Middle English Period Research Articles

Echoes of Eriugena in the Old English Boethius

This article identifies a passage from Eriugena’s Periphyseon as a source for an interpolation in the Old English Boethius. The interpolation introduces an unambiguous reference to the Neoplatonic idea of reditus, the return of all created creatures to God. This is not the first such evidence of Neoplatonic ideas in Old English texts and the article explores the significance of this new identification as further evidence for the presence of eastern mystical traditions in early English monastic and courtly circles, challenging the idea that English mysticism began in the Middle English period.

Pronouns: The Importance of Our Everyday Language

We use language to create and maintain relationships. So, it is only natural that language can offer clues to our connection to the people around us and social status. Pronouns more than other words can be used to explain relationships. During the Middle English period, English used the pronouns “you” and “thou” when addressing people of different social position. “You” was used by members of the upper class when talking to each other and used by members of the lower class when addressing a superior. “Thou” was used by members of the lower class when addressing each other, by close family members, and addressing God in prayer. These distinctions continue into the Early Modern English period and we see them used in Shakespeare. I investigated pronouns “you” and “thou” in Shakespeare’s Othello by looking at every occurrence of these pronouns used by Othello, Desdemona, Iago, and Emilia. It became evident that Shakespeare uses pronouns conventionally until moments of extreme anger and at the end of the play. Modern English has lost the pronoun “thou”, but we still use pronouns to indicate social status. According to James W. Pennebaker, people of a low social status tend to overuse the pronoun “I”. People of higher social status rely more on pronouns “we” and “you”. I explore this usage of pronouns in Susan Glaspell’s play Trifles. I draw conclusions about correlation between pronouns and social status in Early Modern English and Modern English by comparing pronouns in Othello and Trifles. My research shows that even though language changes, human relationships remain the same and looking at pronouns helps us understand these relationships better when doing literary analysis.

Dijahronijski aspekt morfologije složenih prideva

This paper focuses on a diachronic study of compound adjectives found in the Old and Middle English texts of the Helsinki Corpus. The compound adjectives of both periods are analysed, and further classified into types on the basis of the word class their constituent elements belong to. The aim of the research is to follow the development courses of compound adjective types in the two language periods and to investigate what happened to them in Modern English. The comparison of the types results in the description of the character of these changes, illuminating which Old English types survived into the subsequent periods, which were lost from the language, and what were the new ones introduced in the Middle English period.

A corpus-based study of abbreviations in early English medical writing

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).

Dynamic norm and variability of personal pronouns in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer

The subject of this research is the dynamic variability in the sphere of personal of the Middle English Period. The object of this research is the personal pronouns of the Middle English (in form of the nominative case) used in the “Canterbury Tales” by Geoffrey Chaucer. Insufficient study of this layer of lexicon necessitates detailed examination of the rich tapestry of variability of pronouns for determination of the area of Medieval language norm that influenced the establishment of modern literary English language, which defines the relevance of this research. The goal consists in description of the dynamic norm of the Middle English. Research methodology consists in systematization, description and classification of language material, extracted through the method of continuous sampling from the first part of the “Knight’s Tale” of the “Canterbury Tales” of Geoffrey Chaucer, and setting quantitative parameters that reveal and confirm linguistic patterns that regularly manifest within the system of personal pronouns of the Middle English. The scientific novelty lies in comprehensive research of variability of personal pronouns and establishment of the dynamic norm and “quasi-norm” of the national literary standard of English language formed in the XIV century. The main conclusion consists in substantiation of the leading role of central dialects in comprising dynamic norm of the Middle English (namely with regards to pronouns), while the forms developed in the north and south should be attributed to quasi-norm.

Становление нефинитной субпарадигмы в среднеанглийский период (на материале памятников английской поэзии)

The article analyses development of non-finite verb forms in Middle English by the material of the English poetry. Scientific originality of the study lies in the fact that synchronous development of non-finite verb forms in the Middle English period is traced within a certain paradigm - verbal field. The research objective is to identify the place of non-finite verb forms in the Middle English verb paradigm. The findings indicate that the Middle English period is characterized by appearance of Gerund developed from the verbal noun. Moreover, Infinitive and Participles I and II acquire verbal features, gradually losing their nominal feature - declension. Development of analytical constructions and Gerund allows broadening the syntactic potential of non-finite verb forms.

Standardization Process in its Final Stages

This study concerns the development of the determiners mine/my and thine/thy in the Early Modern English period. The -n forms had essentially been ousted before words starting with consonants over the Middle English period, and over the subsequent centuries, these forms also fell into disuse before words starting with initial vowels and h. While the rise of the n-less variants has been the object of several previous studies, the present investigation aims at accounting for the fate of the declining n-variants in the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760, a data source comprising speech-related texts. We look into the chronological stages of development for the declining mine and thine forms, the genres that maintained these forms longest, and the speaker groups that were the last to use the forms. Comparisons are made with the results obtained in previous studies on mine/my and thine/thy variation.

