N. F. Blake

The Cambridge history of the English language

1. Introduction Suzanne Romaine 2. Vocabulary John Algeo 3. Syntax David Denison 4. Onomastics Richard Coates 5. Phonology Michael K. C. MacMahon 6. English grammar and usage Edward Finegan 7. Literary language Sylvia Adamson Glossary of linguistic terms Bibliography Index.

The phylogeny of The Canterbury Tales

Geoffrey Chaucers The Canterbury Tales survives in about 80 different manuscript versions. We have used the techniques of evolutionary biology to produce what is, in effect, a phylogenetic tree showing the relationships between 58 extant fifteenth-century manuscripts of “The Wife of Baths Prologue” from The Canterbury Tales. We found that many of the manuscripts fall into separate groups sharing distinct ancestors.

A history of the English language

Preface - Table of Abbreviations - What is a History of English? - Background Survey - Before Alfred - The First English Standard - The Aftermath of the First Standard - Interregnum: Fragmentation and Regrouping - Political, Social and Pedagogical Background to the New Standard - Language Change from 1400 to 1660 - Establishing the Standard within Social Norms - Emancipation, Education and Empire - World Domination and Growing Variation - Appendix: Technical Terms and Phonetic Symbols - Suggested Further Reading - Index

LEXIS AND SEMANTICS

Lexis Of all linguistic concepts, that of ‘word’ is the most fundamental, possessing a quality of homely familiarity which is lacking in more technical terms like ‘phoneme’, ‘morpheme’ or even ‘syntax’. Words seem to have a reality either as pronunciations or as written characters, they have grammatical rules for combination, and they have meanings: and for everyday purposes we require little more than this in order to discuss them adequately. Yet, as soon as words become the object of serious study requiring more precise definition, it is apparent that our complacency is ill-founded. Difficulties are encountered in describing with precision what constitutes that composite of form and meaning we call a word. Our ready acceptance that words can be misspelt, mispronounced or inappropriately combined confirms that their use is governed by linguistic rules, but we assume too easily that such rules are founded on an ability to recognise words as the fundamental unit of analysis. In any period this is a troublesome business, but especially so in Middle English. That written Middle English presents a problem in the definition of any individual word by its orthographic form is a fact vividly apparent to anyone who has ever used a computer to search a text. The machines capacity to recognise forms is relatively inflexible, but inflexibility is not characteristic of scribal spelling. The scribe who, in the late fourteenth century, wrote MS Cotton Nero A.x, Art. 3, refers within a few lines of each other to þyn aunt and þy naunt , reflecting an uncertainty about word boundaries which is sometimes exploited in the patterns of alliterative verse: ‘And worisch him as n amely as he my n e awyn warre’ ( Wars of Alexander 582).

A grammar of Shakespeare's language

Preface Abbreviations Introduction The Linguistic Background The Noun Group The Verb Group Adverbials, Interjections, Conjunctions and Prepositions Concord, Negation, Repetition, and Ellipsis Clause Organisation and Sentence Types Discourse Markers Pragmatics Conclusion Bibliography

MIDDLE ENGLISH DIALECTOLOGY

Dialectology is more central to the study of Mfiddle] Efnglish] than to any other branch of English historical linguistics. Strang (1970: 225) Dialect method and the study of Middle English Introduction The most striking fact about Middle English is that it exhibits by far the greatest diversity in written language of any period before or since. Before 1100 – in the Old English period – extant written sources for the study of variation are rather sparse, and much of the Late Old English literary output is in a relatively invariant West Saxon literary language. Similarly, close to the end of the Middle English period (in the fifteenth century), we witness the rise and subsequent spread of a relatively uniform written variety – the beginnings of ‘standard English’. From that century onward, the vast bulk of printed documents is in this variety, regardless of the geographical provenance of the author: documents do not readily betray their region of origin, and the dialectal diversity that continued to exist in speech is suppressed in writing. For this reason, much of our knowledge of Early Modern English variation depends much more on indirect evidence, such as contemporary commentaries on pronunciation (on which see especially Dobson 1968), and much less on variable forms attested in the texts themselves. For written Middle English, on the other hand, our access to variation is direct, and it is this primary source that we use to reconstruct the diversity of spoken Middle English. Variability in written Middle English is very wide-ranging at every linguistic level: spelling, morphology, syntax and lexicon. There are also several non-linguistic dimensions in which this variation can be observed. Of these, the geographical and chronological dimensions are most immediately obvious: texts from different areas are different, and later texts differ very markedly from earlier ones (for some examples see Lass in this volume).

