6th Medieval English Studies Symposium
Poznan, 24 – 25 November 2007
Book of abstracts
Middle English Studies Symposium (MESS) 2007 – ABSTRACTS
PLENARY PAPERS:
Speaking and Writing in Suffolk speech: Language and Dialect in the Work
of Osbern Bokenham
Simon Horobin
Oxford University
This paper draws upon my recent discovery of a manuscript by the fifteenth-century
poet and hagiographer Osbern Bokenham containing a complete translation of the
Legenda aurea. This new manuscript sheds considerable light upon Bokenham’s work
and its place in fifteenth-century literary history. In this paper I will consider the
evidence that this discovery provides for our understanding of Bokenham’s language
and dialect, focusing on spelling, phonology, grammar and lexis. Bokenham is one
of the few Middle English writers to refer explicitly to his dialect, and the discovery
of this manuscript provides considerable new data for our understanding of the
Suffolk dialect of this period, and the extent to which Bokenham’s language was
provincial. I will also examine the vocabulary of Bokenham’s translations,
considering the extensive number of antedatings provided by this manuscript. This
will lead into a discussion of Bokenham’s style, particularly his debts to other poets
such as Chaucer and Lydgate and his use of aureate diction.
The Shape of Chaucerian Tragedy
Harold Kaylor
University of Troi
Chaucer translated Boethius’s Consolation of philosophy in c.1380, just prior to writing
his tragedy, Troilus and Criseyde. Chaucer’s tragedy is structured using elements
found in the Consolatio and elements found in Dante’s Divine comedy.
Boehtius describes a four-level system of epistemology in Book V of the
Consolatio: he posits 1) sense-knowing, which is followed in an upward, hierarchical
order by 2) image-knowing, 3) reason-knowing, and finally 4) intelligence-knowing.
Chaucer develops Troilus’s aventures in lovynge according to this scheme. In the
tragedy, Book I develops Troilus’s sensing love for the first time in his life. Book II
develops the imaging of love by Troilus and Criseyde in each other. Chaucer then
develops first positive arguments in the love debate in Book III and then negative
arguments in the love debate in Book IV, so that the two books together present both
sides of “reason-knowing” in Troilus’s love for Criseyde. The end of Book V then
allows Troilus a brief apotheosis in which he gains a moment of understanding or
“intelligence-knowing” of the loving that he has progressively experienced since first
laying eyes upon his Criseyde.
Following the psychological paradigm in the Consolatio, Boethius describes
two types of individuals: 1) those who are ruled by emotion [the prisoner Boethius in
Book I] and who are subject to tragedy, and 2) those who are ruled by reason [the
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Middle English Studies Symposium (MESS) 2007 – ABSTRACTS
prisoner Boethius in Book V] and who may avoid tragedy and accept consolation.
Chaucer constructs his character Troilus as a representative of the former type and
Criseyde as a representative of the latter.
In contrast with the Thomist theological scheme that structures Dante’s
Comedy, and which makes use of the “revealed truth” that allows the pilgrim Dante
to explore the trans-stellar region of eternity, Chaucer denies Troilus a Virgil and a
Beatrice as knowledgeable guides and access to the eternal realm. In the end, it is for
Troilus as it was for Alisoun of Bath: only “experience, though noon auctoritee were
in this world” gives true substance to the abstract noun, love.
Chaucer’s use of Boethian and Dantesque concepts is subtle, but it reveals
much about the problematic nature of his famous tragedy of Troilus.
Linguistic geography, demography, and monastic community: Scribal
language at Bury St Edmunds
Kathryn A. Lowe
University of Glasgow, UK
We know little about the East Anglian dialect of English during the Anglo-Saxon and
early Middle English period, and the paucity of sources stands in sharp relief to the
richness of the material surveyed for the area for the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval
English. We do, however, have an important series of vernacular charters from the
important Benedictine monastery of Bury St Edmunds which span the period and
which have rarely been investigated. They potentially offer insight into the nature of
the dialect written in the diocese from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries and its
development during this period. A scriptorium-based approach to dialect study
permits the inclusion of a centre from this area and accords with Richard Hogg's
suggestion that classification of dialect based on diocese, whence most text
production originated during the period, might be a more tenable and more fruitful
approach to Old English dialect study than one based on imposed political
structures. The paper examines the language of those private documents produced
during the Anglo-Saxon period and their copies in a number of registers and
cartularies in the thirteenth century. The charters selected for study include S 1225,
S 1486, S 1494 and S 1489. The cartularies discussed include CUL, Ff. 2. 33 and BL,
Add. 14847, both datable to the end of the thirteenth century. I present evidence for
the so-called ‘Kentish’ development of the front vowels /æ(:)/ and /y(:)/ to /e(:)/ in
these texts. I also offer a number of potential explanations as to why a series of
quintessential Norfolkisms (including kirke and the adverb ending -lik(e)) appear in
several cartulary copies of Old English texts from the foundation.
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Middle English Studies Symposium (MESS) 2007 – ABSTRACTS
Tolkien's Indolent Kings - Echoes of Medieval History and English Literature in
J.R.R.Tolkien's Lord of the rings
Andrzej Wicher
University of Łódź
The present paper is an attempt to describe the parallels between Tolkien’s great
work and certain characteristic motifs appearing in the early medieval history of
England and Western Europe. The author tries also to show that The lord of the rings
may be thought of as containing a project to revise the traditional, liberal and rather
optimistic, conception of English history represented by such English historians as
G.M.Trevelyan, and T.B.Macaulay. Since the motif of the indolent king is, at the same
time, a very important archetype of European culture, it should not come as a
surprise that Tolkien’s use of this archetype seems to be influenced by the way this
subject is treated in some classical literary works, first of all, in such plays by W.
Shakespeare as King Lear, or Richard II. The paper, therefore, contains also some
comments on this matter. The characters in Tolkien’s work that the author mainly
concentrates upon are Theoden, and Denethor.
PAPERS:
Obsolete Scandinavian loanwords – a semantic analysis of two fields: ‘the
army’ and ‘the sea’
Magdalena Bator
Społeczna WyŜsza Szkoła Przedsiębiorczości i Zarządzania w Warszawie
The aim of the present paper is to examine obsolete loanwords of Scandinavian
origin belonging to two semantic fields, i.e., ‘the army’ and ‘the sea’. They will be
analysed from the point of view of their etymology, recorded forms and their
occurrences in written texts and dialects. It is proposed that the reasons for their
disappearance in history of the English language include such factors as rivalry of
synonyms, both of French and native origin, e.g., brinie, kete; limitation in usage to the
local dialects and later disappearance from the written records, e.g., hune;
disappearance of the objects designated by a given word, e.g., houscarl, etc.
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Middle English Studies Symposium (MESS) 2007 – ABSTRACTS
The etymological affiliation of bases in ME deverbal word-formation:
Common-root and cross-root modelling by the OED textual prototypes
Michael Bilynsky
Ivan Franko National University of Lviv
Falling back on the origin affiliations obtainable from the etymological dictionaries
and the OED/MED queries ME verbs are grouped into three layers: native verbs,
verbs of French lineage and verbs of Latin origin. Although about forty per cent of
the native verbs were inherited by the ME lexicon from OE and the two layers of
verbal borrowings are dated predominantly in ME textual prototypes there are not
only differences but also similarities between native vs. borrowed (aggregate or
French vs. Latin presented separately) bases as regards direct/inverse transpositional
time distribution in eight categories of deverbal (substantival/participial [adjectival]) derivation.
The docking of the chronological information from the OED with that
contained in the lexicographic sources compiled according to the onomasiological
tradition, the dictionaries of strings of synonyms being among them, opens up an
integral area of diachronic semantic research. We have brought into the latter the
problem of word-forming re-categorization evinced in the so-called derivationally
reflected synonymy and the issue of the description of word-formation focusing on
the characteristics of the derivational bases.
The succession of constituents in strings of categorial classes of deverbal
coinages is juxtaposed with that in the strings of respective common-root verbs. The
obtained bodies of matrices are analysed according to the extent of the strings’
consecutive similarity (chronotropism) and mean values of their constituents’
placement preservation at specific lengths that can be alternatively expressed in
terms of the positive/negative sequential outcomes or the OED diachronic textual
prototypes age differentials. Significant fluctuations between the etymological layers
of verbs as regards these parameters have been revealed.
The description based on the onomasiological types is supplemented with the
distribution fluctuations originating from the suffixal variance of tokens in
(lexicalized) action/agent nouns and deverbal adjectives.
The presentation will demonstrate the heuristic possibilities of computeraided quantitative lexicology, in particular as regards the design, storage and
recoverability of diachronic derivational data, exemplary and/or exhaustive factual
illustrations as well as visualization of distributions. It will show one other way of
using the entire earliest quotations corpus from the OED (and/or MED) by
developing a complementary system of software sustainable diachronic queries.
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Middle English Studies Symposium (MESS) 2007 – ABSTRACTS
The poetics of Gest historiale of the destruction of Troy
Bartłomiej Błaszkiewicz
University of Warsaw
The paper seeks to provide a comprehensive overview of the poetic style and literary
context of the longest Middle English romance and one of the longest medieval
literary texts – the Gest historiale of the destruction of Troy. The thirty-six book
alliterative poem has rarely been at the centre of academic inquiry and the argument
pursued is designed to contribute somewhat to filling this unfortunate gap in
romance studies, especially since the poem deserves attention for its sophisticated
handling of the alliterative line and a unique treatment of the traditional story.
