Middle English Research Articles

Usage and precept in eighteenth-century English object-clause complementisers

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the use of zero and that as connectors for object clauses in eighteenth-century English. Previous approaches have shown that the use of zero increased in late Middle English and became well-established in the second half of the sixteenth century, especially in speech-based text-types. Our own research, based on the evidence of The Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence, has shown that in the mid-seventeenth century zero was well beyond the mid-range stage of lexical diffusion (73%) with the five high frequency verbs to know, to think, to say, to tell and to hope. Chronologically, it has been shown that progress of the zero innovation was thwarted in the eighteenth century, which has been attributed to the effect of prescriptivism. In this paper, we intend to throw light on this issue by tracking the courses of zero and that during the eighteenth century in both usage and precept. With this purpose we rely on two sources of information. On the one hand, a precept corpus containing a selection of grammars published in Britain in 1681–1800. Usage, on the other, has been surveyed in light of the evidence of The Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension Sampler. Our aim is to assess the existence of a correlation between usage and precept in the expression of object clauses in this period with the following objectives: i) to analyse the use and distribution of zero and that clauses among grammarians; ii) to evaluate the incidence of the phenomenon in correspondence, as an input mirroring the vernacular; and iii) to assess the role of the grammarians’ statements in the propagation of the marked conjunction over the period.

An ouroboros of oppression: The self-perpetuating, inequitable high school outcomes of middle school tracking

This study investigated the impact middle school tracking has on outcomes in high school and the factors associated with those outcomes. Utilizing data from a large, diverse school district, this quantitative study investigated the relationships between middle school and high school English course enrollment among 4,503 middle school students. The conceptual framework of the Ouroboros, combining the theories of Lucas’s effectively maintained inequality (EMI) and Merton’s self-fulfilling prophecy (SFP), was used to examine and challenge the status quo of educational tracking systems. We identified three major findings from the study. First, chi-square analysis indicated a statistically significant difference between enrollment rates in accelerated or AP English courses between students who came from tracked and detracked middle school English programs. Second, logistic regression models indicated socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity, GATE-identification, gender, and eighth-grade English course enrollment were significant predictors of student enrollment in an accelerated or AP English class in high school. Third, chi-square analysis indicated that there was a significant association between a student’s eighth-grade English course label and their high school English course enrollment choices. Findings of this study suggest that detracking English classes at the middle school level represents an important stride forward in closing gaps in education.

Innovative Design and Practical Exploration of Junior Middle School English Unit Teaching Under the Guidance of New Curriculum Standards

This paper aims to explore the innovative design and practice of junior middle school English unit teaching under the background of new curriculum standards. Under the guidance of the new curriculum standards, the establishment of unit teaching objectives should be guided by core literacy, focusing on cultivating students' ability and quality of doing things in English, and improving their language ability, cultural awareness, thinking quality and learning ability in the process of problem solving. When designing the unit teaching content, we should take the big concepts as the core, refine and focus on these big concepts according to the teaching objectives, and build the logical structure and timing structure of the teaching content around them, so as to effectively promote students' understanding of the big concepts. When arranging the unit teaching process, English practice should be taken as the path, and practical English teaching process should be built through project-oriented, task-based and activity-based design methods, so that students can achieve comprehensive improvement of core literacy in the complete English practice process.

Historical Continuity in the Morphological Marking of Subjectivity? Textual Perspectives on the Origin of English Adverbial "-ly" in Late Old and Early Middle English

In spite of the fact that the Present-Day English “adverbial signature” – the suffix ‑ly – is peculiar to English among the Germanic languages and that its emergence seems to conflict with general tendencies of language change in English – the loss of inflectional endings and the fact that English is otherwise happy to allow zero-derivation – neither the early history of ‑ly in Old and Middle English nor the exact date and reasons for its remarkable spread have been fully understood. Recently, the subjective semantics of adverbs in ‑ly have received considerable attention, in both synchronic and diachronic studies. This claim for a particular subjective (abstract or figurative) meaning of adverbs in ‑ly, however, rests almost exclusively one study, Donner’s lexicographical examination of MED material (1991). This chapter inspects the potential of comprehensive textual studies for the suggested subjective semantics in the early use of ‑ly, focussing on two late Old English translations of the Theodulfi Capitula and the early Middle English poem The Owl and the Nightingale, one of the earliest idiomatic and colloquial English texts.

