Middle English

Laurel Brinton, Alexander Bergs

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783110522969
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The volume provides a wide-ranging account of Middle English, organized by linguistic level. Not only are the traditional areas of linguistic study explored in state-of-the-art chapters, but the volume also covers less traditional areas of study, including creolization, sociolinguistics, literary language (including the language of Chaucer), pragmatics and discourse, dialectology, standardization, language contact, and multilingualism.

Laurel J. Brinton and Alexander Bergs

Chapter 1:
Introduction

Laurel J. Brinton: Vancouver (Canada)

Alexander Bergs: Osnabrück (Germany)

1English Language Studies

2Description of the Series

3Description of this Volume

4References

1English Language Studies

The study of the English language has a lengthy history. The second half of the 18th century saw a phenomenal increase in the number of published grammars of the vernacular language, while the field of comparative linguistics arising in the 19th century was concerned in large part with the Germanic languages, including English. Moreover, in the field of theoretical linguistics that English has played a truly central role. While there are no reliable statistics, it seems safe to say that the majority of studies in contemporary linguistics deal at least in part with English, and are also written in English.

During the 20th century, monumental works concerned with the English language, both synchronic and diachronic, were produced, following historical/comparative and more contemporary linguistic approaches. In keeping with developments on the field of general linguistics, today it is possible to find descriptions and analyses of the history and development of English from virtually any linguistic perspective: external, internal, generative, functional, socio-linguistic, pragmatic, comparative, phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical, semantic. There are numerous “Histories of English” to cater to just about every (theoretical) taste, as well as detailed descriptions of historical periods, language levels, or theoretical frameworks of English and specialized studies of individual topics in the development of the language.

Work on the history of English has culminated most recently in the a series of edited handbooks and histories of English: the six-volume Cambridge History of the English Language, edited by Richard M. Hogg (1992–2001), The Handbook of the History of English, edited by Ans van Kemenade and Bettelou Los (2006), The Oxford History of English, edited by Lynda Mugglestone (2012 [2006]), The Oxford Handbook of the History of English, edited by Elizabeth Closs Traugott and Terttu Nevalainen (2012), the two-volume English Historical Linguistics: An International Handbook, edited by Alexander Bergs and Laurel J. Brinton (2012), and most recently The Cambridge Handbook of English Historical Linguistics, edited by Päiva Pahta and Merja Kytö (2015).

While study of the history of any language begins with texts, increasingly scholars are turning to dictionaries and corpora of English that are available online or electronically. The third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary online, while still undergoing revision, is now fully integrated with the Historical Thesaurus. The Middle English Dictionary, completed in 2001, is freely available online along with the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse. The pioneer historical corpus of English, The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, was first released to scholars in 1991. The Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus, containing all Old English texts, is searchable online. ARCHER, A Representative Corpus of English Registers 1650–1900, accessible at a number of universities, provides a balanced selection of historical texts in electronic form. COHA, a 400-million-word, balanced Corpus of Historical American English 1810–2009, was launched online in 2010. Smaller corpora, such as the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760, the Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts, the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, the Corpus of Early English Medical Writing, the Corpus of Late Modern English 3.0, and the newly expanded Old Bailey Corpus, have made more specialized corpora – covering more periods and more text types – available to scholars. Archives of historical newspapers online, including the Zurich English Newspaper Corpus and the Rostock Newspaper Corpus, provide another source of electronic data. Finally, syntactically annotated corpora for historical stages of English are being produced, including The York-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Poetry, The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose, The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English, and The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English. (For information on all of the corpora listed here, see http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/).

2Description of the Series

The two-volume English Historical Linguistics: An International Handbook (Bergs and Brinton 2012) serves as the textual basis for the current five-volume reader series The History of English. The aim of this series is to make selected papers from this important handbook accessible and affordable for a wider audience, and in particular for younger scholars and students, and to allow their use in the classroom. Each chapter is written by a recognized specialist in the topic and includes extensive bibliography suitable for a range of levels and interests.

While conventional histories of English (e.g., Brinton and Arnovick 2016) are almost universally organized chronologically, the six-volume Cambridge History of English (Hogg 1992–2001) is organized by linguistic level, as is the shortened version (Hogg and Denison 2006) and to a lesser extent The Handbook of the History of English (van Kemanade and Los 2006). Volumes 1 to 4 of this series likewise follow this pattern:

Volume 1: The History of English: Historical Outlines from Sound to Text provides a comprehensive overview of the history of English and explores key questions and debates. The volume begins with a re-evaluation of the concept of periodization in the history of English. This is followed by overviews of changes in the traditional areas of phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics as well as chapters covering areas less often treated in histories of English, including prosody, idioms and fixed expressions, pragmatics and discourse, onomastics, orthography, style/register/text types, and standardization.

Volume 2: The History of English: Old English provides an in-depth account of Old English. Individual chapters review the state of the art in phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic studies of Old English. Key areas of debate, including dialectology, language contact, standardization, and literary language, are also explored. The volume sets the scene with a chapter on pre-Old English and ends with a chapter discussing textual resources available for the study of earlier English.

Volume 3: The History of English: Middle English provides a wide-ranging account of Middle English. Not only are the traditional areas of linguistic study explored in state-of-the-art chapters on Middle English phonology morphology, syntax, and semantics, but the volume also covers less traditional areas of study, including Middle English creolization, sociolinguistics, literary language (including the language of Chaucer), pragmatics and discourse, dialectology, standardization, language contact, and multilingualism.

