic features. But we must take care in what we abstract from style, for any conclusions we reach must be evaluated with the medieval context. Finally we may do well to ask, if the medieval world itself does not understand “literature” in the same way we do, how productive is it for us to force our modern, disciplinary categories on its writings?

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5 References Andrew, Malcolm and Ronald Waldron (eds.). 2002. The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript. 4th edn. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Arnovick, Leslie K. 2006. Written Reliquaries: The Resonance of Orality in Medieval English Texts. Amsterdam/Philadephia: John Benjamins. Babington, Churchill. 1869. Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden monachi Cestrensis; together with the English Translations of John Trevisa and of an Unknown Writer of the Fifteenth Century. London: Longman. Benson, Larry D. 1965. Art and Tradition in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Benson, Larry D. (ed.). 1987. The Riverside Chaucer. 3rd edn. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Blake, Norman F. 1969. Rhythmical alliteration. Modern Philology 67: 118–124. Blake, Norman F. 1977. The English Language in Medieval Literature. London: Dent. Blake, Norman F. 1987. Late medieval prose. In: W. F. Bolton (ed.), The Middle Ages, 369–399. New York: Peter Bedrick Books. Blake, Norman F. 1992. The literary language. In: Norman Blake (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. II. 1066–1476, 500–541. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brook, G. L. and R. F. Leslie (eds.). 1963. Laʒamon: Brut. (Early English Text Society, 277.) London/New York: Oxford University Press. Burnley, David. 1983. A Guide to Chaucer’s Language. Houndmills: Macmillan. Burnley, David and Matsuji Tajima (eds.). 1994. The Language of Middle English Literature. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Burrow, J. A. and Thorlac Turville-Petre. 2005. A Book of Middle English. 3rd edn. Malden: Blackwell. Cannon, Christopher. 1998. The Making of Chaucer’s English: A Study of Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cannon, Christopher. 2008. Middle English Literature: A Cultural History. Cambridge: Polity Press. Chism, Christine. 1999. Romance. In: Scanlon (ed.), 57–69. Cooper, Helen. 2010. Prose romances. In: Edwards (ed.), 215–229. David, Alfred and James Simpson (eds.). 2006. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol. A. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company. Davis, Norman. 1987. Language and Versification. In Benson (ed.), xxix–xiv. Edwards, A. S. G. (ed.). 2010. A Companion to Middle English Prose. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer. Ginsberg, Warren S. 1987. Notes to The Clerk's Prologue and Tale. In: Benson (ed.), 879–884. Hammond, Gerald and Sylvia Adamson (eds.). 1996–2011. Bible in English. Chadwyck-Healey. http://collections.chadwyck.co.uk/marketing/products/about_ilc.jsp?collection=bie; last accessed 3 January 2017. Hanna, Ralph. 1999. Alliterative poetry. In: Scanlon (ed.), 488–512. Hanna, Ralph. 2010 [2004]. Rolle and related works. In: Edwards (ed.), 19–31. Hartung, Albert E. and J. Burke Severs (eds.). 1969–93. A Manual of the Writings in Middle English. 9 vols. Hamden, CT: Anchor Books. Hasenfratz, Robert (ed.). 2000. Ancrene Wisse. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications. Horobin, Simon. 2003. The Language of the Chaucer Tradition. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.

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Horobin, Simon. 2007. Chaucer’s Language. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Kelly, Henry Ansgar. 2010. The Englishness of the Wycliffite Bible. Paper delivered to the Medieval Association of the Pacific, Tacoma, March 2010. Kolve, V. A. 1966. The Play Called Corpus Christi. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Macaulay, G. C. 1900–01. The English Works of John Gower. (Early English Text Society, E.S. 81–82.) London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co. Minkova, Donka. 2003. Alliteration and Sound Change in Early English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Minkova, Donka. 2007. The forms of verse. In: Peter Brown (ed.), A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture c.1350–1500, 176–193. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Newhauser, Richard. 2009. Religious writing. In: Scanlon (ed.), 37–55. Pearsall, Derek. 1977. Old English and Middle English Poetry. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Renoir, Alain. 1988. A Key to Old Poems. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Scanlon, Larry (ed.). 1999. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Literature 1100– 1500. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Simmons, Thomas Frederick (ed.). 1879. The Lay Folks Mass Book. London: Trübner and Co. Smith, Jeremy J. 2009. Writing in English, writing in England: Language. In: Marilyn Corrie (ed.), A Concise Companion to Middle English Literature, 145–165. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Spearing, A. C. 2010. Margery Kempe. In: Edwards (ed.), 83–97. Stevens, Martin and A. C. Cawley (eds.). 1994. The Towneley Plays. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tolkien, J. R. R. 1929. Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad. Essays and Studies 14: 104–126. Tolkien, J. R. R. and E. V. Gordon (eds.). 1967. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Revised by Norman Davis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Turville-Petre, Thorlac. 1996. England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290–1340. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Watson, Nicholas. 1999. The politics of Middle English writing. In: Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans (eds.), The Idea of the Vernacular, 331–352. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press.