Research on the Implementation Strategy and Path of Teaching-Learning-Evaluation Consistency in Junior Middle School Subjects under the Core Literacy

Guided by the core literacy, it is of great significance to study the integration strategy of teaching-learning-evaluation in junior middle school English. The purpose of this study is to improve the English learning effectiveness and the core literacy of junior middle school students through three levels of teaching, learning and evaluation. However, some problems and challenges appear in the implementation process. In this regard, teachers need to conduct in-depth research, adopt effective teaching methods, and realize the integration of teachinglearning-evaluation , so as to improve the core quality of students and lay a good foundation for their future development.

Loan verb accommodation: a comparison of Old Norse and French in Middle English

Loan verb accommodation: a comparison of Old Norse and French in Middle English

Writing, Voice, and Person-Making: Dispatches from Middle English Studies

Writing, Voice, and Person-Making: Dispatches from Middle English Studies

Exploring teaching methods for middle school English vocabulary in China: Based on observation of high-quality lessons in people’s education edition

This study investigates the methodologies used in teaching vocabulary in middle school English classrooms, focusing on the interconnections among class types, parts of speech, teaching stages, and methods. By combining offline classroom observations with a review of 99 high-quality online lessons from the People’s Education Edition, the research provides a comprehensive comparison of vocabulary instruction practices. The findings reveal that vocabulary instruction is often embedded within broader lessons on listening and speaking, reading, writing, and grammar rather than being addressed in dedicated sessions, and that there is significant variability among teachers in core vocabulary selection and instructional approaches. The study concludes that there is a lack of consistent and dedicated vocabulary teaching methods across different class types. This research offers valuable insights for educators to develop more targeted and effective vocabulary teaching strategies, aiming to improve vocabulary acquisition among middle school students.

The Suffix -ster in Present-day English: A Usage-based and Network Model Account

In this paper, we provide an analysis of the present-day distribution of the -ster suffix in English and account for that distribution through the diachronic forces that shaped it. Taking a constructional approach (Bybee 2010), we show that words with the -ster suffix in Middle English constituted a semantically coherent set in so far as the items in that set mostly referred to professions. In the latter part of the first half of the Modern English period, we find a renaissance of -ster usage, albeit with a semantic shift toward the identification of a human agent (usually male) involved in activities that were subversive, illicit or even criminal, e.g. gangster. We sketch out a model in which certain of the constructions stand as central members, or exemplars, which then serve as analogical bases to which other constructions with -ster are extended. We argue that the cumulative effect of the central exemplars of this set strengthens the representation of -ster as formally independent and imbues it with the emergent meaning of subversion, illicitness, or criminality. The result of these diachronic process is a very healthy productivity of -ster in later modern English and a distribution across several domains.

“Yet ar ye not lyche, for thu art a fals strumpet”

Abstract In Late Middle English, the system of second-person pronouns with singular referents is characterised by retractable choices based on the interactional status of interlocutors. This system has until recently been documented mostly in studies based on poetic texts, such as the Canterbury Tales by Chaucer, and, to a lesser extent, private correspondence and mystery plays. We use the Book of Margery Kempe as a primary source and offer the perspective of a middle-class female author from early-fifteenth-century Norfolk. Conventional politeness of Margery Kempe requires the default use of ye/you/your forms, especially when addressees are unfamiliar, older or socially superior, but also in situations of mutual acceptance and deference. Thou/thee/thine forms, on the other hand, indicate social or intellectual superiority as well as, at the interactional level, condescension, contempt, annoyance, defiance and abuse. Their use, therefore, is typically marked.

EVOLUTION OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN INDIAN WRITING THROUGH THE POSTCOLONIAL LENS

English as a language has undergone many fundamental and linguistic changes over the ages. From Old English, or Anglo-Saxon that was spoken in England and Scotland in the early Middle ages, to the Middle English, which underwent a lot of changes after the Norman conquest until the late fifteenth century. English saw many changes during the Renaissance all through to the modernist period to finally become what it is today. English, consequently, emerged as a language that is ever-changing in nature, a language that adapts and accommodates all. One such evolution in the language can be seen through the postcolonial experience of the former British colonies. The adoption of English in India, like other colonies, was a result of the Raj. Indian writing in English emerged as an honest enterprise that has turned out to be a new form of Indian culture and voice that has been adopted and adapted by the native people. Indian writers- poets, novelist, essayists and dramatists, have been making great contributions to world literature while gaining immense recognition and fame. It has achieved independent stature in world literature. Subsequently, the use of English became essential for postcolonial writers as it works towards the enlightenment of both the colonizer and the colonized about the ‘Self and the ‘Other’. This paper attempts to highlight the evolution of the English language by navigating through the postcolonial narrative of writers who have not only adopted the language but also have changed it

