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BOOK OF ABSTRACTS Keynote lectures Richard Dance (University of Cambridge) The trouble with Vikings: ‘Difficult’ Old Norse borrowings in Middle English An ICOME conference in Norway is the ideal opportunity to reflect on the considerable role played by the early Scandinavian languages in the development of English. Tracing this Old Norse influence has, of course, long fascinated scholars, and there has been much interesting recent work both on the linguistic evidence for it and on the contexts and nature of the contacts in Viking Age England which brought it about. Nevertheless, there remains a surprising amount still to do to identify and understand lexical borrowings from Old Norse in the surviving records of medieval English. This task can be a very challenging one, not least etymologically: given the genetic proximity of the languages in contact, and the patchiness of our knowledge of the vocabularies of both the source and target languages prior to and during the crucial period, it can be unusually difficult to establish which late Old and Middle English words really do show some input from Old Norse. (See, amongst many others, Townend 2002, Dance 2003 and 2011, Pons-Sanz 2013 and 2015, Durkin 2014: 190219.) Things are especially tricky when it comes to the rich and diverse vocabulary of Middle English texts composed in the North, North Midlands and East of England, particularly the self-consciously showy and frequently obscure word-hoard of alliterative verse. Great literary monuments like the poems of the Gawain manuscript, The Wars of Alexander and the alliterative Morte Arthure contain hundreds of words whose forms, meanings or usage have been explained as showing Old Norse input by one or more commentators (in a plethora of editions, books, articles, dissertations and historical dictionaries) since the mid-nineteenth century. But the vocabulary of these texts has not been treated together from this perspective in a full, etymologically analytical study since Björkman’s panoramic survey of the Scandinavian loans in Middle English (19001902).

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Page 1: BOOK OF ABSTRACTS Keynote lectures - uis.no Book of Abstracts_web... · BOOK OF ABSTRACTS Keynote lectures ... is the ideal opportunity to reflect on the considerable role played

BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

Keynote lectures Richard Dance (University of Cambridge)

The trouble with Vikings: ‘Difficult’ Old Norse borrowings in Middle English

An ICOME conference in Norway is the ideal opportunity to reflect on the considerable role played by

the early Scandinavian languages in the development of English. Tracing this Old Norse influence

has, of course, long fascinated scholars, and there has been much interesting recent work both on the

linguistic evidence for it and on the contexts and nature of the contacts in Viking Age England which

brought it about. Nevertheless, there remains a surprising amount still to do to identify and understand

lexical borrowings from Old Norse in the surviving records of medieval English. This task can be a

very challenging one, not least etymologically: given the genetic proximity of the languages in

contact, and the patchiness of our knowledge of the vocabularies of both the source and target

languages prior to and during the crucial period, it can be unusually difficult to establish which late

Old and Middle English words really do show some input from Old Norse. (See, amongst many

others, Townend 2002, Dance 2003 and 2011, Pons-Sanz 2013 and 2015, Durkin 2014: 190–219.)

Things are especially tricky when it comes to the rich and diverse vocabulary of Middle English texts

composed in the North, North Midlands and East of England, particularly the self-consciously showy

and frequently obscure word-hoard of alliterative verse. Great literary monuments like the poems of

the Gawain manuscript, The Wars of Alexander and the alliterative Morte Arthure contain hundreds of

words whose forms, meanings or usage have been explained as showing Old Norse input by one or

more commentators (in a plethora of editions, books, articles, dissertations and historical dictionaries)

since the mid-nineteenth century. But the vocabulary of these texts has not been treated together from

this perspective in a full, etymologically analytical study since Björkman’s panoramic survey of the

Scandinavian loans in Middle English (1900–1902).

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This paper draws on my ongoing work on the vocabulary of Sir Gawain and the Green

Knight (see Dance 2013), and introduces the larger ‘Gersum Project’ which has developed from it.

Gersum is a collaborative project underway in Cambridge and Cardiff, funded for three years by the

U.K.’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, in which Sara Pons-Sanz, Brittany Schorn and I (with

the support of HRI Digital in Sheffield) are investigating all the words which could be derived from

Old Norse in a range of late Middle English alliterative poems. In this paper, I shall present some of

the fruits of this work so far, focusing on instances where the evidence for Scandinavian input is

especially troublesome and, therefore, especially interesting. There are dozens of items in our texts

whose etymology is essentially ‘obscure’, but where Old Norse derivation or influence is one amongst

several more or less convincing attempts at an explanation, including the likes of balʒ, enker-,

draueled, flosche, g[l]opnyng, gryndel, loupe, slokes, snitered, sprit, taysed, traunt and wyles. By

examining a selection of these colourful and remarkable words — some of them well-known cruces in

the etymological literature, some barely discussed at all — I shall explore in what ways these

supposed relics of Viking activity prove to be so ‘difficult’, considering some of the things this tells us

not only about the linguistic evidence itself, but also about the ways scholars have treated it. These

words will help illustrate a few of the diverse and fascinating problems which beset linguists, editors

and literary critics trying to interpret their material in the engagingly messy contexts of English

language history — which can include (often at one and the same time) having to reconstruct forms

much earlier in the history of Germanic, trying to work out what the words in our Old and Middle

English and Old Norse sources actually mean, and wrestling with possible input from the other

languages of medieval Britain.

References:

Björkman, E., Scandinavian Loan-Words in Middle English, 2 vols., Studien zur englischen Philologie 7, 11

(Halle, 1900–1902)

Dance, R., Words Derived from Old Norse in Early Middle English: Studies in the Vocabulary of the South-West

Midland Texts, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 246 (Tempe, Arizona, 2003)

Dance, R., ‘“Tomarʒan hit is awane”: Words Derived from Old Norse in Four Lambeth Homilies’, in Foreign

Influences on Medieval English, ed. J. Fisiak and M. Bator (Frankfurt am Main, 2011), pp. 77–127

Dance, R., ‘“Tor for to telle”: Words Derived from Old Norse in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’,

in Multilingualism in Medieval Britain (c. 1066–1520), ed. J. A. Jefferson and A. Putter (with the

assistance of A. Hopkins), Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe 15 (Turnhout, 2013), pp.

41–58

Durkin, P., Borrowed Words: A History of Loanwords in English (Oxford, 2014)

Pons-Sanz, S. M., The Lexical Effects of Anglo-Scandinavian Linguistic Contact on Old English (Turnhout,

2013)

Durkin, P., ‘Identifying and Dating Norse-Derived Terms in Medieval English: Approaches and Problems’, in

Early Germanic Languages in Contact, ed. J. O. Askedal and H. F. Nielsen, NOWELE Supplement

Series 27 (Amsterdam and Philadelphia, 2015), pp. 203–21

The Gersum Project: http://www.gersum.org

Alexandra Gillespie (University of Toronto)

“Unbokeled is the male”: Chaucer and the makeshift manuscript

In this paper, I argue that the editorial convention by which the Canterbury Tales are presented in

Fragments (I-X) obscures some more interesting arrangements for the Tales that are witnessed in early

manuscripts, such as the famous Hengwrt manuscript. I will juxtapose the idea of the Tales-as-book

with Chaucer's depictions of pilgrims' bags within the Tales: the Pardoner's "male" and "mitain"; the

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"male" that is unbuckled after the Knight's Tale, then knitted up - and unbuckled again - in the

Prologue to the Parson’s Tale. I will describe some surviving medieval bags and compare the structure

of Canterbury Tales manuscript Huntington HM 144 with that of Hengwrt, as I understand it. My

overarching question is about the "makeshift" - provisional and portable - form of all of these objects.

How does Chaucer build his codicological aesthetic in the Tales from ideas about books and bags,

fragments and assemblages, Tales and tellers?

Gabriella Mazzon (University of Innsbruck)

Narration and argumentation in Middle English romances

Far from being only a form of “entertainment”, medieval romances were also the locus for conveying

ideologies and values, especially at a time in which the reading public, or anyway the public that

would be exposed to these narratives, was rapidly expanding.

Until not long ago, text analysis has mostly neglected to include the mode of reception of texts

as a significant factor – more recently, however, the “performative turn” in various branches of textual

and cultural studies has allowed us to analyse various text-types as “macro-speech acts”, constructed

in ways that are functional to the mode of fruition of that text.

Thus, for instance, we should no longer conceive of text in verse as a kind of elitist,

constrained and artificial form that has nothing to offer to language research. In particular, the texts of

verse romances have been studied in this performative perspective, in connection with the tradition of

oral poetry, musical entertainment and public reading. It was commonly maintained that poetry is not

ideal for linguistic analysis because of its various formal constraints. On the one hand, this view

discounts the fact that prose patterns were also constrained, that models from other languages had a

strong influence, that scribes and “authors” were specifically trained and belonged to a rather limited

elite; on the other hand, the fact that verse echoed, in certain text-types, a form of “performance” has

also been underestimated, under the influence of our modern conception of “canonical” poetry.

In this talk I am going to consider both prose and verse romances as different text types but

with relatively similar topics, sharing many ideological elements, and only partly different in terms of

expressive and stylistic means. We will look, in particular, at ways in which narration progresses (e.g.

in terms of linkers, deictics, topic-shifters), with special attention to the ways in which chronological

sequences, as well as thematic shifts, are dealt with, and at ways in which arguments are put forth and

proceed (e.g. in terms of modality markers, intensifiers, pragmatic markers), specifically in relation to

the two discourses of “good/bad counsel” and “honour/shame”, both important ideologically in

medieval romance, and both themes that have received critical, but not linguistic, detailed attention so

far.

Matti Peikola (University of Turku)

Paratextual elements in Middle English manuscripts: challenges and opportunities for research

The concept of paratext – introduced by the French structuralist Gérard Genette in the 1980s – refers

to the various verbal and visual elements that surround the ‘main text’ of a book, directing the reader’s

perception of its message (the foundational work is Genette 1987; for recent developments, see e.g.

Birke & Christ 2013). In addition to providing guidelines for interpretation (e.g. titles, prologues,

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epilogues), paratextual elements help the reader to navigate the material book (e.g. rubrics, indexes,

tables of contents). They may also serve to promote the interests of book producers commercially or

otherwise (e.g. blurbs, title-pages, errata lists).

The current decade has witnessed an increasing and fruitful application of the paratextual

framework to the study of early modern printed texts and their communicative practices (e.g. Smith &

Wilson eds 2011; Meurman-Solin & Tyrkkö eds 2013, Pt. III). Applications to medieval texts

transmitted via the manuscript medium, however, are still rare (e.g. Poleg 2013, Ch. 3; Liira 2014).

Challenges are brought about, for example, by the heavy authorial emphasis in Genette’s original

formulation and its underlying idea of a clearly discernible moment of publication. The ‘bespoke’

mode characteristic of medieval manuscript production, based on individual negotiations between

makers and users of books, also adds a complicating layer to the model originally based on the

‘speculative’ production of printed books for the commercial market.

Acknowledging these challenges and responding to them, my paper addresses the

opportunities that paratextual elements may offer for the study of Middle English manuscript texts. I

seek to demonstrate that the concept of paratext has the potential to increase our understanding of the

communicative functions that underlie the ‘framing’ or ‘packaging’ of medieval manuscript texts for

their readers. Research into paratexts may also aid us in discerning broader patterns in a work’s textual

transmission. It is not simply the presence or absence of a paratextual element that matters, but more

the variant forms of the same paratext and the combinations of different paratexts attested across the

manuscripts of a given work.

The materials I use to illustrate my arguments include both ‘interpretive’ and ‘navigational’

paratextual elements, especially prologues and various types of paratext in the form of a table or a

calendar. The main focus will be on late Middle English manuscripts containing religious prose, but I

will also address some scientific/utilitarian writings and some more ‘literary’ compilations. The paper

is informed by my earlier research into paratextual elements of the Wycliffite Bible and some related

manuscripts (e.g. Peikola 2009, 2015), and the ongoing work of the Framing Text: Early English

Paratextual Communication, 1400–1600 team at the University of Turku.

References:

Birke, Dorothee and Birte Christ. 2013. Paratext and digitized narrative: Mapping the field. Narrative 21, 1: 65–

87.

Genette, Gérard. 1987. Seuils. Paris: Editions du Seuil.

Liira, Aino. 2014. Interaction on the page: Paratexts in two manuscripts of the Middle English Polychronicon.

Unpublished Master’s Thesis, University of Turku.

Meurman-Solin, Anneli and Jukka Tyrkkö (eds). 2013. Principles and Practices for the Digital Editing and

Annotation of Diachronic Data. Helsinki: VARIENG.

http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/series/volumes/14/

Peikola, Matti. 2009. Instructional aspects of the calendar in later medieval England, with special reference to

the John Rylands University Library MS English 80. In Peikola, Matti, Janne Skaffari & Sanna-Kaisa

Tanskanen eds, Instructional Writing in English: Studies in Honour of Risto Hiltunen.

Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 83–104.

Peikola, Matti. 2015. Manuscript paratexts in the making: British Library MS Harley 6333 as a liturgical

compilation. In Corbellini, Sabrina, Margriet Hoogvliet & Bart Ramakers eds, Discovering the Riches

of the Word: Religious Reading in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Brill, 44–67.

Poleg, Eyal. 2013. Approaching the Bible in Medieval England. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Smith, Helen and Louise Wilson (eds). 2011. Renaissance Paratexts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Papers

Laura Ashe (University of Oxford)

Soul and community in Middle English writings of religious instruction, c. 1200-1350

Church orthodoxy urged individuals to seek the salvation of their own souls as their lives’ priority, in

an explicit command to put God before all human relationships and obligations; sermons and exempla

emphasized the dangers of trusting to others for one’s moral well-being, both after death and during

life. It was only in the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 that Pope Innocent III first

cautiously but officially averred that married laypeople could obtain salvation without abandoning that

condition; presumably he was responding to a deep pastoral need, for priests to be able to reassure the

laity that their souls were not necessarily condemned. But the most popular and influential writings

continued to assert that the religious life was the only perfect life, that all concern with the things of

this world leads to sin, and that personal relationships between the laity – familial, marital, and kinship

bonds – were no help to the soul. Meanwhile, writing in Middle English arose in a period of increasing

public dissatisfaction and class conflict, and complaint poetry and scabrous prose offered severely

critical comment on society. And yet signs of lay optimism and clerical adaptation can indeed be

found – in works such as the South English Legendary which offer a focus on community, and

fellowship in purgatory, or in the enthusiastic adoption of affective piety in the ME lyrics, or in the

sermon collections which equivocate on the nature of sin (‘The ryche ne rychesse god ne hatyth, / But

who-so for rychesse god forsakyth.’)1

This paper will examine the fascinating gap, in the early Middle English period, between the

unremitting harshness of Church orthodox teaching, and the critical and engaged reception of that

teaching, traced via the covert and overt responses to it found in literatures produced for and by a

pious, but self-determining, and ethically independent, laity.

Julia Bacskai-Atkari (University of Potsdam)

Syntactic features and clause typing in Middle English polar questions

My talk examines the syntax of polar questions involving if and whether in Middle English,

concentrating on the exact status of these elements on the left periphery of the clause. While the

analysis of if as a complementiser inserted into C is essentially uncontroversial in the literature, the

status of whether has been subject to considerable debate. As is known, whether was available not

only in embedded clauses but also in main clause interrogatives (Van Gelderen 2009, Fischer et al.

2001) from the Old English period onwards (and continued into Early Modern English). In main

clauses, whether frequently but not obligatorily appeared with a fronted verb (V2 or T-to-C

movement), but this was by no means obligatory: Van Gelderen (2009) interprets the lack of verb

movement to C as an indicator of whether being a grammaticalised complementiser in these cases. The

same asymmetry is manifest in Middle English embedded questions, where whether could be followed

by that, as in (1) and (2):

1 Wenzel, ed., from the Fasciculus Morum, 180-1.

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(1) I wot not whether that I may come with him or not. (Paston Letters XXXI)

(2) If þai ani child miht haue, Queþer þat it ware scho or he

‘If they might have any child, whether it were a she or he.’

(Cursor Mundi 10205, Van Gelderen 2009: 155, ex. 61)

(3) O þis watur he gert ilkan Drinc, quer he wald or nan

‘Of this water he gives each to drink whether he wanted it or not.’

(Cursor Mundi 5517–6618, Van Gelderen 2009: 155, ex. 62)

While (1) and (2) indicate a clear operator status for whether, examples without that, such as (3), raise

the question why that was not inserted. Contrary to Van Gelderen (2009), and in line with Walkden

(2014), I argue that whether was not grammaticalised as a complementiser, and the variation observed

in Middle English reflects two possibilities for the insertion of the polar operator. This is important

because the grammaticalisation of whether in Middle English would be inconsistent with its overall

historical development, since whether is an operator in Modern English, too, as Van Gelderen (2009)

also assumes; in this way, the history of whether raises important issues for historical syntax in

general. First, it can be inserted into [Spec,CP] in the standard way, occupying the same position as

ordinary wh-elements, even though it is not moved from within the clause. Second, it can be inserted

into C by head adjunction (cf. Bayer and Brandner on similar phenomena in constituent questions). In

the first case, the C head is filled by verb movement (head adjunction) or by the complementiser that.

In the second case, whether lexicalises the C head, yet it is not a base-generated complementiser itself

(unlike if). In both cases, the finite interrogative C head is lexicalised; I argue that this property of

Middle English is a remnant of an earlier V2 pattern where [fin] generally had to be lexicalised.

Regarding the lack of grammaticalisation, I claim that there is a feature difference between whether,

which is specified as [wh], and if, which is merely [Q], a subset of [wh]: only an operator with a mere

[Q] specification can be grammaticalised into a complementiser in polar questions, since the C head

itself is specified as [Q]. Middle English provides evidence for the availability of if as an operator in

conditional clauses (resulting in sequences like if that) but not in interrogatives; I argue that the early

grammaticalisation of if into a complementiser in interrogatives was facilitated by the availability of

whether as an overt operator, which enabled a functional split between the two elements.

References:

Bayer, Josef and Ellen Brandner (2008) On Wh-Head-Movement and the Doubly-Filled-Comp Filter. In: Charles

B. Chang and Hannah J. Haynie (eds.) Proceedings of the 26th West Coast Conference on Formal

Linguistics. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.

Fischer, Olga, Ans van Kemenade, Willem Koopman and Wim van der Wurff (2001) The syntax of Early

English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gelderen, Elly van (2009) Renewal in the left periphery: Economy and the complementiser layer. Transactions

of the Philological Society 107.2.

Walkden, George (2014) Syntactic reconstruction and Proto-Germanic. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Artur Bartnik (Catholic University of Lublin)

Case assignment and the evolution of left-dislocated structures

Apart from typical left-dislocated structures illustrated in (1), in which the nominative case is assigned

in a traditional way, Old English exhibits structures which seem to be structurally different (example

2). Consider:

(1) & se þe ne can þa beorhtnesse þæs ecan leohtes, se bið blind.

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‘and he who does not know the brightness of the eternal light, he is blind’

(coblick, HomS_8_[BlHom_2]:17.62.230)

(2) And ðone ðe ðu nu hæfst, nis se ðin wer

‘and him who you now have, he is my husband’

(coaelhom, ÆHom_5:35.705)

Allen (1977, 1980) argues that the relative clause in (1) is externally headed, while in (2) the

underlined head is internal to the relative clause because, among other things, the accusative case is

assigned locally by the verb have (cf. also Harbert 1983 for a different analysis).

Old English left-dislocated structures also have more intriguing examples in which it is not

easy to determine the source of case. Consider:

(3) And þam ðe me his heafod to gebringð, ic gife him c punda goldes

‘and he who shall bring me his head, I shall give him 100 pounds’

(coapollo,ApT:7.23.113)

(4) Þone þe me tocymð, ne drife ic hine fram me

‘he who comes to me I do not drive him away from me’

(coeuphr,LS_7_[Euphr]:67.66)

In examples (3) and (4) the relative elements (þam and þone) do not receive case that results from their

function in the clause (nominative). Rather, they seem to assume the case of the resumptive pronoun in

the main clause (him, hine, respectively).

