Corpus-based studies of Middle English adverb largely: syntax and information-structure

Synchronic variability in the area of phonetics, phonology, vocabulary, morphology and syntax is a natural feature of any language, including English. The existence of competing variants is in itself a fascinating phenomenon, but it is also a prerequisite for diachronic changes. This volume is a collection of studies which investigate variability from a contemporary and historical perspective, in both native and non-native varieties of English. The topics include Middle English spelling variation, lexical differences between Middle English dialects, Late Middle and Early Modern English forms of address, Middle English negation patterns, the English used by Polish immigrants living in London, lexical fixedness in native and non-native English used by Polish learners, and the phenomenon of phonetic imitation in Polish learners of English. The book should be of interest to anyone interested in English linguistics, especially English phonetics and phonology as well as history of English, historical dialectology and pragmatics.

The Early Middle English period witnessed the massive borrowing and adoption of the Latin system of abbreviations in England. Mediaeval writers appropriated those symbols that were directly transferable from Latin exemplars, especially suspensions and brevigraphs, while contractions and superior letters were incorporated somewhat later. The existing accounts of abbreviations in handwritten documents are fragmentary as they offer the picture of the literary compositions of the period, which have been traditionally taken as the source of evidence for handbooks on palaeography. In addition to this, most of these accounts are limited to the description of their use and typology in independent witnesses, being in many cases impossible to extrapolate the results beyond the practice of individual scribes. The present paper takes that step beyond individuality and pursues the study of abbreviations from a variationist perspective with the following objectives: a) to analyse the use and distribution of abbreviations in Late Middle English and Early Modern English (1350–1700), and b) to evaluate the relevance of these abbreviations across different text types of medical writing. The data used as source of evidence come from The Málaga Corpus of Early English Scientific Prose, both the Late Middle English and the Early Modern English components (1350–1500 and 1500–1700, respectively).

development of 'an impersonal' verb in Middle English - the case of behoove, Cynthia L. Allen Double trouble - geminate versus simplex graph in the Ormulum, John M. Anderson, Derek Britton Language and style in additions to The Tales, Norman F. Blake Middle English creolization hypothesis revisited, Andrei Danchev Infinitive marking in the late Middle English - transitivity and changes in the English system of case, Olga Fisher From syntax to discourse - the function of object-verb order in late Middle English, Tony Foster, Wim van der Wurff words in -ate and the history stress, Piotr Gasiorowski Assessing the relative status of languages in medieval Ireland, Raymond Hickey Using the future to predict the past - Old English dialectology in the light of Middle English place-names, Richard M. Hogg When did Middle English begin? later than you think! Peter R. Kitson Old English Anglian/saxon boundary revisited, Gillis Kristensson Stress, survival and change - Old to Middle English, Christopher B. McCully Against the emergence of the nuclear stress rule in Middle English, Donka Minkova, Robert P. Stockwell -ing constructions in Middle English, Lilo Moessner Concessive clauses in Chaucer's prose, Rafat Molencki Middle English nonrestrictive expository apposition with an explicit marker, Saara Nevanlinna, Paivi Pahta On the beginning and development of the begin to construction, Michiko Ogura Peterborough Chronicle diphthongs, Betty S. Philipps Middle English phonetics - a systematic survey including notes on Irish and Welsh loanwords, Herbert Pilch Quasi-impersonal verbs in Old and Middle English, George G. Pocheptsov Like father (un)like son - a sociolinguistic approach to the language of the Cely family, Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, Terttu Navalinen Whatever happened to the Middle English indefinitive pronoun?, Matti Rissanen Mutation, variation and selection in phonological evolution - a sketch based on the case of late Middle English a>au/_l)C/#), Nicolaus Ritt Handmade tales - the implications of linguistic variation in two early manuscripts of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Jeremy Smith Middle ( and Old) English prerequisites for the great vowel shift, Albertas Steponavicius Exclamations in late Middle English, Irma Taavitsainen.