The Play of Love, 1230–1578: A Case Study and Edition

ABSTRACT This article offers the first comprehensive history of the “play of love”—a similitude that compares God’s withdrawal in temptation to a mother at play with her young child—from its origin in Ancrene Wisse through its subsequent appearances in English and Latin devotional writing. In Ancrene Wisse, the scene allows an anchorite to understand her emotion in light of God’s love while acknowledging that God’s unprompted withdrawal causes suffering. The play of love was subsequently excerpted, translated into Latin, and circulated in England and on the continent. A Latin compilation misattributed to Richard Rolle, Quandoque tribularis (edited in the appendix), and later Middle English works refashion the play of love to prescribe specific practices or emotions. This case history thus reveals surprising connections between early English vernacular religious writing, Latinate European readers, and later medieval English compilers, as well as an object lesson in these readers’ changing expectations.

On the co-optation of according to as an evidential in English

Abstract The use of according to + NP has rarely been the topic of any specialized research in relation to English evidentiality, although it would probably figure among the most frequent types of reportative evidentials found in written texts. One of the problems often associated with reportatives has related to the existence of the Reportative Exception (see, e.g. AnderBois 2014), referring to the fact that the speaker may not always subjectively endorse the proposition conveyed with the support of the evidential phrase. The present study reviews the history of according to + NP from Middle English onwards, after which it began to develop evidential functions, and shows how the tendency to reject the truth of the content of the proposition marked by according to + NP arose in specific contexts containing alternative information sources, comparison, or adversative clauses. It was shortly after the diachronic appearance of according to + NP in such contexts that the more periphrastic form, in accordance with + NP, began to renovate/renew the earlier, non-evidential meanings of according to + NP. The present study also attributes the development of according to + NP to a process of co-optation (e.g. Heine 2013) rather than grammaticalization.

Scribal Consistency across Four Middle English Texts in NLW, Brogyntyn ii.1

ABSTRACT The number of hands involved in copying NLW, Brogyntyn ii.1 has been a subject of debate. Progress is currently being made from the rather general observations by Kurvinen (1953), Huws (1996), and Salter (2012) to the more recent and better-founded accounts by Carrillo-Linares (2023), on the scribes of Sir Gawayn and the Carl of Carlisle, and Connolly (forthcoming), on the first quire. The present paper aims to contribute to a hitherto unresolved part of the discussion by comparing decorative, palaeographical, and linguistic evidence across the Treatise on Grafting, the Treatise on Limning, Dialogue with a Bird, and The Tale of Ten Wives. I refute Kurvinen’s and Salter’s suggestions of multiple scribes through sound support of Huws’s claim that a single scribe was in charge of both the prose and verse sections in this part of the codex.

A quantitative exploration of the functions of auxiliary do in Middle English

One of the questions that still surrounds the history of auxiliary do is what function it had during the Middle English period (c.1100–1500). Scholars have put forward different hypotheses, suggesting that it could serve, among others, as a perfective marker (Denison 1985), agentive marker (Ecay 2015) and habitual marker (Garrett 1998). The present article reports on a quantitative study that aims to shed further light on this issue. By means of a collexeme analysis, this article investigates the semantic features of the infinitives that occur with auxiliary do in several Middle English corpora. The results show that auxiliary do was not connected to verbs with specific semantic profiles, but it was employed in different contexts and had various functions. Specifically, the data suggest that auxiliary do was used (i) as an accommodation tool to facilitate the use of low-frequency verbs, particularly of French origin, and (ii) as an aspectual particle to mark both perfectivity and habituality. It is argued that the multifunctionality of auxiliary do in Middle English played a crucial role in the preservation of the construction before it spread to the NICE (i.e. negation, inversion, code and emphasis) environments.

Multiple Adjectival Modification in Old and Middle English: A Reconfiguration of a Constructional Network

The present article looks at patterns of Old and Middle English multiple adjectival modification (asyndetic and conjoined) and interprets their interrelations in the framework of Construction Grammar. This study contributes to previous research by offering a systematic, corpus-based comparison of formally related adjectival structures, which are analyzed from a usage-based perspective and then mapped onto the language network organized according to domain-general cognitive principles. The results indicate constructional change between Old and Middle English, which can be accounted for in terms of the reconfiguration of horizontal-relatedness links (which are based on contrast and alternation) and the resulting change in the vertical-inheritance structure. More broadly, the study confirms that any violations of the well-established Principle of No Synonymy in language may be explained in a diachronic perspective and with reference to general principles of language processing.