Volume 4: The History of English: Early Modern English provides a comprehensive account of Early Modern English. In seventeen chapters, this volume not only presents detailed outlines of the traditional language levels, such as phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics, but it also explores key questions and debates, such as do-periphrasis, the Great Vowel Shift, pronouns and relativization, literary language (including the language of Shakespeare), and sociolinguistics, including contact and standardization.

The last volume in the series turns its attention to the spread of English worldwide. Volume 5: The History of English: Varieties of English is one of the first detailed expositions of the history of different varieties of English. It explores language variation and varieties of English from an historical perspective, covering theoretical topics such as diffusion and supraregionalization as well as concrete descriptions of the internal and external historical developments of more than a dozen varieties of English including American English, African American Vernacular English, Received Pronunciation, Estuary English, and English in Canada, Africa, India, Wales, among many others.

Taking into account the important developments in the study of English effected by the availability of electronic corpora, this series of readers on The History of English offers a comprehensive, interdisciplinary, and theory-neutral synopsis of the field. It is meant to facilitate both research and teaching by offering up-to-date overviews of all the relevant aspects of the historical linguistics of English and by referring scholars, teachers, and students to more in-depth coverage. To that end, many chapters have been updated from the 2012 edition to include more recent publications.

3Description of this Volume

This volume provides a detailed description not only of the traditional components of Middle English (its phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics) but also of a range of more specialized topics (including pragmatics and discourse, sociolinguistics, language contact and multilingualism, dialects, standardization, and literary language, including the language of Chaucer). In this respect it greatly expands the coverage of a traditional history of English textbooks.

The initial overview chapter by Jeremy S. Smith sets the stage for the more specialized chapters which follow. Characterizing Middle English primarily in terms of the variation it embodies, this chapter surveys some of the geographical and temporal variation one finds in the phonology, grammar, and lexicon of Middle English. Core chapters then treat Middle English phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. Nicholas Ritt takes a non-traditional approach to the description of Middle English. As non-segmental features (e.g. stress, rhythm) are seen as more stable than segmental features, the chapter begins with a description of Middle English word stress and the effect of French borrowings on the Germanic stress system. The development of Middle English consonants and vowels is then seen as primarily a response to constraints imposed by stress and rhythm, including the reduction of vowels in unstressed syllables, alterations in vowel quantity, and consonantal weakening. In addition to providing a thorough description of Middle English inflectional morphology – clearly displayed in tabular form – the chapter on “Morphology” by Jerzy Wełna focuses on the important morphological processes of the period, such as the generalization of the nominal –s plural, the replacement of grammatical by semantic gender, the spread of th- forms of the third-person plural pronoun, the decay of the subjunctive, the break-down of ablaut gradition, and so on, always with a view to the contribution of these changes to the Modern English morphological system. The chapter ends with a discussion of Middle English derviational morphology and word formation, recognizing the importance of French in these processes. Attention is paid to dialectal diversity in the period. Jeremy S. Smith also takes a novel approach to describing the “Syntax” of Middle English. Rather then emphasizing the ‘sentence’ and enumerating nominal and verbal structures and sentence types, the chapter recognizes the medieval focus on larger elements of rhetorical structure. Analyses of four textual selections, two prose and two verse, brings to light a number of important syntactic features of Middle English, including coordination and subordination, element order, changes in the structure of noun and verb phrases, and concord. Louise Sylvester shows in “Semantics and Lexion” that the semantic structure of a language can be approached from the perspective of either semasiology (focus on the meaning of lexemes) or onomasiology (focus on the expression of semantic concepts), exemplified by the Middle English Dictionary and the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, respectively. Following a discussion of types of semantic change and collocational studies, including the contribution of lexicography to such studies, the chapter analyzes the semantic structure of the Middle English lexicon in terms of word formation. The chapter ends with a treatment of the effects of borrowing.

The remaining chapters extend beyond the traditional area of linguistic study. One set of chapters is concerned with language contact during the Middle English period. Herbert Schendl provides an introduction to “Language Contact: Multilingualism” in Middle English society, pointing to the complex and changing nature of multilingualism in medieval England, on possibilities of creolization, on code-switching, and on the so-called “Celtic hypothesis”. This is followed by a detailed discussion of well-documented and “uncontroversial” contact effects on the lexicon (French, Latin, and Old Norse), including word formation, and of the “more controversial” influence of language contact on phonology, morphology, and syntax. After identifying different varieties of French which affected English (Central French, Anglo-Norman, and “Law French”), Janne Skaffari, in “Language Contact: French”, describes the long period of English/French contact and the ultimate transition to English. When speaking of contact, scholars must contend with a number of uncert...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Middle English: Overview
• Chapter 3: Phonology
• Chapter 4: Morphology
• Chapter 5: Syntax
• Chapter 6: Semantics and Lexicon
• Chapter 7: Pragmatics and Discourse
• Chapter 8: Dialects
• Chapter 9: Language Contact: Multilingualism
• Chapter 10: Language Contact: French
• Chapter 11: Standardization
• Chapter 12: Middle English Creolization
• Chapter 13: Sociolinguistics
• Chapter 14: Literary Language
• Chapter 15: The Language of Chaucer
• Index