Typology and Spectrum of Latin-Irish and Latin-English Codeswitches in Medieval Sermon Literature

Abstract

Over the twenty-five years since the seminal publication of Siegfried Wenzel’s Macaronic Sermons in 1994, the application of modern code-switching theory to historical homilies has become habitual. Although many authors now make use of Myers-Scotton’s Matrix Language Frame concepts, the present study presents the advantages of Muysken’s approach, which is instead based on notions of grammatical government. The threefold typological model developed by Muysken turns out to be beneficial for the determination of difficult syntactic structures. Such difficulties include diamorphs, words which may belong to more than one language, and directionality, which denotes the language underlying the code-switching components. Computerised analysis is shown to be aided by adopting this theoretical typology model by Muysken. A sample syntactic analysis is tailored to constructions concerning subjects and objects. Using the threefold categorisation contributes to the understanding of the differences in dependency and linearity between Latin-Irish and Latin-English code-switching. Additional elements of late-medieval multilingual sermons in these two areas are indicative of other linguistic strategies within the spectrum of bilingualism which can complement or compete with code-switching. Convergence and variance are consequently characterised in several collections of insular sermons to achieve an innovative insight into the alternatives available to deal with ambiguity.