THE DYNAMICS OF ENGLISH SENSORY VERBS MORPHOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS

The study is focused on the analysis of the dynamic development of the morphological functions of the main sensory verbs, which make up the core of five lexical-semantic fields of visual, auditory, gustatory, olfactory and tactile sensory perception, in the diachronic view and covers all periods of the English language development: Old English, Middle English, Early New English and New English. The objective is a detailed and in-depth study of the grammatical and phonetic characteristics of the main nuclear English sensory verbs at each stage of their development and highlighting the changes that took place in their morphological chronology. The main tasks are to track, analyze and compare the grammatical and phonetic characteristics of sensory verb lexemes of five main lexical-semantic fields to indicate the process of sensory perception in each historical period, comparing their dynamics and identifying all possible grammatical and phonetic changes that took place in the specified time period. Various methods, analyses and approaches were involved to obtain reliable data: phonetic, component, comparative, quantitative analysis, analysis of dictionary definitions, comparative-historical method, diachronic-synchronic approach. The study is based on the use of all possible Old English, Middle English and Modern English dictionaries that are available. The results prove that in the subsystem of English sensory verbs denoting the processes of sensory perception, there have been noticeable changes on the grammatical and phonetic levels. Throughout all periods of the English language development, their grammatical and phonetic functions have been subjected to various forms of alignment and similar influence from the class of strong declension to weak declension. A significant part of the basic nuclear sensory verbs underwent quantitative and qualitative phonetic changes.

Ecology and Gender in Sir Launfal

ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between landscape and gender in Marie de France’s Lanval and two of its adaptations: the fourteenth-century English romances Sir Launfal and Sir Landevale. Engaging with the ecofeminist principles of Val Plumwood, it contends that the character of the “fairy mistress” and the nature of her otherworldly realm undergo significant changes by adaptation into Middle English, specifically, changes that diminish female agency. As she is adapted into English texts, especially Sir Launfal, the Lanval fairy is made subject to patriarchal hierarchies, and the otherworld is similarly presented as an object of patrimony.

Subject‐Object Asymmetries and the Development of Relative Clauses between Late Middle English and Early Modern English

AbstractThis paper presents the results of a corpus study on the Wycliffe Bible and the King James Bible, examining the distribution of the pronouns who(m)/which and the complementiser that in relative clauses with a personal referent. The data indicate that the decisive factor in both periods was the function of the gap (subject vs. non‐subject): wh‐pronouns are preferred in object relative clauses, while that is preferred in subject relative clauses. In addition, the paper argues that the subject/non‐subject distinction was decisive not only regarding the major wh/that distribution but also regarding the who(m)/which distinction. While in the case of the wh/that distinction, a syntactic difference (relative pronoun versus relative complementiser) underlies the attested asymmetry, the pronouns who(m) and which do not differ in their core syntactic properties. The data clearly indicate that both the wh‐strategy in general and the pronoun who(m) in particular started to spread from the lower functions of the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy, whereby the spread of who(m) was one step behind the general spread of the wh‐strategy. The findings thus suggest that asymmetries along the lines of the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy are not necessarily paired up with syntactic asymmetries.

Exploring the Role of Multimodal Metaphor through Gestures in Middle School English Education

Introduction: As scholarly interest in metaphorical gestures has burgeoned in recent years, the exploration of these non-verbal communicative cues has primarily centered on domains, such as speeches, advertisements, and movies. Surprisingly, there exists a notable dearth of research specifically delving into the nuanced role of metaphorical gestures within the realm of English teaching, especially in middle school settings. This study sought to address this gap by strategically selecting two nationally recognized English courses taught in middle school English classrooms. The study aimed to explore the role of multimodal metaphor in gestures and provide some inspiration for middle school English teachers. Methodology: In this research, two videos from National Excellent Courses were selected for analysis using a multimodal annotation tool, namely EUDICO Linguistic Annotator (ELAN). The course selected was the middle school English teaching design course, and the students involved were from Beijing Normal University, China. All gestures analyzed were classified into three types of metaphors, namely ontological, structural, and orientational. Results: The findings indicated that ontological metaphors occurred most frequently, followed by orientational metaphors, with structural metaphors being the least frequent This research demonstrated the cognitive process of conceptual metaphor in classroom gestures with concrete examples. Conclusion: In contemporary middle school English classrooms, relying solely on textual material is insufficient for fully supporting the teaching process. This study substantiates that employing multimodal metaphors in gestures can enhance teachers’ ability to motivate students effectively and facilitate improved interaction and semantic communication. The study provides English teachers with valuable guidance on implementing multimodal teaching strategies utilizing metaphorical gestures.