There are even examples in which the case assigner seems to lie outside the structure, as in

(5) below. Note that the resumptive pronoun in the main clause is different from the dative þam in the

fronted clause:

(5) For þon þam þe butan andetnessa & butan dædbote heora lif geendiaþ her on worulde, þonne

ne becumaþ heo æfre to ængum life ne to ænigre reste,

‘because (for) those without confession and without repentance their life ends here on earth

then they will never become to any life nor to any rest’

(coverhomL,HomU_15.1_[Scragg]:175.91)

To account for case assignment, we assume that structures like (2)-(5) are correlative constructions, in

which relative clauses are adjoined to main clauses (cf. Liptak 2009, Bhatt 2003, Dayal 1996 for

details). We further argue that Old English correlatives have defective complementizers which do not

prevent case transfer across clausal boundaries.

In the paper we also discuss the demise of correlatives in Middle English. According to

Kiparsky (1995) and Bianchi (1999), correlative clauses evolved into headed relatives in the history of

English. We consider this evolutionary approach and show that once case distinctions disappear

internal heads in correlatives are reanalyzed as already existing external heads illustrated in (1).

References:

Allen, Cynthia. 1980. Movement and Deletion in Old English. Linguistic Inquiry 11: 261-323.

Bhatt, Rajesh. 2003. Locality in correlatives. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. 210:

485-541.

Bianchi, Valentina. 1999. Consequences of Antisymmetry: Headed Relative Clauses.

Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyer.

Dayal, Veneeta. 1996. Locality in Wh-quantification: Questions and relative clauses in Hindi.

Studies in linguistics and philosophy, no. 62. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Harbert, Wayne. 1983. A Note on Old English Free Relatives. Linguistic Inquiry 14: 549-553.

Hirschbühler Paul and María-Luisa Rivero. 1983. Remarks on Free Relatives and Matching

Phenomena. Linguistic Inquiry 14: 505-520.

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Kiparsky, Paul. 1995. Indo-European origins of Germanic syntax. In Clause Structure and

Language Change, Adrian Battye and Ian Roberts (eds), 140-169. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lipták, Anikó. 2009. Correlatives Cross-Linguistically. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Taylor, Ann, Anthony Warner, Susan Pintzuk, and Frank Beths. 2003. The York-Toronto-

Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose. York: University of York.

Magdalena Bator and Marta Sylwanowicz (University of Social Sciences, Warsaw)

Middle English culinary and medical recipes - a study of the text type features

The early recipes (both culinary and medical) have recently received much scholarly attention. The

available studies have dealt either with the structure of the recipes, their authorship / readership,

vocabulary, or individual text type features; to name but a few publications: on medical recipes: Hunt

(1990), Jones (1998), Alonso-Almeida (1999, 2013), Taavitsainen (2001a, b, 2012), Pahta (2003,

2011, 2012), Mäkinen (2004, 2006), Quintana-Toledo (2009), Sylwanowicz (2009, 2014, 2016),

Marttila (2011), Cruz-Cabanillas (forthc.); on culinary instructions: Görlach (1992, 2004), Carroll

(1999, 2004), Hieatt (1998, 2004) Marttila (2009, 2014), Bator (2014), Dylewski (2016). In spite of the

growing interest in the evolution of recipes of both kinds, hardly any publication juxtaposes the two.

The proposed paper is the outcome of an ongoing research project dealing with a comparison

of the culinary and medical recipes at various stages of their development. The present study

concentrates on the Middle English period. Its main aim is to illustrate the similarities and differences

in terms of the major text type features as found in the two types of the recipe, such as (a) the form of

the heading, (b) the degree of ellipsis in sentences, (c) the form of verbs, (d) the use of possessive

pronouns, (e) object omission, (f) temporal sequence, (g) the lack of complex sentences, (h) a certain

degree of technical language, and (i) the lack of quantifications. Our preliminary studies have shown

that some of these features are typical of one type of recipe, being hardly noticeable in the other, as in

the case of null object (popular in the culinary but not in the medical corpus), or technical language

(for instance measure terms). The results will show the differences but also the degree of overlapping

between the most prominent text type features of the two kinds of instructions.

The corpus for the proposed analysis consists of an equal sample of texts (culinary and

medical) from the 14th and 15th centuries.

References:

Alonso-Almeida, F. 1999. “Gyf hyr this medycyn. Analysing the Middle English medical recipe discourse”,

Revista de Lenguas para Fines Especificos 5-6: 49-81.

Alonso-Almeida, F. 2013. “Genre conventions in English recipes (1600-1800)”, in: DiMeo, M. - S. Pennel (eds.)

Reading and writing recipe books 1550-1800. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 68-92.

Bator, M. 2014. Culinary verbs in Middle English. Frankfurt a/M.: Peter Lang.

Carroll, R. 1999. “The Middle English recipe as a text-type”, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 100: 27-42.

Carroll, R. 2004. “Middle English recipes: Vernacularization of a text-type”, in: Taavitsainen, I. - P. Pahta (eds.),

Medical and scientific writing in late medieval English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 174-

196.

Cruz-Cabanillas, I. (forthc.). “Medical recipes in Glasgow University Library manuscript Ferguson 147”, in:

Fisiak, J., et al. (eds.) Essays and Studies in Middle English. Frankfurt a/M.: Peter Lang Verlag.

Dylewski, R. 2016. “Medieval vs. Earlier American Culinary Recipes: A Comparison of Typological Features”.

Paper delivered at The 52nd International Congress on Medieval Studies. Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Görlach, M. 1992. “Text types and language history: the cookery recipe”, in: Rissanen, M., et al. (eds.) History

of Englishes. New methods and interpretations in historical linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 736-

761.

Görlach, M. 2004. Text types and the history of English. Berlin; New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Hieatt, C.B. 1998. “Editing ME culinary manuscripts”, in: McCarren, V. - D. Moffat (eds.) A guide to editing

ME. Michigan: Univ.of Michigan Press, 133-140.

Hieatt, C.B. 2004. “The third 15th c. cookery book: A newly identified group within a family”, Medium Aevum

73.1: 27-42.

Hunt, T. 1990. Popular medicine in Thirteen-Century England: Introduction and texts. Cambridge: D. S.

Brewer.

Jones, C. 1998. “Formula and formulation: “‘Efficacy phrases” in medieval English medical manuscripts”,

Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 99: 199-209.

Mäkinen, M. 2004. “Herbal recipes and recipes in herbals – intertextuality in early English medical writing”, In:

Taavitsainen, I. - P. Pahta (eds.) Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English. Cambridge,

Cambridge University Press, 144-173.

Mäkinen, M. 2006. Between Herbals et Alia: Intertextuality in Medieval English Herbals. PhD diss., University

of Helsinki, Faculty of Arts, Department of English and The Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and

Change in English.

Marttila, V. 2009. “Mincing words: A diachronic view on English cutting verbs”, available at:

http://www.lingref.com/cpp/hel-lex/2008/paper2171.

Marttila, V. 2011. “New arguments for new audiences: A corpus-based analysis of interpersonal strategies in

Early Modern English medical recipes”, in: Taavitsainen, I. - P. Pahta (eds.) Medical Writing in Early

Modern English, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 135-157.

Marttila, V. 2014. Creating digital editions for corpus linguistics. The case of Potage Dyvers, a family of six

Middle English recipe collections. Ph.D. dissertation. University of Helsinki.

Pahta, P. 2003. “On structures of code-switching in medical texts from medieval England”, Neuphilologische

Mitteilungen 104.2: 197-210.

Pahta, P. 2011. “Code-switching in early modern english medical writing”, in: Taavitsainen, I. - P. Pahta (eds.)

Medical Writing in Early Modern English, 135-157. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pahta, P. 2012. “Code-switching in English of the Middle Ages”, in: Nevalainen, T. - E.C. Traugott (eds.) The

Oxford handbook of the history of English. Oxford: OUP, 528-537.

Quintana-Toledo, E. 2009. “Middle English medical recipes: A metadiscursive approach”, Studia Anglica

Posnaniensia 45.2: 21-38.

Sylwanowicz, M. 2009. “It is to be heled with medicines...: Names of Medicines in Late Middle English Medical

Texts”, Kwartalnik Neofilologiczny 56.3: 349–362.

Sylwanowicz, M. 2014. “Here begynnyth and tellyth howe a man schal make hys salves, oynementes and

vnguentys. Towards Standard Medical Terminology in Middle English”, Kwartalnik Neofilologiczny

61.3: 559–567.

Sylwanowicz, M. 2016. “And ƥan it wole be a good oynement restoratif… Pre- and postnominal adjectives in

Middle English medical recipes”, Anglica 25/2: 57-71.

Taavitsainen, I. 2001a. “Middle English recipes: Genre characteristics, text type features and underlying

traditions of writing”, Journal of Historical Pragmatics 2: 85-113.

Taavitsainen, I. 2001b. “Changing conventions of writing: the dynamics of genres, text types, and text

traditions”, European Journal of English Studies 5(2): 139-150.

Taavitsainen, I. 2012. “Discourse Forms and Vernacularisation Processes in Genres of Medical Writing”, in:

Ajmelaeus, A. - P. Pahta (eds.) Translation – Interpretation. Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for

Advanced Studies, 91–112.

María José Carrillo-Linares (University of Huelva, Spain) and Keith Williamson (University of

Edinburgh, Scotland)

The linguistic character of manuscripts attributed to the so-called ‘Beryn Scribe’: a comparative

study

In 2003 Mooney and Matheson identified a single scribe who produced the three copies of

the Brut Chronicle found in London, British Library, Harley 1337, London, British Library, Harley

6251, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson C.901, as well as some portions of texts in Ann Arbor,

University of Michigan, Hatcher Library 225, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 50, and Oxford,

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Bodleian Library, Tanner 11. Likewise, they argued that the same scribe was responsible for a copy of

the Prick of Conscience, a fifteenth-century chronicle of London, and Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls

in Oxford, John’s College 57, one of the versions of Lydgate’s Life of our Lady, copied in Cambridge,

Cambridge University Library, Kk.1.3 (part 10) and a copy of the Canterbury Tales including the

unique text of the Tale of Beryn in Northumberland, Alnwick Castle 455. Mooney and Matheson

(2003) dubbed the copyist of these manuscripts ‘the Beryn Scribe’. Previously, in 2000, Horobin had

identified another manuscript as being in the same hand as that of the Tale of Beryn in the paper

sections of the Helmingham manuscript (Princeton Firestone Library Ms 100). Moser and Mooney

(2014) made some additions to the existing list of manuscripts copied by the Beryn Scribe identifying

Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson C.901, another Middle English prose Brut Chronicle and

Manchester, John Rylands Library English MS 63 plus Rosenbach MS 1084/2, of the Canterbury

Tales.

Matheson (2008) argues that the Beryn scribe was ‘a consistent translator into his own

dialect’. However, LALME LP 6040 localises the language of the text of Alnwick Castle 455 to

southern Essex, and the language of the Helmingham manuscript was described by Manly and Rickert

(1940) as East Midland language, and it seems to be even more markedly East Anglian. Our research

on the text of the Prick of Conscience in Oxford, John’s College 57 rather suggests that the language

of this text is better localised further north, in the area of north-west Norfolk and Ely. Our aim is to

analyse the linguistic features of various texts copied by the Beryn scribe, producing extended LPs

(i.e. going beyond the LALME list) for each of them. The linguistic evidence considered in the

previous studies is restricted to a very limited number of forms, some of them with a widespread

distribution and others which, although being less common, are not restricted to any particular area.

In order to achieve our aims, we compare the evidence in our LPs in order to find the

common elements that might be attributable to the scribe´s own repertorire, as well as the features

distinctive to any of them, which could have been motivated by the language of the exemplars he was

using. This methodology enables us to provide a more detailed and nuanced account of the copying

practice of the Beryn scribe.

References:

Benskin, Michael & Margaret Laing. 1981. Translations and Miscsprachen in Middle English Manuscripts. In

Michael Benskin & Michael Samuels (eds.), So meny people, longages and tonges: Philological Essays

in Scots and Medieval English pesented to Angus McIntosh. Edinburgh: The Editors. (pp. 55-106).

Carrillo-Linares, Maria José & Keith Williamson. 2016. Lexis in relation to other linguistic layers in the copying

of Middle English texts: a case-study of Oxford, St John’s College 57. Paper presented at the Fisrt AMC

for Historical Dialectology Symposium held at Edinburgh (9-10 June, 2016).

Carrillo-Linares, Maria José & Keith Williamson. (forthcoming). A reconsideration of the dialectal provenance

of Oxford, St John’s College MS 57.

Horobin, Simon. 2000. The Scribe of the Helmingham and Northumberland Manuscripts of the Canterbury

Tales. Neophilologus 84: 457-465.

Laing, Margaret & Keith Williamson. 2004. The Archaeology of Medieval texts. In Christian. J. Kay and Jeremy

J. Smith (eds.), Categorization in the History of English, Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins. (pp. 85–145).

LALME = McIntosh, Angus. Michael. L. Samuels & Michael. Benskin [with the assistance of Margaret Laing &

Keith Williamson]. 1986. A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University

Press. e-LALME <http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/elalme/elalme.html>.

Manly, John & Edith Rickert. 1940. The Text of the Canterbury Tales: Studied on the Basis of All Known

Manuscripts, 8 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Matheson, Lister. 2008. Essex/Suffolk scribes and their language in fifteenth-century London. In Marina

Dossena, Richard Dury & Maurizio Gotti (eds.), English Historical Linguistics 2016. Volume III: Geo-

Historical Variation in English, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. (pp. 45-65).

Mooney, Linne R. & Lister Matheson. 2003. The Beryn Scribe and his Texts: Evidence for Multiple-Copy

Production of Manuscripts in Fifteenth-Century England. The Library. 4. 4: 347-370.

Mosser, Daniel. 2010. The paper Stocks of the Beryn Scribe. Journal of the Early Book Society for the study of

Manuscripts and Printing History. 13: 63-93.

Mosser, Daniel & Linne R. Monney. 2014. More Manuscripts by the Beryn Scribe and his Cohort. The Chaucer

Review. 49, 1: 39-76.

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Anna Cichosz (University of Łódź)

Quotative inversion with subject pronouns: from Old to Middle English

Quotative inversion, defined as S-V inversion in a reporting clause, is practically absent from PDE if

the subject is a personal pronoun (Barber et al. 1999: 922), as shown in (1).

(1) “The safety record at Standset is first class,” he said. (after Barber et al. 1999: 922)

If inversion takes place, it is said to be “unusual and archaic” (Quirk et al. 1985: 1022), as in (2).

(2) ‘We may all be famous, then’, said he (after Biber et al. 1999: 922)

Since the structure is assumed to be archaic, its use in early English should be more common. Indeed,

Mitchell (1985: §1949) reports after Ogura (1979) that there are two competing patterns attested in

OE: cwæð he (‘said he’) used in Bede and he cwæð (‘he said’) used in the Homilies of Wulfstan, as in

(3) and (4) respectively.

(3) Ac ic hæbbe, cwæð he, in minre mægðe

But I have said he in my country

minne broðor mæssepreost (cobede,Bede_4:23.328.9.3292)

my brother priest

‘But I have, said he, a brother who is a priest in my country’ (cobede,Bede_4:23.328.9.3292)

(4) Bearn ic afedde, he cwæð (cowulf,WHom_11:108.1029)

child I fed he said

‘I fed a child, he said’

Cichosz (2016) shows that quotative inversion with all subject types in OE is largely restricted to the

verb cweðan (only 3 out of 145 cases have secgan), while in PDE inversion is “most common when

the verb is said” (Quirk et al. 1985: 1022). This study aims to show when and how seien (which

dominates in the function of introducing direct speech in ME, cf. Moore 2011: 56-57) replaced

quethen in this context. As shown in (5) and (6), both verbs could follow the inverted pattern in ME,

while non-inversion is well attested for seien, as in (7) but unavailable with quethen (unlike in OE).

(5) Ich habbe funden quod he mon efter min heorte.

I have found said he man after my heart

‘I have found, he said, a man after my heart’ (CMANCRIW-1,II.46.432)

(6) Gode seide he ha beoð.

good said he they are

‘Good, he said, they are’ (CMANCRIW-1,II.60.608)

(7) 'Firste,' He saise, 'sekes þe kyngdom of heuen

first he says seek you kingdom of heaven

‘First, he says, seek a kingdom of heaven’ (CMEDTHOR,40.582)

In various analyses of ME syntax focusing on the loss of the V-2 rule, quotative inversion is

mentioned but only to state that it would not be included in the investigation because of its distinct

discourse characteristics (Los 2009, Westergaard 2007) and structural ambiguity (Haeberli 2002: 10,

fn. 13), which make it different from typical V-2 (even though it is associated with V-2, cf. Zwart

2005: 19). This study takes ME quotative inversion as the main topic in an attempt to account for the

variation found in the OE and ME data. The investigation is based on the YCOE (Taylor et al. 2003)

and the PPCME2 (Kroch & Taylor 2000) corpora and employs corpus methods to trace the

development of the structure in early English.

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References:

Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad and Edward Finegan. 1999. Longman Grammar

of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Pearson Education.

Cichosz, Anna. 2016. Quotative inversion in Old English. Paper presented at the ISLE-4 conference in Poznań

(20th September 2016).

Haeberli, Eric. 2002. Observations on the loss of Verb Second in the history of English. In C. Jan- Wouter Zwart

& Werner Abraham (eds.), Studies in comparative Germanic syntax, 245-272. Amsterdam: John

Benjamins.

Kroch, Anthony, and Ann Taylor. 2000. The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English (PPCME2).

Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania.

Los, Bettelou. 2009. The consequences of the loss of verb-second in English: information structure and syntax in

interaction. English Language and Linguistics, vol. 13, no. 01, 97–125.

Mitchell, Bruce. 1985. Old English Syntax. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Moore, Colette. 2011. Quoting Speech in Early English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Taylor, Ann, Anthony Warner, Susan Pintzuk, and Frank Beths. 2003. The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed

Corpus of Old English Prose (YCOE). Department of Linguistics, University of York. Oxford Text

Archive.

Westergaard, Marit. 2007. English as a mixed V2 grammar: Synchronic word order inconsistencies from the

perspective of first language acquisition. Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 43(2). 107-131.

Zwart, Jan-Wouter. 2005. “Verb second as a function of merge”. In Marcel den Dikken and Christina M. Tortora

(eds.), The Function of Function Words and Functional Categories, 11-40. Amsterdam/Philadelphia:

John Benjamins.

J. Camilo Conde-Silvestre (Universidad de Murcia)

Communities of practice and the rise of Standard English: evidence from late fifteenth-century

private correspondence

The development of a ‘third wave’ approach in sociolinguistic research has afforded a new view of

language variation as practice inherent in the construction of both individual and group identities and

in the enactement of social meaning (Eckert 2012). A key analytical construct in this respect is that of

‘community of practice’: a group of people linked by the pursuit of a joint enterprise, sharing a

repertoire of resources, including linguistic ones like code selection and the adoption of standard or

non-standard forms of language, among others (Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998). Field research

has also confirmed the relevance of this construct in the diffusion of variation, as part of a common,

locally-constructed style: “it is in the process whereby an individual negotiates with his/her

communities of practice that linguistic style is constructed and refined and patterns of variation are

imbued with meaning” (Eckert 2000: 172; see also Meyerhoff 2002). Communities of practice are

therefore crucial for the diffusion of standard or non-standard practices, as part of the process of

identity construction, and I believe that this tenet—which certainly holds for the present— could also

be extended to the past, adding a new dimension to the historical study of standardisation.

Historically-oriented studies based on this construct are scarce, due to the obvious difficulties in

reconstructing groups and, especially, identities and social meanings in past societies—see, however,

for the history of English, Watts (2008), Fitzmaurice (2010), Kopaczyck and Jucker (eds. 2013), and

Conde-Silvestre (2016), among others. Nevertheless, evidence can be drawn from the extant

collections of late Middle English private correspondence—like the Stonor and Paston letters—which,

incidentally, belong with a crucial period in the early implementation of standard English. In this

paper, I intend to reconstruct some of the communities of practice modelled by the correspondents in

these letters, analysing the linguistic resources that their members shared, in connection with the

adoption of incipient standard features. This micro-sociolinguistic perspective may help to see early

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standardisation as a process of identity construction, at the same time as it makes a third-wave

sociolinguistic approach to linguistic materials from the past feasible.

References:

Conde-Silvestre, J. Camilo. 2016. A third wave historical sociolinguistic approach to late Middle English

correspondence: evidence from the Stonor Letters. In Cinzia Russi, (ed.), Current Trends in Historical

Sociolinguistics. 44-66. Warsaw and Berlin: De Gruyter Open.

