Margaret Laing

Catalogue of Sources for a Linguistic Atlas of Early Medieval English

Bibliographical abbreviations catalogue of sources index of Middle English texts - titles, incipits index of Old English texts index of texts in Latin index of texts in French.

Corpus-provoked questions about negation in early Middle English

Abstract In early ME negative clauses are usually formed with either (1) the negative adverb ne immediately preceding the verb, continuing Old English usage, or (2) the verb preceded by ne and followed by another negative adverb not. A later construction has not alone after the verb. The first two types give way to the third by late ME. ‘Jack’s Law’ also shows that the construction ne…not does not occur with multiple negation from negative concord. Work towards A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME) is building up a corpus of early ME texts, tagged lexico-grammatically. Tags devised for identification/comparison of lexical and morphological variation may also serve as flags for syntactic investigation. This paper illustrates this by looking at formal variation in early ME negation, considering some rarer constructions and possible syntactic constraints on their use.

Shape-shifting, sound-change and the genesis of prodigal writing systems

In a series of articles we have looked at individual early Middle English writing systems and explored aspects of multivocal sound/symbol and symbol/sound relationships. This article combines previous observations with new material, and provides insights into the genesis of these relations and how they may interconnect. Since many early Middle English texts survive as copies, not originals, they may give clues to the orthographic systems of their exemplars too. We investigate the ‘extensibility’ of Litteral and Potestatic Substitution Sets. Writing systems may be economical or prodigal. The ‘ideal’ economical system would map into a broad phonetic or a phonemic transcription: that is, one ‘sound’, one symbol. In early Middle English there is no one standard written norm, so there is potentially less restraint on diversity than in standard systems. Further extensibility is built into the system. We show that much of what tends to be dismissed as ‘scribal error’ rather represents writing praxis no longer familiar to us – flexible matrices of substitution and variation.

On Middle English she, sho: A refurbished narrative

Abstract We offer a radical reinterpretation of the first step in the development of OE [h] in hēo towards PDE [ʃ] in she. This solves outstanding difficulties in accounting for the vocalism in ME [ʃe:], precursor of PDE [ʃi:]. The background is the etymology of she created for the Corpus of Narrative Etymologies, and its accompanying Corpus of Changes. The database for CoNE is The Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, with 36 different spellings for she across 71 texts. First, we present the OE etymology of she, tracking the changes that gave rise to all the attested OE variants. Second, using Britton’s (1991) paper as a starting point, we give a new explanation for initial [hj], allowing a straightforward account for all three attested ME vocalisms: [e:], [o:] and [ø:]. Third, we unpack the changes underlying the complex of variants attested in LAEME.

The early Middle English reflexes of Germanic *ik ‘I’: unpacking the changes

Abstract The phonological shape of the PDE first-person nominative singular pronoun ‘I’ is assumed to have a simple history. The final consonant of WGmc *ik ‘palatalises’ (i.e. fronts and assibilates), and later drops, yielding [i-], which develops through the Great Vowel Shift into something like [ai]. However, the late Old English and early Middle English evidence indicates that such a simple narrative does not match the attested data. Rather, there are significant temporal, geographical and variational aspects, including complex lexical diffusion. The Linguistic Atlasof Early Middle English, Corpus of Tagged of Texts contains 145 texts that include one or more variants of the pronoun ‘I’. Between them, they exemplify an intricate history. In this article we unpack the changes that have brought about the attested complexity. As a basis we use the etymology of this item created for the recently published Corpus of Narrative Etymologies (CoNE), which itself interfaces with its accompanying Corpus of Changes (CC). The history of this small grammatical word ultimately needs to be considered against the wider background of velar palatalisation in general and in relation to the reflexes of other commonly occurring items of a similar structure. But the changes visible in ‘I’ seem not to be fully replicated in any of them, and here we confine ourselves to its particular and apparently unique history.

Q is for WHAT, WHEN, WHERE?: The ‘q’ spellings for OE hw-

Abstract There is a wide array of spellings attested in Middle English for initial OE hw- in words such as when, where, what, who, which. Those beginning with ‘q’, found mostly in the North (including Scotland) and Northeast Midlands, have long been the subject of scholarly debate. The consensus is that they represented an articulation stronger than [hw], usually assumed to be [xw]. Just a handful of scholars have suggested that the articulation could have been [kw], but there is so far little detailed argument for this position. We propose that at least a subset of reflexes of OE hw- words came at least variably to be pronounced with initial [kw]. We suggest that this strengthened pronunciation existed alongside [xw], and lenited [hw] and [w], as well as simple [h] with the [w] deleted. We link (as some other scholars have) the history of these spellings with that of northern lenition of original initial [kw] to [xw]/[hw]/[w]. We approach the problem from a strongly variationist perspective, presenting (in accompanying appendices) detailed information on the ‘q’ spellings accessible from LAEME and eLALME. We review all the data, from the earliest attested forms through to modern dialect surveys, including place-name evidence, and we assess previous arguments on the topic.