8th International Conference on Middle English

ICOME-8

2-4 May 2013, University of Murcia

PLENARY SPEAKERS:

Herbert Schendl
(University of Vienna)

Multilingualism, multilingual texts and language shift in late medieval England

In multilingual societies, speakers often face the question which language to choose in a specific communicative act, both in speech and writing. That this also applied to the literate multilingual speakers in medieval England is supported both by secondary sources and the surviving texts. A range of monolingual texts in Latin, French and English, the main written languages of the period, mirrors a di- or triglossic situation, at least in the early part of the period. Linguistically even more interesting evidence for medieval multilingualism is provided by the numerous mixed-language texts, which, as now widely agreed, represent instances of written code-switching. In spite of these linguistically relevant data, historical English linguistics has tended to adopt a predominantly ‘monolingual’ perspective in the linguistic and sociolinguistic study of the ME period, both in its theoretical outlook and its choice of data. However, as lexicographers of Anglo-French such as W. Rothwell and D. Trotter have repeatedly emphasized, the (socio)linguistic study of Middle English should be based on all types of textual evidence, both monolingual and multilingual.
The present paper will concentrate on late medieval code-switching as a reflection of medieval multilingualism and of a specific type of language choice, especially in non-literary texts. This multilingual practice is closely linked to the multilingual literacy of scribes and authors as well as to the pragmatic setting of their work. The particularly high incidence of such texts from the decades immediately before and after 1400 and the fact that code-switching is more frequent in texts whose matrix language is French or Latin can be linked to the text-type specific shift from French and Latin to English, i.e., code-switching seems to act as an indicator of ongoing language shift. This as well as the varying switching patterns raises interesting questions about the sociolinguistic functions of switching in these mostly non-interactive texts, about the validity of the concept of code-switching for all multilingual text-types and about the differentiation between code-switching and borrowing.

References

- Schendl, Herbert and Laura Wright (eds.) 2011. Code-switching in early English (Topics in English Linguistics 76). Berlin/New York: de Gruyter-Mouton.

- Sebba, Mark, Shahrzad Mahootian and Carla Jonsson (eds.) 2012. Language mixing and code-switching in writing. Approaches to mixed-language written discourse (Routledge Critical Studies in Multilingualism) New York/London: Routledge.

Terttu Nevalainen
 (University of Helsinki)

Sociolinguistic perspectives on variation in Late Middle English

Middle English is usually portrayed as a period in which regional dialects were freely represented in writing, and, quoting Corrie (2012: 106), “represented without the ideological issues which have underscored the writing of dialects in subsequent times”. Extending the generalization of dialect writing to other sources of linguistic variation, we may wonder about the extent to which Middle English texts could also represent variation related to the writers’ regional mobility, age, social networks and status, and even gender. For Early Middle English such questions are largely irrelevant: just as there is not enough material to base a description of northern English on, there is little data to explore writer characteristics. But as we move on to the 15th century, the personal correspondence available in English provides just such a resource.
Questions to do with linguistic variation have of course occupied Middle English scholars long before the emergence of historical sociolinguistics as a field of study. For example, H.C. Wyld (1936) was puzzled by the failure of the northern third-person verbal suffix -s to spread to East Anglia before reaching London in the 15th century and Davis (1954) described how the language of the Paston brothers diverged as they were exposed to different social environments. Since these early studies, a good deal historical sociolinguistic research has been carried out on 15th century correspondence, notably the Paston family, showing how social status and networks, for example, correlate with linguistic variation (e.g. Bergs 2005, Conde Silvestre & Hernández Campoy 2004). Recent studies also question any simple notion of Middle English regional variation. Stenroos and Thengs (2012) argue that real “geographical space” and reconstructed “linguistic space” reveal partly different trends, thus providing complementary evidence on regional variation.
Largely based on the 15th century data included in the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC), my talk will make use of a new tool, Text Variation Explorer, to assess linguistic variability in this period when writing was considered work and thus an occupation for servants and others professionally trained to do it. I will focus on evidence (1) for dialect mixing and leveling in official contexts and (2) for the role of scribes in introducing or retaining linguistic variability as witnessed in personal correspondence. The latter is of particular relevance when approaching the topic of gender variation in Late Middle English.

