Journal articles: 'Early Middle English'

1

Francis, W. N., and Lilo Moessner. "Early Middle English Syntax." Language 66, no. 3 (September 1990): 646. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/414657.

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Leahy, Conor. "Middle English in Early Auden." Review of English Studies 70, no. 295 (January 10, 2019): 527–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/res/hgy112.

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STANLEY, E. G. "SOURCES OF EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH." Notes and Queries 41, no. 2 (June 1, 1994): 141—a—141. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/nq/41-2-141a.

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Elenbaas, Marion. "Particle verbs in early Middle English." Linguistics in the Netherlands 20 (November 11, 2003): 45–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/avt.20.08ele.

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van Gelderen, Elly. "Split Infinitives in Early Middle English." Language Dynamics and Change 6, no. 1 (2016): 18–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/22105832-00601003.

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The split infinitive is one of seven syntactic properties that English is said to share with Old Norse, and I will show that, on the basis of the area and date of its first occurrence, Norse origin is unlikely.

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Murray, Robert W. "Syllable Cut Prosody in Early Middle English." Language 76, no. 3 (September 2000): 617. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/417137.

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Mäkinen, Martti. "On interaction in herbals from Middle English to Early Modern English." Journal of Historical Pragmatics 3, no. 2 (June 3, 2002): 229–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/jhp.3.2.04mak.

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The focus of this article is on interaction in Middle English and Early Modern English herbals. In the Middle Ages, herbals were mainly instructive aids for producing medicines of the plants described in the text. Later, in the Early Modern English period, the herbal genre split into two, retaining the genre called herbals and giving birth to systematic botanical texts. The interaction established in texts can be studied through the use of pronouns (involvement markers) and the use of imperatives. This study shows that the strategies employed in the Middle English period are very different from the strategies in the Early Modern English period: the use of second-person pronouns and imperatives prevails in the Middle English period, whereas the use of first-person pronouns was preferred in the Early Modern English period. In addition to this, another division, irrespective of the time of writing, is observed in the material: the first group includes handbooks and practical herbals, and the other group learned and empirical herbals. Factors which explain these differences in interaction strategies are the purposes for writing and the education of the intended audience.

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Goering, Nelson. "Phonological Evidence for Resolution in Early Middle English." Journal of English and Germanic Philology 120, no. 4 (October 1, 2021): 465–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/jenglgermphil.120.4.0465.

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9

STENBRENDEN, GJERTRUD F. "Old English and its sound correspondences in Old English and Middle English." English Language and Linguistics 24, no. 4 (August 7, 2019): 687–718. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1360674319000182.

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This article seeks to identify the phonetic correspondence(s) of the digraph <cg> in Old English (OE) and Middle English (ME), assessing a range of sources: the etyma in early Germanic (Gmc) languages, the various spellings in OE and the spelling evidence in the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English. Almost all the textbooks on OE claim that <cg> was pronounced /dʒ/, i.e. as a phonemic affricate, in OE. Evidence is thin on the ground, and the argument rests on certain back spellings <cg> for words with etymological <d+g>, e.g. midgern <micgern>. Words with <cg> in OE go back to Gmc *g(g)j, which subsequently underwent palatalisation, and eventually assibilation and affrication. This article argues that the value [ɟj] is more likely for OE and early ME, and that such an interpretation agrees with the available spelling evidence for both OE and ME, in that there is not one <d>-type spelling in the entire historical corpus until late ME. It is also argued that the development of the voiced (pre-)affricate was later than that of its voiceless counterpart, as voiced fricative phonemes are a late, and infrequent, development in Gmc. Moreover, it is likely that the development of /dʒ/ was affected by the high number of French loans with /dʒ/ which entered the English lexicon after 1066. Thus, the English system of consonant phonemes may not have acquired /dʒ/ until the thirteenth century at the earliest.

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Roig-Marín, Amanda. "Spanish Arabic loanwords in late Middle and early Modern English." SELIM. Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature. 25, no. 1 (September 29, 2020): 173–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.17811/selim.25.2020.173-185.

