Placing Middle English in Context (Topics in English Linguistics, No. 35) (Topics in English Linguistics)

The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies, which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics. For further publications in English linguistics see also our Dialects of English book series. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Natalie Fecher. Preface Introduction Chronological and social context Language periodization and the concept “middle” Language and society in twelfth-century England Syntactic constraints on code-switching in medieval texts Dialect, normalization and corpus-linguistic methodology Introduction Never the twain shall meet. Early Middle English – The East-West divide Standard language in Early Middle English? Changing spaces: Linguistic relationships and the dialect continuum Normalizing the word forms in the Ayenbite of Inwyt Chaucer’s spelling and the manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales WHICH and THE WHICH in Late Middle English: Free variants? Lexical semantics Introduction Robbares and reuares þat ryche men despoilen: Some competing forms Here comes the judge: A small contribution to the study of French input into the vocabulary of the law in Middle English Naming and avoiding naming objects of terror: A case study An application of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage to diachronic semantics Patterns of semantic change in abstract nouns: The case of wit The spatial and temporal meanings of before in Middle English The adjective weary in Middle English structures: A syntactic-semantic study Utterance and discourse meaning Introduction Slanders, slurs and insults on the road to Canterbury: Forms of verbal aggression in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales Hir not lettyrd: The use of interjections, pragmatic markers and whan-clauses in The Book of Margery Kempe Whoso thorgh presumpcion ... mysdeme hyt: Chaucer’s poetic adaptation of the medieval “book curse” Sounds, prosody and metre Introduction Middle English prosodic innovations and their testability in verse Old English (non)-palatalised */k/: Competing forces of change at work in the “seek”-verbs Some remarks on the nonprimary contexts for Homorganic Lengthening On the phonetic and phonological interpretation of the reflexes of the Old English diphthongs in the Ayenbite of Inwyt Author index Subject index An authoritative collection of twenty-seven articles, mostly gathered from the Second International Conference on Middle English Language and Texts held in Espoo, Finland, in 1997, which consider the development and standardisation of Middle English in genres and in specific texts. Subjects include the relationship between language and society, the `normalisation' of word forms, Chaucer's spelling, French influence on Middle English, semantic changes, the use of interjections and curses and innovations in verse.

The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics.

In 1930 Kemp Malone in a famous paper asked "When did Middle English begin?".