Eckert, Penelope. 2000. Linguistic Variation as Social Practice. Oxford: Blackwell.

Eckert, Penelope. 2012. Three waves of variation study: the emergence of meaning in the study of variation.

Annual Review of Anthropology 41. 87-100. Also available online at

<https://web.stanford.edu/~eckert/PDF/ThreeWaves.pdf>.

Fitzmaurice, Susan M. 2010. Mr Spectator, identity and social roles in an early eighteenth-century community of

practice and the periodical discourse community. In: Päivi Pahta, Minna Nevala, Arja Nurmi and Minna

Palander-Collin (eds.), Social Roles and Language Practices in Late Modern English. 29-54.

Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Kopaczyk, Joanna and Andreas Jucker (eds.) 2013. Communities of Practice in the History of English.

Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Lave, Jean and Étienne Wenger. 1991. Situated Learning. Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Meyerhoff, Miriam. 2002. Communities of practice. In: Jack K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill and Natalie Schilling-

Estes (eds.), The Handbook of Language Variation and Change. 526-548. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell (1st

edition).

Watts, Richard J. 2008. Grammar writers in eighteenth-century Britain. A community of practice or a discourse

community? In: Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (ed.), Grammar, Grammarians and Grammar Writing

in Eighteenth-Century Britain. 37-56. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Wenger, Étienne. 1998. Communities of Practice. Learning, Meaning and Identity. New York: Cambridge

University Press.

Chiara de Bastiani

The impact of the grammaticalization of the definite determiner on Middle English Syntax

With this paper, I aim to present empirical data dealing with the impact of the grammaticalization of

the definite determiner on Middle English syntax. The grammaticalization of the definite determiner

in the English language is a debated issue within linguistic studies; according to Philippi (1997), both

OE and OHG lacked a definite determiner. While Tschirch (1982) and Demske (2001) demonstrated

that the definite determiner grammaticalized at the end of the OHG period, the discussion about the

grammaticalization of the OE definite determiner is more controversial (Cf. Crisma 2011 and Osawa

2009).

Empirical data arising from the scrutiny of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles A and E, show that in

OE the determiner paradigm se was involved in discourse organization, even if it also signaled

definiteness in some contexts. At the beginning of the EME period, however, a functional shift can be

observed: definiteness is signaled through the se paradigm, while the discourse organizational function

has been taken up by the complex determiner þis. Finally, the se paradigm undergoes a leveling of

forms, resulting in the uninflected form þe. These findings are in line with the development traced by

Breban (2012).

The grammaticalization of the definite determiner may have played a significant role within

the scenario of the syntactic change occurring between the OE and the ME periods. Starting from a

metrical definition of prosodic heaviness (Cf Hinterhölzl 2015), I aim to test whether the

grammaticalization of the functional head D had an impact on the positioning of DP objects in ME.

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According to the metric definition of prosodic heaviness, a constituent is defined as heavy if both its

head and its complement are filled with lexical material; this definition predicts that a DP containing a

realized head D and a complement NP is a heavy constituent. Moreover, in the framework postulated

by Hinterhölzl (2015), the I-domain in the English language is PF-sensitive, requiring all heavy

objects to be spelled out post-verbally. This definition predicts that a growing number of given, but

heavy DP objects with a realized head D are spelled out post-verbally after the reanalysis of the

demonstrative se as the definiteness marker. Together with the demise of the system of discourse

markers such as þa and þonne, the increasing post-verbal positioning of given objects may have

rendered opaque the information structural requirements governing the syntax of the OE language (cf.

Pintzuk-Taylor 2012a-2012b, Petrova-Speyer 2011, Van Kemenade-Los 2006, Hinterhölzl-Van

Kemenade 2012) and prompted the reanalysis of the syntactically-driven SVO word order.

The data are based on a scrutiny of Early Middle English texts and on wider searches on the

YCOE corpus.

References:

Breban, Tine (2012), “Functional Shift and the Development of English Determiners“, in Information Structure

and Syntactic Change in the History of English, eds. Anneli Meurman-Solin, María José López-Couso,

Bettelou Los, Oxford University Press, New York, 271-300

Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/

Crisma, Paola (2011), “The emergence of the definite article in English, A contact-induced change?“, in The

Noun Phrase in Romance and Germanic, eds. Petra Sleemanand Harry Perridon, Structure Variation

and Change, John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam,175-191

Demske, Ulrike (2001), “Merkmale und Relationen, Diachrone Studien zur Nominalphrase des Deutschen”, eds.

Stefan Sonderegger and Oskar Reichmann, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin-New York

Hinterhölzl, Roland (2015), “An interface account of word-order variation in Old High German“, in Syntax over

Time, eds. Theresa Biberauer, George Walkden, Oxford, Oxford University Press, vol. 15, 299-318

Hinterhölzl Roland- Kemenade, Ans Van (2012), “The interaction between syntax, information structure, and

prosody in word order change“, in The Oxford Handbook of the History of English, eds. Terttu

Nevalainen, Elizabeth Traugott,Oxford University Press, New York, 803-821

Osawa, Fuyo (2009) “The emergence of DP in the history of English, The role of the mysterious genitive“, in

Historical Linguistics 2007, selected papers from the 18th International Conference on Historical

Linguistics, Montreal, 6-11 August 2007,eds. Monique Dufresne, Fernande Dupuis and Etleva Vocaj,

135-147

Petrova, Svetlana -Speyer, Augustin (2011), “Focus Movement and Focus Interpretation in Old English”, in

Lingua 121, www.elsevier.com/locate/lingua, 1751-1765

Philippi, Julia (1997), “The rise of the article in the Germanic languages”, in Parameters of Morphosyntactic

Change, eds. Ans Van Kemenade, Nigel Vincent, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 62-93

Pintzuk, Susan- Taylor, Ann (2012a), “Verb Order, Object Position and Information Status in Old English“,

York Papers in Linguistics, Series 2, 29-52.

Pintzuk, Susan- Taylor, Ann (2012b), “The effect of Information Structure on Object Position in Old English: A

Pilot Study“, in Information Structure and Syntactic Change in the History of English, eds. Anneli

Meurman-Solin, María José López-Couso, Bettelou Los, Oxford University Press, New York , 47-65

Tschirch, Fritz (1982), “Geschichte der deutschen Sprache. Die Entfaltung der deutschen Sprachgestalt in der

Vor- und Frühzeit”, Grundlagen der Germanistik, Erich Schmidt Verlag, Berlin, 168-174

Kemenade, Ans Van -Los, Bettelou (2006), “Discourse Adverbs and Clausal Syntax in Old and Middle

English”, in The Handbook of the History of English, eds Ans van Kemenade and Bettelou Los,

Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Oxford, UK

Taylor, Ann – Warner, Anthony – Pintzuk, Susan. - Beths, Frank. (2003), The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed

Corpus of Old English Prose (YCOE), University of York, Heslington, York England YO10 5DD

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Isabel de la Cruz-Cabanillas and Irene Diego-Rodríguez (University of Alcala)

The circulation and transmission of hippocratic lunaries in Middle English

The great majority of lunar prognostic texts have ‘largely escaped the attentions of scholarship’

(Voigts, 1994: 123). This is the case of the Pseudo-Hippocrates´ Treatise on Zodiacal Influence, a text

incorporated into medical codices which contain more extensive and relevant works. It has therefore

hitherto remained comparatively unknown and the only way to identify parallel copies is by consulting

different catalogues and medical manuscripts (Taavitsainen, 1987: 20). Nonetheless, even specialised

catalogues are rarely comprehensive and do not include cross-references to other catalogues (Kibre,

1984 & 1985; Voigts and Kurtz, 2000), which makes the identification of parallel texts an arduous

task and, consequently, their edition and study. In this paper we deal with this lunary, and concentrate

on five copies of it — GUL Hunter MS 513, BL Additional MS 12195, BL Harley MS 2378, BL

Sloane MS 73 and Royal Physicians College MS 384 — since they present a very similar layout,

structure and content. They also contain a tract relating to abscesses at the end, which is absent in

other related versions. This pseudo-Hippocratic treatise was translated from Latin into English in the

late Middle English period (Taavitsainen, 2012: 93), and our hypothesis is that the five texts may be

copies of the same exemplar. Our aim is to study their language according to the methodology of

eLALME which will show the circulation and textual transmission of the treatise. The only

transcription that has been published so far is the one produced by Means of BL Harley MS 2378, so

we have firstly transcribed the other versions, and secondly examined the language of the five of them.

Finally, by collating and comparing them, we intend to identify the original text which may have given

rise to these translations. This research is part of a project that aims to identify the parallel texts of this

pseudo-Hippocrates’ treatise and to group the Middle English manuscripts genetically in relation to

the original versions. Future research will pursue the study of other Middle English translations in

order to complete and enlarge the genetic affiliation of the English versions.

References:

Benskin, M., M. Laing, V. Karaiskos and K. Williamson. An Electronic Version of A Linguistic Atlas of Late

Mediaeval English http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/elalme/elalme.html

Kibre, P. (1984) Studies in Medieval Science: Alchemy, Astrology, Mathematics and Medicine. London:

Hambledon Press.

Kibre, P. (1985) Hippocrates Latinus: Repertorium of Hippocratic Writings in the Latin Middle Ages. New

York: Fordham University Press.

Means, L. (ed.) (1993) Medieval Lunar Astrology: a collection of representative Middle English texts. New

York: The Edwin Mellen Press.

Taatvitsainen, I. (1987) ‘The Identification of Middle English Lunary MSS’, in Neuphilologische Mitteilungen,

88, 18-26.

Taavitsainen, I. (2012) ‘Discourse Forms and Vernacularisation Processes in Genres of Medical Writing 1375-

1550’, in COLLeGIUM: Studies across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences, 7, 91-112.

Voigts, Linda Ehrsam (1994) “The Golden Table of Pythagoras” in Popular and Practical Science of Medieval

England, ed. Lister M. Matheson. East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 123-140.

Voigts, Linda Ehrsam and Patricia Deery Kurtz (2000) Scientific and Medical Writings in Old and Middle

English: An Electronic Reference CD. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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Edurne Garrido-Anes (Universidad de Huelva)

Acceptance, rejection and omission of the word ‘dole’ in Middle English: an approach to

assessing its dialectal distribution

Despite becoming mostly obsolete by 1600, the noun ‘dole’ – also spelt ‘dool’ or ‘dule’ – has survived

into Present-Day English as an archaic, poetic or dialectal word. Its possible dialectal character in

Middle English will be assessed in this paper by studying how scribes from different areas behaved

when confronted with this word in their copy texts. Three works preserved in multiple manuscripts

have been selected to carry out this research: The Prick of Conscience, with the study of the ninety-

seven known manuscripts of the Main Version; Poema Morale, with its seven main extant exemplars

analysed; and Cursor Mundi, with nine of them. In exactly the same contexts, most scribes tended to

maintain the word that they found in their source. However, some parallel copies of these works at

times present lexical variants, and occasionally avoid the item by omission or rephrasing. In order to

be able to ascertain whether the recorded instances of acceptance, omission and apparent rejection of

‘dole’ – or of its derived forms – were or were not geographically conditioned, the methodology

proposed by Carrillo-Linares and Garrido-Anes (2008, 2009) will be followed. Specialised external

sources such as the MED, the OED, E-LAEME and E-LALME, alongside printed or online editions of

at least one manuscript of the above-mentioned works constitute essential points of departure from

which to elicit initial examples of the word, as well as further references of potential occurrences and

of the localised or localisable manuscripts where they need to be checked. Once identified the factors

that may prevent direct correlation between the dialectal localisation of a Middle English manuscript

based on spelling and morphology and that of the lexicon it contains, some distribution maps will be

provided to show common patterns of behaviour regarding the use of ‘dole’ in the textual transmission

of the three works.

References:

Benskin, M., Laing, M., Karaiskos, V. & Williamson, K. (2013-). An Electronic Version of A Linguistic Atlas of

Late Mediaeval English. Edinburgh: The University of Edinburgh.

[http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/elalme/elalme.html]

Carrillo-Linares, M. J. (2005/2006). “Lexical Dialectal Items in Cursor Mundi: Contexts of Occurrence and

Geographical Distribution.” SELIM: Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and

Literature 13, 151-178.

Carrillo-Linares, M. J. & Garrido-Anes, E. (2008). “Middle English Word Geography: Methodology and

Applications Illustrated.” In M. Dossena, R. Dury & M. Gotti (eds.), English Historical Linguistics

2006: Volume III: Geo-Historical Variation in English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 67-90.

Carrillo-Linares, M. J. & Garrido-Anes, E. (2009). “Middle English Word Geography: External Sources for

Investigating the Field.” In M. Dossena & R. Lass (eds), Studies in English and European Historical

Dialectology. Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 135-156.

Eldredge L. & Klinck A., (Eds.) (2000). The Southern Version of Cursor Mundi, Vol. V. Ottawa: University of

Ottawa Press.

Fowler, R. R. (1990). The Southern Version of Cursor Mundi, Vol. II. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press.

Horral, S. M. (Ed.). (1978). The Southern Version of Cursor Mundi, Vol. I. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press.

Kurath, H. et al. (2001). Middle English Dictionary. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

[http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/].

Laing, M. (2013) A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, 1150–1325. Edinburgh: The University of

Edinburgh. [http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laeme2/laeme2.html].

Lewis, R. E. & McIntosh, A. (1982). A Descriptive Guide to the Manuscripts of the Prick of Conscience. Oxford:

Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature.

Markus, M. (2016) EDD Online. (Innsbruck Digitised Version of Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary,

1898-1905). Innsbruck: University of Innsbruck. [http://eddonline-proj.uibk.ac.at/edd/]

McIntosh, A., Samuels M. L. & Benskin, M. (1986). A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, 4 vols.

Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press.

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McSparran, F. et al. (2006). Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse (CMEPV).

Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service.

[http://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/].

Moore, S. (1930). “The Manuscripts of the Poema Morale: Revised Stemma.” Anglia: Zeitschrift für englische

Philologie 54, 269-287.

Morris, R. (Ed.) (1863). The Pricke of Conscience (Stimulus Conscientiae). A Northumbrian Poem by Richard

Rolle de Hampole. Berlin: A. Asher & Co.

Morris, R. (Ed.). (1868). “Poema Morale.” In: Old English Homilies and Homiletic Treatises (Sawles Warde,

and þe Wohunge of Ure Lauerd: Ureisuns of Ure Louerd and of Ure Lefdy &c.) of the Twelfth and

Thirteenth Centuries, Edited from MSS in the British Museum, Lambeth and Bodleian Libraries, with

Introduction, Translation and Notes. London: EETS, pp. 159-182.

Mous, P. (Ed.). (1986). The Southern Version of Cursor Mundi, Vol. IV. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press.

Scottish Language Dictionaries. (2004). Dictionary of the Scots Language (DSL) (2004). Dundee: University of

Dundee. [http://www.dsl.ac.uk/support-dsl/]

Simpson, J. A. & Weiner, E. S. C. (2004). Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd. Edition. OED Online. Oxford:

Clarendon Press. [http://dictionary.oed.com].

Stauffenberg, H. J. (Ed.). (1985). The Southern Version of Cursor Mundi, Vol. III. Ottawa: University of Ottawa

Press.

Trotter, D., Rothwell, W. & S. Gregory, S. (2016). The Anglo-Norman Dictionary. AND Online. Aberystwyth &

Swansea: Aberystwyth University & Swansea University. [http://www.anglo-norman.net].

Wright, J. (1898-1905). The English Dialect Dictionary. Oxford, London, Edinburgh, New York, Toronto:

Henry Frowde.

Warrack, A. & Grant, G. (1911). Scots Dialect Dictionary. London: W. & R. Chambers, Limited.

Ken R. Hanssen (Nord University)

Discordia Concors in Chaucer’s The Parlement of Foules

The Parlement of Foules remains a strange bird in Chaucer’s body of work, critics finding it difficult

to reach an overall consensus as to its meaning and import. The most popular approach disregards the

first half of the poem altogether, links the courting of the formel eagle to the impending nuptials of

Richard II and Anne of Bohemia, and attributes the dissension among the fowls to the riotous

Parliaments of 1376, 1377, and 1380. Basically functioning as an epithalamium, the poem is thus

reduced to a premier instance of English occasional verse. Other critics, finding the first half of the

poem incompatible with such an interpretation, have made a virtue out of the poem’s lack of

coherence, arguing that it allows for an open-ended treatment of a topic that inherently resists tidy

analysis. I will argue that both these ways of approaching the poem are defensive and unable to give

its project proper articulation. Rather than being form without content or content without form, The

Parlement of Foules expresses how an old hierarchical harmony gradually gives way to the chaotic

discordance of a new world. By initially introducing Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis and its absolute

emphasis on the necessity of love of the state, Chaucer offers a lens through which to view the

subsequent action. What emerges is a poem that is not only subversive to its genre but to a prevailing

social order, a poem that far from being incoherent and obscure is a very deliberate structure openly

engaging with critical issues of social power.

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Alpo Honkapohja, University of Zurich

Abbreviations after the Conquest: a corpus investigation of manuscript abbreviations in the

Linguistic Atlas of Early Mediaeval English.

The aim of the paper is to carry out a corpus study of manuscript abbreviations. As anyone who has

worked directly with manuscripts knows, scribes were in the habit of making considerable use of

abbreviations to save space or time. In printed editions and corpora based on these editions, these

abbreviations are normally expanded ‘for the benefit of the reader’, which creates a number of

problems for historical linguistic enquiry (see, e.g. Lass 2004, Driscoll 2006 & 2009, and Rogos 2011

& 2012). However, even though we now have corpora in which the abbreviations are encoded rather

than expanded (LAEME and MEG-C), there have been fairly few corpus linguistic studies that make

use the abbreviations as linguistic data. The present study aims to address this problem by presenting a

quantitative approach to manuscript abbreviations in the early Middle English period, between 1150

and 1350. The period is of particular interest for the study of writing systems, as both the linguistic

situation and orthographical practices changed in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest of 1066. The

data comes from the Linguistic Atlas of Early Medieval English (LAEME) corpus, which covers the

years 1150 to 1350 and contains ca. 650,000 words. LAEME is one of the very few linguistic corpora,

which encode abbreviations, instead of expanding them silently.

I will compare on the distribution of abbreviations in small function words (‘in’, ‘that’, and

‘other’) and longer lexical words, across different genres, geographical areas and etymological origin

of the word, comparing Romance and Germanic vocabulary. Previous studies (e.g. Honkapohja, May

2017 forthcoming) have shown that scribes are likely to treat function words and lexical words

differently, each having their own individual repertoire for the former, while reproducing the forms

found in the examplar for the latter. In order to compare scribal behaviour, I will focus particularly on

parallel texts, LAEME is well-suited for the present study as it includes 32 texts as parallel versions

and contains clearly identified scribal stints.

The results are expected to shed light on the development of scribal practices during the

formative years that followed the Norman Conquest, as well as the dissemination of Latin and French

abbreviations into native Germanic vocabulary.

References:

Driscoll, M.J. 2006. “Levels of transcription”. Electronic Textual Editing, ed. by Lou Burnard, Katherine

O’Brien O’Keeffe & John Unsworth, 254–261. New York: The Modern Language Association of

America.

Driscoll, M.J. 2009. “Marking up abbreviations in Old Norse-Icelandic manuscripts”. Medieval Texts –

Contemporary Media: The Art and Science of Editing in the Digital Age, ed. by M.G. Saibene & M.

Buzzoni, 13–34. Pavia: Ibis.

Honkapohja, Alpo. May 2017, forthcoming. “‘Latin in Recipes?’ A corpus approach to scribal abbreviations in

15th-century medical manuscripts”. In Skaffari, Pahta, Wright. De Gruyter.

LAEME = Linguistic Atlas of Early Mediaeval English 1150-1325. 2008. Compiled by Margaret Laing.

Edinburgh: the University of Edinburgh. http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laeme1/laeme1.html

Lass, Roger, 'Ut Custodiant Litteras: Editions, Corpora and Witnesshood', in Methods and Data in English

Historical Dialectology, ed. by Marina Dossena and Roger Lass (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004), pp. 21-48.

MEG-C = The Middle English Grammar Corpus. 2011. Compiled by Merja Stenroos, Martti Mäkinen, Simon

Horobin& Jeremy Smith, University of Stavanger. http://www.uis.no/research-and-phd-

studies/research-areas/history-languagesand-literature/the-middle-english-scribal-texts-

programme/meg-c/

Rogos, Justyna. 2011. “On the pitfalls of interpretation: Latin abbreviations in MSS of the Man of Law’s Tale”.

