Investigating language change using Anglo-Norman spoken and written register data

Abstract

AbstractLanguage change is generally considered to originate in the spoken mode before spreading to the written mode, although the latter provides all our available data for language change until recent times. While written mode representations of speech, such as fictional dialogue, can be used, their authenticity is hard to verify. This study addresses these issues by comparing the language of the Year Books, texts which attest to oral pleading in medieval courts, and include very extensive dialogue, with legal register written-mode origin texts, in the Parliament Rolls of Medieval England. Both sets of texts were written in Anglo-Norman, arose within a fairly homogenous speech community, and cover the same time period – late thirteenth century until c. 1350. It is shown that changes known to have occurred in later medieval French are instantiated at this time in the dialogic texts, but to a lesser degree or not at all in the written register texts. Features of morphology, lexical semantic extension, and discourse syntax in these sources indicate in each case that the innovation arose and spread first in the spoken origin source. Support from diachronic change is thus offered for a continuity assumption for the primacy of the spoken mode in present and past states of language.