The discussion is thus meant to illustrate the intermingling of the romance and
epic conventions which provide the poem with its unique character and the basic
idea on which the argument is based is that the poem utilizes the widest possible
historical and literary tradition for the story of the Trojan war in order to make the
most of the interlacement tradition which had long been the staple narratorial
technique of the French romance, but war rarely developed in the English context.
Another issue looked at is the interplay of the concepts of the cyclical nature of the
social and political life and the linearity of history in the traditional understanding
developed by medieval Christianity.
Furthermore the argument is also designed to address the question of how
the formulaic character of the prosody common to the Middle English alliterative
romance determines the style of the piece. In order to do so one shall compare the
poetics of Gest historiale with other outstanding examples of the alliterative romance
like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Morte D’Arthure, or The wars of Alexander. The
argument is to define the basic features of the mnemonic grid governing the
distribution of the conventional poetic material and, at the same time, to define the
features of poetic style which make for the unique character of the poetic language
employed.
On variation of dual and plural personal pronouns in Old English texts
Vladimir Bondar
Saint-Petersburg Institute for Linguistic Research
Some Old English texts show consistent confusion of dual and plural personal
pronouns, which finds its parallels in other Old Germanic languages, e.g. Gothic.
Undoubtedly, this process is connected with the fading of the dual category, which
was rather convincingly shown in Seppänen 1985. At the same time it is an
undeniable fact that the extinction of the dual in the Old Germanic languages had its
own peculiarities in each separate language though sharing some common features.
The example of Old Icelandic will suffice to prove this fact. So presumably some
peculiar features could be found in Old English. The corpus texts have been analyzed
to single out the time, date and dialect where this process took place. The given
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Middle English Studies Symposium (MESS) 2007 – ABSTRACTS
material allowed to distinguish two kinds of dual/plural confusion. These two types
differ according to the time, dialect and genre of the text. The confusion proper is to
be found in the Mercian dialect where it is most consistent. This fact was then
analyzed from the angle of the regional sociolinguistic status. The presence of
bilinguals [Poussa 1982] in that area was one of the factors which could make up for
a rapider deletion of the dual. As a result of contact with Common Nordic which had
no dual pronouns bilinguals could start confusing plural and dual pronouns more
often. This can be traced in the text where the author puts the Tironian note between
‘eow’ (you) and ‘inc’ (you both) as well as from the statistics of such usage in the
texts of various dialects. Furthermore the hypothesis of the language contact
influence is supported by some data from the modern language contacts. Thus the
languages which have the category of dual (Koryak, Khanty and Mansy languages)
often replace dual forms by the plural ones under the influence of Russian [Lyskova
2001, Zhukova 1997]. All other factor which were propounded to explain the loss of
the dual category such as the Latin influence for Old High German [see Howe 1996]
have been discarded in connection with the Old English phenomenon.
REFERENCES:
Poussa, P.
1982
Seppänen, A.
1985
“The evolution of early standard English: the creolization hypothesis”, Studia Anglica
Posnaniensia 14: 69–85.
“On the use of the dual in Gothic“, Zeitschrift für Deutsches Altertum und Deutsche
Literatur 114: 1–41.
Lyskova, N. A.
2001
“Protsessy utraty form dvojstvennogo chisla (Dual) v sovremennykh obsko-ugrskikh
yazykakh“, Materialy XXX mezhvuzovskoj nauchno-metodicheskoj konferentsii
prepodavatelej i aspirantov. Vypusk 27. Sektsiya Uralistiki, Chast’. 2. — SPb.:
Filologicheskij fakultet SpbGU: 3–9.
Twist and turn: On the visual rhetoric of Old English variation
Rafał Borysławski
University of Silesia
The paper investigates aspects and functions of repetition and cyclicity present in
Anglo-Saxon visual and literary culture, whose principal emanation to be discussed
here is the poetic device of variation. Along with the form of kenning, it is
fundamental to Old English literary discourse and is widespread in Old English
poetry. Anglo-Saxon variation, reminiscent of classical periphrasis, is arguably best
defined by Arthur Brodeur in his The poetic art of Beowulf as “a double or multiple
statement of the same concept or idea in different words, with a more or less
perceptible shift in stress”. All content-words in an Anglo-Saxon poetic text may lend
themselves to variation and the forms the figure may assume are manifold. Variation
then appears as a model of creative recycling, but – what is much more interesting
for the scope of the paper – its idea shares some basic similarities not only with the
construction of numerous Anglo-Saxon poems, but also with what constitutes their
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Middle English Studies Symposium (MESS) 2007 – ABSTRACTS
content. Cyclicity and repetition permeate Anglo-Saxon literary world to the point
nearing obsession, and, in an intriguing manner, the themes and techniques parallel
to Old English textual variation are also present among Anglo-Saxon artifacts of
visual culture, abounding in cross-references to Celtic and Norse convoluted animal
patterns.
The chief aim of the paper is to present various manifestations of Old English
textual and visual variations and enquire about their possible purposes and origins,
stretching, I believe, much further than mere embellishment of texts and objects on
the one hand, and the consciousness of earthly mutability and unpredictability on the
other. I shall argue that the functions of Old English poetic and visual variations,
much as they were concerned with the external artistry of poems or artifacts, were
chiefly mnemonic. Thus from an outwardly purely ornamental purpose, the function
of variation extended to representations of an intertwined macro- and microcosmic
model, combining the labyrinthine ornament with memory and portraying the twists
and turns of fate as possessing an unpredictable rhythm.
Chivalrous male werewolves versus deviant she-werewolves: Medieval and
Victorian anthropomorphization of the Bestiary lupus
Katarzyna Bronk
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań
“Every devil must have a face.
Even if it is a wolf's face,
even if it is a serpent's face ...
it must be animal or human
or some hybrid of the two”
Hilary Mantel1
Categorizing anything or anyone as monstrous in a given time period depends on
many cultural and social variables. In case of literary monsters or beast it is possible
to trace their common source, which allows for the selection of determinants that
contribute to defining monstrosity. The Bible and various bestiaries, registers of real
and fabulous beings, function as a matrix for recent literary descriptions of abnormal
beings. By choosing a beast, lupus, which in Christian tradition and imagery
represent the Devil, I shall analyze the literary representation of this faunal monster
which undergoes human-animal hybridization or anthropomorphosis. Inspired by
Cohen's (1994: 61) statements that in medieval times “humanity was measured in the
distance from the animal”, and that “[t]he search for perfect humanity consisted in
distancing oneself as far as possible from the animal”, I wish to investigate the results
of humanizing the beast, either by giving it an anthropoid form or by endowing the
beast with human character. I try to prove that in medieval literature
anthropomorphizing is a process of ennoblement, allowing humanity to reign over
the bestial element; whereas in Victorian fiction such a transformation denotes a
strengthening of the evil potential of the monster. This will be shown on the example
1
Hilary Mantel 2000. Fludd. New York: Owl/Henry Colt & Company.
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Middle English Studies Symposium (MESS) 2007 – ABSTRACTS
of werewolves which are hybrid reincarnations of bestiary and biblical monsters. My
ultimate point of reference and primary source of the characterization and the
symbolic meaning of the beast is the thirteenth century Bestiary (MS Bodley 764).
Marie de France's Bisclavret, a lay from the twelfth century, and the anonymous
William of Palerne or William and the Werwolf, a fourteenth-century Middle English
translation of a French romance, are discussed to present the civility and nobility of
the medieval werewolf. Frederick Marryat's The white wolf from the Hartz Mountains
(1839) is to show that the change from Bestiary-stemming lupus into a Victorian ladywerewolf only added to the monstrosity of the beast. The question of the sex of the
human-animal beast seems significant in the discussion of humanized monsters since
it determines the literary presentation of both medieval and Victorian
anthropomorphized beasts. My aim is to show that the medieval werewolf remains
virtuous and courteous because it is a male changed into a monster, and the
Victorian werewolves are more portentous and dangerous when they are females.
REFERENCES:
Cohen, Esther
1994
“Animals in medieval perceptions: the image of the ubiquitous other”, in: Manning,
Aubrey and James Serpell (eds.), 59-80.
Manning, Audrey – James Serpell (eds.)
1994
Animals and human society: changing perspectives. London & New York: Routledge.
Old Frisian and Anglo-Saxon legal texts – lexical and stylistic comparison
Katarzyna Buczek
The main focus of the paper is to deliver the linguistic and lexical comparison of
fragments of Germanic legal corpus; Anglo-Saxon legal texts: from Æthelberht’s code
of laws for Kent to Laws of Alfred and Ine, and Old Frisian: Seventeen statutes and
Twenty-four land laws from First riustring codex. These two groups of texts provide
certain legal limitations, however are of slightly different structure. Old Frisian laws
are, most of the time, the result of analysis of individual cases which are later on
generalized, whereas Anglo-Saxon legal codes are of more organized form, prepared
for promulgation by one authority.