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Chapter 15: The Language of Chaucer 1 2 3 4

Spelling and dialect Grammar 295 Vocabulary 299 References 304

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Abstract: This chapter provides an introduction to the variety of Middle English employed by the 14th-century poet Geoffrey Chaucer, situating it within the development of the English language in an important stage in its development. The chapter begins by outlining the process of standardization, considering the place of Chaucer’s language in the emergence of a standard variety of written English from the numerous competing written varieties of Middle English. Section 2 provides an overview of Chaucer’s noun, verb, and pronoun systems, highlighting important differences between Chaucer’s usage and those that preceded and followed him. Section 3 focuses on Chaucer’s vocabulary, its origins, and the impact of external sources, principally French and Latin, as well as the various methodologies and electronic resources available for assessing Chaucer’s exploitation of the richness of the Middle English lexicon.

1 Spelling and dialect The ME period was a time of considerable linguistic variation. There was no standard written or spoken variety of the language and, as a consequence, writers simply wrote using their native dialect. Chaucer was a Londoner by birth and so the dialect he used was that of London. This should not be taken to imply that the London dialect was of a higher status than other regional varieties; the author of the alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was of Cheshire origin and so wrote his works using that dialect. Speakers of Middle English were certainly aware of regional differences in pronunciation, as may be seen in Chaucer’s characterization of the Northern dialect in the Reeve’s Tale. Here Chaucer employs certain characteristic features of Northern pronunciation, grammar, and vocabuSimon Horobin: Oxford (UK)

DOI 10.1515/9783110525328-015

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lary as part of his depiction of two Cambridge undergraduates who are of Northern origins. It is tempting for modern readers to see this as early evidence of north-south prejudices that are found among present-day English speakers, but the lack of evidence for a standard variety makes such an interpretation unlikely. Furthermore, the fact that the Northerners are Cambridge undergraduates suggests a higher status for the Northern dialect than the Southern speech used by the cheating Miller. Since J. R. R. Tolkien’s (1934) important study of Chaucer’s use of Northern dialect in the Reeve’s Tale there have been numerous studies of Chaucer’s depiction of dialect, although scholars continue to struggle to explain why Chaucer should have chosen to employ dialect speech in this particular tale and with these particular characters. For an overview of discussion of this issue and a new interpretation see Machan (2003). While there is no evidence of a standard spoken variety of Middle English, there is, however, some evidence indicating the emergence of a standard written language towards the end of the ME period (see Schaefer, Chapter 11). This development began during the late 14th century, but it is important to recognize that this process was not influenced by Chaucer, nor was he directly responsible for ensuring the establishment and adoption of this standard variety. Throughout much of the ME period spelling was considerably more varied than in Present-day English, as a result of its lack of status and its local functions. However, by the end of the ME period, the vernacular began to be used for communication on a wider scale and this kind of variation became inefficient. As a result there was an increased need for a standardized written variety of Middle English which could be understood over a wide geographical area. In a seminal discussion of the development of London English during the 14th and 15th centuries, M. L. Samuels (1963) distinguished four “types” of written standard which he labelled types I– IV. Type I, also known as the Central Midlands Standard, is found in a number of texts associated with John Wycliffe and the Lollard movement. This language is found in a large number of manuscripts of religious texts and Bible translations produced by the Lollards, copied and circulated widely throughout the country. This type of language is based upon the dialects of the Central Midlands counties, and characteristic forms include sich ‘such’, mych, ‘much’, ony ‘any’, silf ‘self’, stide ‘stead’, ʒouun ‘given’, siʒ ‘saw’. Samuels’ Type II is found in a group of manuscripts copied in London in the mid to late 14th century; a group which includes the Auchinleck manuscript. The Auchinleck manuscript was produced in London around 1340 by six scribes, some of whom were Londoners while others were natives of the West Midlands. Characteristic Type II features include forms which are common to the Norfolk and Suffolk dialects, and are thought to derive from immigration into the capital from those counties. Examples of such forms are þai, hij ‘they’, þeiʒ ‘though’, werld ‘world’, þat ilch(e), ilch(e) ‘that very’.

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The London dialect changed towards the end of the 14th century, as a result of continued immigration. This late 14th- and early 15th-century variety, termed by Samuels Type III, is the dialect of the earliest Chaucer manuscripts: the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge MS 61 of Troilus and Criseyde. Other Type III documents are early civic documents such as the London guild returns and the Petition of the Mercers’ Company, as well as the early 15th-century holograph manuscripts containing the works of the poet Thomas Hoccleve. Characteristic features of this language are forms common to the Central Midlands dialects, including they ‘they’, hir(e) ‘their’, though ‘though’, yaf ‘gave’, nat ‘not’, swich ‘such’. Type III was subsequently replaced around 1430 by Type IV, also termed by Samuels “Chancery Standard” which was employed by government clerks working in the Chancery, Signet, and Privy Seal Offices. Type IV also shows the influence of forms found in the Central Midlands dialects although these have been further supplemented by forms originally restricted to the North Midlands, e.g. theyre ‘their’, thorough ‘through’, such(e) ‘such’, gaf ‘gave’, not ‘not’. Michael Benskin’s extensive analysis of Chancery and other administrative documents copied throughout the 15th century has led him to question the status of Chancery Standard and the claims made by John Fisher concerning its early adoption among Chancery scribes (Benskin 2004; Fisher 1996) What is clear, however, is that while Chaucer’s dialect may have played an important role in the standardization of written English, it was not ultimately the ancestor of the standard language. It is important to be aware that these types are not fixed standards, with fixed sets of rules from which deviation was stigmatized, as is the case with our PDE standard written language. It is more accurate to see these four types as focused standards, in that texts written using one of these types share a number of distinctive spelling features, but not all of them will appear in all texts (Smith 1996). So while PDE standard written English does not permit variation, these standardized, or focused, types do tolerate a certain amount of variation. So Chaucer’s dialect belongs to a variety known to scholars as Type III London English, a standardized usage employed in a number of texts copied in London towards the end of the 14th and beginning of the 15th centuries. These labels have, however, come under considerable scrutiny since Samuels’ article was first published in 1963. Horobin (2003) has studied the variation found within documents copied in Type III and Type IV, arguing that the distinction between these types is more a reflection of differences of register rather than date. The majority of manuscripts written in Samuels’ Type III contain literary texts, particularly ones connected with Chaucer, suggesting that it may have functioned as a kind of literary, or Chaucerian, standard language. More recently, palaeographical analysis has further complicated the picture, by showing that many Type III documents