THE LITERARY LANGUAGE

Introduction The title of this chapter, ‘The literary language’, suggests that there is a clear division between literary and non-literary languages in the Middle English period. As is true of any period in English, there exists a highly literary style at one end of the spectrum and an equally clear non-literary style at the other end, but in between there are so many gradations that it is difficult to draw a precise boundary between them. One can, however, say that if one were to attempt to draw such a boundary, it would for the Middle English period be drawn in a rather different place from the one which we would recognise as appropriate for the modern situation. Today literature is traditionally regarded as both an exclusive and an evaluative term; works which lack an aesthetic structure or an emotional appeal are readily dismissed as being not literature. The growth of a book-buying market has led to literature being advertised and sold as something quite separate from other printed material. The word literature comes ultimately from Latin littera , ‘that which is written’, and this definition reflects Middle English attitudes to literature more adequately than contemporary ones do, though the beginnings of a modern attitude can be traced at the end of the medieval period. It is in the fifteenth century that literary texts like the Canterbury Tales begin to be produced by themselves in de luxe manuscripts as though they were special texts which needed a specialized form of reading. Until that time, and in most cases long afterwards as well, literary texts appeared with other written material in compendia of one type or another. What we would now classify as literary texts do not have a different status in presentation or format.

The Language of Shakespeare

Preface - Abbreviations - Introduction - Language Environment - Varieties - The Nominal Group - The Verbal Group - Adverbs, Prepositions and Conjunctions - Word Order and Sentence Types - Conclusion - Notes - Select Bibliography - Table of Passages Quoted - Index

The Nominal Group

The nominal group may be defined briefly as a group of words which can act as the subject of a sentence.1 As we noted in the Introduction it is usual to posit that the nominal group in Modern English contains four elements: determiner, modifier, head and qualifier. The head is that part of the group upon which all the other elements depend and is the only obligatory element. The modifier and qualifier are those elements which precede and follow the head respectively and are defined formally by their position in relation to the head. There is theoretically no limit to the number of modifiers and qualifiers each head can carry. The determiner in Modern English precedes the modifier and consists of a small group of words like the articles and possessive and demonstrative pronouns which are mutually exclusive; there can be only one determiner per head in each nominal group. One cannot say in Modern English the his book. Hence the nominal group ‘The beautiful, young girl with the black hair sitting in the corner’ consists of the determiner the, two modifiers beautiful and young, the head girl, and two qualifiers with the black hair and sitting in the corner. It is characteristic of Modern English that whereas modifiers consist usually of single words like beautiful, though they can be modified by an intensifier like very, qualifiers are usually phrases such as with the black hair.

The Linguistic Background

During the Middle English period three languages were current in England: the various dialects of English itself, Anglo-Norman which had given way to Central French, and Latin. By the end of this period the latter two had become second languages which had to be learned, and the triumph of English as the national language was guaranteed. Although French may have been familiar to certain classes, especially nobles, lawyers and merchants, the nationalist spirit generated through the Hundred Years’ War meant that it was never going to be accepted by the general population. For its part, Latin underwent an important transformation during the fifteenth century in that the Latin of the Middle Ages was Vulgar Latin, the spoken variety of Latin especially associated with the Catholic Church. The humanists from the fourteenth century in Italy and from the fifteenth in England set about recreating classical Latin as that variety of the language which should be taught and used for all purposes. This had several important implications. The first was that Latin ceased for all practical purposes to be a spoken language and so was no longer a competitor with English as the language of spoken communication in England. English could develop unchallenged as the spoken and ultimately the written language of England. But a second result of the reinstatement of classical Latin as the taught form was that Latin was no longer a living language; it was taught in the dead form of the language.