Foreign Influences on Medieval English, ed. by Jacek Fisiak & Magdalena Bator, 47–54. Frankfurt am

Main: Peter Lang.

Rogos, Justyna. 2012. “Isles of systemacity in the sea of prodigality? Non-alphabetic elements in manuscripts of

Chaucer’s ‘Man of Law’s Tale’”. http://www.isle-linguistics.org/resources/rogos2012.pdf

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Nils-Lennart Johannesson (University of Stockholm)

Reflections on Orrmulum lexis

Work on a new edition of Orrmulum, the vast 12th century homiletic work surviving in the author’s

holograph (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 1), and in some parts, lost from MS Junius 1, in a

17th century copy by Jan van Vliet (London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 783), has yielded various

by-products, such as analyses of Orrm’s scriptural interpretations (Johannesson 2007a,b, 2008a–c,

2012), studies of semantic fields (Johannesson 2006b), variation studies (Johannesson 2000, 2006a),

and studies of individual words (Johannesson 2004, 2015). The purpose of the last two papers was to

provide alternative interpretations and/or etymologies of a small number of individual words. The

proposed paper, by contrast, will adopt a wider perspective of groups of words of different origins.

Preparing the glossary for the new edition of Orrmulum has provided an opportunity to take a bird’s-

eye view of the lexis used by Orrm in his homiletic work. In this paper I will present some reflections

on the status of native English vocabulary, Old Norse borrowings, Old French borrowings, and Middle

Dutch borrowings. An analysis of erased (but identifiable) words in the manuscript can give an

indication of what kind of words Orrm had second thoughts about and eventually decided to exclude

from his text. Orrm occasionally provides comments on the status of words as in (1), where the

Scandinavian borrowings brodd ‘shoot’ and blome ‘flower’ were obviously sufficiently integrated to

count as examples of ‘ennglissh’.

(1) Forr nazaræþ bitacneþþ uss;

Onn ennglissh brodd. & blome. (H10772f.)

References

Johannesson, Nils-Lennart. 2000. ‘On the time-depth of variability: Orm and Farmon as h-droppers’. Language

Structure and Variation, ed. by Magnus Ljung, 107–119. Stockholm Studies in English 92. Stockholm:

Almqvist and Wiksell International.

—. 2004. ‘The etymology of rime in the Ormulum’. In Worlds of Words. A tribute to Arne Zettersten, ed. by Cay

Dollerup. Nordic Journal of English Studies 3.61–73.

—. 2006 a. ‘To don uss tunnderrstanndenn: an examination of the use of infinitive complementation after

causative DON in the Ormulum’. “These things write I vnto thee ...” Essays in honour of Bjørg Bækken,

ed. by Leiv Egil Breivik, Sandra Halverson, and Kari E. Haugland, 153–162. Oslo: Novus Press.

—. 2006 b. ‘Bread, Crumbs, and Related Matters in the Ormulum’. Selected Proceedings of the 2005 Symposium

on New Approaches in English Historical Lexis (HEL-LEX) , ed. by R. W. McConchie, Olga

Timofeeva, Heli Tissari, and Tanja Säily, 69–82. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.

—. 2007 a. ‘Orm’s relationship to his Latin sources’. Studies in Middle English Forms and Meanings, ed. by

Gabriella Mazzon, 133–143. Studies in English Medieval Language and Literature 19. Frankfurt am

Main: Peter Lang.

—. 2007 b. ‘The four-wheeled quadriga and the seven sacraments: on the sources for the “Dedication” of the

Ormulum’. Bells Chiming from the Past: Cultural and Linguistic Studies on Early English, ed. by Isabel

Moskowich and Begoña Crespo, 227–245. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

—. 2008 a. ‘An Anatomy of Metaphors and Exegetical Statements in Medieval Homiletic Writing’. Selected

Papers from the 2006 and 2007 Stockholm Metaphor Festival, ed. by Nils-Lennart Johannesson and

David C. Minugh, 21–27. Stockholm Studies in English 103. Visby: eddy.se ab.

—. 2008 b. ‘“Þurrh be33ske. 7 sallte tæress”: Orm’s Use of Metaphor and Simile in the Exegesis of John 1:51’.

Selected Papers from the 2006 and 2007 Stockholm Metaphor Festival, ed. by Nils-Lennart

Johannesson and David C. Minugh, 85–94. Stockholm Studies in English 103. Visby: eddy.se ab.

—. 2008 c. ‘Icc hafe don swa summ þu badd: An Anatomy of the Preface to the Ormulum’. SELIM: Journal of

the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature 14.107–140.

—. 2012. ‘“Rihht alls an hunnte takeþþ der. /Wiþþ hise 3æpe racchess”: Hunting as a metaphor for proselytizing

in the Ormulum’. In The Use and Development of Middle English: Proceedings of the Sixth

International Conference on Middle English, Cambridge 2008, ed. by Richard Dance and Laura Wright,

231–242. Bern: Peter Lang.

—. 2015. ‘Lexical Cruces in Orrmulum: The importance of context’. In Studia Neophilologica 87(2): 131–151.

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Aleksandra Kalaga (University of Silesia)

A morphosemantic study of zero-derivation in Middle English

The problem of zero-derivation has frequently been confronted in studies on English word-formation,

usually, however, from the perspective of its usual place in the general theoretical framework of word-

formation. Despite the fact that the process of zero-derivation, whereby a new word is derived from

the already existing one with no accompanying change of morphological form, has been an inherent

part of the English word-formational system since Old English (cf. Kastovsky 1968, Biese 1941),

there is still a lot of controversy regarding the systemic nature of the process. The debate mostly

focuses on the problem of zero-affixes as formal exponents of the process; linguists who view this

process as a derivational technique analogical to affixation operationalize the term “zero affix” and,

consequently, apply the term “zero-derivation” (e.g. Marchand 1969, Kastovsky 1968, 2005). One of

the most frequent, and perhaps the most neutral with respect to theoretical affinity is the approach

where the process is seen as morphological conversion, as it merely implies the shift of a given

lexeme to a different word-class. Still different approaches treat this morphological process as a kind

of syntactic recategorization within a single paradigm (cf. Vogel 1996, see also objections towards

zero-affixes raised by Štekauer 1996) or as a kind of metonymic shift (cf. Schönefeld 2005). Although

much has been said so far about zero-derivation from a theoretical point of view, very little attention

has been paid to the historical aspects of this process. Still, the only comprehensive and systematic

study of the development of zero-derivation in English is the publication by Biese (1941).

The present paper is a corpus-based study of zero-derived types sampled in the corpus of

Middle English texts. Both formal properties, such as the motivation, directionality, and the

availability of the process, as well as qualitative aspects of zero-derivation, such as the most common

semantic patterns resultant from the zero-form application, have been taken into consideration. Also,

etymological data has been incorporated into the present analysis, which has allowed to further

speculate on the productivity of the process as far as the intake of foreign bases is concerned. The

period of Middle English is especially important for the emergence of zero-derivation as one of the

most productive word-formational patterns, as it has witnessed the truncation of the verbal infinitival

suffix –en, which eventually eliminated formal differences between verbs and nouns in the nominative

case. This inflectional loss has led to a significant rise in the productivity of the process in subsequent

stages of the morphological development of the English language. Therefore, despite the fact that the

present study is synchronic in nature, some diachronic aspects comparing the morphosemantic

properties of Middle English zero-derivatives with their later development have also been briefly

discussed, as the analysis has revealed substantial diachronic differences with respect to the

availability, productivity, and semantic output of the process in question.

Primary Sources:

The Diachronic Part of the Helsinki Corpus of English Text.

The Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse.

Dictionaries:

Middle English Dictionary (available online at quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med)

Oxford English Dictionary. Second edition on CD-ROM, version 3.0.

References:

Biese, Y. M. (1941). Origin and Development of Conversions in English. Annales Academiae

Scientiarum.

Kastovsky, Dieter (1968). Old English Deverbal Substantives Derived by Means of a Zero Morpheme.

Esslingen/N.: B. Langer.

Kastovsky, Dieter (2005). Conversion and/or zero: word-formation theory, historical

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linguistics, and typology. In: Laurie Bauer, Salvador Valera (eds). Approaches to Conversion/Zero-Derivation.

Münster: Waxmann.

Marchand, Hans (1969). The Categories and Types of Present-Day English Word-Formation. A Synchronic-

Diachronic Approach. Alabama: University of Alabama Press.

Schönefeld, Doris (2005). Zero-derivation – Functional change – Metonymy. In: Laurie Bauer, Salvador Valera

(eds). Approaches to Conversion/Zero-Derivation. Münster: Waxmann.

Štekauer, Pavol (1996). A Theory of Conversion in English. Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang.

Vogel, Petra M. (1996). Wortarten und Wortartenwechsel. Zu Konversion und verwandten Erscheinungen im

Deutschen und in anderen Sprachen. Studia Linguistica Germanica 39. Berlin and New York: W. de

Gruyter.

Monika Kirner-Ludwig (State University of New York at Albany, NY)

Have we been misreading Harley 2253’s Man in the Moon? Revisiting medieval and Early

Modern English references to the Man in the Moon from a historio-linguistic viewpoint

The Man-in-the-Moon motif has so far mostly received attention from literary scholars carving out its

history and influencing factors as well as its metaphorical use (cf. e.g. Baring-Gould 1967; Brednich

1997; and Honegger 1997, 1999). While these scholars have mainly been concerned with Alexander

Neckam’s mentioning of the Man in the Moon as a phenomenon people would actually believe to be

true in his De Naturis Rerum (a1204) and William Shakespeare’s recurrent references to and re-

contextualizations of the Man in the Moon in his Midsummer Night’s Dream (3.1.51-53), The Tempest

(2.2.129-133), and Love’s Labour’s Lost (5.2.211-214), another array of studies has been produced

which focuses on the one poem dealing with the Man in the Moon as part of the so-called Harley

Lyrics, preserved in MS Harley 2253, fols. 114v-115r, British Library London, produced by an

anonymous writer roughly around 1325. Those mostly philological studies have tried to more

specifically date and comprehend this piece with regard to its linguistic facets and still unresolved

riddles (cf. e.g. Boedeker, K. 1879; Brook 1948; Brown 1924, 1933; Ker 1965; Stenroos 2008).

This paper’s perspective on the Man in the Moon is thus highly facilitated by the fact that both the

provenance and instances of occurrence of the motif have been well researched and documented.

Using this situation as a springboard, the three following main aims have been formulated in order to

provide an explicitly diversified view on the conceptual frames and socio-historical relevance of the

Man in the Moon:

1) I shall argue for a much more outside-the-box approach to the Man in the Moon,

proposing a look beyond the textual margins most research into the motif has been

constrained by.

2) I suggest a much more conceptual approach, zooming in on what the Man in the Moon

stood for and what people associated this fuzzy concept with and how these facets reflect

in diachronic language use on a linguistic, or more specifically cognitive-semantic and

idiomatic level.

3) Based on 1) and 2), I claim that the Man in the Moon poem in MS Harley 2253 may have

been misread and misinterpreted all along.

References:

Baring-Gould, Sabine. 1967. Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, University Books Inc., New York.

Boedeker, K. 1879. Altenglische Dichtungen des MS. Harley 2253. Mit grammatik und glossar, Anglia -

Zeitschrift für englische Philologie. 2, 507–548.

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Brednich, Rolf Wilhelm, ed. 1997. Enzyklopädie des Märchens, Handwörterbuch zur historischen und

vergleichenden Erzählforschung. Vol. 9. „Der Mann im Mond“, 183-188. Berlin: de Gruyter.

Brook, G.L. 1948. The Harley Lyrics: The Middle-English Lyrics of MS. Harley 2253. Manchester: University

Press.

Brown, Carleton. 1924. Religious Lyrics of the XIVth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 3-14.

Brown, Carleton. 1933. English Lyrics of the Thirteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press. xxxv-xl, 131-63.

Butler, John Anthony, ed. 1995. Bishop Godwin, Francis, “The Man in the Moon”. [Publications of the Barnabe

Riche Society, 3]. Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions Inc. 11-63.

Fein, Susanna (ed.). 2000. Studies in the Harley Manuscript – The Scribes, Contents, and Social Contexts of

British Library MS Harley 2253. Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute

Publications.

Honegger, Thomas. 1999. ‘The Man in the Moon: Structural Depth in Tolkien,’ in: Thomas Honegger (ed.).

Root and Branch: Approaches towards Understanding Tolkien. Cormarë Series 2. Zurich and Berne:

Walking Tree Publishers, 9-76.

Honegger, Thomas. 1997. A Note on the Man-in-the-Moon Poem No. 333 in Iona and Peter Opie’s The Oxford

Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes’, Notes and Queries 245 (N.S. 47)/1997: 20-22.

Ker, Neil R. 1965. Facsimile of British Museum MS Harley 2253, Early English Text Society, 255. London:

British Museum.

Stenroos, Merja. 2008. A-marscled in ‘The Man in the Moon’, Notes and Queries 10/2008: 400-404.

Wedge, George Francis. 1967. Alexander Neckam’s De Naturis Rerum: A Study, together with representative

passages in translation, University Microfilms Inc. Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Joanna Kopaczyk, Benjamin Molineaux, Rhona Alcorn, Warren Maguire, Vasilis Karaiskos and

Bettelou Los (University of Edinburgh)

Reconstructing spelling systems through grapho-phonological parsing: The case of 15th-century

Scots

In this talk, we extend research on medieval writing systems – gained mostly through the study of

Middle English (see, e.g., Laing 1999, Laing & Lass 2003) – to early Scots. In doing so, we will

showcase the tools and methods developed for FITS (From Inglis to Scots, University of Edinburgh), a

project which investigates Scots administrative texts from 1380–1500, drawn from the Linguistic Atlas

of Older Scots (Williamson 2008).

Like their Middle English counterparts, we assume early Scots scribes to be “prodigal yet still

systematic” spellers (Laing and Lass 2003: 258). FITS is concerned with the nature of these spelling

systems and assumes them to be at least partly rooted in the phonology. We have therefore developed

a method of grapho-phonological parsing (Kopaczyk et al., under review), which resolves individual

word forms into their component spelling units ('graphemes'). For each token of each resolved

grapheme we record its:

etymological sound value (e.g. OE [ð] for early Scots <y>)

reconstructed sound value (e.g. <y> representing [θ] in <yef(is)> ‘thieves’ and [ð] in <yarfor>

‘therefore’)

graphotactic, morphographic and lexical context

extralinguistic context (e.g. date, place of composition, sub-genre)

This technique enables us to (1) propose the underlying phonology represented by each scribal

orthography (e.g. Alcorn et al. 2017, Molineaux et al. 2016, Maguire et al. in prep.) and (2)

reconstruct the spelling systems of different texts, times and places. Here, we concentrate on the

second of these goals. We illustrate how FITS tools allow us to establish sound substitution sets (‘SS

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sets’, cf. Potestatic Substitution Sets, Laing 1999) and to investigate their contextual variation. We

focus on the SS sets for the grapheme <y> and the digraph <th>, represented in Fig.1.

Fig.1. Overlapping consonantal SS-sets for <y> and <th> in the FITS database

Fig. 1 shows the range of reconstructed consonantal values for <y> and <th> as revealed by the FITS

database visualization tool. This tool allows us to assess the strength of correlation between units of

spelling and the sound values we reconstruct for them (indicated by the thickness of connecting lines

within each set). It is apparent from Fig. 1 that <y> is preferred to <th> as a spelling for [ð], but is

clearly dispreferred for [θ]. Our tools enable us to study these mappings further, e.g. in individual texts

or in particular morphemes. In our talk we investigate the consonantal interpretations of <y> and <th>

more broadly by exploring their positional, geographic and temporal restrictions. In doing so we build

on current scholarship by providing a fresh, Scots-based perspective.

References:

Alcorn, R., B. Molineaux, J. Kopaczyk, V. Karaiskos, B. Los and W. Maguire. 2017. 'The emergence of Scots:

Clues from Germanic *a reflexes' in J. Cruickshank and R. McColl Millar (eds.) Before the Storm:

Papers from the Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ulster triennial meeting, Ayr

2015, pp. 1-32. Aberdeen: Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ulster.

Kopaczyk, J. et al. Under review. Towards a grapho-phonologically parsed corpus of medieval Scots. Database

design and technical solutions.

Laing, M. 1999. Confusion wrs confounded: litteral substitution sets in early Middle English writing systems.

Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 100: 251-270.

Laing M. and R. Lass, 2003. Tales of 1001 nists: the phonological implications of litteral substitution sets in

some thirteenth-century South-West Midland texts. English Language and Linguistics 7: 257-278.

Maguire, W. et al. In preparation. Investigating evidence for final [v] devoicing in Older Scots.

Molineaux, B. et al. 2016. Tracing L-vocalisation in early Scots. Papers in Historical Phonology 1: 187-217.

Williamson, Keith. 2008. A Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots, Phase 1: 1380-1500. Edinburgh: © 2008- The

University of Edinburgh. http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laos1/laos1.html

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Virginia Langum (University of Umeå)

Mad Pilgrims: Migration and Mental Illness in Premodern Literature and Culture

Writing in the fifteenth century, the poet and civil servant Thomas Hoccleve speaks of his “wit” as

“having gone on pilgrimage.” Although metaphorical, Hoccleve wrote in a culture saturated with

associations of pilgrimage and mental and moral health. The image of the “mad pilgrim” is addressed

in Foucault’s influential but often historically dubious History of Madness (2006). In this text, he

claims that premodern societies often shipped away or exiled the mentally ill on boats. While unlikely

that the medieval and early modern seas were filled with such “boats of fools,” madness was a

common affliction of pilgrims who voluntarily left seeking a cure. Images of exile, pilgrimage and

madness are pervasive in medieval texts, and these associations are both metaphorical, as in the case

of Hoccleve, and material as in the case of the mystic Margery Kempe who was cast out by her fellow

pilgrims for her idiosyncratic and “mad” behaviour. This abandonment causes her much mental

distress and anguish. The present study will contextualize these literary descriptions of pilgrimage and

exile within the context of historical documents pertaining to pilgrimage and healing, as well as

medical accounts of mental illness and the impact of geographical and cultural change. This paper is

part of a larger project which examines the articulation of mental illness and migration in literature

from the Middle Ages to the present.

Andrzej M. Łęcki (Pedagogical University of Cracow) and Jerzy Nykiel (University of Bergen)

The cycle of prepositional purpose subordinators in Middle English

Recently more and more attention has been devoted to linguistic cycles, e.g. the papers in van

Gelderen (2009) and van Gelderen (2016). Among developments that have some features of a

linguistic cycle is the development of a number of purpose subordinators in Middle English. While

some of such subordinators arise also later, that is in Early Modern English, their roots can still be

traced to Middle English. What is common to all those subordinators is that their structure embraces

P+NP+that. Not unlike similar forms present in PDE, as discussed by Brems and Davidse (2010), the

noun in the NP is an abstract noun while the clause introduced by that is to be originally taken as a

noun complement clause. The subordinators to be handled in this paper are: to the intent that, to the

effect that, to the end that, on purpose that, and in order that. While the grammaticalization of each of

these subordinators treated individually has been the subject of a number of our earlier studies, namely

Nykiel and Łęcki (2013), Łęcki and Nykiel (2014), Nykiel (2014), and Łęcki and Nykiel (in press), in

this study we take a global look at the renewal of these purpose subordinators. One of our aims is to

explore the causes of the renewal by looking into untypical contexts and critical contexts (Diewald

2006) in which the purpose subordinators arose. Also, we look in this study into the lexical sources of

the purpose subordinators with the aim of, firstly, reconstructing grammaticalization paths that lead to

PURPOSE and, secondly, verifying to what extent a particular lexical source determines the meaning

and function of the purpose subordinator.

It is to be borne in mind that the outburst of new purpose subordinators in Middle English is not an

isolated phenomenon. Brems and Davidse (2010) note that in PDE similar developments are attested,

e.g. in the hope that, which lends more support to the idea that the development of the purpose

subordinators is cyclical. We argue in this study that the PDE developments further continue the cycle

set in motion in Middle English.

The language data for this study are collected from the electronic corpora of the English

language such as the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse and Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of

Middle English.