The paper will contrast the lexical choices done by the scribes, especially the
level of formality of the language, structures of the sentences, whether they are
organized in a dialog or prescriptive vs. proscriptive form, as well as the
sophistication and abstractness of the words and phrases. The analysis of lexical
preferences as far as Old English and Old Frisian equivalent words are concerned
will also be provided.
Furthermore, the styles of the texts will be compared and analyzed with the main
focus on the usage of the different text types. Thus, the presence of the descriptive,
narrative or argumentative elements in the texts is to be taken into consideration
while presenting the differences and similarities between them.
The paper is going to show the variety of stylistic methods used within the
same Germanic linguistic culture, as far as legal texts are concerned.
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Middle English Studies Symposium (MESS) 2007 – ABSTRACTS
Feminine acedia in Robert Henryson’s The testament of Cresseid
Anna Czarnowus
University of Silesia, Katowice
The paper focuses on the mysterious melancholy that Saturn endows Cresseid with
in her dream vision. Consequently, she is touched with leprosy, in the Middle Ages
customarily perceived as the disease of the lecherous due to its transferability
through touch, breath, and intercourse. Curiously enough, here the melancholic
condition becomes the predicament of the woman who "sumtime countit the flour of
womanheid" (The testament of Cresseid, 608), as Troilus has it engraved on her
tombstone in the end. The sense of loss that Cresseid experiences once abandoned by
Diomed makes itself transparent in the disintegration that her body undergoes. The
experience of spiritual deprivation may be analyzed against the background of the
medieval idea of acedia, the sinful listlessness of the spirit affecting mostly monks,
hence men, rather than women. The question of what Carolyn Dinshaw, the author
of Chaucer's sexual poetics, termed "reading like a man", has to be returned to,
especially if we consider the hypothesis that Henryson allows us to "read like a
woman" more than Chaucer. The unfathomable melancholy of the Middle Scots
poet's heroine has to be interpreted in the light of a less known medieval tradition
which surmised that the lecherous were able to practice imitatio Christi. Through her
suffering Cresseid becomes an everyman rather than merely a representative of her
"fickle" sex (as fickle as Fortune that, according to Henryson, afflicts the heroine so
sorely). Her extravert personality metamorphoses into the pensive nature, as she
ponders on her one-time infidelity and on the transience of human life, especially in
the case of the affluent and the powerful. Her degradation symbolizes the possible
fall of all those who enjoy their wealth and authority.
Cresseid's tormented body becomes an emblem of the suffering that affects all
humans, regardless of their position. The pain of the world is projected on her
physicality: the all-human torment, be it physical or mental, is here mapped onto the
body of one of the ladies "of Troy and Grece" (The testament of Cresseid, 452). Cresseid
becomes one of Saturn's children, the humans afflicted with melancholy but also
with the diseases unexpectedly ravaging the body. The Age of Saturn, the time when
both excess and deprivation may be observed in the world of nature and in the social
life, may function as the background for the analysis of Cresseid's state, especially if
we remember the interpretations of Chaucer's works in the light of that astrological
and mythographic theory. Particularly the characterization of Saturn as a "churlish"
character in Henryson's poem allows us to draw such an analogy: the Age of Saturn
was, after all, the time of "cherles rebellyng"(Canterbury tales, I: 2459). The vision of
melancholy and contagious diseases that affect the children of that planetary deity
thus becomes more all-encompassing: it is extended to embrace a woman who
developed her spirituality late in life, but whose repentance was convincing and gave
her more chances for salvation.
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Middle English Studies Symposium (MESS) 2007 – ABSTRACTS
On the epenthesis of p in Middle English
Anna Hebda
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań
Unlike vowel epenthesis, which may serve as a tool for breaking up articulatorily
complex consonant clusters, consonant insertion is not infrequently a consequence of
“mistiming” (McMahon 1994 [1999]: 15, 16) itself leading to an overlap of the
articulatory gestures involved in the production of each of the two members of a
cluster (Ohala 2003 [2005]: 681), whereby an extra (unetymological) consonant results
in between the adjacent segments.
Neither impressive in terms of scale nor particularly influential in terms of
potential restructuring of the system, the phenomenon of consonant intrusion in
early English has not been investigated thoroughly. With the exception of recent
contributions by Wełna (2005a, b) on bilabial and dental stop insertion respectively,
or over century-old papers by Jespersen (1902) and Logeman (1904) discussing the
origin of unhistorical n in nightingale, there are only passing references to the
process in standard reference books (e.g. Jordan 1934 [1974]; Luick 1940-64; Fisiak
1968 [2004]; Wełna 1978). Comments, sometimes as short as one sentence, and hardly
ever longer than a page, are basically restricted to stating that a change of a given
type was, at some point, operative in English, specifying the environment for the
development of an epenthetic segment, and providing a number of illustrative
examples. What the reader does not find out, however, is, for example, whether the
phenomenon was equally common in all dialects of English for all historical periods.
The aim of the present paper is to have a closer look at an epenthetic p and its
ups and downs in mediaeval English. What is known of the consonant is that it
generally surfaced between the bilabial nasal m and the following dental/alveolar,
be it s, t, n, or þ, as early as the beginning of the 13th century (Jordan 1934 [1974];
Luick 1940-64; McLaughlin 1963; Wełna 1978). As regards the mechanism of insertion
in the case under study, the intrusive p is seen here as resulting from “a
denasalisation of m” (McLaughlin 1963: 104) in the sense that during the transition
from one articulatory gesture to another the synchrony or coordination is disturbed.
Consequently, the velic closure occurs before the remaining articulators manage to
take up the target positions for the oncoming segment. What remains to be examined
is thus (1) which items underwent sporadic and which permanent insertion, (2) what
would the latest recorded instances of sporadic epenthetic p be, (3) which dialect is
the first/last to display traces of insertion of the bilabial plosive, (4) whether the rate
of insertion is more or less the same for Early and Late Middle English or not, (5)
whether the rate of insertion is the same irrespective of the dialect area, and, finally,
(6) whether the rate of insertion is affected in any way by the native/foreign origin of
the lexeme. The analysis has been carried out on a selection of texts representing both
early and late mediaeval English.
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Middle English Studies Symposium (MESS) 2007 – ABSTRACTS
Ac non fremefuler or ah nan mare freomful. The alleged Latin provenance
of periphrastic adjectival grading in Early Middle English
Joanna Janecka
University of Warsaw
How know зe þe comparatyf degre? For he passethe his posityf wyt þis aduerbe magis, and endithe in
Englisse in ‘-ir’, as ‘whitur’ … þat is to say ‘whittur: more white’ (…) How know зe þe superlatyf
degre? For hit passeth his posytyf wt þis aduerbe maxime and endithe in Englisse in '-yste' as 'wisyst'
... þat ys to sey 'wisist: most wyse'. (Peniarth Comparacio(2) [Pen 356B]; 66/23, 68/104-5)
Periphrastic adjectival grading has its roots in the Old English intensification by
means of swithe/bet/mo which later became grammaticalised and which, undoubtedly,
were to a certain extent influenced by foreign languages English was in contact with.
Monographs and studies on the adjectival grading in English do not offer a
simple answer as to the extent of such foreign influence, nor do they indicate a
language (or languages: French, Latin or Scandinavian) that might have played a
decisive role in shaping the two types of grading, suffixal and periphrastic. While
French with its periphrasis as the basic grading mode does not necessitate an
elaborate explanation and is widely agreed on, Pound’s (1901) assumption of Latin
influence on English periphrasis is usually more often refuted than conceded (cf. e.g.
Rohr 1929, Mossé 1952, Graband 1965).
The present study aims at furnishing statistical data collected from the 12th 13th c. homilies and religious treatises adapted from Latin exemplars or those heavily
influenced by Latin monastic tradition (e.g. Trinity homilies, Lambeth homilies, Bodleian
homilies, Kentish homilies). The paper includes an overview of the development of
adjectival grading in Latin, followed by the presentation of the grading paradigm of
adjectives in Early Middle English religious prose, illustrating the distribution of
suffixal and periphrastic degree exponents in chosen texts, with special consideration
of the adjectival types, their provenance and syllable structure, as well as potential
dialectal differences.
REFERENCES:
Gildersleeve, B.L. Gonzalez Lodge
1990 [1895] Latin grammar. Houndmills−London: Macmillan.
Graband, Gerhard
1965
Die entwicklung der frühneuenglischen nominalflexion. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.
Grandgent, C. H.
1907
An introduction to vulgar Latin. (Beath’s Modern Language Series.) Boston: D. C. Heath
& Co.
Knüpfer, Hans
1921
“Die anfänge der periphrastischen komparation im Englischen”, Englische Studien 55:
321-389.
Mossé, Fernand
1952
A handbook of Middle English. (Translated by James A. Walker.) Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins Press.
Pound, Louise
1901
The comparison of adjectives in English in the 15th and the 16th century. Heidelberg: Carl
Winter’s Universitätsbuchhandlung.
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Middle English Studies Symposium (MESS) 2007 – ABSTRACTS
Rohr, Anny
1929
Die steigerung des neuenglischen eigenschaftswortes im 17. und 18. jahrhundert mit
ausblicken auf den sprachgebrauch der gegenwart. Giessen: Giessen University.