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were in fact copied by a single scribe, thereby undermining their claim to be representative of a standard language (Horobin and Mooney 2004).

2 Grammar The process of simplification and loss of inflectional endings that is characteristic of Middle English (see Wełna, Chapter 4) is comparatively well advanced by the time of Chaucer’s writing. This means that many of the special endings that were employed to indicate case, number, and gender in Old English were no longer in use. This is apparent from a comparison of Chaucer’s noun paradigm with the equivalent OE version (see Table 15.1). Table 15.1: Declension of stone in Chaucer and in Old English Old English

NOM A ACC CC GEN DAT

Chaucer’s language

SG

P PLL

SG

P PLL

stān stān stānes stāne

stānas stānas stāna stānum

stoon stoon stoones stoon(e)

stoones stoones stoones stoones

Where Old English has distinct endings to mark the nominative/accusative, dative, and genitive singular and plural, Chaucer’s system relies almost entirely on an endingless form and an ending which indicates plurality and possession. There is one further ending, , used to mark the dative singular, although this is only found in fossilized phrases such as on honde. Adjective inflection shows a similar tendency towards syncretism and loss, with the result that the only ending used in Chaucer’s language is -e. This ending is added to plural adjectives, as in stronge men, and to singular adjectives that appear after a determiner, as in the olde man, this yonge sonne. The only adjectives that do not take this inflection, therefore, are ones that are not preceded by a determiner, as in the man is old, or an old man (Burnley 1982). This distinction had already been lost in the Northern dialects of Middle English, but it is preserved by a number of Southern scribes. However, the consistency with which these distinctions are maintained throughout Chaucer’s works is unusual and presumably reflects a conscious desire to preserve this increasingly archaic feature for metrical reasons. As in Present-day English, ME pronouns were inflected according to number, case, and gender. Third person pronouns were selected according to natural

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gender, i.e. real world sex distinctions, as in Present-day English, rather than according to grammatical gender as found in Old English. The forms of the personal pronouns used by Chaucer are as shown in Tables 15.2 and 15.3. Table 15.2: First and second person pronouns in Chaucer 1P

SG

PL PL

NOM

I (ich, ik) me my(n)(e) me thou/thow thyn(e) thee

we us our(e)(s) us ye your(e)(s) you/yow

A ACC CC GEN DAT NOM GEN DAT

Table 15.3: Third person pronouns in Chaucer 3P SG

MASC

FEM

NEUT

NOM

he hym, him his hym, him

she hir(e), hyr(e) hir(e)(s) hir(e), hyr(e)

it, hit it, hit his it, hit

A ACC CC GEN DAT

3P P L

all genders

NOM

they hem hir(e)(s) hem

ACC GEN DAT

The above tables show that there was no formal distinction between the accusative and dative cases in Middle English; these two cases had merged so that the same pronoun was used for both. The different forms of the first person singular nominative pronoun, I, ich, and ik, represent dialect distinctions: the southern form ich is found as an alternative throughout Chaucer’s works, while ik is a variant employed only in the Reeve’s Prologue as part of the Norfolk dialect attributed to that character. Another difference between Middle English and Present-day English in the above table is the two forms of the second person pronoun: thou/ye, equivalent to PDE you. This number distinction is inherited from Old English, but in Middle English it took on additional functions through contact with French (cf. Skaffari, Chapter 10). French maintains a pragmatic distinction in the use of the singular and plural pronouns when used to address a single individual. The plural vous form is used to indicate respect and formality, while the singular form, tu, is reserved to signal familiarity or a lack of respect. A similar distinction is found in Chaucer’s use of thou and ye, and an understanding of this distinction is important in appreciating the subtleties in the shifting relations between characters in

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Chaucer’s works. It was conventional for courtly men and women to address each other using the plural pronoun, as is apparent in the following example from the Franklin’s Tale in which Dorigen consents to be Arveragus’ wife, as in (1): (1)

“Sire, sith of youre gentillesse Ye profre me to have so large a reyne, Ne wolde nevere God bitwixe us tweyne, As in my gilt, were outher werre or stryf. Sire, I wol be youre humble trewe wyf; Have heer my trouthe – til that myn herte breste.” (F 754–759; Chaucer quotations following Benson [ed.] 1988) ‘“Sir, since by your nobility you allow me to have so loose a rein, God would never wish there to be either war or strife between us two through my fault. Sir, I am willing to be your humble, true wife. Receive here my pledge – until me heart breaks”’