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References:

Brems, Lieselotte & Kristin Davidse (2010) Complex subordinators derived from noun complement clauses:

grammaticalization and paradigmaticity, Acta Linguistica Hafniensia, 42:1, 101-116.

CMEPV = Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse. (1997-) Developed by the Humanities Text Initiative.

<http://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/>

Diewald, Gabriele. 2006. Context types in grammaticalization as constructions.

In Constructions. Special Volume 1. Constructions all over – case studies and theoretical implications. Doris

Schönefeld (ed.). http://www.constructions-online.de/articles/specvol1.

Gelderen, Elly van (ed.). 2009. Cyclical Change. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Gelderen, Elly van (ed.). 2016. Cyclical Change Continued. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Łęcki, Andrzej M. & Jerzy Nykiel 2014. All roads lead to purpose: the rise and fall of to the end that and to the

effect that in English. In Studies in Middle English. Words, Forms, Senses and Texts. Michael Bilinsky

(ed.). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. 225-251.

Łęcki, Andrzej M. & Jerzy Nykiel (in press) Grammaticalisation of the English prepositional conjunction in

order to/that. In: Aspects of Grammaticalization: (Inter)Subjectification, Analogy and Unidirectionality,

H. Cuyckens, L. Ghesquière, D. van Olmen (eds.). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Nykiel, Jerzy 2014. ‘Grammaticalization reconciled: functionalist and minimalist insights into the development

of purpose subordinators in English’ Language Sciences 42.1-14.

Nykiel, Jerzy & Andrzej M. Łęcki 2013. Toward a diachronic account of English prepositional subordinators

expressing purpose: to the intent that. In: Of Fair Speche, and of Fair Answere. Medieval English

Mirror 8, Marcin Krygier (ed.). Frankfurt am Mein: Peter Lang. 75-88.

PPCME2 = Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English, second edition. 2000. Kroch, Anthony & Ann

Taylor. 2000. <http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/PPCME2-RELEASE-3/index.html>

Sonya Lundbland (University of Stavanger)

"Hit is tyme rest myn hert, y me suppos": Rhetoric, Dreams, and Maturity in Fortunes Stabilnes

In 1433, the noble prisoner, Charles d’Orleans was placed in the custody of the earl of Suffolk where

he became involved in peace negotiations with France. Seven years later, he was released from his 25-

year captivity and returned home to France (Arn 25-26). Before leaving England, he ordered the

production of manuscripts of his French and English poetry (Critten 341). Now entitled Fortunes

Stablines, his long English poem depicts the inner mind of a young speaker who is awakened to love

for the first time and painfully suspended in a dreamlike state of eros (within which he actually falls

asleep and dreams). While Julia Boffey’s “Charles of Orleans Reading Chaucer’s Dream Visions,”

makes important connections, more comparisons with previous Middle English dream vision is

necessary because claims about the static immaturity of Charles’ dreamer (Critten 343) and the

unfinished nature of the poetry (Arn 22) have questioned the poet’s place in the tradition of Middle

English verse. Some have claimed that the roughness of the English language and poetic device is

intentional, a sign of belonging to the early modern period (Klinck 687). I would like to suggest that,

like the dreamer in Pearl and The Book of the Duchess, Charles’ dreamer enters a maturation process

that involves his faculty of reason. Charles’ dreamer suggests various courses of action to alleviate his

pain, and all are rejected by Cupid who consistently explains his heartbreak as the inevitable

consequence of love. The lover-dreamer's eventual maturity is glimpsed when he comes to accept that

love is illogical, unfair, and inevitable. Later, he embraces a Boethian sense of Hope as course of

action. In this, he has much in common with the dreamer in Pearl and The Book of the Duchess. Using

similar rhetorical devices, such as apostrophe ( Barootes), Charles’ dreamer engages in reasoned

critical analysis of injustice and offers various appeals. My paper is also responding to claims that both

the lover and Charles affect an "unstable self," (Spearing) and a duplicitous persona (Coldiron) in the

spirit of early modern self-fashioning and subjectivity. Showing Charles’ participation in Middle

English rhetorical poetics exposes similarities between Charles and the lover, both endowed with

reason, agency, purpose, and initiative rather than subjectivity. Like the pained lover he creates, in his

exile, Charles knew quite a lot about the very things the lover-narrator expresses: lost agency,

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captivity, longing for escape, intractable situations, and half-life existence akin to dream. Together

with characters like Love, Beauty, and Fortune who are working against the lover, holding him in

painful captivity, Charles crafted a multivalent world of interconnected forces that allude to his own

situation without digressing into allegory. Therefore, it is possible that Charles' poetry is less an

expression of his feelings (or product of his psyche) as it is an efficacious contribution to his actual

release from captivity in 1440. This understanding of the work arises from speculation about Charles’

possible performances in noble households before his release, and also from scholarly consensus about

his opportunity to read Chaucer's work (Epstein) (Critten) while being held in the home of Alice

Chaucer (granddaughter to Geoffrey Chaucer and wife of the earl of Suffolk). No encounters with the

Pearl poem are yet substantiated. Nevertheless, he wrote in the same high elegant style of the Pearl

poet known as the "luf-talkyng" mode, one befitting Charles, a man of princely "nobility and

refinement" (Arn 19). Therefore the comparison is also useful for considering his place in the Middle

English verse tradition.

References:

Arn, Mary-Jo. “Introduction” in Fortunes Stabilnes: Charles of Orleans’s English Book of Love. (critical

edition). Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies: Binghamton, 1994.

Boffey, Julia. “Charles of Orleans Reading Chaucer’s Dream Visions.” Mediaevalitas: Reading the Middle

Ages; The J.A. W Bennett Memorial Lectures, Ninth Series, Perugia, 1995.

Barootes, B.S.W. “’O perle’:Apostrophe in Pearl.” Studies in Philology. Fall 2016, Vol. 113. Issue 4, p. 739-764.

Coldiron, A.E.B. Canon, Period, and the poetry of Charles d’Orleans: Found in Translation. Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press.

Critten, Rory G. "The Political Valence of Charles D'Orléans's English Poetry." Modern Philology: Critical and

Historical Studies in Literature, Medieval through Contemporary, vol. 111, no. 3, Feb. 2014, pp. 339-

364.

Epstein, Robert. “Prisoners of Reflection: The Fifteenth-Century Poetry of Exile and Imprisonment.” Exemplaria

15 (2003): 159-98.

Klinck, Anne L. "Making a Difference: Bilingualism and Re-Creation in Charles D'Orléans." Neophilologus,

vol. 99, no. 4, Oct. 2015, pp. 685-696.

Copeland, Rita. "Lydgate, Hawes, and the Science of Rhetoric in the Late Middle Ages." Modern Language

Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History, vol. 53, no. 1, Mar. 1992, pp. 57-82.

Spearing, A.C. “Dreams in The King’s Quair and the Duke’s Book.” Charles d’Orleans in England 1415-1440.

Ed. Mary-Jo Arn. D.S. Brewer, Cambridge: 2000.

Spearing, A.C. Textual Subjectivity: The Encoding of subjectivity in medieval narratives and lyrics. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.

Martti Mäkinen (Hanken School of Economics)

N-gram inventories in the study of Middle English variation

An earlier study showed that Stylo, a package for R, was able to discriminate between the purposes of

writing, or the dialects, or the authors of Middle English documents (Mäkinen 2016). The current

paper takes that study as a starting point, and develops the earlier findings by investigating the

elements shared by the texts between which affinity was established, and determining what elements

are conditioned by which factors.

Stylo is a stylometric package written for R for studies in stylometry and authorship

attribution. Stylo uses n-grams of either words or characters, and their z-scores (the distance between

the raw score and the population mean in units of the standard deviation) for establishing links

between texts. In addition to the different visualisations, Stylo also provides the user with tables of

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frequencies and z-scores, which can be used after the automatic analysis to study the n-grams that

were pivotal in establishing links between texts. (Eder, Rybicki, and Kestemont, 2015)

The current paper starts from two assumptions: each Middle English text attests to a unique

set of character n-grams, and such unique sets are more similar among texts that share a similar variant

of Middle English, conditioned either diatopically otherwise (Jensen, 2010; Stenroos and Thengs,

2012). The material for this study is drawn from A Corpus of Middle English Local Documents

(MELD), compiled at the University of Stavanger. The version used for this study is 2016.1,

consisting of 1,436 texts and 600,000 words (MELD).

Looking at the choices of method and material, this study is situated between LALME and

investigations on the geographical provenance of texts (cf. Williamson 2000, 144-151), i.e. the method

combines elements from fit technique and “character n-gram geography”. As such, the automatically

created n-grams do not yield themselves easily to the study of linguistic elements, that is, they do not

respect the boundaries of morphemes or syllables. Nevertheless, they may open vistas into the spelling

variation conditioned by provenance, purposes of writing, or authorship.

References:

Eder, Maciej, Jan Rybicki and Mike Kestemont. 2014. ‘Stylo’: a package for stylometric analyses.

Computational Stylistics Group. [Online]. Available at

<https://sites.google.com/site/computationalstylistics/>. Accessed Dec, 2016.

Embleton, Sheila, Dorin Uritescu and Eric Wheeler. 2009. The Stability of Multidimensional Scaling over Large

Data Sets: Evidence from the Digitized Atlas of Finnish. In: Mélanges en l’honneur de Juhani Härmä,

(Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki 77), eds. Eva Havu, Mervi Helkkula and Ulla

Tuomarla. 101-108.

Jensen, Vibeke. 2010. Studies in the Medieval Dialect Materials of the West Riding of Yorkshire. PhD thesis,

University of Stavanger.

LALME = McIntosh, Angus, Michael L. Samuels & Michael Benskin. 1986. A Linguistic Atlas of Late

Mediaeval English. 4 vols. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press.

Mäkinen, Martti. 2016. Testing a stylometric tool in the study of Middle English documentary texts. Paper, read

at ICEHL 19, University of Essen, August 22-26, 2016.

MELD = The Middle English Local Documents Corpus, version 2016.1. September 2016, University of

Stavanger.

Stenroos, Merja and Kjetil V. Thengs. 2012. Two Staffordshires: real and linguistic space in the study of Late

Middle English dialects. In: Outposts of Historical Corpus Linguistics: From the Helsinki Corpus to a

Proliferation of Resources (Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English 10), eds. Jukka

Tyrkkö, Matti Kilpiö, Terttu Nevalainen and Matti Rissanen. Helsinki: VARIENG. [Online]. Available

at <http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/series/volumes/10/stenroos_thengs/>. Accessed Dec, 2016.

Williamson, Keith. 2000. Changing spaces: linguistic relationships and the dialect continuum. In: Placing

Middle English in Context, eds. Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen, Päivi Pahta, and Matti Rissanen.

141–179. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Imogen Marcus (Edge Hill University)

Loans or code switches? The status of lone other-language lexical items in later medieval texts

This paper places Middle English within its multilingual context by seeing it as existing alongside

Anglo-French and Latin. The Middle English Dictionary (Kurath, Kuhn & Lewis: 1952) lists large

numbers of French origin lexical items. This paper asks: were these lexical items loans or code

switches? Distinguishing a loan word from a single-word code-switch is notoriously difficult (cf.

Poplack 2012, Durkin 2014) and poses a problem to researchers seeking to assess historical contact

influence. In order to address this issue, three criteria based on Matras (2009), namely textual context,

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verbal morphology and the length of attestation of individual lexical items are applied to a sample of

French-origin Middle English words, taken from the Bilingual Thesaurus of Everyday Life in Medieval

England.

The results tentatively suggest that although it is possible to find potential candidates for code

switching among hapax legomena, code-switching is not responsible for single word French-origin

lexical items in Middle English. Rather, as Poplack and Dion (2012) suggest in relation to present day

data, individual lexical items of French origin were immediately borrowed into Middle English by

language users, with no intermediate stages. However, in relation to Anglo-French, a different picture

emerges. There is some evidence to suggest that a good number of lone other-language items could

have been code switches in this variety of French. After outlining the principal reasons for why

borrowing can be applied as an explanation in relation to foreign-origin lone items in Middle English

but not in relation to these items in Anglo-French, the paper will conclude by stressing the lack of

rigid boundaries between English, French and Latin lexis during the medieval period.

References:

Primary sources:

A Bilingual Thesaurus of Everyday Life in Medieval England (Ingham, Sylvester, Marcus – forthcoming 2017).

Middle English Dictionary (Kurath, Kuhn & Lewis: 1952)

Secondary sources:

Durkin, P. 2014. Borrowed words. Oxford: OUP.

Matras, Y. 2009. Language Contact. Cambridge: CUP

Poplack, S. (2012) What does the Nonce Borrowing Hypothesis hypothesize? Bilingualism: Language and

Cognition 15,3: 644–648.

Poplack, S. and N. Dion (2012) Myths and facts about loanword development. Language Variation and Change

24,03: 279-315.

Rafał Molencki (University of Silesia)

The divergent semantic development of people in Anglo-Norman and Middle English

The majority of Anglo-French borrowings preserve most of their original senses in Middle English,

often becoming more formal and/or abstract counterparts of their Germanic synonyms, but the story of

the word people in English is a clear counterexample. The paper is concerned with a lexical

replacement in Middle English caused by language contact, accompanied by semantic extension. On

the turn of the 13th and 14th centuries a new word people borrowed from Anglo-Norman appeared in

English texts and in the latter half of the 14th century it became a high frequency item competing with

earlier native words lede and folk. In Early Modern English lede became obsolescent and/or dialectal

while folk was relegated mostly to the colloquial register of the language.

This semantic development and rapid increase in the use of people appears to have occurred in Middle

English independently of Anglo-Norman, where the sense of the noun people was mostly restricted to

that of ‘nation’, ‘subjects’ and ‘crowd’. Like in continental French the usual word denoting ‘people’,

‘persons’ was gentz with 1394 attestations in the Anglo-Norman Dictionary corpus vs. bare 84

occurrences of pe(o)ple.

After presenting some etymological information and the Anglo-Norman data, we will trace the

expansion of the new Romance word versus the demise of its native counterparts in both lexical

databases (especially Oxford English Dictionary and Middle English Dictionary) and the corpora of

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various English texts written in the late Middle Ages. We will pay special attention to the manuscript

variation (e.g. in Cursor mundi) in this respect and to the dialectal distribution shown in the LALME

maps. The replacement process will be discussed in the context of bilingualism, code-switching and

the typology of language contact and lexical borrowing. Some phonetic and semantic factors will also

be taken account of.

References:

AND=Anglo-Norman Dicitonary – http://www.anglo-norman.net

Ingham, Richard. 2012. Middle English and Anglo-Norman in contact. Bulletin de l'Association des Médiévistes

Anglicistes de l'Enseignement Supérieur 81. 1-23

LALME=M. Benskin, M. Laing, V. Karaiskos and K. Williamson. 2013. An Electronic Version of A Linguistic

Atlas of Late Mediaeval English [http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/elalme/elalme.html] Edinburgh: The

University of Edinburgh.

MED=Kurath, Hans and Sherman M. Kuhn (eds.). 1956-2002. Middle English Dictionary. Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press, available online at http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/m/mec

OED=Oxford English Dictionary Online – http://www.oed.com

Sankoff, Gillian. 2001. Linguistic outcomes of language contact. In Peter Trudgill, J. Chambers & N. Schilling-

Estes (eds.). Handbook of Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 638-668.

Trudgill, Peter. 1974. Linguistic change and diffusion: description and explanation in sociolinguistic dialect

geography. Language in Society 3. 215-246.

Minako Nakayasu (Hamamatsu University School of Medicine)

How did Paston men and women regulate space and time? The spatio-temporal systems in

Paston letters

This paper explores how members of the Paston family exploit the systems of space and time in

communicating through letter writing along the lines of historical pragmatics and discourse analysis

(Taavitsainen and Jucker 2015). The text used for the present investigation is The Paston letters and

papers of the fifteenth century edited by Davis (2004[1971]), including letters by both men and

women.

The language has built-in spatio-temporal systems (Nakayasu to appear) in which the

speakers/writers judge how far the situations they wish to express are from their ‘here and now’, that

is, proximal or distal. Such relationships of space and time are represented with the aid of spatio-

temporal elements, for example, pronouns, demonstratives, adverbs, tense forms and modals. These

elements are related to each other not just in either the spatial or temporal domain, but in the integrated

spatio-temporal domain, and these relationships change in discourse. Few studies have attempted such

a systematic analysis of the spatio-temporal systems as an integrated whole.

The present paper carries out both statistical and discourse-pragmatic analyses of the spatio-

temporal systems in Paston letters. First, a statistical analysis of how frequently the elements of space

and time are employed shows which perspective, i.e. proximal or distal, is likely to be taken. Second,

an examination of discourse-pragmatic aspects reveals how these elements are related with each other

to take either perspective, and how these perspectives then continue to be taken and alternate with each

other in discourse. The focus is also on the interaction between the writer and the addressee.

Sociolinguistic factors (Bergs 2005) such as the writer’s gender and the relationship between the

writer and the addressee are examined in order to demonstrate how these factors influence the spatio-

temporal systems in letters.

Finally, this research provides an answer to the question of how Paston men and women

regulated space and time in their letters and yields insight into the pragmatic and discourse

configuration of Middle English letters.

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References:

Bergs, Alexander. 2005. Social networks and historical sociolinguistics: Morphosyntactic variation in the

Paston letters (1421-1503). Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Davis, Norman (ed.). 2004[1971]. Paston letters and papers of the fifteenth century, Part I. Oxford: The Early

English Text Society/Oxford University Press.

Nakayasu, Minako. To appear. “Spatio-temporal systems in Chaucer”. In Peter Petré, Hubert Cuyckens and

Frauke D’Hoedt (eds.), Sociocultural dimensions of lexis and text in the history of English. (Publisher

not announced yet.)

Taavitsainen, Irma and Andreas H. Jucker. 2015. “Twenty years of historical pragmatics: Origins, developments

and changing thought styles”. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 16(1): 1-24.

John G. Newman (University of Texas Rio Grande Valley)

The obsolescence and ooss of the Old and Middle English negative indefinite næniʒ

Næniʒ (ne + æniʒ) ‘not any’ functioned as a negative indefinite of Old English and Middle English. It

was used dependently as a noun modifier (næniʒe godcunde englas) and independently as a noun

(næniʒ heora). In the second use, it often occurred with a noun in the partitive genitive. However,

næniʒ falls out of use during Middle English times while its functional equivalent nan (ne + an) ‘not

one’ survives into Modern English times. (One measure of equivalence is that both were used to

translate Latin nullus in texts like that of the Lindisfarne Gospels.) Though the functional equivalence

was no doubt responsible in part for the obsolescence of næniʒ, why næniʒ and not nan would fall out

of use remains a question. This paper sets down some groundwork for addressing this question by

investigating certain suppositions about the distribution of næniʒ, relative to that of nan, and by

analyzing the evolution of dependent and independent uses of næniʒ in Old and Middle English.

One supposition regards dialectal differences. Some work suggests that næniʒ was much

more frequently occurring in the northern dialects (initially Anglian) than it was in the southern

dialects, wherein nan was dominant form (Wülfing 1894; Jost 1950). A second supposition relates to

genre differences. One study (Bately 1970) compares evidence from the Meters of Boethius to

evidence from Alfredian prose and shows that næniʒ had a presence in West Saxon but also that the

form may have been more common in verse texts than in prose texts of that dialect. Since in base form

næniʒ was disyllabic and nan was monosyllabic, concerns for meter in verse texts may have been

causal in some number of instances to the use of næniʒ in such texts. Of course such concerns would

have been irrelevant to the many instances of næniʒ in the Northumbrian Lindisfarne Gospels. A third

supposition concerns the progressive obsolescence of næniʒ and the approximate date of its loss.

Mustanoja (1960: 210) asserts that næniʒ dies out as an indefinite pronoun in Early Middle English,

being last attested in the Ormulum (an East Midland text of c. 1200), The Oxford English Dictionary

substantiates that claim, providing a quotation from the Ormulum as the latest instance of næniʒ.

However, the Middle English Dictionary offers evidence from the debatably later manuscripts Cotton

Claudius D iii (a. 1225) and Lambeth 487 (a. 1225) as well as the more surely later manuscript Cotton

Galba E ix (?a. 1450), containing the Siege Calais, that the word survived down to the 15th century.