Auxiliation in progress: Diachronic grammaticalisation changes in Old
English and Early Middle English have perfects
Matti Kilpiö
University of Helsinki
This paper discusses developments in Old English and early Middle English HAVE
perfects. It focuses on changes in the inflection of the past participle and word-order
changes connected with the HAVE perfect (typically sentence-bracing, exbraciation
and adjacency of HAVE and the participle, all in relation to the placement of the
direct object).
The most important findings are that the inflection of the past participle, already a
marginal feature in early Old English, becomes ever rarer in late Old English and
disappears in early Middle English. Word-order changes seem to take place at a
slower pace: the sentence-brace and the placement of the direct object before the past
participle are still common word-order patterns in early Middle English. The loss of
inflection and word-order changes are parallel processes contributing to the
grammaticalisation of the HAVE perfect, but they do not appear to be closely
interdependent. The grammaticalisation of HAVE perfects and the auxiliation of
HAVE take decisive steps towards completion within the time period studied.
Verging on totality? On 'minority indefinites' conveying totality in Old
English
Leena Kahlas-Tarkka
University of Helsinki
Most of the Germanic indefinite pronouns conveying totality are formed from a common
Proto Indo-European stem, used for both indefinite and interrogative pronouns. These
formations have partly been produced by grammaticalisation processes, in which prefixes
have lost their function as independent lexemes. Similar processes can explain the
etymologies of several Old English indefinites for ‘every’ and ‘each’. There are a considerable
number of words used for expressions with universal reference, but the present study is
devoted to the low frequency words used in this function. The paper sheds some light on the
great variety of expressions available in Old English, supplements earlier studies on some of
these structures, and especially maps reasons for the low frequencies of others. The words in
focus are gehwæþer, æghwæþer, welhwylc, welhwa, gewelhwylc and æthwa, which not only
illustrate developments in the intensification and grammaticalisation of early English
function words, but also their simplification and gradual loss. The data have been retrieved
from the Dictionary of Old English corpus.
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Middle English Studies Symposium (MESS) 2007 – ABSTRACTS
Word order patterns in Old English and Old High German subordinate
clauses: A corpus-based comparative study
Anna Kamińska
University of Lodz
The aim of this paper is to present, analyse and compare word-order patterns of
subordinate clauses in two closely related Germanic languages: Old English and Old
High German. The development and gradual differentiation of word order in those
languages, stemming from the common Proto-Germanic source, is a complex story
which must take into consideration foreign influences as well as internal
mechanisms. Nowadays, the word order of English and German subordinates is
completely different. The former one retains the basic SVO order characteristic of the
whole English system, whereas the other follows the V-final pattern:
Er sagt, dass es wahrscheinlich ist.
[He says that it probable is]
This rule applies to all types of subordinate clauses in Modern German. More
than one thousand years ago, however, this pattern was rather a tendency than a
rule, and Old High German texts are not so consistent in this respect:
wela gisihu ih in dinem hrustim,
[well see I by your armour]
dat du habes heme herron goten,
[that you have at home a good master]
dat du noh bi desemo riche reccheo ni wurti. –
[that you never by this prince banished have not been] (Hildebrandslied)
The interesting thing is that in this complex sentence only one subordinate
clause is V-final, whereas the other one demonstrates a ‘non-subordinate’ order. In
Old English, some subordinate clauses also follow the V-final order, and certain
scholars prefer to treat it as a rule, e.g.
In Old English, main clauses mostly obeyed a V-2 constraint, while subordinates mostly remained V-F
(Denison 1993: 54).
Dependent clauses on the contrary display in OE the V-last or “subordinate order” (Onesti 1993: 90).
However, one has to be careful when analysing those patterns, because in Old
Germanic languages subordination was not fully developed yet, and sometimes it is
difficult to decide whether a given clause is subordinate or independent since
subordinating conjunctions and adverbs were often identical in form. Word-order, as
Mitchell (1985) admits, cannot serve as a criterion since subordinates may follow
various patterns, and the exact frequency of those patterns must be empirically
determined.
This paper aims to compare Old English and Old High German word-order
patterns in different types of subordinate clauses: nominal, relative and adverbial of
time, place, condition, comparison, concession, cause, purpose and result. The
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Middle English Studies Symposium (MESS) 2007 – ABSTRACTS
analysis will address the theory of Davis and Bernhardt (2002), who claim that there
are no differences between Old English and Old High German word order, and that
there exists a common “West-Germanic”, or even “Old-Germanic” syntax.
The corpus used for the purpose of the study contains more than 3500 clauses,
including 1296 subordinates. The present paper is specifically devoted to subordinate
clauses, but it is a part of a larger project entitled The influence of text type on word
order of Old Germanic languages: a corpus-based comparative study of Old English and Old
High German (for conclusions regarding non-conjoined declarative clauses, see
Kaminska 2007).
REFEREFCES:
Behagel, Otto
1932.
Deutschesyntax: eine geschichtliche darstellung. Band IV: Worstellung. Periodenbau.
Heidelberg: Carl Winters Universitätsbuchhandlung.
Bernhardt, Karl A. - Graeme Davis
1997
The word order of Old High German [Studies in German language and literature].
Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press.
Davis, Graeme - Karl A. Bernhardt
2002
Syntax of West Germanic:. The syntax of Old English and Old High German. Göppingen:
Kümmerle Verlag.
Davis, Graeme
2006
Comparative syntax of Old English and Old Icelandic: linguistic, literary and historical
implications. Oxford: Peter Lang.
Denison David
1993
English Historical Syntax: Verbal Constructions. London - New York: Longman.
Kaminska, Anna
2007
“The word order of Old English and Old High German non-conjoined declarative
clauses in different text types”, Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 43: 2007.
Mitchell, Bruce
1985
Old English syntax. 2 Vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Onesti, Nicoletta Francovich
1993
“Verb syntax in the Peterborough Chronicle (1132–54)”, English diachronic syntax: 89 –
110.
Amour courtois in John Lyly’s Endimion and William Shakespeare’s Love’s
labour’s lost
Urszula Kizelbach
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań
Amour courtois follows the Ovidian understanding of love as “a certain inborn
suffering” experienced by first, a Troubadour poet in the Provencal poetry, and then
a knight from the medieval romance. Courtly love continues to be present in the
Renaissance, but with a different effect. John Lyly in Endimion faithfully follows the
medieval understanding of courtly love as “frauendienst” or “service to the lady”.
Here the protagonist, Endimion, is a typical representative of the courtly custom,
which makes him serve/suffer and worship Cynthia, the most virtuous of all ladies.
In Lyly love grows out of the medieval cult of the monarch, as Cynthia turns out to
be an idealised and spiritualised Queen Elisabeth of England. Concurrent with
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Middle English Studies Symposium (MESS) 2007 – ABSTRACTS
Renaissance values, the courtiers from Shakespeare’s Love's labour’s lost espouse a
different ideal, which is knowledge, as they are focused on creating an Academe, and
declare to abjure the company of the ladies for three years. Much as Endimion is a
perfect (humble, patient) lover that sticks to the medieval courtly etiquette and treats
his love towards Cynthia as an ennobling feeling, the Men of Navarre in
Shakespeare’s comedy undermine amour courtois through their behaviour and
actions. They speak of courtship in abusive terms, they don’t idealise ladies any more
but indulge in erotic, not romantic, fantasies about women. In Shakespeare
courtliness is only a learned pose and a certain convention of talking and acting love,
which is recognised as an impractical, unrealistic occupation by both the suitors and
their ladies. The aim of this article is to present the after-life of amour courtois in the
Renaissance as a “love’s labour’s lost”, where courtliness is mocked and purposefully
made imperfect to show that the characters are fully aware of their medieval legacy.
Character Comedy in the Icelandic Family Saga
Fritz Koning
University of Northern Iowa
Although, of course, medieval Icelandic literature shows no evidence of a
Molieresque Comedie Humaine, a couple of the major sagas, focusing on individual
heroes, such as "Egil's Saga" or Grettis Saga" seem to show distinctive traits of
character comedy. This in the sense that human frailty and peculiar idiosyncracies
are highlighted over and beyond the normal amount found in the saga. The paper
will attempt to trace and categorize these and see them in the general context of
humor in medieval literature.
A medievalist reading of The combat by Edwin Muir
Barbara Kowalik
Warsaw University
The relationship of man to his natural environment and particularly to the animal
world is a prominent theme in the poetry of the twentieth-century Scottish writer,
Edwin Muir. I propose that Muir perceives animals through the paradigms of some
medieval genres and concepts. Thus, he mythologises beasts, especially horses, and
presents them as heroes in the vein of epic and romance. He uses the conventions of
fairy tale and folktale. He envisages animals as immobilised in the form of visual
images and emblems, especially heraldic symbols. My particular focus is Muir's
poem "The combat", which I read as a modern beast fable. I compare Muir's use of
this genre to the way it was employed by one of the most remarkable medieval
fabulists, the fifteenth-century Scottish poet, Robert Henryson. On the whole, Muir's
animal dreams, besides the Arthurian and chivalric subjects in his poetry, appear to
be one more aspect of his medievalism, a yearning towards a pre-industrial society
epitomised by an idealised medieval kingdom.
