Tim William Machan

Chaucer and the History of English

Linguistic history, like all history, is written retrospectively. It is written from some historical vantage that allows a critic to survey what has been previously spoken and written and to decide which forms are representative, which aberrant, which tangential, and which proleptic in the ways they figure in a coherent account of language change and development. While speakers use language to accomplish specific tasks in specific situations, historians assemble these utterances into moments of stasis (like dialects or historical stages) and narratives of change. Classifying the linguistic record in this way, language historians make possible large conceptualizations of a sort that typically eludes speakers in ordinary conversation.

Robert Henryson and the Matter of Multilingualism

Medieval multilingualism can be a gaudy affair. It can feature so promi- nently in the design and rhetoric of a work that it does not simply cap- ture a readers attention but instead serves, as much as love or virtue or political order, as one of that works central thematic and organizing principles. Without multilingualism, Piers Plowman would certainly be difficult to imagine. Latin supplies quotations, technical words, and a critical subtext that advance the poems plot, meditation on concepts like salvation, and even the depiction of characters like Anima, who move into and out of Latin in conversationally strategic ways. This movement itself advances one of the poems most prominent topics: the dynamics between an authoritative culture (social as well as religious) that is medi- ated by Latin and a popular culture mediated by English and focused on challenging inherited notions of piety, language, and politics. In many ways, through its use of multilingualism Piers Plowman precociously depicts a world in which English has come to displace Latins status as a High Language in medieval Englands diglossia, a world that would not in fact come into sociolinguistic existence for another 300 years or so. And the importance of multilingualism to Piers Plowman was not lost on the scribes who transmitted the text. They gave particular attention to maintaining a consistent, restrained format throughout the tradition, and among the features they maintained was the highlighting of Latin passages, whether through rubrication or underscoring in red. John Gowers works offer similarly gaudy examples of multilingualism. Gowers entire career is of course multilingual, since he wrote successively in Latin and French as well as English, but, more narrowly, the Confessio Amantis offers a widely known and discussed interplay of Latin and English at several compositional levels. The individual English tales are framed by Latin verses, while a Latin commentary develops more fully the poems allusions, rhetorical devices, and ethics. As with the manuscripts of Piers Plowman, those of the Confessio foreground the works multilingual na- ture by setting off and rubricating much of the Latin text, rendering the interplay of Latin and English a particularly prominent feature of one of the most deluxe manuscript traditions of late-medieval England. Gower

Defining Markedness in Middle English

Reading Piers Plowman depends in part on being able to distinguish well-formed ‘unmarked’ Middle English usages from well-formed but ‘marked’ ones, and both kinds of utterances from ones that are simply scribal or even authorial errors. Not being native speakers of Middle English and lacking any fourteenth-century English grammar books or dictionaries, modern readers can make these judgements on behalf of Langland and his contemporaries only by examining late medieval usages, modern dictionaries, textual notes, and the like. Even with rigorous practices of historical reconstruction, then, we have little access to the daily language practices of medieval England or, more generally, to Middle English as a natural language. Focusing on two peculiar but well-established forms, this paper suggests that for as much as Piers Plowman reveals about medieval theology and social practice, the poem also tells us that there are things about medieval English that we do not, and perhaps cannot, know.

Dialect Boundaries and Dialect Translation: The Case of Middle Scots and Middle English

Abstract The late-medieval Scottish–English border had a porous impermeability. Politically, there was in theory a demarcation between Scotland and England that remained relatively fixed from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries, though a zone of marches surrounded that demarcation, and border disputes continued throughout the period. On the English–Scottish linguistic border, such porous impermeability took several forms. The extremes would be works written primarily in either Scots or some form of English and arrayed between them is what might be called the interlinguistic marches: works written in a language neither entirely Scots nor entirely English that somehow depends on and elides any easy distinctions between the varieties. These marches, and what they say about the Scots–English linguistic border, are the focus of this paper. The paper begins by looking at several texts whose language challenges any easy pronouncements about Scots–English dialect boundaries. Originally written in one variety, they survive as well in copies wherein the text has been rewritten, in all or in part, in the other variety. These rewritings might be called ‘dialect translations’, though other terms also could apply, each of them reframing not only the rewritings but also the varieties and language dynamics they help create. From these examples the paper turns to the larger issue that is its primary concern: the medieval English linguistic repertoire, including the grammatical integrity and social significance of medieval English regional varieties in general. Language and dialect boundaries certainly do matter, but it is speakers who decide how and when.

Politics and the Middle English Language

With characteristic insight and elan, Roger Lass has observed that linguistic change ‘‘occurs over ’geological’ time, beyond the capacity of humans to act, since no actor can see the consequences of his actions. A speaker engaged in a change is not an agent, but a victim.’’1 Lass’s concern is structural change, and his point is that given the time scheme and variable fashion in which such change typically takes place, individual speakers could not have been conscious of their role in initiating or propagating phenomena like those collectively known as the First Consonant Shift or the Great Vowel Shift. Speakers living at the conclusion of such a change might well be able to look back and describe its history, as seventeenth-century orthoepists were in fact able to characterize competing vowel articulations. But since not all synchronic variation results in diachronic change, speakers living during what can be retrospectively recognized as the beginning or spread of a change cannot know whether and how the variations that they notice will prove historically momentous; and the future of in-progress change is rendered even more obscure by the fact that much change transpires without the conscious recognition of the very speakers who propagate it. Though Lass’s concerns are specifically structural, they point to larger linguistic principles that can have significant utility for the study of language and the future of Chaucer studies. This is so because his critique of agency in structural change has relevance to the initiation and propagation of change in a language’s pragmatics, whether at the level of individual speech acts or, very generally, at the levels of the discursive uses of