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The influx of Arabic vocabulary into English has received relatively scarce attention in the past: Taylor (1934) and Cannon Kaye (1994) remain classic lexicographical works, but few subsequent investigations have monographically tackled the Arabic lexical legacy in English. This article concentrates on the Spanish Arabic influence on English, that is, on Arabic-origin lexis specifically used in the Iberian Peninsula as well as on the vocabulary which was mediated by Spanish at some point in its history from Arabic to its adoption into the English language. It assesses two sets of data retrieved from the Oxford English Dictionary and examines the most frequent routes of entry into the English language (e.g. Arabic Spanish French English) and the larger networks of transmissions of these borrowings throughout the history of the language, with particular attention to the late medieval and early modern periods.

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Scahill, John. "Trilingualism in Early Middle English Miscellanies: Languages and Literature." Yearbook of English Studies 33, no. 1 (2003): 18–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/yes.2003.0007.

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Scahill, John. "Trilingualism in Early Middle English Miscellanies: Languages and Literature." Yearbook of English Studies 33 (2003): 18. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3509014.

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Bruce, Alexander M. "The Development of Orthographic Wh- in Early Middle English." Journal of English Linguistics 25, no. 2 (June 1997): 97–101. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/007542429702500202.

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Walkden, George, and Donald Alasdair Morrison. "Regional Variation in Jespersen’s Cycle in Early Middle English." Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 52, no. 2 (December 1, 2017): 173–201. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/stap-2017-0007.

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Abstract In this paper we investigate the place of origin of the change from Jespersen’s Cycle stage II – bipartite ne + not – to stage III, not alone. We use the LAEME corpus to investigate the dialectal distribution in more detail, finding that the change must have begun in Northern and Eastern England. A strong effect of region and time period can be clearly observed, with certain linguistic factors also playing a role. We attribute the early onset of the change to contact with Scandinavian: North Germanic is known to have undergone Jespersen’s Cycle earlier in its history, and the geographical distribution of early English stage III fits neatly with the earlier boundaries of the Danelaw.

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15

Laing, Margaret. "Corpus-provoked questions about negation in early Middle English." Language Sciences 24, no. 3-4 (May 2002): 297–321. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0388-0001(01)00035-3.

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Skaffari, Janne. "From OV to VO in Early Middle English (review)." Language 81, no. 4 (2005): 1024. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/lan.2005.0203.

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Schreier, Daniel. "On the loss of preaspiration in Early Middle English." Transactions of the Philological Society 103, no. 1 (April 2005): 99–112. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-968x.2004.00146.x.

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Dr.Siraj Ahmad Rather. "A study on the Nominal Plural forms in early middle English." International Journal of Research in Informative Science Application & Techniques (IJRISAT) 1, no. 1 (February 8, 2022): 17–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.46828/ijrisat.v1i1.18.

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Nominal plural forms were not common in old English. Old English noun usually inflected as a strong neuter, the plural form being win. The s – form in the text is perhaps one of the earliest instances of transfer to –s and comes straight down to later periods, seeing that the s – form is the only accepted plural. The second point is s – ending extends to historically unexpected classes of nouns. Examples are burgas, degles, feondas, Rondas, hoses etc. The number of nouns that transferred to – s may not be very large, but the examples show that this is a preliminary stage to the further development in early Middle English. The present nominal plural forms describe how the old English changed into early Middle English.

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19

Weiskott, Eric. "Early English meter as a way of thinking." Studia Metrica et Poetica 4, no. 1 (August 7, 2017): 41–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.12697/smp.2017.4.1.02.

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The second half of the fourteenth century saw a large uptick in the production of literature in English. This essay frames metrical variety and literary experimentation in the late fourteenth century as an opportunity for intellectual history. Beginning from the assumption that verse form is never incidental to the thinking it performs, the essay seeks to test Simon Jarvis’s concept of “prosody as cognition”, formulated with reference to Pope and Wordsworth, against a different literary archive.The essay is organized into three case studies introducing three kinds of metrical practice: the half-line structure in Middle English alliterative meter, the interplay between Latin and English in Piers Plowman, and final -e in Chaucer’s pentameter. The protagonists of the three case studies are the three biggest names in Middle English literature: the Gawain poet, William Langland, and Geoffrey Chaucer.