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Middle English Studies Symposium (MESS) 2007 – ABSTRACTS
“What is weak? What is strong? Identifying verbal forms in Old and Middle
English“
Marcin Krygier
Adam Mickiewicz University
There exist a whole range of complex interrelations between the two main classes of
verbs in Mediaeval English, weak and strong. Theoretical studies so far have
focussed on the systemic aspects of these interrelations (e.g., Price 1910, Wełna 1991,
1997, Krygier 1994), while synchronic accounts of the verbal inflection in individual
texts, manuscripts, and authors, usually have been descriptive in their approach (cf.
among others Thüns 1909, Füller 1937, Francovich-Onesti 1993). This reflects a more
universal tendency to approach the issues of paradigmatic competition in Old and
Middle English only in an impressionistic, slightly superficial fashion, cf. Lass' 1997
assumption of a "roughly equal text-likelihood of any noun form", which Lass
himself admits to be probably counterfactual.
The present paper aims at redressing this imbalance to a certain extent. On the
basis of data extracted from two major texts from more or less the same dialectal
area, the Vespasian Psalter and the Ancrene Riwle, the following questions will be
addressed: (1) what is the relative frequency of individual verbal forms in
Old/Middle English, (2) how distinctive are the weak and strong paradigms in
Old/Middle English, especially in the present tense, and (3) what can be gleaned
from the data about the synchronic organisation of the verbal paradigm in
Old/Middle English.
REFERENCES:
Francovich Onesti, Nicoletta
1993
"Verb syntax in the 'Peterborough Chronicle' (1132-1154)"; in: Maurizio Gotti (ed.) ,
English diachronic syntax. 89-109.
Füller, Liselotte
1937
Das Verbum in der 'Ancrene Riwle'. Jena: Neuenhahn.
Krygier, Marcin
1994
The disintegration of the English strong verb system. Frankfurt am Main: Lang.
Lass, Roger
1997
"Why house is an Old English 'masculine a-stem'"; in: Terttu Nevalainen -- Leena
Kahlas-Tarkka (eds.), To explain the present: Studies in the changing English language in
honour of Matti Rissanen. 101-109.
Price, Hereward T.
1910
A history of ablaut in the strong verbs from Caxton to the end of the Elizabethan period.
College Park: McGrath.
Thüns, Bernhard
1909
Das Verbum bei Orm: Ein Beitrag zur altenglischen Grammatik. Weida: Thomas & Hubert.
Wełna, Jerzy
1991
"The strong to weak shift in English verbs: A reassessment"; Kalbotyra 42: 129-139.
1997
"Weak-to-strong: A shift in English verbs?"; in: Raymond Hickey -- Stanisław Puppel
(eds.), Language history and linguistic modelling: A festschrift for Jacek Fisiak on his 60th
birthday; 215-228.
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Middle English Studies Symposium (MESS) 2007 – ABSTRACTS
The rise of had better/rather structure
Andrzej Łęcki
University of Silesia
The competition between ‘have’ and ‘be’ has already been much discussed in
literature. Being the verbs of very low semantic content they could often be used
almost interchangeably, e.g.: Iordan is haten seo ea þe se hælend on gefulwad wæs, & heo is
swiðe mycel wæter & swiðe strang stream hafað, & sæflod on yrneð. ‘This is a river called
Jordan where Jesus has been baptised. It has a lot of water and a very strong current
and it flows to the sea.’ (971) HomS 2 (Verc 16) 64. Crosslinguistically, but also within
one language, the struggle between ‘have’ and ‘be’ is often observed in the way age
is given. In Middle English, for instance, the structure with HAVEN is commonly
attested, compare: Þet knaue child for-tene ger Schel habbe. ‘That male child fourteen
years shall have.’ c1350 (a1333) Shoreham Poems (Add 17376) 61/1726.
In addition, the rivalry between ‘have’ and ‘be’ is perceivable when the two
verbs function more like auxiliaries rather than full verbs. Visser (1963-1973 [2002]:
1471ff.) examines in detail the appearance of is to do with construction in the
twentieth century in lieu of has to do with – present in English since Mediaeval
English. Another example concerns the use of BE in the perfect tense with transitive
verbs, which seems quite an innovation, e.g.: He must be finished it by already. I’ll be
broken another tennis rocket. He must be got a new one. Stephen Nagle (p.c.). Such
exchangeability of HAVE and BE must be due to a very high frequency of
appearance of these verbs, which in turn has resulted in their wearing off the
semantic content to the point where they are nothing more than meaningless
phonetic substance.
This paper explores the development of English HAD BETTER/RATHER
structure. I try to show that the employment of HAVE before BETTER is a case of
substitution of BE in the original construction which is composed of the verb BEON
‘be’ accompanied by BET ‘better’ or alternatively by a comparative form of LEOF
‘desirable’ and a Noun Phrase (usually a pronoun) in the dative case followed by a
that-clause. Compare: betere him is þ he þæs dæges hit forga. ‘It is better for him to
refrain from it this day.’ Conf 3.1.1 (Raith O) 3.14. Prima facie, the initial construction
does not have much to do with Present-Day English HAD BETTER where the Noun
Phrase is in the Nominative case and in the stead of that-clause, a bare infinitive is
used. It is clear that the development is much more complex and it might constitute a
perfect example of a grammaticalisation path of HAVE. In fact, the changes that have
affected HAD BETTER are easily accommodated by the theory of
grammaticalisation. I attempt to show how the mechanisms and principles of
grammaticalisation set out by Lehmann (1982) [2002], Hopper (1991) and Heine
(2003) [2005] apply in this particular case of grammaticalisation.
REFERENCES:
Closs Traugott, Elizabeth – Bernd Heine (eds.)
1991
Approaches to grammaticalization: focus on theoretical and methodological issues. Vol. 1:
Typological studies in language, 19, 1. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins
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Middle English Studies Symposium (MESS) 2007 – ABSTRACTS
Publishing Company.
Heine, Bernd
2003 [2005]
"Grammaticalizaton”, in: Brian D. Joseph & Janda, Richard D. (eds.), 575-601.
Hopper, Paul J.
1991
“On some principles of grammaticalization”, in: Elizabeth Closs Traugott & Bernd
Heine, (eds.), 17-35.
Joseph D., Brian – Richard D., Janda (eds.)
2003 [2005]
The handbook of historical linguistics. (Blackwell handbooks in linguistics.) Padstow: TJ
International Ltd.
Lehmann, Christian
1982 [2002]
Thoughts on Grammaticalization. (Second, revised edition) ASSidUE 9. (PDF format)
<http://www.bibliothek.uni-erfurt.de/target/ assiduelink.html>
Visser, F. Th.
1963-1973 [2002] An Historical Syntax of the English Language. (3 parts in 4 vols.) Leiden: EJ Brill.
The categorisation of the infinitive in the Old English ACI constructions
Janusz Malak
Opole University
The Old English ACI constructions are believed to be characterized by propositional
properties interpretationally similar to structures which within the GB format are
classified as control (both subject and object) constructions, Exceptional Clauses, and
Small Clauses. What is unexpected about the Old English ACI is the observation that
this structure is found as the complement of roughly two types of verbs, i.e. causative
and perception verbs. The evidence corroborating the existence of the structures
comparable with Modern English Exceptional Clauses is so meager that it is believed
that Exceptional Clauses did not exist in Old English, the extant examples of this
structure being Latinisms. Attributing the propositional properties to the Old English
ACI constructions is mainly based on the assumption that the infinitive form in such
structures plays the analogical role to that of the predicate in tensed clauses. Such an
analysis is also based on the observation that the role of the object of the higher verb
in relation to that of the infinitive is analogical to that found in the Modern English
control and Exceptional Clause constructions. It will be argued in this paper that
such an assumption is not justified because the categorial specification of the Old
English infinitive appears to have differed to a certain extent from that of its Modern
English counterpart. It is the categorial specification of this constituent that will be
held responsible for the lack of the predicational relation between the oblique
marked NPs and the infinitival forms following them. This, in turn, will account for
the lack of the structures in Old English corresponding to Exceptional Clauses in
Modern English.
The problems addressed in this paper pertain to two issues. One of them is the
criterion helpful in determining the syntactic category specification of a given word.
In this case the analysis is aimed at determining whether the form classified as
‘infinitive’ is characterized by exclusively nominal or verbal features. The other issue
pertains to the interpretational category termed ‘predication’. It is assumed here that
the existence of structures termed Exceptional Clauses in Modern English is possible
due to the unequivocal verbal syntactic specification of the infinitive. The lack of
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Middle English Studies Symposium (MESS) 2007 – ABSTRACTS
such structures in Old English can be attributed to the syntactic categorization of the
infinitive distinct from its Modern English equivalent. Its syntactic categorization
will be held responsible for a different role this constituent assumes in the derivation
of ACI structures. This remark points to the theoretical model in which the material
will be analysed. The analysis will be set in the minimalist model which describes
structures as the products of derivational process where formal syntactic features
connected with the syntactic categorisation play a most important role.