Sirrah, as a form of address aimed at inferiors, is fairly frequent in Shakespeare's plays and those of the seventeenth century, but its etymology has, surprisingly, never been convincingly identified. To date, the only explanation available is that sirrah was a composition of sir and the interjection ah or ha. This hypothesis, often uncritically quoted, even by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), goes back to John Minsheu, a lexicographer of the early seventeenth century. But this paper tries to show that Minsheu's opinion, based on word formation, is far-fetched and that sirrah is merely a phonetic variant of sir. Both words have the same Old French etymological origin, namely sire. Sirrah is, in fact, an ironical and mimicking pronunciation of sire. Sir, for its part, though generally an honourable title, was also not entirely free of derogatory connotations in Late Middle and Early Modern English. The evidence for the close proximity of sir and sirrah will be taken from historical English phonology, semantics, pragmatics and sociolinguistics. The retrieval of the key data is based on Open Source Shakespeare and, for Late Middle English, on both the Middle English Dictionary and the OED, as well as the Innsbruck Middle English Prose Corpus.

This chapter presents a corpus-based study of the history of then as a discourse marker in English. It will be shown that the pragmatic use of then and its status as a discourse particle was more or less stable throughout the history of English, even though its syntax changed profoundly. The precursor of then in Old English occurs on a large scale in a fixed position in questions, imperatives and conditional correlatives, and is presuppositional in the sense that it reflects a speaker’s response to the context, such as surprise or disapproval in questions, reinforcement or downtoning of the directive in imperatives. From early Middle English onward, the pragmatic use of then in questions and imperatives occurs in available alternative positions in the clause: initially (in yes/no questions and imperatives) and final (in questions). The older particle position became restricted to questions. The finally position was extended to declarative SVO clauses. The division of labour between particle use and temporal adverb use will be shown to interact, over the late Middle English and early Modern periods, with major syntactic changes that affected each of the clause types in different ways: the loss of V2, the auxiliation of the modals and the rise of do-support, and the loss of V to T movement. Through these developments, the pragmatic use of then has, if anything, expanded. This suggests that its robust discourse function was a powerful drive for maintenance under syntactic change.

Old and Early Middle English did not yet have modal sentential adverbs of low probability. Old Norse did not have such words, either. From the 13th century onwards first epistemic prepositional phrases of Anglo-Norman origin functioning as modal adverbials consisting of the preposition per/par and nouns such as adventure, case, chance were borrowed into Middle English. In the late 15th century an analogous hybrid form per-hap(s), the combination of the Old French preposition per/par ‘by, through’ and the Old Norse noun hap(p) ‘chance’, both singular and plural, was coined according to the same pattern and was gradually grammaticalized as a univerbated modal sentence adverb in Early Modern English. The Norse root happ- was the source of some other new (Late) Middle English words which had no cognate equivalents in the source language: the adjective happy with its derivatives happily, happiness, etc. and the verb happen. Together with another new Late Middle English formation may-be, a calque of French peutêtre, perhaps superseded the competing forms mayhap, (modal) happily, percase, peradventure, perchance, prepositional phrases with the noun hap and, finally, per-hap itself in Early Modern English after two centuries of lexical layering or multiple synonymy. The history of perhaps is a clear example of grammaticalization, whereby a prepositional phrase became a modal adverb now also used as a discourse marker. We find here all the typical features of the process: phonetic attrition, decategorization, univerbation, and obligatorification.

Synchronic variability in the area of phonetics, phonology, vocabulary, morphology and syntax is a natural feature of any language, including English. The existence of competing variants is in itself a fascinating phenomenon, but it is also a prerequisite for diachronic changes. This volume is a collection of studies which investigate variability from a contemporary and historical perspective, in both native and non-native varieties of English. The topics include Middle English spelling variation, lexical differences between Middle English dialects, Late Middle and Early Modern English forms of address, Middle English negation patterns, the English used by Polish immigrants living in London, lexical fixedness in native and non-native English used by Polish learners, and the phenomenon of phonetic imitation in Polish learners of English. The book should be of interest to anyone interested in English linguistics, especially English phonetics and phonology as well as history of English, historical dialectology and pragmatics.