Clearly, additional data from a variety of textual materials must be examined in order to test these

suppositions and arrive at a more complete picture of the obsolescence and eventual loss of næniʒ (cf.

Mitchell 1985: 178). The present investigation analyzes instances of næniʒ in in number of relatively

data-rich Old and Middle English texts. By design, several of these texts are not cited in the studies

mentioned above.

The data gleaned argue (1) that næniʒ was not largely restricted to the northern dialects but

had a significant presence in West Saxon, (2) that næniʒ was much more frequent in West Saxon verse

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than it was in West Saxon prose, (3) that næniʒ survived longer in Middle English times than has been

assumed to date, and (4) that certain patterns related to the dependent and independent uses of næniʒ

may have been indicative of its obsolescence and loss.

References:

Bately, J. 1970. King Alfred and the Old English Translation of Orosius, Anglia 88, 433-460.

Jost, K. 1950. Wulfstanstudien. (Schweizer Anglistische Arbeiten Band 23.) Bern: A. Francke.

Krapp, G. P. and E. V. K. Dobbie (eds.) 1936. The Anglo-Saxon poetic records: a collective edition. Vols. 1-6.

New York: Columbia University Press.

McNeil, G. P. (ed.) 1886. Sir Tristram. Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons.

Middle English Dictionary. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/.

Mitchell, B. 1985. Old English Syntax. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Morris, R. 1867. Old English Homilies and Homiletic Treatises. London: Early English Text Society.

Morris, R. (ed.) 1874-1893. Cursor Mundi, in Four Texts. London: Early English Text Society.

Mustanoja, T. F. 1960. A Middle English Syntax. Part 1. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.

Oxford English Dictionary. http://www.oed.com/

Schröer, M. M. A. (ed.) 1888. Die Winteney-version der regula S. Benedicti. Halle: M. Niemeyer.

Skeat, W. W. (ed.) 1871-1887. The Four Gospels in Anglo-Saxon, Northumbrian, Old Mercian Versions. Vols.

1-4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

White, R. M. and R. Holt (eds.) 1878. The Ormulum. Vols. 1-2. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Wright, T. 1861. Political Poems and Songs. Vol. 2. RS 14.2.

Wülfing, J. E. 1894-1901. Die Syntax in den Werken Alfreds des Grossen. Vol. 1. Bonn: Hanstein.

Michiko Ogura (Tokyo Woman’s Christian University)

Indirect Object with or without to in the Earlier and Later Versions of the Wycliffite Bible

In Modern English grammar, verbs with the dative object show twofold word order, as stated in Blake

(2001: 91): “A recipient of the verb give may displace a patient in the choice for object (I gave the

book to him, I gave him the book), but the double-object construction would have to be considered

marked with respect to the construction with a prepositional phrase which is obviously much more

common across verbs in general.” In Old English, verbs with the double object were found more

frequently, owing to the fact that the case endings were distinct and reliable enough and nouns in the

oblique case were not necessarily accompanied by prepositions: e.g. GD1(C) 4.43.12 & he forgæf eac

manegum oþrum læcedom & mundbyrd ‘and he also gave many others medicine and protection.’ In

Middle English, the dative indirect object tended to take the preposition to, but the modern rule of

word order was not established yet. The earlier and later versions of the Wycliffite Bible provides us

with good examples of the dative with or without to. The earlier version often shows an excessive use

of to, while the later version often matches with the modern grammar and order: Mt 14.15 (EV) bigge

meetis to hem, (LV) to bye hem mete; Mt 21.23 (EV) who ʒaf to thee this power?, (LV) who ʒaf thee

this power? In this paper I examine the Hexateuch and the four Gospels and compare earlier and later

versions of the Wycliffite Bible so as to show (1) the overuse of to in EV, (2) the more “modern” use

of the to-phrase and word order in LV, and (3) the reverse of these features (1) and (2). The result will

give an earlier, unstable use of the preposition to with the indirect object and the still shaky word order

in this construction.

References:

Blake, Barry J. 2001. Case. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Forshall, J. and F. Madden (eds.) 1850. The Holy Bible, containing The Old and New Testaments … by John

Wycliffe and his Followers. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Yonekura, Hiroshi. 1985. The Language of the Wycliffite Bible: the Syntactic Differences between the two

Versions. Tokyo: Aratake Shuppan.

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Tino Oudesluijs and Anita Auer (University of Lausanne)

Geographical Variation in Late Medieval Administrative Documents:

Evidence from York and Coventry

The Middle English period provides us with the greatest amount of variation in writing in the history

of the English language (Milroy 1992: 156). This variation has since long been explained through

geography. According to traditional dialectology, Middle English consisted of 5 broad dialect areas,

i.e. Northern, West Midland, East Midland, Southern and Kentish, into which Middle English texts

were subsequently categorised (cf. Brook 1965: 62). If they did not perfectly fit into one of these

dialect areas, they were often labelled ‘mixed’ dialects. Later studies considered a dialect continuum,

rather than various fixed dialect areas, and tried to place Middle English texts within the geographical

space of that continuum (cf. A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English; McIntosh et al. 1986). By

applying these two models scholars have argued that by the beginning of the sixteenth century –

commonly considered the end of the Middle English period – we see that “local forms of written

English had all but disappeared” (Benskin 1992: 71), and more supralocal forms had emerged in

writing.

As pointed out by Stenroos (2016), however, both approaches use idealised models, as there

are many other factors that should be considered which can affect the geographical realisation of

written language. Moreover, she points out that regional variation in writing continued throughout the

fifteenth century, and she subsequently states that “the geographical connections of any text, scribe or

speaker are potentially highly complex” (Stenroos 2016: 122). In support of Stenroos’ claim, one

should thus aim for the use of more flexible and “multi-pronged” approaches to the study of

geographical variation in Middle English.

In this paper, we aim to apply such a multi-pronged approach to variation to the investigation

and comparison of two previously uninvestigated data sets of fifteenth-century administrative writings

from the urban centres of York and Coventry. As there is no doubt regarding the geographical origin

of the two datasets, it will be interesting to see

a. What kinds of linguistic variation can be found in the respective corpora (and whether the

findings concur with or differ from other studies that focused on data from the respective

urban centres),

b. How the attested linguistic differences and similarities in both corpora compare against

each other and how this may or may not reflect previous studies on these varieties,

c. How the variation might be explained by considering other factors such as scribal

practices, supra-localisation, etc.

Ultimately, we hope to be able to shed some light on the (ongoing) internal and external processes that

may explain the variation - or lack thereof - in the language of fifteenth-century administrative texts

from York and Coventry.

References: Benskin, M. 1992. Some new perspectives on the origins of standard written English. In J. A. van Leuvensteijn

& J. B. Berns (eds.), Dialect and Standard Language in the English, Dutch, German and Norwegian

Language Areas. Amsterdam: North-Holland. 71-105.

Brook, G. L. 1965. English Dialects. 2nd edition. London: Deutsch.

McIntosh, A., M. L. Samuels & M. Benskin. 1986. A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieaeval English.

Milroy, J. 1992. Middle English dialectology. In N. F. Blake (ed.), The Cambridge history of the English

language, Vol. 2: 1066–1476. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 156–206.

Stenroos, M. 2016. Regional language and culture: The geography of Middle English linguistic variation. In

Machan, T. W. (ed.), Imagining Medieval English: Language Structures and Theories, 500–1500.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 100-125.

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Justyna Rogos-Hebda (Adam Mickiewicz University)

Abbreviations as pragmatic markers: scribal practices in BL Harley MS 1706 of Richard Rolle’s

Form of Perfect Living and De Emendatione Vitae

The proposed presentation focuses on the visual pragmatics of scribal abbreviating practices in two

fragments of BL Harley MS 1706, containing Richard Rolle’s Form of Perfect Living and De

Emendatione Vitae (ff. 67r-80v and ff. 114v-139v respectively). The author analyses how late

medieval English scribes use the "half-graphic objects" (Traube 1909: 134) to encode linguistic

information on the one hand and, on the other, to organise visually manuscript discourse (cf. Carroll et

al. 2013: 56). Acknowledging the need for a cross-disciplinary framework in the study of manuscripts,

suggested by the Pragmatics on the Page Project (PoP), i.e. the study of the linguistic contents of

historical texts alongside their visual appearance (cf. Carroll et al. 2013), the proposed paper pursues a

visual-pragmatic analysis of scribal abbreviations, which are interpreted here as visual discourse

markers, operating on three levels of meaning: textual, interactional and metalinguistic (following

Erman 2001). The manuscript under consideration, in turn, is approached as a "visual text" (cf.

Kendall et al. 2013), that is one in which the readers construe the meaning of the text through

internalising the physical organisation of the page. In her presentation the author will try to unpack the

idiosyncracies of the visual pragmatics of scribal abbreviations and confront those graphic discourse

markers with other visual cues on the page.

References:

Carroll Ruth, Matti Peikola, Hanna Salmi, Mari-Lisa Varila, Janne Skaffari, and Risto Hiltunen. 2013.

"Pragmatics on the Page. Visual Text in Late Medieval English Books". European Journal of English

Studies 17(1): 54-71.

Erman, Britt. 2001. ”Pragmatic markers revisited with a focus on you know in adult and adolescent talk”.

Journal of Pragmatics 33: 1337-1359.

Kendall, Judy, Manuel Portela, and Glyn White. 2013. "Introducing Visual Text". European Journal of English

Studies 17(1): 1-9.

Pragmatics on the Page (PoP)

https://www.utu.fi/en/units/hum/units/English/research/projects/Pages/Pragmatics-on-the-Page.aspx

Traube, Ludwig. 1909. Vorlesungen und Abhandlungen. Erster Band: Zur Paläographie und

Handschriftenkunde. München: C. H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung.

Eve Salisbury (Western Michigan University)

The Uses of Middle English Literature

In her recent book, the Uses of Literature, Rita Felski identifies four “modes of textual engagement”---

recognition, enchantment, knowledge, and shock---that change “our understanding of ourselves and

the world.”2 Combining literary theory with common sense views of life, Felski argues that reading

literature produces an “emphatic experience” that enhances our attachments to texts in different ways

and for different reasons.

While Felski focuses primarily on modern literatures, I would like to apply her theory of

reading to a range of Middle English narratives (romances such as Havelok the Dane, Bevis of

Hampton, Sir Gowther, Lybeaus Desconus as well as didactic works such as “How the Goode Wife

2 Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008).

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Taught hyr Doughter” and “How the Goode Man Taght hys Sone”)3 to suggest that Middle English

literature produces the kinds of emphatic reading experiences Felski claims. Recognizing one’s self or

situation in the text (whether by identifying with certain characters or by the circumstances in which

they find themselves) urges a heightened sense of self and one’s relation to community; experiencing

literary enchantment encourages excursions into virtual otherworlds that revive our sense of wonder

and curiosity; learning about the customs and mores of another time and place expands our

understanding of historical context; the shock element (whether jarring juxtapositions of human / non-

human, miraculous / demonic) challenges the limits of what we think we know. Likewise, reading

literature in a form of English both familiar and unfamiliar reminds us that mastering a language is the

means by which we form attachments at the earliest stages of life. In thinking about these four modes

of engagement in the Middle English canon Felski’s formulations reveal what we have known for at

least twenty-five years: that attachments to this field of literature enhance our understanding of

ourselves and the world(s) in which we live---both virtual and real, both then and now.

Hans Sauer (LMU, Munich/Vistula University, Warsaw)

Lydgate’s use of binomials in his Troy Book

With ca. 140 000 lines of verse, John Lydgate (ca. 1370 – ca. 1451) has the distinction of being the

most prolific English poet. He emulated Chaucer, but could not equal him. Whereas Lydgate was very

popular in his time, and even enjoyed the patronage of the English kings, his reputation is much lower

today, and he is often seen as mediocre and second-rate, and accordingly not in the centre of research.

Nevertheless, studying his poetry is illuminating from a linguistic and a stylistic point of view. In the

present paper I concentrate on Lydgate’s use of binomials in his Troy Book (ca. 30 000 lines), which

was commissioned by King Henry V, and which Lydgate composed between 1412 and 1420. To my

knowledge, they have not been studied in any detail before. Like many other 14th and 15th century

authors, Lydgate was very fond of binomials, because they are one of the means to achieve a rich and

ornate style. Binomials are pairs of words that belong to the same word-class, are connected by a

coordinating conjunction, and have some semantic relation. To give just a few examples from the

beginning of the Troy Book (and in a slightly modernized spelling): the power and the might;

sovereign and patron; hot and dry; war and strife; dim and dark. Binomials have many interesting

aspects that can be analysed, e.g.: their formal structure (simple or extended); their word-class (mostly

nouns, adjectives and verbs); their connection (mostly and, but sometimes also or, etc.), their semantic

structure (i.e. the semantic relation between the elements, especially synonymy - as in three of the

examples given above, furthermore antonymy, and complementarity, as in sovereign and patron and

in hot and dry); the relation to the source (in the case of the Troy Book, Guido delle Colonne’s

Historia destructionis Troiae), i.e. the question which binomials Lydgate took over (or translated)

from his source and which he newly introduced; the sequence of the elements (fixed or flexible, and

the factors responsible for the sequence); the question how far they were traditional and formulaic

(and, for example, taken over by Lydgate from Chaucer) and how far they were created ad hoc by

Lydgate himself. The paper is thus a contribution to research on binomials in general and on Lydgate

in particular.

Editions:

3 All taken from TEAMS/METS volumes: Four Romances of England, ed. Ronald B. Herzman, Graham N.

Drake, and Eve Salisbury (1999), the Middle English Breton Lays, ed. Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury (1995),

Lybeaus Desconus, ed. Eve Salisbury and James Weldon (2013), and Trials and Joys of Marriage, ed. Eve

Salisbury (2002). All published by Medieval Institute Publications, Kalamazoo, MI.

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Lydgate’s Troy Book, ed. Henry Bergen, 3 vols. EETS ES 97, 103, 106. London: Kegan Paul

etc., 1906-1910 [several reprints].

John Lydgate, Troy Book: Selections, ed. Robert H. Edwards. TEAMS: Middle English Text

Series. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998.

Guido delle Colonne, Historia destructionis Troiae, ed. Nathaniel Griffin. Medieval Academy

of America Publications 26. Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1936.

Select literature:

Pearsall, Derek. 1997. John Lydgate: A Bio-bibliography. Victoria, British Columbia.

Schirmer, Walter F. 1961. John Lydgate: A Study in the Culture of the XVth Century, transl.

Ann E. Keep. London: Methuen.

Wendy Scase (University of Birmingham)

The LALME Typology of Scribal Practice: Some Issues for Manuscript Studies

The proposed paper will present work being carried out by the presenter for her project ‘Crafting

English Letters: A Theory of Medieval Scribal Practice’, funded by the Leverhulme Trust Major

Research Fellowships scheme.

Angus McIntosh’s famous three types of scribal practice – usually referred to as literatim,

translation, and mixed copying – have become thoroughly embedded in the analysis, both linguistic

and literary, of Middle English manuscript texts. Historical linguists of what this paper will call the

McIntosh School have developed and elaborated McIntosh’s typology and it provides a key

conceptual framework for the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, the Linguistic Atlas of Early

Middle English, and much related work on dialect. Unquestionably the LALME project was one of

seismic importance and its impact continues to reverberate; for example the MELD project, while

seeking to open up for linguists new approaches to medieval written English, presents itself as a

complementary approach.

In the work of literary scholars and manuscripts researchers the LALME typology also

continues to prove seminal. Editors and literary and textual critics have adopted McIntosh’s typology

in their analyses of scribal behaviours. The typology informs discussions of editorial methods and

approaches to textual criticism (e.g. Beadle). And it can sometimes appear in work with a more literary

critical focus, for example Wakelin’s recent monograph that presents scribal responses to their texts as

a kind of forerunner of modern close reading and literary criticism. Even Hanna’s doubts about the

treatment of London texts in LALME concern interpretation and representation of the particular data

rather than the typology.

This paper will identify some problems with the McIntosh typology when it is considered in

relation to scenarios of text production and reception. The problems that will be discussed are not the

often- rehearsed ones associated with the cartographic representation of linguistic relationships, or the

fact that scribes moved. Instead the focus will be on how far the typology can be reconciled with the

practicalities of copying and book production. Case studies of literary and other manuscript materials

will be drawn on to illustrate some of the key issues and to explore alternative interpretations of

scribal behaviour and accounts of the Middle English manuscript archive.

References:

Beadle, Richard, ‘Some Measures of Scribal Accuracy in Late Medieval English Manuscripts’, in Probable

Truth: Editing Medieval Texts from Britain in the Twenty-First Century, ed. by Vincent Gillespie and

Anne Hudson, Texts and Transitions 5 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), pp. 223-39.

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Benskin, Michael and Margaret Laing, ‘Translations and Mischsprachen in Middle English Manuscripts’, in So

Meny People Longages and Tonges: Philological Essays in Scots and Mediaeval English presented to

Angus McIntosh, ed. by Michael Benskin and M. L. Samuels (Edinburgh: Middle English Dialect

Project, 1981), pp. 55-106.

Hanna, Ralph, London Literature, 1300-1380 (Cambridge: CUP, 2005).

Laing, Margaret, A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (Edinburgh: The University of Edinburgh, Version

3.2, 2013) [http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laeme2/laeme2.html].

Laing, Margaret, ‘Multidimensionality: Time, Space and Stratigraphy in Historical Dialectology’, in Methods

and Data in English Historical Dialectology, ed. by M. Dossena and R. Lass (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004),

pp. 49 - 96.

McIntosh, Angus, ‘Word Geography in the Lexicography of Mediaeval English’ (1973), repr. in Middle English

Dialectology: Essays on Some Principles and Problems, ed. by Angus McIntosh, M. L. Samuels and

Margaret Laing (Aberdeen: Aberdeen U. P., 1989), pp. 86-97).

McIntosh, Angus, M. L. Samuels, and Michael Benskin with Margaret Laing and Keith Williamson, A Linguistic

Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1986; Electronic Version,

2013) [http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/elalme/elalme.html].

Stenroos, Merja & Kjetil V. Thengs, ‘Two Staffordshires: real and linguistic space in the study of Late Middle

English dialects’, in Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English, Volume 10, Outposts of

Historical Corpus Linguistics: From the Helsinki Corpus to a Proliferation of Resources, ed. by Jukka

Tyrkkö, Matti Kilpiö, Terttu Nevalainen & Matti Rissanen (Helsinki: Research Unit for Variation,

Contacts and Change in English (VARIENG), University of Helsinki, 2012), n.p.

Wakelin, Daniel, Scribal Correction and Literary Craft: English Manuscripts 1375-1510 (Cambridge: CUP,

2014).

Delia Schipor (University of Stavanger)

Multilingual events in Middle English texts from the Hampshire Record Office

The proposed paper investigates multilingual events in documentary texts dated to 1400-1525 from

three collections located at the Hampshire Record Office in Winchester. This study forms part of a

research project on which I am currently working, titled Multilingualism in the Late Medieval

Material of the Hampshire Record Office.

The three collections are the Jervoise Family collection, the Winchester City Archives

collection and the Winchester Diocese collection. They are complementary in the sense that they

contain a wide variety of text types ranging from manorial records, court records, leases, surveys,

family and official correspondence to wills, abjurations and other religious-administrative texts.

The languages used for these documentary texts are Latin, English, and French. Most texts are

written in one of the three languages, but in some cases all three languages or two of the languages,

mostly Latin and English, are used together in the same text. The main aim of this paper is to answer

the following research questions:

In which texts do multilingual events occur and what are their pragmatic functions?

Do multilingual events cluster and if so, how? Can this be related to text type and

chronology?

Multilingual events represent instances of multiple language use within a text, including code-

switching. Code-switching defined as an alternation between languages within an act of

communication is insufficiently broad when applied to historical texts accompanied by paratexts such

as subtitles, illustrations and marginal notes which often introduce a new language in the text. This

paper suggests classification tools and terminology for multilingual events found in visually complex

historical texts.

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Multilingual events in written communication may be both planned and spontaneous. They are

interpreted pragmatically and analyzed in connection with the date and type of texts in which they

occur.

Multilingualism was the norm across medieval England and multilingual practices seem to

have evolved concomitantly with the language shift following the decision of Henry V to adopt

English as the language of his Signet Office in 1417. This transition was a gradual process which

developed differently across the country. To a large extent, individual scribes seem to have shifted at

their own pace (cf. Schipor, 2013). Studying the pragmatic functions of multilingual events gives an

insight into the changing roles of the languages involved and the literacy practices associated with the

shift, as there are indications that the frequency and use of multilingual events change as the shift

proceeds (Schipor, 2013).