Participant-internal and participant-external necessity: The case of
*þurfan and þearf
Jerzy Nykiel
University of Silesia
In this paper the shades of the meaning of necessity conveyed by the OE verb *þurfan
and the OE noun þearf are contrasted. It has been demonstrated by Loureiro-Porto
(2005) and Nykiel (2007) that, contrary to earlier assessments, e.g. Warner (1993),
*þurfan is predominately a token of necessity external to the obligee. The noun þearf,
when used in collocation with agan and beon, yields structures like we agan þearfe and
us is þearf and, concurrently, it is in such structures that the meaning of necessity
lends itself to comparison with that of *þurfan. Some of the queries to be raised are to
what extent the types of necessity occurring in the relevant structures are compatible
with each other and how they relate to the necessity of *þurfan.
The concept of necessity to be used in this study builds on van der Auwera
and Plungian’s (1998) scheme where non-epistemic necessity is divided into
participant-internal necessity and participant-external necessity. This specification of
necessity when combined with the tenets of Sweetser’s (1990) and Talmy’s (2000)
force dynamic approach, which assigns the roles of the Agonist and Antagonist to
the two participants in a context of necessity, allows a corpus-based scrutiny of the
occurrences of *þurfan and þearf. Working on a sample of examples retrieved from the
OE part of the Helsinki Corpus and the DOE corpus, I aim to check the occurrences
of *þurfan and þearf found in the sample against such parameters as, among others,
the source of the necessity, the role played by negative/non-assertive contexts,
performative use. A factor that should not be overlooked is the fact that the noun
þearf as used in the aforementioned collocations is a more frequent item than *þurfan.
All in all I hope to contribute to a better understanding of the means of the
expression of necessity in Old English. Importantly, besides commonly
acknowledged tokens of necessity like the pre-modal verbs, I take into account the
role played by the less central lexical expressions.
REFERENCES:
Loureiro-Porto, Lucia
2005
The semantic predecessors of need: from Old to Early Modern English. [Doctoral
dissertation, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela.]
Nykiel, Jerzy
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Middle English Studies Symposium (MESS) 2007 – ABSTRACTS
2007
Sweetser, Eve
1990
Expressing obligation in Old English. [Unpublished PhD dissertation, University
of Silesia.]
From etymology to pragmatics: metaphorical and cultural aspects of semantic
structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Talmy, Leonard
2000
Toward a cognitive semantics. Vol.1. Cambridge, Mass-London: MIT Press.
van der Auwera, Johan - Vladimir Plungian
1998
“Modality’s semantic map”, Linguistic Typology 2: 79-124.
Warner, Anthony R
1993
English auxiliaries. Structure and history. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Milton’s Christian warfare: The elements of psychomachia in Paradise lost
and Paradise regained
Jacek Olesiejko
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań
The heroes of Paradise lost and Paradise regained undergo a trial, which is to prove
their religious maturation and their readiness for salvation. Through metaphor,
allegory and debate, Milton incorporates a religious message behind the heroic
events and exploits in the epics. The two works deal with the theme of Christian
Warfare. Milton juxtaposes the good with the evil, vice and virtue and his heroes face
choices between the wrong and the right, the flesh and the spirit, the terrestrial and
the heavenly. These two epics depict characters, who build the foundation for their
faith through freedom of thought and self-reliance. In what follows, I would like to
suggest that Paradise lost and Paradise regained are the expression of Milton’s
Protestant stance on religious self-education. The first aim of the article is to analyse
the idea of Christian warfare in Paradise lost and Paradise regained. Finally, the
difference between Milton’s Christian warfare and the allegorical Psychomachia will
be examined.
For Milton, both good and evil are equally central to human moral experience.
In Areopagitica he states that in our post-lapsarian condition evil is inseparable from
good. He frequently stresses an idea that only the experience of evil can assure the
experience of good. Thus knowing good through evil is central to human moral
experience. What is more, true virtue can only originate through the contemplation
of vice; without sufficient exposition to evil, if virtue remains untried, it is “blank”.
He says that a human being does not bring innocence into the world, but impurity;
thus every human being must be purified by trial. The idea of the trial is central to
both poems. Whereas Paradise lost depicts human obedience and the subsequent
failure, Paradise regained depicts Christ's obedience and his victory over Satan. In both
epics, the human being is exposed to evil and various temptations. The first epic
demonstrates the unfallen condition of human reason and will; through the
transgression their purity is entirely lost. The danger may only come from the human
mind and heart, when they turn away from God. The psychomachia of Paradise lost
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Middle English Studies Symposium (MESS) 2007 – ABSTRACTS
describes our pre-lapsarian condition. Paradise regained, however, attends to our postlapsarian condition. The danger originates outside human mind. It is the temptations
of the world that cause the fragile human reason and will to turn away from God.
Therefore, Christ is tempted by Satan with wealth, power and earthly knowledge.
Here, through the successful trial, Christ proves his identity of the Son of God and
his purity is manifested through his victory over Satan.
Tehee! Interjection, emotion, grammar, and literature in Medieval English
Hans Sauer
University of Munich
In some modern grammars of English, e.g. Quirk et al. 1985, the interjection (or
exclamation) is seen as a nuisance which disturbs the orderly structure of the
language, or at least the grammarians' idea of how language should function
properly, and is accordingly condemned and largely ignored. This negative
treatment is a relatively new phenomenon, however. In traditional grammars, e.g. in
Aelfric's bilingual grammar from around 1000 A.D., the interjection was regularly
listed as the last of the eight word-classes (parts of speech), and the grammars
usually explained that interjections have the specific function to express emotions. To
be fair, the most recent grammars such as Biber et al. 2002 see the interjection in a
much more positive light than Quirk et al. and recognize their function to "signal
relations between speaker, hearer(s), and discourse".
In any case interjections played an important part in Old and Middle English
literature. For example, several Old English poems, including Beowulf, begin with the
exclamation hwaet, which has been much discussed; the Advent lyrics (Christ I) are
structured round the interjection eala, and the Old English version of the Soliloquies
comes up with emphatic sequences such as nese la nese 'no oh no', gea la gea 'yea oh
yea'. The inventory of interjections largely changed from Old English to Middle
English, and loan-words such as alas, fie, harrow, hay etc. became dominant among the
interjections. Chaucer, the foremost Middle English author, also provides us with a
rich array of exclamations; sometimes, several interjections were combined, as in
[Absolon] "Fy! allas! What have I do?" [Alisoun] "Tehee!" quod she and clapte the
window to.
In my paper, I shall look at theoretical aspects of the interjection as well as
attempt to establish an inventory for Old and Middle English, and I shall comment at
their use in Medieval English literature.
REFERENCES:
Biber, Douglas et al (ed.)
2002
Longman student grammar of spoken and written English. Harlow, Essex: Pearson
Education.
Mitchell, Bruce
1985
Old English syntax. 2 Vols., Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mustanoja, Tauno F.
1960
A Middle English syntax. Part I:Parts of Speech. Helsinki: Société Neophilologique.
Quirk, Randolph et al (ed.)
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Middle English Studies Symposium (MESS) 2007 – ABSTRACTS
1985
Sauer, Hans
2006
A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman.
"Aelfric and emotion", Poetica 66: 37-52.
Alfred Tennyson’s “The Holy Grail” – a defence of logocentrism in the
guise of medieval romance
Piotr Spyra
University of Łódź
Central to the development of Tennyson’s poetic Arthurian cycle, “The Holy Grail”
emerged from under the Laureate’s pen “half-way through the evolution” of the
Idylls of the king2. “In some ways the hardest idyll to write,” this “climactic” poem
marks a turning point in the series3, ushering in the impending doom that is to undo
the project of Arthur and unmistakeably designating the beginning of the end of
Camelot – “the transition from aspiration to desperation”4. Based upon “The Tale of
the Sankgreal” of Sir Thomas Malory, the idyll shares the main thematic concerns of
its source, such as the quest for the Holy Vessel, the specific focus on four particular
knights of the realm – Lancelot, Galahad, Percivale and Bors – or the underlying
involvement with the issues of purity and sinfulness. Even so, there is a significant
number of instances where the text departs from the original. The paper explores the
nature of these differences, attempting to identify the possible reasons behind the
tale’s restructuring. Highlighting the poem’s didacticism, it aims to unveil a
rhetorical strategy that imposes patterns of thought on the readers; in fact, much
more than a simple reworking of an old tale, “The Holy Grail” proves itself to be an
elaborate admonition of logocentrism in the guise of medieval romance.
My aim in this paper is to investigate the poem’s thematic focus on language,
and to examine the nature of its instructiveness. A study of the shift from the specific
to the unspecified and from the particular to the universal, clear in comparison with
Malory, serves to underline Tennyson’s Arthurian enterprise being above all a
didactic endeavour. As most changes pertain to the vision of the Grail and the
character of Galahad, I analyse the way their presentation affects the readers’ views
on the nature of language and the concept of Truth in general. With the Laureate’s
Galahad being much of a role model whose perfection is beyond the attainment of
the common folk, the text depicts a world void of the absolute Truth and full of
relativity, arguing nonetheless that this does not invalidate the notion of absolute
meanings and absolute points of reference in general. The purpose of the paper is
above all to shed some light on the how the elaborate didactic rhetoric of Tennyson’s
text makes use of its Malorean source and subordinates the details of the story to
support its own logocentric argument.