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20

ELENBAAS, MARION. "Motivations for particle verb word order in Middle and Early Modern English." English Language and Linguistics 17, no. 3 (October 21, 2013): 489–511. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1360674313000130.

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This article examines possible motivations for the choice of particle verb word order in Middle English (1100–1500) and Early Modern English (1500–1700). The word order alternation of Present-Day English particle verbs, which presents language users with a choice between verb–object–particle and verb–particle–object order, first emerged in Early Middle English (twelfth century). For Present-Day English, several studies (e.g. Gries 1999, 2003; Dehé 2002) have shown that the choice is influenced by a number of linguistic factors, such as the heaviness of the object (morphosyntactic factor) and the givenness of the object (discourse factor). This article reveals the influence of a number of morphosyntactic factors and also shows that the choice is increasingly influenced by the givenness of the object. The differences between Present-Day English on the one hand and Middle and Early Modern English on the other hand are discussed in the light of syntactic changes going on in these periods. It is argued that the developments in particle verb syntax are characterised by an increasing division of labour between the two word orders, which may also explain why both orders survive into Present-Day English.

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Abbott, Robert D., Michel Fayol, Michel Zorman, Séverine Casalis, William Nagy, and Virginia W. Berninger. "Relationships of French and English Morphophonemic Orthographies to Word Reading, Spelling, and Reading Comprehension During Early and Middle Childhood." Canadian Journal of School Psychology 31, no. 4 (July 24, 2016): 305–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0829573516640336.

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Two longitudinal studies of word reading, spelling, and reading comprehension identified commonalities and differences in morphophonemic orthographies—French (Study 1, n = 1,313) or English (Study 2, n = 114) in early childhood (Grade 2)and middle childhood (Grade 5). For French and English, statistically significant concurrent relationships among these literacy skills occurred in Grades 2 and 5, and longitudinal relationships for each skill with itself from Grades 2 to 5; but concurrent relationships were more sizable and longitudinal relationships more variable for English than French especially for word reading to reading comprehension. Results show that, for both morphophonemic orthographies, assessment and instructional practices should be tailored to early or middle childhood, and early childhood reading comprehension may not be related to middle childhood spelling. Also discussed are findings applying only to English, for which word origin is primarily Anglo-Saxon in early childhood, but increasingly French in middle childhood.

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22

Calle-Martin, Javier. "The Split Infinitive in Middle English." NOWELE / North-Western European Language Evolution 68, no. 2 (July 21, 2015): 227–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/nowele.68.2.05cal.

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A split infinitive construction denotes a type of syntactic tmesis in which a word or a phrase, especially an adverb, occurs between the infinitive marker to and the verb. The early instances of the split infinitive in English date back to the 13th century, when a personal pronoun, an adverb or two or more words could appear in such environments (Visser 1963-1973 II: 1038-1045). This paper investigates the split infinitive in Middle English with the following objectives: a) to trace the origin and development of the construction; b) to analyse the nature of the splitting adverb in terms of its etymology and lexico-grammatical features; and c) to examine the prosodic patterns contributing to the acceptance of particular splitting combinations. The source of evidence comes from the following corpora: Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose, Penn-Parsed Corpora of Historical English, Middle English Medical Texts, Middle English Grammar Corpus, and the Malaga Corpus of Late Middle English Scientific Prose.

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Nathan, Geoffrey S., and Nikolaus Ritt. "Quantity Adjustment: Vowel Lengthening and Shortening in Early Middle English." Language 73, no. 1 (March 1997): 182. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/416607.

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IGLESIAS-RÁBADE, Luis. "Non-'Technical' Anglo-Norman Lexicon in Early Middle English Texts." Orbis 36 (January 1, 1993): 81–103. http://dx.doi.org/10.2143/orb.36.0.2012802.

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25

Murray, Robert W. "ORM'S PHONOLOGICAL-ORTHOGRAPHIC INTERFACE AND QUANTITY IN EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH." Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 42, no. 1 (March 29, 1995): 125–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18756719-90000059.

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Haeberli, Eric, and Richard Ingham. "The position of negation and adverbs in Early Middle English." Lingua 117, no. 1 (January 2007): 1–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2005.08.001.