References

- Bergs, Alexander. 2005. Social Networks and Historical Sociolinguistics: Studies in Morphosyntactic Variation in the Paston Letters (1421–1503). Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
- Conde Silvestre, Juan Camilo & Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy. 2004. A sociolinguistic approach to the diffusion of Chancery written practices in late fifteenth century private correspondence. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 105 (2):133–152.
- Corrie, Marilyn. 2012. Middle English: dialects and diversity. The Oxford History of English, ed. by L. Mugglestone, 106-146. Oxford: OUP.
- Davis, Norman. 1954. The language of the Pastons. Proceedings of the British Academy 40: 119–144.
- Stenroos, Merja & Kjetil V. Thengs. 2012. Two Staffordshires: real and linguistic space in the study of Late Middle English dialects. Outposts of Historical Corpus Linguistics (Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English 10), ed. by J. Tyrkkö, M. Kilpiö, T. Nevalainen & M. Rissanen. http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/journal/volumes/10/ stenroos_thengs/
- Wyld, Henry Cecil 1936. A History of Modern Colloquial English. Third edition. Oxford: Blackwell.

Vincent Gillespie
(Oxford University, UK)

Fatherless Books: Authorship, Attribution and Orthodoxy in Later Medieval England

The recurrent concern for ‘sound doctrine’ in later medieval English religious texts has often been seen as a distinguishing characteristic of books produced by or for the Carthusians and Birgittines. But I want to suggest that their prominent espousal of such priorities is in fact not only a reflection of the distinctive textual cultures of those orders, but also, and perhaps more tellingly, a reflection of a wider concern among those responsible for the production, transmission, dissemination and reception of fifteenth-century vernacular books of religion to mark out their religious productions from those suspicious books soiled with heterodoxy and Lollard opinions. One of the most significant manifestations of that interest, I wish to argue, is an increasing concern to establish and promulgate the attribution of vernacular religious texts and books, whether through the inclusion of colophons that claim parentage for certain texts, or increasingly through comments in wills and benefactions that create chains of provenance for books being passed on to a new generation of readers and users, to generate comfort and security about their authority and orthodoxy. A new look at the ‘fatherless books’ of the fifteenth century, and at the increasing number of books, texts and readers that claim filiation with authoritative writers, and construct for themselves patrimonies of authorship, ownership, and transmission, is surely overdue.

María José López-Couso
(University of Santiago de Compostela)

Exploring linguistic accretion: Middle English as a testing ground

In recent years, increasing attention has been given to a cross-linguistic phenomenon variously referred to in the literature as ‘accretion’ (Kuteva 2008), ‘pleonasm’, and ‘hypercharacterization’ (Lehmann 2005), among other terms. Such labels typically encompass a wide range of disparate phenomena attested at different levels of the linguistic system which involve the accumulation of redundant linguistic material. Examples of linguistic accretion comprise cases of multiple relativization markers in languages such as Swahili, Ngemba, and Singlish (Kuteva 2008), double determination in definiteness marking in some Scandinavian languages (Dahl 2004, 2009), stem reduplication in certain Latin pronominal forms (Sornicola 2006), and the use of expletive subject pronouns in languages which mark person on the verb (Lehmann 2005; Sornicola 2006).
As can be gathered from these and similar examples, linguistic accretion phenomena are interesting not only in and of themselves, but also and especially because they may be at the origin of new grammatical structure and because they provide appealing instances of linguistic competition between options. In this context, my aim in this talk is to look into a range of cases of accretion documented in the Middle English period in different domains. After briefly revisiting some well-known examples of hypercharacterization at the levels of vocabulary (e.g. synonym compounding patterns such as for routhe and for pitee) and inflectional morphology, including adjective gradation (e.g. more older) and double plurals (e.g. children), I will focus on less familiar instances of accretion, mostly from the domain of syntax. Among these, I will consider the following: ‘redundant’ or ‘strengthened’ adverbial subordinators of the type shown in for because and and if, the use of so-called ‘double locative overlap constructions’ and their relevance for the grammaticalization of existential there, and the occurrence of resumptive pronouns in extraction contexts. By comparing these patterns with their counterparts not containing the ‘surplus’ element, attention will be paid to the motivations and the functions of these hypercharacterized forms and constructions, both at the level of communication and at the level of grammatical structure.

References

- Dahl, Östen. 2004. The Growth and Maintenance of Linguistic Complexity. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
- Dahl, Östen. 2009. “Increases of complexity as a result of language contact.” In Kurt Braunmüller & Juliane House (eds.). Convergence and Divergence in Language Contact Situations. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 41-52.
- Kuteva, Tania. 2008. “On the frills of grammaticalization.” In María José López-Couso & Elena Seoane (eds.). Rethinking Grammaticalization. New Perspectives. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 189-217.
- Lehmann, Christian. 2005. “Pleonasm and hypercharacterisation.” In Geert Booij & Jaap van Marle (eds.). Yearbook of Morphology 2005. Dordrecht: Springer, 119-154.
Sornicola, Rosanna. 2006. “Expletives and Dummies”. In Keith Brown (ed.). Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd edn., vol. 4.Oxford: Elsevier, 399-410.