On Early and Late Modern English Non-native Suffix -oon

This paper is about identifying a nuance of social meaning which, I demonstrate, was conveyed in the Early and Late Modern period by the suffix -oon. The history of non-native suffix -oon is presented by means of assembling non-native suffix -oon vocabulary in date order and sorting according to etymology. It turns out that standard non- native -oon words (which are few) tended to stabilise early and be of Romance etymology. A period of enregisterment, c. 1750–1850, is identified by means of scrutiny of non-native -oon usage in sixty novels, leading to the conclusion that four or more non-native -oons in a literary work signalled vulgarity. A link is made between the one-quarter non-European -oons brought to English via colonial trade, and the use of such -oons by non-noble merchants, traders and their customers splashing out on luxury foreign commodities. Thus, it is found that a suffix borrowed from Romance languages in the Middle English period received fresh input during the Early Modern period via non-European borrowings, resulting in sociolinguistic enregisterment in the Late Modern period.

Homorganic Cluster Lengthening, Pre-Cluster Shortening and Preference-based change in Early English

Abstract This paper discusses the processes of Homorganic Cluster Lengthening (HCL) and Pre-Cluster Shortening (PCS) occurring in the late Old English and Early Middle English periods. These processes are responsible, respectively, for vowel-lengthening before voiced homorganic consonant clusters (OE bindan, feld, hund > LOE/EME bīnd, fēld, hūnd) and vowel shortening before other clusters (OE cēpte, fīfta, brōhte > ME kepte, fifte, brohte). This paper builds on reassessments of data by Minkova (2014) to contribute an account of HCL within the system of “preference laws” articulated by Vennemann (1988). This account attributes the motivation for HCL to preferences for syllable-internal transitions between nucleus and coda in order to explain the fine details of HCL; namely, the fact that HCL applies with higher frequency to high vowels followed nasals than to low/mid vowels and in a sporadic manner to front vowels followed by /l/ compared to back vowels. These differences are attributed to the application of the Coda and Nucleus Laws (Vennemann 1988: 25, 42), with additional proposals about the effect of velarization of /l/ in Old English, with comparison to PCS providing important context throughout.

Intertextual Variation in Old and Middle English

ABSTRACT The existence of word order differences between individual authors in Old and Middle English is well known. Nevertheless, many empirical investigations of earlier English word order have focused on just one or two texts from each time period. In the early part of the Middle English period, subordinate clause word order changed from a mix between verb-final and subject–verb to overwhelmingly subject–verb. In the transition period between the old and the new order, synchronic variation is expected. In this paper, 2400 subordinate clauses from four late Old English texts and six early Middle English texts are analysed for word order variation between different texts with different authors. The analysis reveals a high degree of variation between texts from the same period, seemingly independent of dialect and genre. The analysis also indicates that the change in English word order must have been slow and gradual.

Multilingual Texts as a Reflection of Code-Switching in Medieval England: Sermons and Beyond

The multilingualism of medieval England especially in the Middle English period, has for long been the subject of research in historical linguistics, literature, and medieval studies, to name but a few. It is particularly visible in the monolingual texts in the different medieval languages of literacy (Latin and Old English in the Old English period, and French, Latin and English in the Middle English period), where it has left traces in the lexicon and grammar of English. More recently, the numerous multilingual texts from medieval England have attracted increased attention, not least because they can be seen as written evidence for code-switching, a well-known discourse strategy in multilingual societies. Multilingual sermons are among the best-known text types showing this mixing of languages, and they are found from the Old English period onwards, though they are particularly well attested from the later Middle English period. The present paper will look at the main types of multilingual sermons from medieval England, both from the Old English and the Middle English periods. It will, however, go beyond this and place such sermons in the context of other medieval multilingual text types. Based on the analysis of a range of medieval multilingual texts, we will show that multilingual sermons, especially the so-called »macaronic sermons«, are not as unique as sometimes claimed in sermon studies. After a critical discussion of the traditional criteria for defining »macaronic« texts, we will argue that such texts can be better accounted for on the basis of functional classifications as provided by modern code-switching theories. Such an approach in no way reduces the special nature of »macaronic sermons«, but it firmly places them in the wider bilingual context of medieval England and the multilingual strategies regularly used by its speakers and writers in a variety of text types. The contextualisation of multilingual sermons in this wider context of written multilingual texts will hopefully lead to a better understanding of multilingual sermons from medieval England and possibly also those from other European countries.