J. M. Gray, Thro’ the vision of the night: a study of source, evolution and structure in Tennyson’s Idylls of the
king (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1980) 3.
3 Gray 3, 5.
4 John D. Rosenberg, The fall of Camelot: a study of Tennyson’s “Idylls of the king” (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP, 1973) 60.
2
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Middle English Studies Symposium (MESS) 2007 – ABSTRACTS
The Germanic Foot: Did it survive into Middle English?
Attila Starčević
Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest
The aim of the talk is to discuss Middle English open syllable lengthening (MEOSL), as
well as to address the issue of whether there was MEOSL at all, as understood
traditionally, and how it relates to the Germanic foot (Dresher & Lahiri 1991). A
discussion of some overlooked facts on MEOSL will be offered (Dutch and German
show a similar process: cf. Prokosch 1933, Lahiri & Dresher 1999). MEOSL has been
treated from various perspectives over the last few decades (see e.g. Minkova 1982,
1985, 1991, Ritt 1994). The issue itself is not recent, of course (cf. Luick 1914 for one of
the first attempts to relate all of the ME quantity changes to a single cause, and Ritt
1994 for references).
OE short vowel underwent a series of changes in open syllables that resulted
in a set of new long vowels in ME (e.g. clĭpian > clēpen, mĕte > mēte, ălu > āle, bŏta >
bōte). Generally, only those OE words underwent MEOSL unfailingly that had the
C0VCV ‘template’: tălu > tāle. Here, ‘template’ is not used in the sense of a
morphological template known from the Semitic languages but rather as a skeleton
relating to alternating vocalic and consonantal positions. However, words of the
C0VC ‘template’ show either a long or a short vowelled reflex (e.g. hwæal > whāle vs.
hlŏt > lŏt), as do words with the C0VCVC ‘template’ (sădol > săddle vs. crădol > crādle).
This was traditionally attributed to analogy originating in the declinational
characteristics of the period: e.g. ME sādel < sădol (with the usual ‘weakening’ of the
OE unstressed vowels in schwa and MEOSL) was influenced by trisyllabic laxness
from one of its oblique forms which was later lexicalised: sădeles ‘saddleGEN’
(obviously, this re-lexicalisation did not take place in the case of ME crādel ~ crădeles
> crādle).
The overlooked issues of MEOSL include the following: (i) why was there no
MEOSL in words of C0VCV ‘template’ whose second vowel was not /ə/ (the only
two eligible vowels are ME /i/ and /u/: e.g. belly/narrow (< OE belig/n(e)aru) and
(ii) why where the original OE long vowels shortened before the very same vowels in
mono-morphemic words: e.g. OE sārig > sŏrry, m1dwe/m1du > mĕadow. It seems that
MEOSL is not solely about having the original OE short vowels lengthened in open
syllables. Murray & Vennemann (1983) appeal to the “Stressed Syllable Law” which
states that the preferred Germanic stressed syllable contains exactly two morae and
that this drive is found in the West Germanic languages. This is problematic because
both early Germanic (*fatam) and ME had stressed syllables that weighed only one
mora (belly), underlined here. Dresher & Lahiri (1991) claim that there was indeed
such an ideal but this preferred weight could be drawn from both the syllable and
the foot. This leads to the postulation of a resolved Germanic foot and the
equivalence of H = L X (X for either H(eavy) or L(ight)). Here, H is (or can as well be)
drawn on the syllable level and L X on the foot level. This resolved foot is claimed to
explain a number of Germanic processes like Siever’s Law in Gothic or High Vowel
Deletion in OE.
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Middle English Studies Symposium (MESS) 2007 – ABSTRACTS
It will be suggested that MEOSL was in fact a templatic change. The analysis
will highlight some of the issues connected with a CV/VC approach to MEOSL. This
framework which has grown out of Government Phonology does not recognise the
syllable as a theoretical construct (cf. Scheer 2004), yet it offers some new insight.
REFERENCES:
Dresher, B. E. – A. Lahiri
1991
”The Germanic foot: metrical coherence in Old English”, Linguistic Inquiry 22: 251286.
Minkova, Donka
1982
”The environment for open syllable lengthening in Middle English”, Folia
Linguistica Historica 3.2: 29-58.
Minkova, Donka
1985
”Of rhyme and reason: some foot-governed quantity changes in English”, in: R.
Eaton et al. (eds.) ”Papers from the fourth international conference on English
theoretical linguistics”. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 163-178.
Minkova, Donka
1991
The history of final vowels in English. Berlin - New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Murray R. W. - T. Vennemann
1983
”Sound change and syllable structure in Germanic phonology”, Language 59: 514528.
Lahiri, A. - B. E. Dresher
1999
”Open syllable lengthening in West Germanic”, Language 75: 678-719.
Luick, K.
1914
Historische grammatik der Englischen sprache. Oxford & Stuttgart: Bernhard
Tauchnitz.
Prokosch, E.
1933
A comparative Germanic grammar. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ritt, N
1994
Quantity adjustment: vowel lengthening and shortening in early Middle English.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Scheer, T.
2004
A lateral theory of phonology: Vol 1: “What is CVCV and why should it be?” Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter.
Szigetvári, P.
1999
“VC phonology: a theory of consonant lenition and phonotactics”. [Doctoral
dissertation. Budapest: MTA/ELTE.]
25
Middle English Studies Symposium (MESS) 2007 – ABSTRACTS
Late Middle English synonyms of madness in medical literature
Marta Sylwanowicz
WyŜsza Szkoła Pedagogiczna TWP, Warsaw
Every language is culture-specific to a large extent and its semantics reflects not only
ways of living characteristic of a society but also that society’s ways of thinking
(Wierzbicka, 1997). If the language we use influences and reflects the way we see the
world, then the field of madness will show how speakers of English viewed
emotional and mental disturbances.
The aim of the present paper is twofold, first, to provide a brief characteristics
of the Middle English terms relating to the field of madness found in medical
compilations from 1375 until around 1500 and second, to analyse their textual
distribution, here medical and non-medical works. This analysis should reveal
whether the terms under discussion were restricted to particular text-types and/or
areas of the lexicon.
An obvious difficulty one encounters in such studies is the lack of informants
which could tell us whether a word encapsulates the meaning of madness or not.
Consequently, one can only examine occurrences of the respective nouns in Middle
English texts. Fortunately, medieval medical texts represent long tradition of medical
writing in England and constitute a rich source of information about the linguistic
situation before and after the French invasion The data for the paper come from the
Oxford English Dictionary (version 3), Dictionary of Old English on CD-ROM and the
Middle English Medical Texts (MEMT), a computerised collection of medical treatises
from c. 1375 to c. 1500. MEMT has been produced by the research team in the
Department of English at the University of Helsinki under the supervision of Prof.
Irma Taavitsainen and Dr Päivi Pahta. The texts of the corpora are subdivided into
three categories, i.e. Surgical texts, Specialised texts, and Remedies and materia
medica. Additionaly the corpora contains 10 works in verse. The MEMT is a
comprehensive tool which provides a solid basis for studies focusing on one register
of writing.
This is a pilot study which attempts to contribute to the historical description
of the particular field.
How to measure orthographic similiarity among Middle English
Manuscripts?
Jacob Thaisen
Adam Mickiewicz University
A traditional way of assessing the linguistic similarity among ME primary sources is
to profile scribal usages by selective questionnaire designed to elicit diagnostic
forms, especially dialectally diagnostic forms. Often phonological (<nat:not> NOT),
morphological (<-th:-s> 3RD PRES. IND. SING. SUFFIX) and lexical
(DARK:MURKY) variants are considered together. Angus McIntosh (1974; 1975)
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Middle English Studies Symposium (MESS) 2007 – ABSTRACTS
distinguishes between graphemic contrasts with and without phonological
significance (<nat>:<not> NOT and <it:itt> IT, respectively) but has no category for
phonological contrasts that have no graphemic significance. The medieval scribes
themselves may have followed Donatus in thinking of a littera as having a name, a
sound-value, and a graphic shape as distinct properties. In this classification scheme,
two shapes may share a sound-value (<y:þ>) or two sound-values a shape (<h> in
<thauh> THOUGH:<his> HIS).
My own work has in recent years come increasingly to take the graphic shape
as its starting point and so to play down semantics and phonology. Such an approach
allows for cases where a scribe inserts, say, <th> in place of an exemplar <þ> simply
because his orthography did not actively include <þ>. In such a case it seems
doubtful whether the scribe’s practice can be described as ”translation” even if the
exemplar form and the copy form are unidentical. Rather, the scribe is adapting what
is in his exemplar to his own littera system as he copies. This line of reasoning may be
applied to pairs such as <eeC:eCe> or <sh-:-sch-> too, with the implication that the
McIntosh distinction between ”translation” and ”transcription” as scribal copying
modes is itself dynamic.
The most fundamental question in these classification efforts is what
constitutes a variant. The increasing availability of diplomatic transcripts of ME
manuscript texts opens up new, quantitative avenues that prompt a reconsideration
of this question. One of these avenues is to adopt a graphic shape-centered approach
by language modelling the transcripts probabilistically through building contextsensitive n-gram models of grapheme combinations.