The use of the second person plural pronoun here is intended to indicate Dorigen’s respect for her husband, and is all the more striking given that the terms of the marriage arrangement are that both husband and wife are to be equals. While the plural pronoun is used to indicate respect between individuals, the singular form was employed to indicate disrespect or contempt, as in the Host’s abrupt interruption of Chaucer’s Tale of Sir Thopas, as in (2): (2)

“Namoore of this, for Goddes dignitee,” Quod oure Hooste, “for thou makest me So wery of thy verray lewednesse” (B2 2109–2111) ‘“No more of this, for God’s sake”, said our Host, “for you make me so fed up by your complete ignorance”’

However, the singular form may also be used to express familiarity and intimacy. For instance, in Chaucer’s courtly romance Troilus and Criseyde the two lovers address each other using the plural pronoun throughout the poem, although both switch to the singular pronoun at moments of high emotional intensity, such as Troilus’ pledge of commitment to Criseyde: “For I am thyn, by God and by my trouthe!” (3.1512). While these examples show Chaucer’s subtle exploitation of the pragmatic distinctions between singular and plural pronouns, there are occurrences where Chaucer pays less attention to such nuances of usage. The neuter form of the third person singular pronoun remained identical with the masculine form his, as in Old English. The replacement of this form with its PDE equivalent its did not occur until the EModE period. However, the third

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person plural pronouns are quite different from those used in Present-day English. This is because Chaucer’s system represents a transitional stage in the replacement of the OE pronouns hie, hiera, him with forms derived from Old Norse: they, their, them. These ON third person plural pronouns were adopted during the ME period; presumably in an attempt to avoid confusion with other personal pronouns. As with many ON loanwords, these pronouns are first recorded in the Northern and East Midlands dialects and only later appear in the Southern dialects. It is not until the 14th century that we see these forms appearing in texts copied in London, and Chaucer used only the nominative form they, alongside the forms hem and hir derived from Old English. Chaucer’s verb endings show a number of differences from those of Presentday English, as may be seen in the Table 15.4. Table 15.4: Present tense verbal endings in Chaucer and in Present-day English

1P SG 2P SG 3P SG P PLL

Chaucer’s language

Present-day English

loue louest loueth loue(n)

love love loves love

While the ending is the main form for the 3rd person singular present indicative in Chaucer’s writings, another ending in is also found in a handful of examples. As with the ON derived third person plural pronouns this ending was originally a Northern feature, only adopted into London English during the 14th century. Chaucer evidently knew the ending, as he used it as a variant in rhyme twice in the Book of the Duchess, (3), but it was not a consistent feature of his own dialect: (3) That never was founden, as it telles, Bord ne man, ne nothing elles. (lines 73–74) ‘That never was found, as it is told, plank nor man, nor nothing else’. The only other instance of its use in Chaucer’s works is in the dialect speech in the Reeve’s Tale, indicating clearly that Chaucer considered this verb ending to be a northern dialect feature.

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3 Vocabulary A large proportion of Chaucer’s vocabulary is made up of words of OE origin, and these tend to be words which constitute the core of his vocabulary: high frequency items which refer to everyday concepts. Chaucer’s vocabulary also comprises a substantial number of words of ON derivation, the majority of which represent core concepts such as housbonde, law, sky, skile, though. We saw in the previous section that ON words were adopted earliest in the more northerly dialects of Middle English, and it is therefore not surprising that Chaucer prefers words of OE derivation such as swich ‘such’, chirch ‘church’, ey ‘egg’ to the ON equivalents slik, kirk, egg. We have already seen that Chaucer employed only the nominative third person plural ON pronoun form, they, alongside hem, not them and hir/her, not their. The only appearance of the forms them and their in Chaucer’s works is in the Northern dialect of the students in the Reeve’s Tale, indicating that Chaucer considered these forms to be northern. Chaucer’s lack of use of these pronouns is striking, given that they replaced the OE forms in the London dialect shortly after his death. While he generally preferred OE words rather than ones of ON descent, Chaucer did employ some ON words alongside their OE equivalents, as in the cases of thilke/same; give/yive; against/ayeinst. There are some examples of doublets of this kind where there was evidently a distinction in meaning or register which can be important for our understanding of Chaucer’s work. A good example of this concerns Chaucer’s use of the words cherl, which is of OE origin, and carl, a borrowing from Old Norse. Both are used by Chaucer with reference to a peasant, although it is apparent from the contexts within which they are used, and the people to which the terms are applied, that carl was considered to be a considerably more contemptuous term of abuse than cherl (Burnley 1989: 50–51). Discussions of Chaucer’s vocabulary have tended to focus most on his borrowings from French, and principally on those French words that are first recorded in his works. This approach is most evident in Joseph Mersand’s book Chaucer’s Romance Vocabulary, which calculates that Chaucer’s complete vocabulary was 8,072 words, of which 4,189 are derived from Romance sources. Mersand drew on the evidence of first citations in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (Simpson and Weiner [eds.] 1989) to calculate that 1,180 of the Romance words used by Chaucer first appear in English in Chaucer’s works, and he argued that these words represented Chaucer’s “gifts to the English language” (Mersand 1937: 56). But the methodology that Mersand employed, and the figures that he produced, are based upon a number of problematic assumptions. The fact that the earliest recorded use of a word in the OED is found in Chaucer’s works does not necessarily mean that Chaucer was the first writer to use it. As a major literary