From leech to doctor: The Lexical and Semantic Evolution of Terms for ‘physician’ in Non-Medical Prose Texts

The study examines five names of medieval medical practitioners: barber, doctor, leech, physician, and surgeon. The aim is to view the semantic change of those names in non-medical prose texts from the Middle English period. The analysis also considers their origin, frequency, semantic fields, function and both metaphorical and non-metaphorical meanings in Middle English and later. Furthermore, the research verifies to what extent the findings of Sylwanowicz (2003) are confirmed by the results of a similar examination of a non-medical corpus. The data for the study come from the Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose, with the support of historical dictionaries.

Etymological models of English adverbs

The paper focuses on research and reconstruction of etymological models of adverbs in the Old and Middle English periods. Analysis of adverbs and their etymology is directly connected with one of the aspects of general-theoretical problems, i.e. part of speech affiliation of adverbs and a disputable issue of degrees of comparison. It has been hypothesized that the ability of adverbs to form degrees of comparison is presupposed by the fact whether their protoforms had potential to do this. The research is based on top 50 most frequently used adverbs in Present-day English (PDE). This list comprises not only lexical units formed by means of suffix ‘- ly’, which are traditionally characterized by degrees of comparison, but also one- or many component adverbs formed by compounding. The units on the list represent various time samples in Old and Middle English. In the paper 3 basic etymological models of adverb formation – one-, two-, three- and multicomponent models have been reconstructed. In their turn they are divided into 22 subparadigms, 15 of which are actualized in the paper. The most common subparadigms are Adj. + SUF; N. + SUF; Adv. Among 50 lexical units under analysis 19 units are formed on adverbial stem; 14 – adjectival; 9 – nominal; 4 prepositional; 3 – verbal; 1 – pronominal. Among 19 PDE adverbs evolved from an adverbial stem 16 units do not form degrees of comparison, except often, early, soon; among 14 adverbs formed on the basis of an adjectival stem 12 units do not have degrees of comparison, except rather, extremely. PDE adverbs which have developed from other parts of speech are not characterized by degrees of comparison.

Grammaticalisation paths in the rise and development of aside

In this paper we analyse the grammaticalisation processes involved in the rise and development of the ‘a-adverbial’ aside from the original combination of the preposition on and the substantive side in Old English. Different aspects of this grammatical change will be discussed in the paper, from morphosyntactic and phonological (coalescence-univerbation) to semantic ones (development of abstract senses, extension of semantic range), taking very much into account the diachronic axis that underpins them. Special attention has been paid in the analysis to the variation patterns of aside that existed in the Late Middle English period (when the actual process of grammaticalisation was about to be completed) and to the correlation of these variants with the geographic provenance of the texts, trying to determine if the processes of word formation that gave rise to this new word class travelled homogeneously across Britain.

From Bede to Wyclif: The Knowledge of Old English within the Context of Late Middle English Biblical Translation and Beyond

Abstract The continuity between Old and Middle English periods has been a matter of interest and debate in the field of medieval studies. Though it is widely accepted that Old English texts continued to be copied and used in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the possibility that they were collected, read and studied, and influenced scholars and religious thinkers in late medieval England is often rejected as implausible. The reason most commonly given is the difficulty of understanding the Old English language in the late Middle Ages. The present article aims to reassess this view and re-examine evidence for the reading and use of Old English texts in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with a primary focus on biblical translation. The article explores the possibility that Middle English glosses that occur in Old English sermon and biblical manuscripts reflect a scholarly interest in these texts, rather than a struggle to understand their language. The article also examines evidence that the translators of the Wycliffite Bible may have had some familiarity with Old English biblical translations, possibly as a result of study of biblical and sermon manuscripts.

Punctuation in Early Modern English Scientific Writing: The Case of Two Scientific Text Types in Gul, Ms Hunter 135

AbstractAmong the different topics studied by palaeography, punctuation has traditionally been disregarded by scholars for being considered arbitrary and unsystematic (Salmon 1988: 285). However, some studies carried out over the last few decades have demonstrated that the English punctuation system underwent a process of standardisation which started in the Middle English period, from a purely rhetorical to a grammatical function. Moreover, it was towards the sixteenth century when a set of punctuation marks was introduced (i.e. the semicolon), a fact that restricted the functions of major punctuation marks up to that time, such as the period and the comma (Salmon 1999: 40). The present paper analyses the punctuation system in Glasgow University Library, MS Hunter 135 (ff. 34r–121v), a volume that is most suitable for such a study as it contains two different text types belonging to the genre of medical writing: a surgical treatise and a collection of medical recipes. The results confirm that the different punctuation marks are unevenly distributed in the texts under study and, more importantly, their main functions are found at different levels within the text.