Historical Perspectives in the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary Elizabeth M. Knowles A he New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (NSOED), published in 1993 by the Oxford University Press, is a historical dictionary of Modern English. The inclusion of information on the age and life history of words current at any time between 1700 and the present day is a major feature, and every headword is traced back to its first point of record (in many cases, to a manuscript source of the Old or Middle English period). The first Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, published in 1933, was similarly chronological in approach, but was closely tied to the precise lexicographical and semantic structure of the parent OED. It was intended primarily as an abridgement of the OED, and for many years its projected title was the "Abridged Oxford Dictionary." The NSOED editors, while using the OED as its primary source material, pursued a program of systematic research using both manual and automatic methods. (The project began in 1980, and online searching facilities became available in 1989.) The text is completely new, and presents considerably enhanced historical information. The ordering of the senses of each word is chronological, and the dating of first and last uses is recorded in conventionalized date ranges. After the three larger early divisions of Old English, Middle English, and late Middle English, there is a tripartite division of centuries: material from the period up to 1 149 is dated as Old English (OE), Middle English (ME) covers the period from 1150 to 1349, and late Middle English (LME) represents the period from 1350 to 1469. The last years of the 15th-century are designated as late 15th-century (l15), and after that each century has three divisions, so that for example 1600 to 1629 is early 17th-century (e17), 1730 to 1769 is mid 18th-century (m18), and 1870 to 1899 is late 19th-century (l19). All headwords and main sense 48Elizabeth M. Knowles divisions are dated items, as are derivatives that are not themselves headwords but which are subsumed at the end of the entry for the root word. (Thus painfully and painfulness (both LME) are found in a derivative block at the end of the entry for ME painful.) The basic OED material was first enhanced by a systematic examination of such major historical dictionaries as the Middle English Dictionary (MED), the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST), and the Scottish National Dictionary (SND). These dictionaries were read against the OED, and antedatings and postdatings that affected the first or last date-range of a word or sense were noted on paper slips and filed to await editorial attention to the word. It was clear from the outset of the project that constraints of time would not permit the NSOED editors to undertake the task. Freelancers were therefore recruited to work in advance of the editorial process, so that all relevant material was in the file before any editor reached that particular alphabetical point. The work was complex, requiring not only a knowledge of Middle English and a capacity to cope with Older Scottish, but an ability to "match" OED senses with MED or DOST senses that resulted from a very different semantic analysis. This combination of specialist knowledge and what might be described as a lexicographer's eye was seldom encountered among the Oxford graduate students from whom freelance workers were recruited, and general unfamiliarity with the major period dictionaries was an additional difficulty . Variant spellings and indeed the whole treatment of variants also presented a considerable challenge. (For example, early uses of both the OED's staff n. and stave n. appear in MED under the entry form staf.) It was, however, an extremely fruitful process, as the following random samples show: alpine adj. was antedated from e17 to LME, Arab n. from m17 to LME, Englishwoman from m16 (a glossarial use) to ME, foliage (the representation of the leaves of a branch) from l16 to LME, nasturtium (a kind of cress) from l16 to OE, paganity from m16 to LME, and panful from l19 to ME. Material from DOST included an antedating of defiant a. from m19 (the OED has the...

This article presents a diachronic corpus-based study of the distribution of mandativethat- andto-clauses complementing deontic adjectival matrices in the extraposition construction, as inIt is essential to work upwards from easier workloads(CB). It shows that theto-infinitive encroaches on thethat-clause from Early Middle English onwards and comes to predominate in Late Middle English. It thus adduces evidence for Los's (2005) account of the rise of theto-infinitive as verbal complement: against the generally held view that theto-infinitive replaced the bare infinitive, Los (2005) shows that it spread at the expense of the subjunctivethat-clause in Middle English, e.g. after intention verbs and manipulative verbs. After considering various factors such as the distribution of theto-infinitive in the adjectival complementation system, the tense of the matrix of the adjectival constructions and the Anglo-Saxon versus Romance origin of the adjectives, I conclude that the rise of theto-infinitive with adjectival matrices in Middle English has to be explained by analogy between verbal and adjectival mandative constructions. In addition, this study shows that – unlike with the verbal constructions – theto-infinitive with adjectival matrices stabilizes at roughly a 3:1 ratio to thethat-clause from Early Modern English onwards. For these later periods, finally, it is proposed that the clausal variation may be motivated by lexical determination, discourse factors such as information structure, and stylistic preferences.