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writer Chaucer’s works were comprehensively mined for quotations by the editors of the OED, and so it is hardly surprising that his works are well represented in its quotations. By contrast many of his contemporaries’ and predecessors’ works were less available in modern editions and consequently less widely read for the dictionary, with the result that Chaucer’s uses often appear as the earliest recorded occurrences. The completion of the Middle English Dictionary (Kurath et al. 1952–2001), with a far more comprehensive treatment of the ME period, reveals that many of the words cited as first occurring in Chaucer’s works in OED are in fact found in earlier texts. A further theoretical objection to Mersand’s approach is the way that he assumed that the earliest recorded use of a word is likely to represent its first appearance in English. Many loanwords would have been used in speech for some time before they appeared in the written language, while it is also likely that earlier written instances have been lost. So the fact that the first attestation of a word appears in Chaucer’s works does not necessarily indicate that he was responsible for introducing it into English. Another objection to Mersand’s approach is the assumption that the borrowing of words from French and Latin was a novelty, ignoring the fact that earlier ME writers made considerable use of this same practice. Christopher Cannon (1998) has reconsidered Mersand’s approach, highlighting many of its shortcomings. Yet Cannon’s book suffers from similar limitations in the ways that it draws upon lexicographical and etymological information. Having discussed the flaws in Mersand’s approach, Cannon attempts to show how dictionary evidence can be employed to determine the status of Chaucer’s words. In a discussion of Chaucer’s colloquial style Cannon considers how dictionaries can supply evidence of words derived from the spoken language. He argues that by identifying gaps in the lexicographical record we can distinguish words which Chaucer introduced from the spoken into the written language. According to Cannon, where a word appears in Old English and then does not appear in Middle English before Chaucer, it is likely to represent a colloquialism which fell out of use in the written language and survived only in speech. Using this methodology Cannon produces a list of 36 words which he describes as “resolutely native colloquialisms” (Cannon 1998: 161). Yet Cannon allows the dictionary evidence to stand on its own and he does not proceed to analyze the words themselves, and the use Chaucer made of them. In fact the words listed by Cannon seem most unlikely to be colloquialisms, and the simplest explanation for their absence from the written record is their technical or specialized meanings. For example Cannon’s list includes the word harpe-stringe, a word which perhaps unsurprisingly is used just once by Chaucer. But the lack of occurrences of this word prior to its appearance in the House of Fame tells us very little, apart from the fact that harp-strings are not much discussed in early Middle English

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writing. The frequent appearance of both harp and string in the early Middle English record further undermines any attempt to assign the word harpe-stringe to a colloquial register. Other words on the list are equally technical and unusual, such as ordal ‘trial by ordeal’, thurrok ‘the bilge of a ship’, last ‘a ship’s load’, and chimb ‘the rim of a barrel’, suggesting that their lack of earlier attestation is simply due to their specialized status. It is clear from the discussion so far that trying to base our assessment of Chaucer’s lexicon on dictionary evidence is limited in a variety of ways. Simply counting up French borrowings, or ones first attested in Chaucer’s works, tells us little about the status of such words in Chaucer’s language. To develop a fuller appreciation of the function of borrowing in Chaucer’s works we must make a distinction between French words used by Chaucer which were already in use in English, and those which were more recent borrowings. This distinction is apparent from Chaucer’s discussion of the word fruit in the Parson’s Tale, where he refers to it as the English equivalent of the Latin fructus (I 869). The word fruyt is ultimately of French origin, though it is recorded in Middle English from the early 13th century, and by Chaucer’s time it was clearly well assimilated into the English lexicon. A similar example is found in the Second Nun’s Tale, where peple is given as the English word for Greek leos (G 106). Peple is also a French loanword, but it is one that is found in Middle English from the late 13th century and thus well established within the English lexicon by the late 14th century. One way of trying to distinguish between recent loans and those that had been fully assimilated into English by the time Chaucer used them is to consider their distribution among texts written prior to and contemporary with Chaucer. Where a French loanword is first attested early in the ME period, and found in a variety of different sources by the time Chaucer used it, we can be confident that Chaucer’s use of it would not have been considered novel. In employing such an approach we must remain conscious of the caveats regarding first attestations noted above, as well as the patchy nature of the surviving written record. When we begin to analyze Chaucer’s use of Romance loans it becomes immediately apparent that there is a distinction between Romance words that fill a lexical gap, and words introduced alongside existing English words as stylistic alternatives. The dominance of the French and Latin languages throughout much of the early ME period meant that there were no English words for many key concepts, creating the need for groups of new lexical items. Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe, for example, is one of the earliest ME scientific works. As astronomical texts were traditionally written in Latin in the Middle Ages, it is not surprising that Chaucer was compelled to introduce a number of Latin loanwords into English to provide him with the technical terms he needed. So Chaucer’s Astrolabe contains what appear to be the first attestations of technical words such as