References:

Genette, G. 1997. Palimpsests. Literature in the Second Degree. Transl. by Channa Newman and Claude

Doubinsky. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Ingham, R. (ed.) 2010. The Anglo-Norman Language and its Contexts. Woodbridge & Rochester: Boydell &

Brewer.

Schendl, H. and L. Wright. 2011. “Code-switching in early English: Historical background and methodological

and theoretical issues” in H. Schendl, L. Wright (eds.) Code-switching in Early English. Berlin: De

Gruyter Mouton. 15-46.

Schipor, D. 2013. “Multilingual practices in late medieval English official writing An edition of documents from

the Beverley Town Cartulary”. Master thesis, University of Stavanger.

Sebba, M., S. Mahootian, and C. Jonsson. (eds.) 2012. Language Mixing and Code-Switching in Writing

Approaches to Mixed-Language Written Discourse. London & New York: Routledge.

Suggett, H. 1946. “The use of French in England in the later middle ages” in Transactions of the Royal

Historical Society, IV (28): 219-239.

Varila, M.-L. 2016. “In Search of Textual Boundaries A Case Study on the Transmission of Scientific Writing in

16th-Century England”. PhD Thesis, Unversity of Turku.

Wright, L. 2000. “Bills, accounts, inventories: everyday trilingual activities in the business world of later

medieval England” in D.A. Trotter (ed.), Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain. Cambridge: D.S.

Brewer. 149-156.

Birgit Schwan (LMU, Munich)

Geoffrey Chaucer Translated – Taking “The Clerk’s Tale” as Example

The question of Chaucer and translation can be looked at from two perspectives, namely (a) which

sources Chaucer translated and how he changed his sources through his translation, and (b) how his

works were rendered by later translators. Concentrating on the Griselda-story from the “Clerk’s Tale”

in The Canterbury Tales, I shall focus on perspective (b) and take a fresh look at how Chaucer’s tale

has been translated for today’s reader.

The Canterbury Tales were often rendered into Modern English, sometimes by famous poets

such as Dryden and Wordsworth, as well as into other languages, including German. In my

presentation, I am going to analyse a selection of passages from two Modern English translations, both

verse (Wright 1986) and prose (Davis 2016), as well as from two Modern German translations, again

both verse (Düring 1883-1886) and prose (Kemmler 1989). I shall compare these translations, and also

discuss some passages that might be interpreted differently today than in the fourteenth or fifteenth

centuries.

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Since translation includes interpretation, it is fascinating to observe how an individual choice

of words and/or translation technique can alter the meaning, sometimes only infinitesimally, at other

times in more radical ways. Two of the essential questions of the “Clerk’s Tale” are: First, why is the

main character of Griseldis so incredibly patient, and second, why is the marquis Walter so cruel?

These questions are still taken up again and again. Yet, how do the various renderings by modern

translators handle these questions? What do the linguistic and translational choices of modern

translators tell us about their interpretation of the tale’s characters? What can we then infer about the

characters’ reasons and their development (if any) after a close reading of Chaucer’s tale and the

modern translations? And finally, is the spirit of Chaucer’s tale transferred into a modern age or has it

been lost in translation?

References:

Chaucer, Geoffrey (31988). The Riverside Chaucer. Edited by Larry D. Benson. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.

Chaucer, Geoffrey (22011). The Canterbury Tales. A verse translation with an introduction and notes by David

Wright. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chaucer, Geoffrey (2016). The Canterbury Tales. The new translation by Gerald J. Davis. Bridgeport, Conn.:

Insignia Publishing.

Chaucer, Geoffrey (2008 [1883-1886]). Die Canterbury-Erzählungen. Translated by Adolf von Düring. Köln:

Anaconda.

Chaucer, Geoffrey (22000). Die Canterbury-Erzählungen. Mittelenglisch und Deutsch. Translated into German

prose by Fritz Kemmler. Includes explanatory notes by Jörg O. Fichte. 3 vols. München: Goldmann.

Baker, Mona and Gabriela Saldanha (eds.) (22011). The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. London:

Routledge.

Beer, Jeanette (ed.) (1997). Translation Theory and Practice in the Middle Ages. Studies in Medieval Culture 38.

Kalamazoo, Michigan: Western Michigan University.

Boitani, Piero and Jill Mann (eds.) (22003). The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Bronfman, Judith (1994). Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale: The Griselda Story Received, Rewritten, Illustrated. New

York, London: Garland Publishing.

Cooper, Helen (21996). Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Copeland, Rita (1991). Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and

Vernacular Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ellis, Roger (ed.) (1989). The Medieval Translator: The Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages.

Cambridge: Brewer.

Ellis, Steve (2000). Chaucer at Large. The Poet in the Modern Imagination. Minneapolis, London: University of

Minnesota Press.

Ellis, Steve (ed.) (2005). Chaucer: An Oxford Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fichte, Joerg O. (1973). “The Clerk’s Tale: an Obituary to Gentilesse.” In: New Views on Chaucer. Essays in

Generative Criticism. Publication of the Society for New Language Study, June 1973. 9-16.

Görlach, Manfred (2002). “The contribution of translations to the development of English.” In: Manfred

Görlach, Explorations in English Historical Linguistics. Heidelberg: Winter. 1-68.

Görlach, Manfred (2003). “The translation of medieval and Renaissance texts.” In: Manfred Görlach, Topics in

English Historical Linguistics. Heidelberg: Winter. 71-92.

Laserstein, Käte (1926). Der Griseldisstoff in der Weltliteratur: Eine Untersuchung zur Stoff- und Stilgeschichte.

Weimar: Duncker.

Reynolds, Matthew (2011). The Poetry of Translation: From Chaucer and Petrarch to Homer and Logue.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rossiter, William T. (2010). Chaucer and Petrarch. Cambridge: Brewer.

Severs, J. Burke (1972 [1942]). The Literary Relationships of Chaucer’s Clerkes Tale. Hamden, Conn.: Archon

Books.

Thompson, N. S. (1996). Chaucer, Boccaccio, and the Debate of Love: A Comparative Study of The Decameron

and The Canterbury Tales. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Annina Seiler (University of Zurich)

Ælfric’s Glossary in the Middle English Period

As a companion piece to his Grammar and Colloquy, Ælfric of Eynsham wrote a Latin-Old English

glossary, presenting vocabulary in a series of semantically arranged groups of words. Ælfric’s

Glossary covers a wide range of topics – from body parts to names of plants to vices etc. It was, of

course, aimed at Anglo-Saxon learners of Latin; at the same time, the glossary also provides a

systematic account of the Old English lexicon – or at least of the lexical fields included in the

glossary.

Two of the extant manuscripts bridge the gap from the Old English to the Middle English

period: Worcester Cathedral F. 174 was written in the 13th century by the famous “tremulous hand”

scribe; its forms are consistently Middle English. London, British Museum, Cotton Faustina A. x dates

from the 11th century, but contains numerous annotations in Latin, French and Middle English, which

were added in the late 12th century. The two manuscripts demonstrate that Ælfric’s glossary was still

considered a useful lexicographical tool in the Middle English period. However, both manuscripts also

show that the English lexicon had changed since Ælfric’s time and that the glossary needed updating.

In some instances, Old English words were replaced by or supplemented with more common Middle

English words (e.g. steel for isen); in other cases, French glosses highlight words that were later

borrowed into English (e.g. OFr grumil, which gave the English plant name gromwell).

The aim of the paper is to investigate and compare the lexical changes introduced by the Worcester

scribe and the glossators of the Faustina manuscript. In addition, it focuses on the vocabulary of

Ælfric’s glossary in the context of 13th-century Middle English. On a wider level, the paper explores

the transition from Old to Middle English in the area of the lexicon and attempts to further our

understanding of lexical and semantic continuity and change.

References:

Butler, Marilyn Sandige. 1981. An Edition of the Early Middle English Copy of Ælfric’s Grammar and Glossary

in Worcester Cathedral MS. F. 174. PhD thesis. Pennsylvania State Universty. University Microfilms

International; 8205887.

Franzen, Christine. 1991. The Tremulous Hand of Worcester: A Study of Old English in the Thirteenth Century.

Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Hüllen, Werner. 1999. English Dictionaries, 800-170: The Topical Tradition. [Reprint 2008] Oxford: Clarendon

Press.

Hunt, Tony. 1991. Teaching and Learning Latin in Thirteenth-Century England. Volume 1: Texts, Volume 2:

Glosses, Volume 3: Indexes. Cambridge: Brewer.

Menzer, Melinda J., 2004. ‘Multilingual Glosses, Bilingual Text: English, French, and Latin in Three

Manuscripts of Ælfric's Grammar.’ In: Joyce Tally Lionarons (ed.). Old English Literature in Its

Manuscript Context. Medieval European Studies 5. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press. 95-

119

Swan, Mary. 2012. ‘Marginal Activity? Post-Conquest Old English Readers and their Notes.’ In: Stuart

McWilliams (ed.). Saints and Scholars: New Perspectives on Anglo-Saxon Literature and Culture in

Honour of Hugh Magennis. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. 224-233.

Zupitza, Julius and Helmut Gneuss. 1966. Aelfrics Grammatik und Glossar: Text und Varianten. 2nd ed. Berlin:

Weidmannsche Verlagsbuchhandlung.

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Katarzyna Stadnik (Maria Skłodowska-Curie University, Lublin)

Cognitive-cultural underpinnings of the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor in Chaucer’s Parson’s

Tale

As it is well known, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is a collection of tales told by pilgrims

travelling to the shrine of Thomas Becket, each story being narrated in a manner that reflects the

teller’s character. As the pilgrimage progresses, the tales come to form a pattern of mutually

complementing stories, which offer a wide range of perspectives on the human condition. The final

tale told by the Parson puts a different perspective onto the pilgrimage in that its content offers an

important update on how human life should be comprehended. In this way, the Parson makes his

listeners envisage their journey through space as part of their journey to Jerusalem celestial (ParsT, l.

50).

As it adopts a cognitive-cultural viewpoint on linguistic data, the paper focuses on how the

construal of HUMAN LIFE AS A JOURNEY is achieved, and what sociocultural factors might have

motivated Chaucer’s imagery. The Parson’s Tale is a treatise on penance, in which the Parson

instructs his listeners how to achieve salvation. To help the other pilgrims understand and internalise

the truths he preaches, the Parson imbues his sermon with medieval imagery from medieval

iconography. Therefore, for instance, the abstract notions of PENITENCE is spatialised and

represented using the TREE imagery.

Naturally, Chaucer’s use of the imagery of TREE derives from his Christian background, as

the image of the tree is of Biblical origin. However, what may call for further investigation is the

structure of the sermon’s text. More specifically, a question that arises concerns the cognitive

foundation of the co-ordination of individual images into a coherent whole. Since the text is a

meditation on penitence, evidence from medieval culture will be sought so as to show a potential

correlation between the TREE imagery that pervades the tale and social practices of contemplation.

References:

Benson, Larry, ed. 1987. The Riverside Chaucer. Third edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Carruthers, Mary. 2008. The Book of Memory. Second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sandler, Lucy. 1983. The Psalter of Robert De Lisle in the British Library. Harvey Miller Publishers.

Sandler, Lucy. 2002. “John of Metz, The Tower of Wisdom.” In The Medieval Craft of Memory. An Anthology

of Texts and Pictures, edited by Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski, 215-225. Philadelphia.

Gjertrud F. Stenbrenden (University of Oslo)

The Middle English reflexes of OE <cg>

Most textbooks on Old English (OE) state that the OE digraph <cg> corresponded to a voiced affricate

[dʒ] in OE (Quirk & Wrenn 1989: 16; Mitchell & Robinson 1992: 16). This assumption is built mostly

on a set of occasional spellings, e.g. <orceard> for ort-geard ‘orchard’ and <micgern> for midgern

‘fat’, in early West-Saxon texts (Sievers 1968; Penzl 1969; Campbell 1959; Hogg 1992). That is, the

sequences [t]+[j] and [d]+[j] are spelt <c(ce)> and <cg>, respectively, the latter of which is used

etymologically for WGmc gg < PrGmc gj in words like <ecg> ‘edge’ and <secgan> ‘to say’. Hence, it

is assumed that [tj] and [dj] underwent assibilation to [tʃ] and [dʒ], and since the scribes used <cg> for

the latter, the etymological sound corresponding to <cg> must also have assibilated and affricated to

[dʒ] at the same time, i.e. by the early ninth century at the latest (and before 700, in Hempl’s opinion,

1899: 377).

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However, this is a non sequitur: what these spellings show is that the WGmc velar stops had

palatalized in certain contexts, and that the spellings for these palatalized reflexes, <c(e)> and <g(e)>,

were thought to be the best orthographic means by which to render the new pronunciation of the

original sequences [tj, dj]. They do not prove that etymological <cg> words had reached [dʒ] in OE,

cf. Penzl (1969: 102-103); Sweet (1888: §737) in fact does not assume [dʒ] for <cg> in OE. Moreover,

ME texts are almost shockingly consistent in having <gg> for OE <cg> (LAEME); indeed, there is not

one <dg> in all of LAEME, and such spellings seem to be rare before the fifteenth century (Jordan

1925: §192). Orm uses the Caroline <g> for the reflexes of OE <cg> only, which points to a special

pronunciation of the consonant in these words; Orm never uses <dg> for OE <cg>, which is odd if the

affricate [dʒ] had been reached in early OE.

OE words with <cg> show two diverging developments in modern English: the nouns

typically have a retained stop /dʒ/ (edge, wedge, ridge, bridge), whereas the verbs have a diphthong

/eɪ/ or /aɪ/ (lay, say, lie, buy), pointing to complete vocalization of the consonant, probably through

analogy and paradigmatic levelling.

This paper seeks to examine all spellings for OE <cg> words in LAEME, and to track the

development of these words through ME (and perhaps early Modern English), with a view to

answering the following questions: 1. What is/are the most likely sound correspondence(s) of OE

<cg> in OE and in ME? 2. When did the two diverging developments start? 3. To what extent did

word class, position within the word, analogy and/or paradigmatic levelling play a role in the

development of OE <cg> words?

References:

Campbell, Alistair. 1959. Old English Grammar. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Hempl, George. 1899. Old English Č, ČĞ, &c. Anglia 1899(22): 375-383.

Hogg, Richard M. 1992. A Grammar of Old English. Volume 1: Phonology. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Jordan, Richard. 1925. Handbuch der Mittelenglischen Grammatik. Heidelberg: Carl Winter.

LAEME, see Laing 2008.

Laing, Meg. 2008. A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English. University of Edinburgh. URL address:

http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laeme2/laeme2.html

Mitchell, Bruce and Fred C. Robinson. 1992 (5th edn.). A Guide to Old English. Oxford: Blackwell.

Quirk, Randolph and C.L. Wrenn. 1989 (2nd edn.). An Old English Grammar. London, New York: Routledge.

Penzl, Herbert. 1969. The phonemic split of Germanic k in Old English. In Roger Lass (ed.), 1969, Approaches

to English Historical Linguistics: an anthology; 97-107. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Sievers, Eduard. 1968 (trans. and ed. by Albert S. Cook). An Old English Grammar. New York: Greenwood

Press.

Sweet, Henry. 1888. History of English Sounds. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Jacob Thaisen (University of Oslo)

Quantitative analysis of Middle English palaeographical data

This presentation encourages the quantitative analysis of quantitative data in palaeography by way of

example. Scholars have long called for studies in the field more strongly to incorporate data of this

type and more studies which do so have begun to appear in recent years (Derolez 2003, Burgers 2007,

He et al. 2014, Kwakkel 2012, Samara 2015; cf. Bischoff [1979] 1990). This being so, it is becoming

increasingly important to give due attention to possible overfitting and biased predictor selection in

their analysis. The presentation addresses these methodological concerns, which it is fair to say have

not always been addressed in previous studies. It does so by offering six empirically valid classes in

place of the theoretical, binary opposition between the varieties of cursive Gothic script known as

Anglicana and Secretary. The basis for establishing the classes is patterns of co-occurrence of

seventeen allographs encountered in English texts dating from the late Middle English period, and

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more specifically the materials collected under the auspices of the Middle English Scribal Texts

programme at Stavanger. The presentation complements linguistic (dialectal) analyses of the same

materials. TwoStep Cluster Analysis is the means employed for identifying the patterns. The means

employed for determining the relative contribution of each allograph to each class is regression

modelling with texts’ class membership as the dependent variable and the presence or absence of the

seventeen allographs as the independent variables. The models are constructed in R, using the

“partykit” and “stats” packages. The presentation includes a comparison of conditional inference trees

and generalised logistic models.

References:

Bischoff, Bernhard. 1979. Paläographie des römischen Altertums und des abendländischen Mittelalters. 1990.

Latin palaeography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Transl. Dáibhí Ó Cróinín and David Ganz.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Burgers, Jan. 2007. “Palaeography and diplomatics: The script of charters in the Netherlands during the

fourteenth and fifteenth centuries”. Quaerendo 37, 1-23.

Derolez, Albert. 2003. The palaeography of Gothic manuscript books: From the twelfth to the early sixteenth

century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

He, Sheng, Petros Samara, Jan Burgers & Lambert Schomaker. 2014. “Towards style-based dating of historical

documents”. In IEEE Computer Society (ed.), Proceedings: 14th International Conference on Frontiers

in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR), 265-270. Los Alamitos: Conference Publishing Services.

Kwakkel, Erik. 2012. “Biting, kissing and the treatment of feet: The transitional script of the long twelfth

century”. In Erik Kwakkel, Rosamund McKitterick & Rodney Thomson (eds.), Turning over a new

leaf: Change and development in the medieval book, 76-126 and 206-208. Leiden: Leiden University

Press.

Samara, Petros. 2015. “Towards a medieval palaeographical scale (1300-1550)”. In Irmgard Fees, Benedikt Hotz

& Benjamin Schönfeld (eds.), Papsturkundenforschung zwischen internationaler Vernetzung und

Digitalisierung: Neue Zugangsweisen zur europäischen Schriftgeschichte, n.p. Göttingen: Göttingen

Academy of Sciences and Humanities. http://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001S-0000-0023-9A13-A

Oliver Traxel (University of Stavanger)

Middle English in the Modern World

The representation and interpretation of the linguistic past is no new phenomenon. There are

innumerable examples of older texts that have been edited, emended and prepared for use by a modern

audience. While these deal with authentic material there are other cases where texts give merely an

impression of belonging to a previous language stage; they are therefore compositions that draw on

earlier material to create something new with an archaic twist. This paper gives an overview of the

different categories where we encounter Middle English in modern contexts and discusses reasons,

strategies and usefulness. It is part of a larger project that also includes Old English and Early Modern

English.

Modern texts that look like Middle English may have been devised as forgeries. The most

well known example is Thomas Chatterton’s 18th‐ century collection known as Rowley Poems, which

are written in a pseudo‐ Middle English style. But much more common are compositions that make no

attempt at deception as the subject matter is clearly modern, such as Carol Bergvall’s Shorter Chaucer

Tales (Bergvall 2011) or the Chaucer Blog (Bryant 2010). There are also complete translations of

modern children’s classics, such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (2013) or

Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince (2008). The language of these examples may be called

neo‐ Middle English and such renderings require an excellent knowledge of this language stage. They

are particular valuable for teaching purposes (Ruszkiewicz 2016).

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Middle English may also be used for atmospheric reasons. The occasional incorporation of

obsolete language features can be found throughout the modern period, ranging from Edmund

Spenser’s poetry (Osselton 1990) to Walter Scott’s novels (Tulloch 1980) and beyond. In addition,

Middle English words or brief translated passages can be found in modern media in order to provide

the audience with a seemingly authentic atmosphere, as seen, for example, in various Arthurian

movies (Osberg and Crow 1999). Finally, there is a lot of amateur work which shows only

rudimentary linguistic knowledge and combines modern features with older ones for reasons of fun

and entertainment. One prominent example is Billy Bailey’s Chaucer Pubbe Gagge, which is written

in what may be called mock‐ Middle English (Traxel 2012).

References:

Bergvall, Caroline 2011. Meddle English. Callicoon, NY: Nightboat Books.

