Inflections in the two manuscripts of Laʒamon's Brut

Abstract

This paper is devoted to a study of selected morphological features of the two surviving manuscripts of Laʒamon's “Brut”. The text itself, which is one of the main sources of evidence as far as Early Middle English is concerned, has long been the subject of scholarly interest. Initially the two manuscripts of the text were considered to represent diachronically different stages of the language, while currently the consensus seems to be that, while roughly cotemporaneous, they are products of different linguistic traditions. The present study contains a comparison of the strong verb system and personal pronoun usage in the two manuscripts, based on a representative sample of 3432 lines taken from three separate sections of the poem. The evidence it offers generally confirms the assumption that the Caligula manuscript is much more archaic and/or conservative of the two in its linguistic choices.