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Lee, Seungeun, and Jinhyun Jo. "The Effects of Early English Education on Korean Middle School Students’ English Grade and English Learning Attitudes." Journal of Humanities and Social sciences 21 10, no. 1 (February 28, 2019): 493–508. http://dx.doi.org/10.22143/hss21.10.1.35.

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Calle-Martín, Javier. "A corpus-based study of abbreviations in early English medical writing." Research in Corpus Linguistics 9, no. 2 (2021): 114–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.32714/ricl.09.02.06.

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The Early Middle English period witnessed the massive borrowing and adoption of the Latin system of abbreviations in England. Mediaeval writers appropriated those symbols that were directly transferable from Latin exemplars, especially suspensions and brevigraphs, while contractions and superior letters were incorporated somewhat later. The existing accounts of abbreviations in handwritten documents are fragmentary as they offer the picture of the literary compositions of the period, which have been traditionally taken as the source of evidence for handbooks on palaeography. In addition to this, most of these accounts are limited to the description of their use and typology in independent witnesses, being in many cases impossible to extrapolate the results beyond the practice of individual scribes. The present paper takes that step beyond individuality and pursues the study of abbreviations from a variationist perspective with the following objectives: a) to analyse the use and distribution of abbreviations in Late Middle English and Early Modern English (1350–1700), and b) to evaluate the relevance of these abbreviations across different text types of medical writing. The data used as source of evidence come from The Málaga Corpus of Early English Scientific Prose, both the Late Middle English and the Early Modern English components (1350–1500 and 1500–1700, respectively).

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Martín, Javier Calle. "“When That Wounds Are Evil Healed”: Revisiting Pleonastic That in Early English Medical Writing." Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 52, no. 1 (March 28, 2017): 5–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/stap-2017-0001.

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Abstract The origin of pleonastic that can be traced back to Old English, where it could appear in syntactic constructions consisting of a preposition + a demonstrative pronoun (i.e., for py pat, for pæm pe) or a subordinator (i.e., op pat). The diffusion of this pleonastic form is an Early Middle English development as a result of the standardization of that as the general subordinator in the period, which motivated its use as a pleonastic word in combination with many kinds of conjunctions (i.e., now that, if that, when that, etc.) and prepositions (i.e., before that, save that, in that) (Fischer 1992: 295). The phenomenon increased considerably in Late Middle English, declining rapidly in the 17th century to such an extent that it became virtually obliterated towards the end of that same century (Rissanen 1999: 303-304). The list of subordinating elements includes relativizers (i.e., this that), adverbial relatives (i.e., there that), and a number of subordinators (i.e., after, as, because, before, beside, for, if, since, sith, though, until, when, while, etc.). The present paper examines the status of pleonastic that in the history of English pursuing the following objectives: (a) to analyse its use and distribution in a corpus of early English medical writing (in the period 1375-1700); (b) to classify the construction in terms of genre, i.e., treatises and recipes; and (c) to assess its decline with the different conjunctive words. The data used as source of evidence come from The Corpus of Early English Medical Writing, i.e., Middle English Medical Texts (MEMT for the period 1375-1500) and Early Modern English Medical Texts (EMEMT for the period 1500-1700). The use of pleonastic that in medical writing allows us to reconsider the history of the construction in English, becoming in itself a Late Middle English phenomenon with its progressive decline throughout the 16th and 17th centuries.

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Quintana-Toledo, Elena. "Middle English Medical Recipes: A Metadiscursive Approach." Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 45, no. 2 (January 1, 2009): 21–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/v10121-009-0014-5.

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Middle English Medical Recipes: A Metadiscursive Approach This paper seeks to explore Middle English medical recipes from a metadiscursive perspective. This study will draw on Hyland's (2005) metadiscourse model where code glosses, endophoric markers, evidentials, frame markers and transition markers are included in the interactive dimension, and attitude markers, boosters, engagement markers, hedges and self mention are to be found within interactional metadiscourse. I shall apply this framework for the identification and analysis of data in a corpus which comprises a selection of recipes taken from both Middle English Medical Texts (Taavitsainen - Pahta - Mäkinen 2005) and The corpus of early English recipes. The metadiscursive approach to the study of medical recipes will allow us to establish links between authors, texts and audience of the recipe genre and, consequently, to affirm their status as products of social engagement.