Bryant, Brantley L. 2010. Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog. Medieval Studies and New Media. New York:

Palgrave Macmillan.

Carroll, Lewis. 2013. The Aventures of Alys in Wondyr Lond. Translated into Middle English Verse by Brian S.

Lee. Westport: Evertype.

Osberg, Richard H., and Michael E. Crow. 1999. Language Then and Language Now in Arthurian Film. In King

Arthur on Film: New Essays on Arthurian Cinema. Ed. Kevin J. Harty.

Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland & Company, 39‐ 66.

Osselton, Noel. 1990. Archaism. In The Spenser Encyclopedia, Albert C. Hamilton, David A. Richardson &

Donald Cheney (eds.). Toronto: University Press, 52‐ 53.

Ruszkiewicz, Dominika. 2016 (forthcoming). “Chaque jour j’apprenais quelque chose”: Using “Le Petit Prince”

and Its Translations to Teach Old and Modern Languages. In Saint‐ Exupéry relu et traduit. Ed. Joanna

Górnikiewicz, Iwona Piechnik & Marcela Świątkowska. Kraków: Biblioteka Jagiellońska.

Saint Exupéry, Antoine de. 2008. The Litel Prynce. Translated into Middle English by Walter Sauer.

Neckarsteinach: Edition Tintenfass.

Traxel, Oliver M. 2012. Pseudo‐ Archaic English: The Modern Perception and Interpretation of the Linguistic

Past. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 47(2‐ 3): 41‐ 58.

Tulloch, Graham. 1980. The Language of Walter Scott: A Study of His Scottish and Period Language. London:

Deutsch.

Letizia Vezzosi (University of Florence)

Some observations on Middle English Charms as a special discourse type.

Middle English charms have been collected, anthologized, translated, explained, and historically

contextualized for their folkloristic, anthropological, literary, historical or metaphysical interest. Only

rarely have they been looked at as a piece of discourse with an independent status, an exception to

which are the relatively recent studies by Olsan (2005) and Alonso-Almeida (2008). In line with these

surveys, the present paper concentrates on some linguistic aspects that characterise ‘charms’ as

‘performative rituals’.

Studies on language use and on expression of personal attitude and evaluation (among others,

Biber 2004 and 2006, Eggins 1994, Hunston and Thompson 2000, Kytö 1991, Ochs 1989,

Taavitsainen 2001) defines ‘performative rituals’ as oral performances to accomplish a purpose, i.e. a

change in the state of the person or persons or inanimate object, by means of performative speech in a

ritual context (Garner 2004).

The efficacy of a speech act, such as a charm, depends on formulaic language and the

rightness of the performance situation (i.e. rituality), but also shared knowledge (and shared belief) of

magical language on the side of both the performer, the beneficiary and the community of hearers or

believers.

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The present paper aims to investigate how and which linguistic features (lexical,

grammatical, and syntactical) clarify the magical intent of the charm performer. On the base of a

corpus of nearly three thousand words taken from a variety of edited sources (mainly Sheldon 1978,

with further additions taken from Hunt 1990, Alonso-Almeida 2000, Luria – Hoffman 1974), we will

analyse two types of charms – those whose aim is to prevent or eradicate some negative element and

those whose aim is to reinforce or establishing some positive element – and we intent to determine

whether different types of charms are differently characterised in terms of formal structure, stance

marking, or formulaic or rhetoric language: more specifically, whether they have a similar structure,

that is they are structured into heading, directions of performance, incantation and concluding formula

or show different patterns or different distribution), whether they manifest any preference concerning

lexical, grammatical or person marking, or whether they show similarities or differences in the

selection of rhetoric figures of speech, formulas etc.

References:

Alonso-Almeida, Francisco, 2000, Edition and study of a late medieval English medical receptarium. G.U.L. MS

Hunter 185 (T.8.17) [Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria,

Spain]

Alonso Almeida, Francisco, 2008, “The Middle English medical charm: register, genre and text type variables”.

Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 109.1: 9-38.

Biber, D., 2004, “Historical patterns for the grammatical marking of stance: A cross-register comparison”,

Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5: 107-135.

2006, “Stance in spoken and written university registers”, Journal of English for Academic Purposes 5: 97-116.

Eggins, S., 1994, An introduction to systemic functional linguistics, London: Pinter.

Garner, Lori Ann, “Anglo-Saxon Charms in Performance”, Oral Tradition 19 (2004): 20-42.

Hunston, S. – Thompson, G. (eds), 2000, Evaluation in text, Oxford: OUP.

Hunt, T., 1990, Popular medicine in thirteenth-century England: Introduction and texts. Cambridge: Brewer.

Kytö, M., 1991, Variation and diachrony, with early American English in focus, Frankfurt am Main: Lang.

Luria, M.S. – Hoffman, R. (eds), 1974, Middle English Lirics, New York: Norton & Co.

Ochs, E. (ed.), 1989, “The pragmatic of affect”, special issue of Text 9:1.

Olsan, Lea T., “The Language of Charms in a Middle English Recipe Collection”, ANQ 18 [2005]: 31-37.

Sheldon, S.E., 1978, Middle English and Latin Charms, Amulets, and Talismans from Vernacular Manuscripts

[Unpublished PhD dissertation, Tulane University, US]

Taavitsainen, I., 2001, “Evidentiality and scientific though-styles: English medical writing in Late Middle

English and Early Modern English”, in M. Gotti – M. Dossena (eds), Modality in specialized texts:

Selected papers of the 1st Cerlus conference, Bern: Lang, pp. 21-52.

Maria Volkonskaya (National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow)

Number symbolism in the Ormulum

The author of the twelfth-century English exegetical text named the Ormulum, Orm, in line with the

prologue traditions of his time (Johannesson 2007b, 109–125), describes the reasons for completing

his task. The writing of this homily collection has been at his brother Walter’s bidding (Dedication

11–28 from Holt 1878); the translation of the gospels into English is set out for preaching in order to

save the souls of all English people, but especially those of the illiterate who do not know Latin and

therefore cannot read or understand the gospels properly (Dedication 111–138, 299–314).

Whereas Orm draws heavily on a number of Latin and Old English texts (Morrison 1984a,

1984b; Johannesson 2007a, 2007b, 2007c), he deliberately conceals his sources and only occasionally

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refers vaguely to þe boc “the book,” established by Matthes (1933) as Glossa Ordinaria. It seems that

one of the reasons for not identifying his sources by name could be Orm’s wish to make his text more

comprehensible for the uneducated.

On the other hand, there are several cases where he has to tackle rather complex ideas and

convey them to his audience. One of those ideas is number symbolism, such as the Greek practice of

isopsephy, that is, finding and explaining the numerical value of certain words (in particular, the

names Iesoys in lines 4302 ff. and Adam in lines 16272 ff.). The complexity of these concepts could

have posed problems for Orm’s didactic project.

This paper will discuss the sources that Orm uses in the passages on number symbolism,

including one rather unexpected reference to William of Conches’s Philosophia, and the way he

interprets, adapts, and includes them into his exegesis to suit the needs of the laity.

References:

Johannesson, N.-L. 2007a. The four-wheeled quadriga and the seven sacraments: on the sources for the

“Dedication” of the Ormulum. Bells Chiming from the Past: Cultural and Linguistic Studies on Early

English, ed. by I. Moskowich and B. Crespo. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 227–245.

Johannesson, N.-L. 2007b. Icc hafe don swa summ þu badd: An Anatomy of the Preface to the Ormulum.

SELIM: Journal of the Spanish Society for Mediaeval English Language and Literature 14: 107–140.

Johannesson, N.-L. 2007c. Orm’s relationship to his Latin sources. Studies in Middle English Forms and

Meanings, ed. by G. Mazzon. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. 133–143.

Holt, R., ed. 1878. The Ormulum with the Notes and Glossary of Dr. R.M. White. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Matthes H.C. 1933. Die Einheitlichkeit des Orrmulum: Studien zur Textkritik, zu den Quellen und zur

sprachlichen Form von Orrmins Evangelienbuch. Heidelberg: Carl Winters Universitätsbuchhandlung.

Morrison, S. 1984a. New Sources for the Ormulum. Neophilologus 68:3: 444–450.

Morrison, S. 1984b. Orm’s English Sources. Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen

221:1: 54–64.

Lawrence Warner (King’s College London)

New light on the Hm 114 scribe (and Thomas Usk)

The scribe of Huntington Hm 114 has long been one of the most important figures in our histories of

the production of Middle English literature. Hm 114 itself is famous for its mammoth Piers Plowman,

a distinctive Troilus and Criseyde (an earlier copying of which, now Harley 3943, he had abandoned),

and a bizarre Mandeville’s Travels, while his other major production, Lambeth 491, is likewise a

major compilation (Brut, Siege of Jerusalem, Awntyrs off Arthure etc.). He has achieved new

prominence recently by being identified, on the basis of what is called “quite conclusive evidence,” as

Richard Osbarn, clerk of the chamberlain in London’s Guildhall from 1400-37, his literary copying

being connected to the establishment of the Guildhall Library in the mid-1420s and offering “the

clearest evidence we have for a personal interest in Middle English literary texts among the highest

officers of the Guildhall” (Mooney and Stubbs). In this paper I expand his corpus substantially, with

documents dating from 1397-1432, the bulk of which are from the Courts of the Mayor or Husting up

to ca. 1411, and enable as detailed a record of a literary figure’s life as is possible in the days before

personal diaries. The evidence suggests that he had departed the Guildhall ca. 1420, moving to the

Goldsmiths’ Hall where he was engaged heavily in the production of their Register of Deeds, his last

entry therein dated 1432. His literary copying almost certainly all took place after he departed the

Guildhall, a proposal supported by my new identification of Hand D of his abandoned Troilus, Harley

3943, in a 1473 entry into the Goldsmiths’ Register, suggesting the probability that he came upon this

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unfinished Chaucer copy in that site—and that the Hm 114 scribe might himself have used as his own

exemplar a copy either produced or read by Thomas Usk, the Goldsmiths’ clerk in the early 1380s.

All this material, together with a new look at the evidence that supposedly leads to his

identification as Osbarn, shows that he was a junior Guildhall clerk during his stints there and that he

could not have been Osbarn, an identification based in large part on the misreading of a crucial piece

of evidence. His recording of the lives of those many individuals who came before the Mayor’s Court,

and who had their wills registered in the Court of Husting, I would suggest, was no less important a

model for “the poetic compilations being produced by the London book trade” such as Ellesmere,

Shirley’s volumes, and, Lambeth 491 and Hm 114 themselves as were the livery companies’

gatherings of ordinances and deeds (e.g. by the Goldsmiths) as suggested by Sheila Lindenbaum.

References:

Lindenbaum, Sheila. “London Texts and Literate Practice.” In The Cambridge History of Medieval English

Literature, ed. David Wallace. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 284-309.

Mooney, Linne R., and Estelle Stubbs. Scribes and the City: London Guildhall Clerks and the Dissemination of

Middle English Literature, 1375-1425. York: York Medieval Press, 2013.

Anna Wojtyś (University of Warsaw)

The preterite-present verb everyone has forgotten: the uses of *-nugan and reasons for its loss

from English

The group of English preterite-present verbs, although very small, includes verbs of quite a high

frequency and importance (cf. Ringe 2006: 260), since half of them later developed into modal

auxiliaries. That latter group has been subject to numerous studies (e.g. Lightfoot 1979, 2009, Warner

1993, Fischer 2003), but the verbs eliminated from the language have not enjoyed such attention, with

merely isolated texts discussing in more detail their use and potential reasons for their later

elimination. Undoubtedly, the most neglected item in this group has been the verb *-nugan, only

briefly mentioned in historical grammars, with comments confined to the date of its disappearance.

The only reason suggested for its loss is embedded in the statement by Nagle Sanders (1996: 256):

“expanded predecessors of ‘It is enough’ helped to eliminate lexically related genugan/benugan”.

The present study analyzes attestations of *-nugan in medieval English in order to determine

the verb’s distribution and its exact sense, thus offering a necessary prelude to the comprehensive

discussion of its elimination. Discussed are also items carrying a sense identical or similar to that of *-

nugan, which might have contributed to the later loss of the verb in question. This will show whether

the causes of the loss of *-nugan were similar or different from those which led to the disappearance

of other preterite-presents. The study also makes reference to the uses of the verb in other Germanic

languages it was attested in.

The data for the study come from the Dictionary of Old English Database (DOED) as well as

Middle English corpora (LAEME, Innsbruck, CMEPV) with references to historical dictionaries (i.e.

Bosworth Toller, OED, MED) and thesauri (i.e. TOE and HTE).

References:

(a) Database

ASD = Bosworth, J. — T. N. Toller (eds.). 1898. An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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CMEPV, MED = McSparran, Frances. The Middle English Compendium (Corpus of Middle English Prose and

Verse, Middle English Dictionary) [http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mec/index.html] Ann Arbor:

Humanities Text Initiative – University of Michigan.

DOED = DiPaolo Healey, A. — J. Holland — I. McDougall — P. Mielke. 2000. The Dictionary of Old English

Corpus in Electronic Form. Toronto: DOE Project 2000.

HTE = Historical Thesaurus of English. Oxford University Press: online edition [www.oed.com/thesaurus].

ICAMET = Markus, M. 1999. Innsbruck Computer Archive of Machine-Readable English Texts (ICAMET).

CD-ROM version. University of Innsbruck.

LAEME = A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, 1150–1325. Compiled by Margaret Laing.

[http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laeme1/laeme1.html] (Edinburgh: ©2008–The University of Edinburgh).

OED = Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press: online edition [http://oed.com]

TOE = Roberts, J. — C. Kay — L. Grundy. 2015. A Thesaurus of Old English. Glasgow: University of Glasgow.

[http://oldenglishthesaurus.arts.gla.ac.uk].

(b) Special studies

Fischer, O. 2003. “The development of the modals in English: Radical versus gradual changes”. In: D. Hart (ed.)

English Modality in Context. (Linguistic Insights. Studies in Language and Communication 11). (Bern:

Peter Lang), 17–32.

Lightfoot, D. 1979. Principles of Diachronic Syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lightfoot, D. 2009. “Cuing a New Grammar.” In: A. van Kemenade ― B. Los (eds.) The Handbook of the

History of English. (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell), 24–44.

Nagle, S.J. — S.L. Sanders. 1996. “Downsizing the preterite-presents in Middle English”. In: J. Fisiak ― M.

Krygier (eds.) Advances in English Historical Linguistics. (Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter),

253–261.

Ringe, D. 2006. From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Warner, A. 1993. English Auxiliaries. Structure and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Laura Wright (University of Cambridge)

Administrative documents as a source of evidence for medieval London house names and why

they are of sociolinguistic interest

I have collected c.250 of the earliest names of London buildings in which people dwelt (a complicated

way of saying “housenames”, necessary because the modern-day notion of a house as a single physical

building housing a family hadn’t yet come into existence), in preparation for constructing a

sociolinguistic history of British housenames. My main sources of data for early London housenames

are the Hustings Court Rolls and Westminster Abbey Muniment deeds.

It transpires that prior to the 1300s, London housenames only ever followed three templates:

1) name of the owner, 2) occupation of the owner, and 3) appearance of the house. Early examples are

Lodebure (‘Hlotha’s bury or manor-house’, attested 1181-1203), Blanckesapeltuna ((house at)

‘Blanck’s apple orchard’, 1168-75) and la Blakehalle (‘the Black Hall’, 1222-46). However from the

1300s a new template arose, that of the heraldic device. Examples of London housenames from the

early 1300s are: Tabard (1306), le Ernedore (‘eagle door’, 1321), le Huse (‘hose’, 1321-2), le

Popyngaye (‘poppinjay’, 1325), le Kok (‘cock’, 1325). This time-frame is commensurate with the rise

in usage of the heraldic badge by merchants as a personal device (unlike the heraldic shield, which

signified noble dynastic lineage and which was unavailable to non-nobles). It is also commensurate

with the rise of chivalric knighthood. Previously, knights had been non-noble cavalrymen belonging

to nobles’ households, but in the 1300s the courtly, “nobiliary knighthood” emerged as a new social

class. Heraldic badges as used by chivalric knights started to appear as the names of shops, selds and

brewhouses. Chivalric orders created in the fourteenth century were the Society of St George, or

Order of the Garter (1344/9), the Company of the Star (1344/52), the Order of the Sword (1347/59),

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the Order of the Ship (1381-6). To be elected to these chivalric orders was a high honour, and it is

these same emblems that begin to appear on fourteenth-century London taverns and brewhouses. Le

Huse (1321-2) references the sign of the Garter. La Mariole (1328-9) is a representation of the

Blessed Virgin Mary to whom the Order of St George was dedicated along with St George. Le

George on the Hop (1331), le Sterre (1354-5), Swerd of the Hoope (1382), le Shipp on the Houp

(1370-1) – all were to become common and long-lasting names.

I suggest that there were actually two steps in this naming process: 1) synecdoche (e.g. ‘cock’

meaning ‘ale-barrel tap’), followed by 2) canting interpretation (e.g. ‘cock’ meaning ‘fowl’), leading

to all subsequent heraldic badge shop and pub names. This naming system then continued in use until

the 1760s when an Act of Parliament introduced house numbering, which had the effect of eradicating

all heraldic shop names, although heraldic pub names continue.

Fumiko Yoshikawa (Hiroshima Shudo University)

Text politeness in Middle English religious prose: a focus on works that might have been

regarded as heretic

This study examines Middle English religious texts from a viewpoint of politeness theory, with a focus

on works that might have been suspected as heretic. At the beginning of the eighth chapter of her

book, Kerby-Fulton (2006: 297) quoted the final passage from the Long Text of Julian of Norwich's

Revelation of Love (hereafter A Revelation) and points out that there are also similar warning

expressions in The Cloud of Unknowing and in an English translation made by a translator just known

as “M. N.” from Marguerite Porete’s The Mirror of Simple Souls. The passage from A Revelation

starts with the words “I pray almyty God that this booke com not but to the hands of the[m] that will

be his faitufull lovers, and to those that will submitt them to the feith of holy church and obey the

holesom vnderstondyng and teching of the men that be of vertuous life, sadde age and profound

lernyng” (ch. 86). In The Cloud of Unknowing, a similar type of passage is found at the beginning of

the text (ch. 1).

Seen from the perspective of speech acts, the illocutionary act of above-mentioned prayer in A

Revelation is a type of directive (See Leech 1983, p. 205-206), which is achieved in the form of a

desire to restrict readership of the book to faithful Christians, that is, to select the readers to meet

certain conditions and ensure the writer stands on a common ground with the readers. Claiming

common ground has been identified as a typical positive politeness strategy (see Brown and Levinson

1978/1987, pp. 103-124). Kerby-Fulton (2006) discussed in great detail that Julian was concerned

about the issue of women’s right to teach; since writing this religious treatise must have put Julian at

great risk of being regarded as a heretic, it appears that she tried to reduce this risk by using a

pragmatic strategy of claiming common ground with the readers. That she also frequently refers to the

‘holy church’ can also be explained as the same positive politeness strategy of claiming common

ground. Insisting that her interpretations of the revelations she received are consistent with what the

holy church teaches is almost equal to insisting that the contents of her text are orthodox. The writer

considers the readers, who probably desire to follow the teaching of the holy church, to be also on the

same ground.

This study aims to collect words from religious texts that are directed to the readers and to

examine their illocutionary force mainly based on Brown and Levinson’s (1978/1987) politeness

theory. Finally, we will discuss how the writer tries “to hold the floor”, borrowing a phrase from Sell

(1992: 220), by examining the perlocutionary effects of the writer’s words to the readers, that must be

closely connected to the writer’s aims throughout the whole body of the text.

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References:

Primary Sources

Glasscoe, M. (ed.) (1976) Julian of Norwich, A Revelation of Love. Exeter: University of Exeter.

Hodgson, P. (ed.) (1944/1981) The Cloud of Unknowing and the Book of Privy Counselling. EETS, o.s. 218.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Secondary Sources

Austin, J. L. (1962/1975) How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Brown P. and S. C. Levinson (1978/1987) Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Kerby-Fulton, K. (2006) Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late

Medieval England. Notre dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame.

Leech, G. (1983) Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.

Searle, J. R. (1969) Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

Sell, R. D. (1992) ‘The Politeness of Literary Texts’. In R. D. Sell (ed.) Literary Pragmatics. London:

Routledge.