König and Vezzosi (2004: 239) commented about work on grammaticalization that: 'Very rarely … do we find detailed discussions of the onset contexts that set such a process into motion and the conditions that such contexts must meet'. However, understanding local context-derived inference is now a high priority in a number of areas of linguistics, ranging from computational semantics to discourse analysis of conversation to work on micro-changes in historical linguistics. In this paper I discuss the hypothesis that a subset of linguistic contexts, specifically 'bridging contexts', are a key factor in morphosyntactic change. I begin by outlining the history of the hypothesis, which originated in work on semantic change, and shifted emphasis from implicatures and invited inferences associated with a changing expression (e.g. Traugott and König 1991) to the linguistic contexts in which two (or more) meanings are possible, but one is 'only contextually implicated' (Evans and Wilkins 2000: 549). Subsequently Heine (2002) and Diewald (2002) hypothesized that the development of "bridging" or "critical" contexts is a necessary and distinct stage in grammaticalization, using synchronic variation as data I then go on to discuss the extent to which we can find evidence in diachronic corpora of English for these hypotheses. I also evaluate Hansen's (2008) claim that in bridging contexts new meanings are backgrounded against Heine's that they are foregrounded. Two case studies are presented: the development in late Middle English and Early Modern English of be going to with temporal meaning (e.g. Danchev and Kytö 1994), and of pseudo-clefts with ALL and WHAT (Traugott 2008a, 2010).

Georg Fridén on the use of Auxiliaries to Form the Perfect and the Pluperfect in Late Middle English and Early Modern English

On the development of transitive expletive constructions in the history of English

In this study we trace the evolution of five English genres from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. We briefly present the multidimensional approach to genre variation developed by Biber (1988), focusing on three empirically defined dimensions of linguistic variation that are associated with differences between oral' and literate' varieties: informational' vs. involved' production, elaborated' vs. situation-dependent' reference and abstract' vs. nonabstract' style. We then show the ways in which science, education, fiction, drama, and letters have evolved over time with respect to these dimensions. Science and drama shift towards more oral characterizations, while education and fiction become more literate'. Letters, in contrast, do not show any significant changes throughout the two centuries under study. Finally, our results are compared to those obtained by Biber and Finegan (1989, 1992, 1997) for the same genres in later stages of the language

Wilhelm Busch (1832-1908) was a German cartoonist and poet whose most famous work was an illustrated dogtrot verse about a pair of little hellions called Max and Moritz. Published in German in 1865, it has delighted generations of German children and their parents and was eventually translated into English by editor and litterateur Christopher Morley in 1932. Knowledge of the Max and Moritz saga had come to Americans earlier, however, through the comic strip “The Katzenjammer Kids” (later “The Captain and the Kids”), first drawn by Rudolph Dirks for the New York Journal in 1897 and long continuing in popularity. (I remember a version of the cartoon in the 1930s as my own childhood favorite Sunday reading.) Katzenjammer is German for a ‘hangover headache’ (literally “cat’s clamoring”), which is presumably what the terrible twosome gave all the adults around them. Manfred Gorlach has continued and much expanded the Max and Moritz corpus by orchestrating the “discovery” for an overexpanding number of versions of the poem in many languages. The present volume brings together fragments and complete versions of the poem, which consists of a preface, seven tricks, and a conclusion. The fragments are from Egyptian, Sahidic, Ancient Greek, Umbarian, Latin, Gothic (in both Moeso and Crimean versions), Old High German, Old Saxon, Old West Norse, early Welsh, early Middle English (in Peterborough and Pershore versions), Anglo-Norman, Old Spanish, Medieval Latin, Middle Dutch, and others. The full text appears in Old English, Middle High German, late Middle English (Chaucerian), Middle Scots, and early Modern English, as well as the Busch recension and a contemporary English translation. The burden of this tongue-in-cheek scholarly display of textual analysis, iconographic description, manuscript history, and critical appraisal is that Wilhelm Busch was not, after all, the author of Max und Moritz but only a latter-day transmitter. Manfred Gorlach’s labor of love in creating this elaborately extensive spoof of linguistic analysis and textual criticism should earn him a special Nobel Prize for

Synchronic variability in the area of phonetics, phonology, vocabulary, morphology and syntax is a natural feature of any language, including English. The existence of competing variants is in itself a fascinating phenomenon, but it is also a prerequisite for diachronic changes. This volume is a collection of studies which investigate variability from a contemporary and historical perspective, in both native and non-native varieties of English. The topics include Middle English spelling variation, lexical differences between Middle English dialects, Late Middle and Early Modern English forms of address, Middle English negation patterns, the English used by Polish immigrants living in London, lexical fixedness in native and non-native English used by Polish learners, and the phenomenon of phonetic imitation in Polish learners of English. The book should be of interest to anyone interested in English linguistics, especially English phonetics and phonology as well as history of English, historical dialectology and pragmatics.