Language modelling is a highly pragmatic approach that is widely applied in
automated speech recognition, statistical machine translation and other natural
language processing applications. The 3-grams that can be generated from
”Canterbury Tales” are ”Can”, ”ant”, ”nte”, ”ter”... ”y T”... ”les”. Training texts are
used to identify what 1-, 2- and 3-grams occur in them and assign frequencies to
each. The resulting tables constitute a 3-gram language model of those texts, and the
agreement between this model and a test text can be calculated as a measure known
as entropy. It is possible to reduce the role of token frequency in favour of type
frequency so as to address lexical difference, which is especially relevant when the
training corpus is small, as is the case with my research.
I have applied this approach to all 58 fifteenth-century copies of Chaucer’s
Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Miller’s Tale, once with the Wife copies as model to be
compared with the Miller copies as test texts and once with the opposite settings. The
scores contained in the two resulting 58x58 tables were then normalised and
clustered. The results confirm the existence of some manuscript pairings that are long
established from palaeographic and textual work, such as Hengwrt and Ellesmere
together as a subgroup of a larger cluster that also includes Christ Church and
Additional 35,286.
Encouraged by these results I venture in the conclusion to this paper that
probabilistic language modelling of manuscript texts can be employed, notably
without much effort, by editors, palaeographers, textual scholars and historical
linguists alike as a powerful tool in, for example, tracking changes of scribe or
exemplar.
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Middle English Studies Symposium (MESS) 2007 – ABSTRACTS
The post-sonorant devoicing of [d] in the past/past participle markers of
weak verbs (sent, built, etc.)
Jerzy Wełna
University of Warsaw
The devoicing of the dental suffix [–d(-)] to [–t(-)] in the forms of the past and past
participle in Middle English verbs like bende, blende, builde, lende, rende, sende, spende,
wende which appear as PT/PP bent, blent (arch.), built, lent, rent, sent, spent, went, is
believed to have been due to the analogy of verbs like kēpen/kepde > kept(e) lub
mēten/mette (cf. Luick 1940: 950). Vachek (1974: 65) finds this interpretation not very
convincing but offers no alternative solution, calling this change “obscure”. A purely
phonological explanation postulating, in agreement with Luick, stem-final devoicing
of [-d] to [–t] after some sonorants is suggested in Jordan/Crook (1974), although
Jordan adduces no examples of verbs subject to such a change. An analogous
treatment, without concluding remarks, can be found in Brunner (1962: 263-264),
while an interpretation in terms of the phonemic theory offered by Eliason (1967) is
purely speculative and not based on the regional distribution of data. Curiously,
Eliason considers this change as the model to which several other verbs with or
without stem-final sonorants, such as dream (dreamt), dwell (dwelt), feel (felt), leave (left),
lose (lost) etc. became adjusted. In general, the change is assumed to have taken place
in Early Middle English and its patterning seems follow the path of lexical diffusion.
The present study will be an effort to reveal the distribution in time and space
of the newly emerging Past/Past Participle forms with [–t], like bent, sent, etc. The
basic materials to be examined come from the Innsbruck Corpus (prose) and
Chadwick-Healey (poetry). The statistical analysis will help, it is hope, to establish
the area where the change originated and how it spread throughout England
eliminating the conservative pronunciation with voiced stops.
REFERENCES:
Brunner, Karl
1960
Die Englische sprache. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Eliason, Norman E.
1967
“The origin of irregular –t in weak preterites like sent and felt”, Studies in historical
linguistics in honor of George Sherman Lane: 210-220.
Jordan, Richard
1974
Handbook of Middle English grammar: Phonology. (Translated and edited by Eugene J.
Crook.) The Hague: Mouton.
Luick, Karl
1940
Historische grammatik der Englischen sprache. Vol. 2. Leipzig: Tauchnitz.
Vachek, Josef
1974
A Brief survey of the historical development of English. Part II: Middle English and Early
Modern English, Bratislava: Filozofická fakulta Univerzity Komenského.
28
Middle English Studies Symposium (MESS) 2007 – ABSTRACTS
Techniques of agent formation in Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales”
Daniel Węgrzyn – Aleksandra Kalaga
Univeristy of Silesia
The aim of the paper is to present a corpus-based analysis of agentive derivatives
sampled in Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales”. The corpus of agentives for
analysis has been compiled on the basis of electronic version of “The Canterbury
Tales” prepared especially for linguistic studies (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme).
The analysed material has been checked against alternative primary sources: the
Hengwrt manuscript of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (also available on the internet at
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme), and the printed edition of Riverside Chaucer
published by Oxford University Press. The main emphasis of our study will be
placed on morpho-syntactic analysis of the types identified in the corpus. We will
survey the agent-forming suffixes employed in Chaucer’s plays and investigate the
quantitative aspects of their productivity.
The approach we adopt in the paper is rather eclectic. The major theoretical
framework we operate on is transformational grammar, nevertheless in order to
provide as accurate and detailed account of the data under inspection as possible, we
will also include morphological, semantic, and – to some extent – pragmatic data.
Hence, apart from discussing structural properties of Chaucerian agent nouns, we
are going to examine more closely the semantic effects of agentive nominalization, as
well as provide an insight into functional aspects of this particular word-formational
category. We will make an attempt at demonstrating not merely the mechanisms, but
also the possible reasons for the activation of the word-formation rule in question,
deictic function and stylistic cohesion being probably the most conspicuous ones.
Although the character of our analysis is synchronic, we will attempt to place
our findings in a diachronic perspective, contrasting them with and comparing them
to the techniques of agent formation which were operative in Old English, as well as
those which are employed in Modern English. In this way we hope for our account of
Chaucerian agent nouns to cast light upon a hitherto somewhat neglected stage in
Nomina Agentis derivation and thus complete the missing link on the diachronic
axis of historical development of this particular aspect of English word-formation
system.
“[T]hat mikel lith fro Havelok” –
supernatural signs of authority in Middle English romances
Władysław Witalisz
Jagiellonian University
Magic and marvel are common features of the romance genre. They are there
primarily to amaze and to address the reader’s taste for the sensational. Some
occurences of marvellous phenomena are additionally invested with meanings that
belong to the medieval discourse of authority and nobility. As in the case of Havelock
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Middle English Studies Symposium (MESS) 2007 – ABSTRACTS
the Dane they identify the hero’s authority, and foreshadow his final victory, or, as in
Guy of Warwick, they confirm his moral value and the truth of his love. A birth mark
on the body of the hero, a curious light coming from his mouth, or the appearance of
an angel at a crucial moment of the narrative, contribute to the execution of a heroic
destiny. Whether magical and, thus, pagan, in their nature, or overtly Christian, these
marvels convey a sense of divine protection of the heroes and re-asses the idea of the
divine origin of aristocratic and royal authority. The supernatural phenomena may
be seen as yet another expression of the romance concern with the construction of
aristocratic identity in Plantagenet England and the authorization of their rule.
In fyr gesended or in fyre sended:
The past participle marking in the Lindisfarne gospels and the Rushworth
gospels
Anna Wojtyś
Academy of Management
The paper examines the past participle marking in the two collections of interlinear
glosses in Northumbrian, namely the Lindisfarne gospels and the Rushworth gospels.
Although in slightly different varieties, both collections contain glosses to one Latin
version of the Bible and the chronologically later Rushworth gospels are to a great
extent based on the earlier Lindisfarne gospels. Thus, the glossaries provide valuable
material for tracing changes in the marking of the past participle in Northumbrian.
Additionally, as the Rushworth gospels contain the gospel by St. Matthew glossed in
Mercian (Ru1), the examination of that text from the two collections is expected to
reveal potential differences between the marking of the past participle in
Northumbrian (Lindisfarne gospels) and Mercian (Ru1).
The discussion focuses on the dropping of the prefix ge-, the process usually
dated to Middle English. Lass (1992: 147), however, assigns its initial stage to tenth
century Northumbrian. Consequently, the study is expected to verify whether any
traces of the elimination of the prefixal past participle marking could be identified in
the two collections of glosses as representative of Old English texts localised in the
north of England.
The data come from Skeat’s editions (1871-1887) included in The Dictionary of
Old English Corpus in Electronic Form (2000), while An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (1898) is
used for their verification.
REFERENCES:
Campbell, Alistair
1959
Old English grammar. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Lass, Roger
1992
"Phonology and morphology". In Norman Blake, (ed.) The Cambridge history of the
English language, Vol. 2: 1066-1476. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lindemann, J. W. Richard
1970
Old English preverbal Ge-: Its meaning. Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia.
Mincoff, Marco
1972
English historical grammar. Sofia: Naouka i Izkoustvo.
30
Middle English Studies Symposium (MESS) 2007 – ABSTRACTS
Stanley, Eric G.
1982
“The pronominal prefix ge- in Late Old English and Early Middle English”,
Transactions of the Philological Society 1982: 25-66
Trobevšek Drobnak, Frančiška
1994
“The Old English preverbal ge- in the light of the theory of language change as
strengthening or weakening”, Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 28: 123-141.
Wright, Joseph — Elizabeth Mary Wright
1923
An Elementary Old English grammar. London: Oxford University Press.
31