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almicanteras, azimutz, consentrik, and declinacioun. That Chaucer expected his audience to consider such words to appear foreign is apparent from his tendency to gloss them, as shown by the way he introduces the word azimutz: “these same strykes or diuisiouns ben clepid azimutz” (1.19). A similar example is found in the introduction of the technical term altitude, which Chaucer carefully glosses when it is first introduced, but then expects his readers to be able to understand it on subsequent occasions: “Thyn Astrolabie hath a ring to putten on the thombe of thi right hond in taking the height of thinges. And tak kep, for from henes forthward I wol clepen the heighte of any thing that is taken by the rewle ‘the altitude’, withoute moo wordes” (1.1). Where Chaucer differs from other writers in their use of technical terms is in employing such words in a wider range of contexts. For example the astronomical term declinacioun appears in the Franklin’s Tale in the following context, (4): (4) He seyde, “Appollo, god and governour Of every plaunte, herbe, tree and flour, That yevest after thy declinacioun, To ech of hem his tyme and his seson, (F 1031–1034) ‘He said, “Appollo, god and governor of every plant, herb, tree and flower, who gives to each of them their time and season, according to your distance from the equinoctial’ Alongside the borrowing of technical terms to provide vernacular equivalents to words available only in French or Latin, Chaucer’s works also employ a number of French words where English equivalents were alread15y available. The introduction of such words was driven by stylistic factors, reflecting the high status attached to French culture during the late Middle Ages, especially within the English court. French loanwords comprise a large proportion of Chaucer’s words concerned with courtly concepts such as gentillesse, curteisye, chivalrye, honour, pitee, mercy. Another way of assessing a word’s status in Chaucer’s works is to examine all of its instances across his oeuvre. An excellent model for this kind of approach is a study by E. T. Donaldson (1970) which demonstrated Chaucer’s ironic use of the courtly love language of earlier romances and lyrics. Donaldson considered the distribution of a group of words that are generally restricted to fabliaux contexts, such as the word hende, meaning ‘noble, courtly, or refined’. This word is found almost exclusively in the Miller’s Tale, where it is employed as an epithet for the Oxford student “hende Nicholas”. There are two occurrences of the word outside the Miller’s Tale: one in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, where it is used of another Oxford student of dubious morals, the Wife of Bath’s fifth husband Jankyn. The

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second instance is its use by Harry Bailly in his efforts to settle a dispute between the Friar and the Summoner (D 1286–1287). This distribution of the word hende indicates that, while its meaning may have been ‘noble, courtly, or refined’, Chaucer only ever used the word ironically. Studies of this kind need to be extended to cover all fields of Chaucerian discourse and stylistic registers, while making use of the considerable resources that are now available for studying the distribution of individual words across Chaucer’s works and the whole ME corpus. The importance of reconstructing the “architecture” of Chaucer’s language to identify the various contextual factors that relate to individual word choice has been demonstrated by David Burnley (1979, 1989). An effective demonstration of this may be seen in Burnley’s discussion of groups of synonyms such as hyre, guerdoun, mede, all with the core meaning ‘reward’ (Burnley 1989: 203– 213). Burnley’s discussion of words used by Chaucer to refer to the ‘heart’ identified a technical usage in the word corage, generally used to translate the Latin word animus and referring to the rational part of the soul. This sheds interesting light on Chaucer’s use of the word in the famous depiction of Criseyde as “slydynge of corage” (Troilus 5.825) (Burnley 1989: 216–217). The resources available for this kind of study have been greatly enhanced in recent years so that it is now possible to carry out detailed analyses of the occurrences of individual words across large quantities of text. A valuable resource is the Glossarial DataBase of Middle English (Benson 2006), based on the texts edited in the Riverside Chaucer, which allows the identification of each occurrence of a particular lexeme across the whole of the Canterbury Tales. Searches can also be limited to particular parts of speech, enabling more finegrained analysis. Searching the Glossarial DataBase enables the identification of patterns in the distribution of certain words across Chaucer’s works of the kind observed by Donaldson, discussed above. It also allows us to observe whether there are any contextual factors that might govern a particular word’s use, such as whether it is spoken by a particular character, in a particular text-type, in a prose text, in rhyming position etc. As well as analyzing the distribution of individual words across Chaucer’s works, we can also examine their occurrence in other Middle English works by searching electronic corpora. The Middle English Compendium (McSparran [ed.] 2006) includes a corpus of Middle English verse and prose which contains texts of some 60 Middle English works which can be searched in their entirety, or by single texts or groups of texts, and which includes complete texts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, Boece, and Treatise on the Astrolabe. While much important work has been done on Chaucer’s language (see also Horobin 2011), there is considerably more that needs to be done. Past studies have tended to focus too much on lexicographical evidence rather than analyzing the

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words themselves and the contexts within which they are used. There has also been a tendency to consider Chaucer’s usage in a vacuum, rather than considering his language in relation to that of his contemporaries. A renaissance of interest in the study of Chaucer manuscripts has also led to a reassessment of Chaucer’s language in the light of the surviving textual evidence, forcing scholars to reconsider the classifications that have been accepted since Samuels’ influential paper of 1963. The transcription of these texts into electronic form by the Canterbury Tales project (Robinson 1996; Solopova 2000; see http://www.petermwrobinson.me.uk/canterburytalesproject.com) and the existence of other electronic editions is further facilitating this reconsideration of the textual evidence, enabling large scale analyses of details of spelling and morphology that were impossible in the pre-digital age.

