Description
Book SynopsisThe fourteen essays presented here discuss the development of English during the Middle English period: how the language developed from Old English, linguistic innovations, and the loss and abandonment of certain words and constructions. A common theme is variation and variability – dialectal, social, temporal, stylistic and idiolectal – with much work fitting under the heading of historical pragmatics. Some of the essays also shed light on everyday life, customs, culture and religious practices during the period. Collectively, the essays make it clear that searchable computerized corpora have become indispensible tools of the discipline, with several contributors describing new corpora created to their own specifications.
Table of ContentsContents: Richard Dance/Laura Wright: Introduction – Javier Calle Martin/David Moreno Olalla: Body of evidence: Middle English annotated corpora and dialect atlases – Julia Fernández Cuesta/Luisa García García/J. Gabriel Amores Carredano: Compilation of an electronic corpus of northern English texts from Old to Early Modern English – Gabriella Mazzon:
Now what? The analysis of Middle English discourse markers and advances in historical dialogue studies – Hans-Jürgen Diller: Ssoong on Ifaluk,
ANGER and
WRATH in Middle English: Historical Semantics as bridge-builder – Cynthia Allen: The Poss(essive) Det(erminer) construction in Early Middle English writings – Ewa Ciszek: The suffix -
ish: Its semantic development and productivity in Middle English – María José Carrillo-Linares/Edurne Garrido-Anes: Lexical variation in late Middle English: Selection and deselection – Anna Wojtyś: The prefix y-: grammatical marker or meaningless appendage? A contrastive analysis of selected manuscripts of Chaucer’s
The Canterbury Tales – Joanna Esquibel:
Gratter cost, more grat zenne, þe more gratter torment: Comparison in Dan Michel’s
Ayenbite of Inwyt – Carole Hough: Names in Chaucer’s
Nun’s Priest’s Tale – Nils-Lennart Johannesson: «Rihht alls an hunnte takeþþ der./Wiþþ hise ʒæpe racchess»: Hunting as a metaphor for proselytizing in the
Ormulum – Mayumi Taguchi: Devotional terms and the use of the Bible in Nicholas Love’s
Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ – Nicolay Yakovlev: Metre and punctuation in the Caligula manuscript of Laʒamon’s
Brut – Ad Putter: A prototype theory of metrical stress: Lexical categories and ictus in Langland, the
Gawain-poet and other alliterative poets.