INFLUENCE OF MIDDLE ENGLISH NORTHERN DIALECTS ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

The article deals with the phonetic, grammatic and lexical features which penetrated into the London Dialect from the Middle English Northern and North-Eastern dialects and evenyually were fixed in the literary language. The article claims that the penetration of the Northern features took place as the result of the London dialect base shift which took place due to the extralinguistic reasons, namely by social and demographic reasons. The article describes both direct influence (lexical) and indirect (partially phonetic and partially grammatic). The article claims that systemic changes in English, such as reduction of unstressed syllables and concequent simplification of grammatical paradigms were greatly fascilitated by the influence of Northern dialects on the London dialect in Late Middle English period

Survival and loss of Old English religious vocabulary between 1150 and 1350

Middle English religious vocabulary is radically different from that of the previous period: while Old English is characterised more by lexical pattern replication of Latin (and Greek) etyma, Middle English is the period of matter replication. Due to the intake of new French religious words, English lexemes and also whole word families undergo semantic transformation and lexical replacement. Other terms, however, survive from the Old English period into the present day, resisting contact-induced pressure. This study shows that the survival of old lexemes into Middle English is largely determined by the extent of their diffusion and frequency of occurrence before the Norman Conquest. It is postulated that two kinds of inherited Old English lexis should be distinguished in the Middle English period: (i) established terms that had belonged to the West Saxon standard and were still preserved in general use by the lower regular clergy, parish priests and the faithful at large, and (ii) terms of limited currency that had failed to spread outside local communities with strong ties and survived for a short time after the Conquest in smaller religious foundations. The innovation and spread of new francophone religious lexis was conditioned by the new preaching practices that began to develop in Europe in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council and the emergence of mendicant orders. Preachers of the new type were the multilingual innovators who generated new lexis in English and at the same time were instrumental in its diffusion, serving as weak ties between the various levels of the medieval society. Urban middle classes, on the other hand, were the most likely English-speaking early adopters of new norms.

Contact effects on the technical lexis of Middle English: a semantic hierarchic approach

In the context of multilingualism in later medieval Britain, the influx of French terminology into the emerging technical vocabulary of Middle English is likely to have produced synchronous synonyms. For functional reasons, some native terms are expected to be dropped from the language, others to undergo differentiation through semantic shift. A significant proportion of the French borrowings are often seen as having been new technical terms, but earlier historical research on the nature of technical vocabulary in English has not clearly characterized this lexical domain; ways are therefore explored here of identifying technical terminology in this period. Definitions contained in historical dictionaries, principally theMiddle English Dictionary, provide the main diagnostic, specificity of meaning. As a case study, borrowings in a technical register are examined using the terms contained in the subdomain ‘Instruments’ within the Middle English vocabulary for Building (extracted from theBilingual Thesaurus of Everyday Life in Medieval Englandproject) supplemented with lexis from theHistorical Thesaurus. Utilizing the components of meaning in theMiddle English Dictionaryand theOxford English Dictionarydefinitions, the lexical items are classified into semantic hierarchies as was done for theHistorical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. In addition to dates of first usage, etymological information about the lexical items is included in the semantic hierarchies, allowing analysis of patterns of replacement by borrowed terms at different levels of the lexicon. It is found that the impact of French on the native lexicon in this dataset is most evident at the superordinate and basic levels of the lexicon, where we find almost equal numbers of native and borrowed terms, while at the hyponymic level native terms are in the vast majority. The study provides an insight into the vocabulary of speakers of the Middle English period with a high level of experience and expertise in technical fields and the findings suggest a resistance to borrowed vocabulary not at the lowest section of the social stratum, but rather by the class of skilled workers.

Exploring the penetration of loanwords in the core vocabulary of Middle English:carryas a test case

This article takes as its starting point the extent of borrowing in Middle English among the hundred meanings included in the Leipzig–Jakarta List of Basic Vocabulary, a recently developed tool for exploring the impact of borrowing on basic vocabulary on a cross-linguistic basis. This is adopted for the possibility it provides for taking an empirically based approach to identifying at least a proportion of those loanwords that have most impact on the core lexicon. The article then looks in detail at a particularly striking example identified using this list: the verbcarry, borrowed into English in the late fourteenth century from Anglo-Norman, and found with some frequency in its modern core meaning from the very beginning of its history in English. The competition this word shows with native synonyms, especiallybear, is surveyed, and the systemic pressures that may have facilitated its widespread adoption are explored, as well as the points of similarity it shows with some other borrowings into the core vocabulary of Middle English; in particular, the hypothesis is advanced that a tendency towards isomorphism in vocabulary realizing basic meanings may be a significant factor here. The article also contends that the example ofcarrysheds new light on the receptivity of even basic areas of the lexicon to Anglo-Norman lexis in the late Middle English period. The trajectory shown by this word is particularly illuminating, with borrowing in a restricted meaning with reference to the commercial bulk transportation of goods, merchandise, etc. being followed by very rapid development of a much broader meaning, which even within the fourteenth century appears in at least some varieties (notably the works of Chaucer) to be a significant competitor for nativebearas default realization of the basic meaning ‘to transfer/carry (something, especially in one's hands)’.