The essays discuss the development of English during the Middle Ages. 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.

The 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.

Autorentext

Richard Dance is Senior Lecturer in Old English Language and Literature at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of St Catharine's College.
Laura Wright is Reader in English Language at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College.

Inhalt

Contents: 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 Wojtys: 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 æpe 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 La amon's Brut - Ad Putter: A prototype theory of metrical stress: Lexical categories and ictus in Langland, the Gawain-poet and other alliterative poets.