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Roberts, Jane. "Some Thoughts on the Representation of Early Middle English in the Historical Thesaurus of English." Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America 23, no. 1 (2002): 180–207. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/dic.2002.0011.

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Durkin, Philip. "New Light on Early Middle English Borrowing from Anglo-Norman: Investigating Kinship Terms in grand‑." Anglia 137, no. 2 (June 7, 2019): 255–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ang-2019-0024.

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Abstract It is well known that the set of kinship terms in Middle English showed considerable influence from French. In the case of aunt and uncle, this accompanied major restructuring of the system of kinship terms, as the Old English set of four distinct terms for paternal and maternal uncles and aunts were replaced by just two terms for ‘uncle’ and ‘aunt’, regardless of whether paternal or maternal. In comparison, the words for ‘grandfather’ and ‘grandmother’ have attracted little attention, as their story has appeared simpler: Old English had words for ‘grandfather’ and ‘grandmother’, irrespective of whether paternal or maternal, and so did Middle English. The terms are also similar in structure, with native terms in which words for ‘father’ or ‘mother’ are the head and eald ‘old’ is the modifier (whether in a compound or a phrasal structure) being replaced by borrowed terms (grandsire, granddame) or hybrid terms (grandfather, grandmother) in which French grand ‘big’ is the modifier. This paper shows that behind this apparently simple story there lurk some significant complications which point to considerable disruption and instability in the terms for ‘grandfather’ and ‘grandmother’ in both Middle English and French (with interesting and perhaps significant parallels also in other West Germanic languages). Consideration of these complications also casts new light on early lexical borrowing into Middle English from Anglo-Norman.

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Westergaard, Marit. "Word Order in Old and Middle English." Diachronica 26, no. 1 (April 9, 2009): 65–102. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/dia.26.1.03wes.

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In the history of English one finds a mixture of V2 and non-V2 word order in declaratives for several hundred years, with frequencies suggesting a relatively gradual development in the direction of non-V2. Within an extended version of a cue-based approach to acquisition and change, this paper argues that there are many possible V2 grammars, differing from each other with respect to clause types, information structure, and the behavior of specific lexical elements. This variation may be formulated in terms of micro-cues. Child language data from present-day mixed systems show that such grammars are acquired early. The apparent optionality of V2 in the history of English may thus be considered to represent several different V2 grammars in succession, and it is not necessary to refer to competition between two major parameter settings. Diachronic language development can thus be argued to occur in small steps, reflecting the loss of micro-cues, and giving the impression that change is gradual.

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Boffey, Julia, and Paula Simpson. "A Middle English Poem on a Binding Fragment: an Early Valentine?" Review of English Studies 67, no. 282 (July 20, 2016): 844–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/res/hgw074.

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Thurber, Beverly A. "Voicing of Initial Interdental Fricatives in Early Middle English Function Words." Journal of Germanic Linguistics 23, no. 1 (February 15, 2011): 65–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s147054271000005x.

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In Modern English, function words such as this, that, and the are pronounced with a voiced onset, while content words have the original voiceless onset. A statistical analysis of the distribution of <ð> and <þ> in Vices and Virtues, a text preserved in London, British Library, Stowe MS 34 (circa 1200), reveals a distribution, whose most plausible interpretation is that these two letters were used to encode stress-conditioned differences in voicing. This sets the voicing of function words, normally dated to the fourteenth century, back to circa 1200 or earlier.*

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Ciszek-Kiliszewska, Ewa. "Degree of Grammaticalisation of Behind, Beneath, Between and Betwixt in Middle English." Research in Language 16, no. 2 (June 30, 2018): 193–222. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/rela-2018-0006.

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The present paper traces the history of four selected adverbs with the prefix be- in Middle English. Already in Old English behind, beneath, between and betwixt are attested to function as both adverbs and prepositions, which demonstrates that the process of grammaticalisation accounting for the development of prepositions from adverbs started before that period. The focus of the study are the diachronic changes of the degree of grammaticalisation of the examined lexemes in the Middle English period as demonstrated by the ratio of their use with a respective function in the most natural context. Hence, specially selected Middle English prose texts are analysed. The analysis shows that while behind and beneath are still frequently used as adverbs in the whole Middle English period, between and betwixt are predominantly used as prepositions already in Early Middle English. This clearly demonstrates that the degree of grammaticalisation of the latter two Middle English words was much higher than that of behind and beneath.