4 References Benskin, Michael. 2004. Chancery Standard. In: Christian J. Kay, Carole Hough, and Irené Wotherspoon (eds.), New Perspectives on English Historical Linguistics: Selected Papers from 12 ICEHL. Vol. II: Lexis and Transmission, 1–40. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Benson, Larry D. (gen. ed.). 1988. The Riverside Chaucer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Benson, Larry D. 2006. A Glossarial DataBase of Middle English. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/g/ gloss/; last accessed 3 January 2017. Burnley, J. D. 1979. Chaucer’s Language and the Philosophers’ Tradition. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Burnley, J. D. 1982. Inflexion in Chaucer’s adjectives. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 83: 169–177. Burnley, J. D. 1989. The Language of Chaucer. Basingstoke: Macmillan. (Reprint of A Guide to Chaucer’s Language. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1983.) Cannon, Christopher. 1998. The Making of Chaucer’s English: A Study of Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Donaldson, E. Talbot. 1970. Idiom of popular poetry in the Miller’s Tale. In: Speaking of Chaucer, 13–29. London: Athlone. Fisher, John H. 1996. The Emergence of Standard English. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky. Horobin, Simon. 2003. The Language of the Chaucer Tradition. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Horobin, Simon. 2011. Chancer and late medieval language. Literature Compass 8(5): 258–265. Horobin, Simon and Linne Mooney. 2004. A Piers Plowman manuscript by the Hengwrt/Ellesmere scribe and its implications for London Standard English. Studies in the Age of Chaucer 26: 65–112. Kurath, Hans, Sherman M. Kuhn, John Reidy, and Robert E. Lewis. 1952–2001. Middle English Dictionary. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/ Machan, Tim William. 2003. English in the Middle Ages. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McSparran, Frances (ed.). 2006. Middle English Compendium. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mec/

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Mersand, Joseph. 1937. Chaucer’s Romance Vocabulary. New York: Comet. Simpson, John A. and Edmund S. C. Weiner (eds.). 1989. Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robinson, P. M. W. (ed.). 1996. The Wife of Bath’s Prologue on CD-ROM. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Samuels, M. L. 1963. Some applications of Middle English dialectology. English Studies 44: 81–94. (Reprinted in Margaret Laing [ed.], Middle English Dialectology: Essays on Some Principles and Problems, 64–80. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1989.) Smith, Jeremy J. 1996. An Historical Study of English: Function, Form and Change. London: Routledge. Solopova, Elizabeth (ed.). 2000. The General Prologue on CD-ROM. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tolkien, J. R. R. 1934. Chaucer as a philologist: The Reeve’s Tale. Transactions of the Philological Society 33(1): 1–70.

Index Anglo-French (Anglo-Norman) 9, 111, 127, 174, 175, 186, 198, 224, 225, 227–235, 275, 280 auxiliary 83, 87, 118–120, 126, 142 bilingualism 23, 111, 166, 167, 169–171, 188–191, 227–230, 235, 236, 254 borrowing, derivational affixes 70, 71, 107, 109, 110, 176, 177, 196, 231, 236 borrowing, lexical – French 24, 30–34, 53, 55, 71, 109–112, 127, 173–175, 193–196, 199–201, 218, 234, 266, 269, 281, 299–303 – Latin 30, 111, 112, 175, 281, 300–303 – Old Norse 9, 23, 24, 175, 176, 215, 216, 269, 298, 299 borrowing, phonological 177, 178, 196, 197, 231 borrowing, syntactic 179–181, 197, 198 change “from below” 214–216 Chaucer 11, 12, 32, 33, 55, 57, 58, 87, 102–104, 107–110, 112, 117, 123, 124, 126, 178, 186, 189, 212, 215, 216, 218, 243, 244, 248, 254, 277, 281–284 – dialect of 292–295 – emotion terms in 104, 105 – grammar of 295–298 – lexical innovation in 300–303 – verbal insults in 123, 249–251 class, social 240, 243, 251, 254–256 code-switching 126–128, 169–171, 189, 190, 235 collocation 102–107 consonant system, ME 40, 41, 139, 178 – changes in 40, 43, 47 contact-induced change 172–181, 192–198 see also borrowing – English/French 107, 109, 110, 178, 235, 236 – English/Norse 178, 179 – English/Celtic 21, 87, 171, 172, 176–181 contact, language 166, 167, 184, 185, 190–192, 226–230 see also bilingualism, borrowing, and multilingualism

