The French influence on the Middle English expression of possession

Abstract

Following the Norman Conquest in 1066, a variety of French known as Anglo Norman was introduced into the linguistic landscape of Medieval England. While previous studies have examined the influence of French lexicon on English, less attention has been given to the influence of French on English grammatical structures in this language contact scenario (Ringe & Eska, 2012). As scholars have noted cross-linguistically, possession represents a domain of grammar that is affected by language contact (Aikhenvald, 2012; McConvell, 2005). Covering the period of late Middle English, from 1300 to 1500, this project examines the influence of Anglo Norman on Middle English possessive constructions.The sources for this study are published Trade Guild Records of London companies, taking points of comparison with texts from regional dialects. Guild merchants represent an influential class of ‘middle men’ in London, whose records have hitherto been marginalised in linguistic analysis (Miller, 2012). As the London dialect formed the foundation for the standardisation of English (Wright, 2005), the multilingual practices of this group represent a perspective on everyday language use of this influential variety.Through the analysis of language practices in multilingual texts, this study fills a gap in the academic literature on the Middle English expression of possession by considering language contact as an explanation for developments during this period. Myers-Scotton’s (2002) Matrix Language Framework provides the methodological frame for the analysis of the multilingual Trade Guild Records. Specifically, the project examines four outcomes of language contact attested in the data: code-switching in inflectional morphology, the replacement of zero-marking with overt morphemes, grammatical replication, and double-marking. These outcomes are related to the possessive forms of the English s genitive, the English and French zero genitives, the English of and French de prepositional constructions, and the ‘double-marked’ or oblique genitive in English (i.e. X of X’s). The findings for this study demonstrate that Anglo Norman has influenced Middle English possessive constructions in measurable ways.