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Leitner, Magdalena. "Thou and you in Late Middle Scottish and Early Modern Northern English witness depositions." Journal of Historical Pragmatics 14, no. 1 (March 4, 2013): 100–129. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/jhp.14.1.04lei.

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In contrast to Early Modern English, little is known about address pronouns in Scotland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This paper investigates early Scottish pronoun usage in more detail by presenting a case study on singular pronominal address in Late Middle Scottish and Early Modern Northern English witness depositions from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The source texts drawn from the Criminal Trials in Scotland 1488–1624, the Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots 1450–1700 and A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 are examined with a quantitative and qualitative approach based on historical pragmatics and historical sociolinguistics. Thou is found to be relatively frequent in the Scottish and Northern English data in comparison with the rapid decline in thou recently found in South-Eastern English depositions. However, there are significant differences in the distributions of pronouns, which are explained by an overrepresentation of upper social ranks in the Scottish sub-corpus.

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Jurczyk, Rafał. "The Loss of Grammatical Gender and Case Features Between Old and Early Middle English: Its Impact on Simple Demonstratives and Topic Shift." Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 52, no. 2 (December 1, 2017): 203–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/stap-2017-0008.

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Abstract In this paper we examine the relation between the loss of formal gender and Case features on simple demonstratives and the topic shifting property they manifest. The examination period spans between Old English and Early Middle English. While we argue that this loss has important discourse-pragmatic and derivational effects on demonstratives, we also employ the Strong Minimalist Hypothesis approach (Chomsky 2001) and feature valuation, as defined in Pesetsky & Torrego (2007), to display how their syntactic computation and pragmatic properties have come about. To account for the above innovations yielding the Early Middle English ϸe (‘the’), we first discuss the formal properties of the Old English demonstratives which distinguish number, gender, and Case features. This inflectional variety of forms allows the Old English demonstratives to be used independently and to show the anaphoric and discourse-linking properties of topics. Crucially, the same properties characterise also German and Dutch demonstratives that manifest Case and/or gender morphology overtly, which shows that the syntactic distribution of LIs and their morphological richness should be considered as intertwined. The above properties are then confronted with the determiner system in Early Middle English, whose forms undergo inflectional levelling producing the invariant ϸe/ðe form that loses its distributional independence and acquires the article status. The levelling process in question is argued to stimulate the shift of the [+ref/spec] feature from the formal to the semantic pole. This suggests that the Early Middle English ϸe form no longer counts as an appropriate anaphor in topic shift contexts owing to its indeterminacy of Case, gender, and φ-features, which means that it cannot satisfy the Full Interpretation requirement at the interfaces.

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van Gelderen, Elly. "The Future offor to." American Journal of Germanic Linguistics and Literatures 10, no. 1 (1998): 45–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1040820700002225.

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I examine the development offor to and forin several stages of English. I argue that as prepositions grammaticalize, they acquire certain intrinsic features and occupy special positions. In Old English,for tois a P, related to Case, and has some future sense (through an extension of the locative meaning). Verbs do not subcategorize for complements withfor(yet), however. In early Middle English,for tois used to introduce a complement with future meaning. Now,for (to)occupies C, which I assume is universally true for purpose/future indicators. In late Middle English, the situation solidifies, and more verbs select a complement withfor (to)indicating purpose and futurity. In Early Modern English,for todisappears, butforseparated fromtotakes over its function of introducing purposive adjuncts and future complements.

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Wełna, Jerzy. "On early pseudo-learned orthographic forms: A contribution to the history of English spelling and pronunciation." Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 46, no. 4 (January 1, 2011): 25–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/v10121-010-0010-9.