DOI 10.1515/9783110525328-016

creolization 169, 198, 236 – social arguments against 225–232 – linguistic arguments against 230–232 degree modifier see intensifier dialects, ME 52–61, 64, 66, 68–70, 86, 87, 134–161, 166, 179 – dialect continuum 135, 140 – ‘fire’, forms of 158, 159 – ‘fit’ technique 140–145 – isogloss vs. heterogloss 146, 147 – ‘many’, forms of 142, 152, 153 – OE long a, reflexes of 147, 148 – present participle, forms of 20, 142, 151, 155, 179, 212 – present plural ‘be’, forms of 69, 142, 155–158 – ‘she’, forms of 23, 57, 72, 150, 152 – spatio-temporal frame 137–139 – ‘they, them’, forms of 57, 58, 72, 142, 153–156, 178, 212, 246–248 – traditional classification 136, 137 diglossia see bilingualism and multilingualism drama 128, 283–289 Early Modern English (EModE) 9, 10, 11, 17, 77, 118, 120, 138, 176, 189, 194, 201, 208, 211, 219, 240, 254 elaboration see borrowing focus particle see intensifier French (Fr.) 9, 24, 25, 30–35, 46, 71, 79, 86, 107, 109–112, 117, 127, 137, 166–171, 173–181, 184–201, 209, 216–219, 252– 254, 266–270, 272, 273, 275, 277, 282, 296, 299, 300–302 see also AngloFrench – Central French 9, 186 – “Law” French 186, 187 – Norman French 9, 24, 241, 232, 233, 252 historical events 187–189

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Index

information structure 117, 118 intensifier 120, 121 Late Modern English (LModE) 119, 138, 139, 201 Latin (Lt.) 9, 30, 70, 109–112, 119, 125–128, 149, 166–168, 170, 173–175, 180, 185, 189, 193, 196, 197, 216–219, 227, 228, 230, 232, 235, 267, 252–254, 269–277, 281, 285, 288 lexicon, ME – dream terms in 102–104 – emotion terms in 104, 105 – healing terms in 97–99 – structure of see word formation literacy 10, 127, 166, 240, 272 literary language 262, 263 see also poetry, prose, literary – vocabulary 105, 106 loanwords see borrowing Middle English – definition of 8–11 – transitional nature of 19–23, 72, 128, 129, 137, 166, 215 morphology – nominal 51–59, 83, 86, 87, 90, 92, 142, 150, 153–155, 178, 295–298 – verbal 60–70, 83, 87, 88, 90, 92, 142, 151, 155–158, 178, 179, 298 multilingualism 167, 168, 236, 252, 253

176, 178, 180, 194, 197, 200, 201, 210, 211, 215, 232, 233, 240, 251, 255–257, 264, 278, 295–298, 300 Old Norse (ON) 9, 23, 102, 119, 169, 175, 176, 178, 179, 181, 198, 207, 212, 214, 298, 299 orthography, ME 15–17, 20, 21, 23, 24, 138, 139, 197, 212, 281 Paston letters 57, 117, 125, 209 – morphosyntactic variables in 245–249, 256 poetry – alliterative, early 263–268 – alliterative, late 277–279, 285–287 – metrical 280–282 – syntax of 88–93 politeness 124, 125 pragmatic marker 121, 122, 128 pronoun, ME 23, 24, 57–59, 142, 150, 152– 156, 178, 212, 246–248, 295–298 – thou/you 57, 124, 125, 197, 198, 248, 256, 257, 296, 297 prose, literary – early 269, 270 – later 270–273 – syntax of 79–88 – translation style of 273–277 punctuation, medieval 78, 81, 82, 86, 89, 91, 92 rhythm 35–37, 42

network, social 245–248 Norman Conquest 8, 9, 30, 111, 136, 172, 185, 187, 206, 227, 232, 241, 251, 252, 261, 267 Northern dialect see also dialects, ME 11, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22–24, 52–61, 64, 66, 69, 84, 87, 88, 92, 137, 139, 146–149, 152, 155, 158, 166, 169, 172, 173, 179, 180, 244, 292, 293, 295, 298, 299 Northern Subject Rule 20, 21, 87, 158, 179 Old English (OE) 9, 10, 19–25, 35, 38, 41, 47, 52–54, 64–70, 80, 82, 83, 89, 90, 100, 102, 103, 107, 108, 110, 112, 116, 117, 120, 121, 137, 138, 146, 152, 155, 166, 171, 172,

scribe 242 “Second Shepherd’s Play” – Towneley cycle 284–289 semantic change, ME 24, 25, 99–102 sentence, medieval conception of 78 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 277, 279, 292 – lexicographic analysis of scene 105, 106 speech 127, 128 speech act 123, 124, 249–251 standard 127, 149–151, 254, 293, 294 – AB Language 210, 211, 216 – Chancery 149, 207, 209–214, 219, 244, 254, 294

Index

– Samuels’ types 207, 211, 212, 214, 244, 293, 294 standardization 206–209, 216, 217, 253, 254 – supralocalization 212, 214 stress 30–35, 177 – Germanic Stress Rule (GSR) 30, 31, 177 – reduction of unstressed syllables 38–40 syntax, ME – noun phrase 83, 86, 87, 90 – parataxis/hypotaxis 81, 82, 86, 89 – verb phrase 84, 87, 90 – word order 82, 83, 86, 89, 92 synthetic > analytic see Middle English, transitional nature of text type 125, 126, 208 textual resources, ME 11–15, 138, 140, 241, 242

309

verb, ME – anomalous 69, 70, 142, 155–158 – preterit-present 69 – strong 64–69 – weak 61–64 vowel system, ME 41, 45 – changes in 38, 39, 43–45, 139 – diphthong(ization) 46, 47, 178, 196, 231 – Open Syllable Lengthening 43–45, 72, 139 women writers 242, 243, 246 word formation, ME 70, 71, 77, 107–110, 176, 177 – French influence on see borrowing, derivational affixes word order, change 117, 118 see also syntax, ME, word order