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On early pseudo-learned orthographic forms: A contribution to the history of English spelling and pronunciation The history of English contains numerous examples of "improved" spellings. English scribes frequently modified spelling to make English words and some popular borrowings look like words of Latin or Greek origin. The typical examples are Eng. island, containing mute <s> taken from Lat. insula or Eng. anchor ‘mooring device’ (< Fr. ancre), with non-etymological <h>. Although such "reformed spellings" became particularly fashionable during the Renaissance, when the influence of the classical languages was at its peak, "classicised" spellings are also found earlier, e.g. in texts from the 14th century. In the present contribution which concentrates on identifying such earliest influences on spellings in Middle English attention is focussed on the regional distribution of reformed spellings, with a sociolinguistic focus on the type of the text. The data for the study come from standard sources like the Middle English Dictionary (2001) and Oxford English Dictionary (2009).

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LAING, MARGARET, and ROGER LASS. "Shape-shifting, sound-change and the genesis of prodigal writing systems." English Language and Linguistics 13, no. 1 (March 2009): 1–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1360674308002840.

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In a series of articles we have looked at individual early Middle English writing systems and explored aspects of multivocal sound/symbol and symbol/sound relationships. This article combines previous observations with new material, and provides insights into the genesis of these relations and how they may interconnect. Since many early Middle English texts survive as copies, not originals, they may give clues to the orthographic systems of their exemplars too.We investigate the ‘extensibility’ of Litteral and Potestatic Substitution Sets. Writing systems may be economical or prodigal. The ‘ideal’ economical system would map into a broad phonetic or a phonemic transcription: that is, one ‘sound’, one symbol. In early Middle English there is no one standard written norm, so there is potentially less restraint on diversity than in standard systems. Further extensibility is built into the system. We show that much of what tends to be dismissed as ‘scribal error’ rather represents writing praxis no longer familiar to us – flexible matrices of substitution and variation.

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MOERENHOUT, MIKE, and WIM VAN DER WURFF. "Object–verb order in early sixteenth-century English prose: an exploratory study." English Language and Linguistics 9, no. 1 (May 2005): 83–114. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1360674305001553.

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Recent work on word-order change in the history of English has shown that late Middle English prose retains object–verb order as a productive option in contexts with an auxiliary and a quantified or negated object, and also in topicalization structures. In order to determine when these limited types of object–verb order became impossible, we have examined a collection of sixteenth-century prose texts. Our findings are that the patterns attested in late Middle English in fact continue until 1550, but then appear to dwindle away. We present the relevant object–verb data, discuss the reasons for the survival of the patterns found, provide an explanation for a difference at the level of detail between the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century data, and offer some suggestions about the reasons for the eventual loss of the structures in question.

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Truswell, Robert. "Grammar Competition and Word Order in a Northern Early Middle English Text." Languages 6, no. 2 (March 24, 2021): 59. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/languages6020059.

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The Edinburgh Royal College of Physicians manuscript of Cursor Mundi and the Northern Homilies, a northern Middle English text from the early 14th century, contains unprecedentedly high frequencies of matrix verb-third and embedded verb-second word orders with subject–verb inversion. I give a theoretical account of these word orders in terms of a grammar, the ‘CM grammar’, which differs minimally in its formal description from regular verb-second grammars, but captures these unusual word orders through addition of a second preverbal A′-projection. Despite its flexibility, the CM grammar did not spread through the English-speaking population. I discuss the theoretical consequences of this failure to spread for models of grammar competition where fitness is tied to parsing success, and discuss prospects for refining such models.

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Sylwanowicz, Marta. "Middle and Early Modern English Medical Recipes: Some Notes on Specialised Terminology." Anglica. An International Journal of English Studies, no. 27/2 (September 17, 2018): 89–101. http://dx.doi.org/10.7311/0860-5734.27.2.05.

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One of the text-type features of a recipe is a certain degree of technical lexicon (cf. Görlach 2004). The aim of the present study is to compare the use and distribution of selected group of terms, here references to medical preparations, in Middle and Early Modern English recipe collections. Particular attention will be given to the factors responsible for the choice of terms. Also, we will concentrate on the rivalry between native and foreign lexical units.

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Greenfield, Anne. "Drama in English. From the Middle Ages to the Early Twentieth Century." Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research 31, no. 2 (2016): 107–8. http://dx.doi.org/10.5325/rectr.31.2.0107.

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Blake, N. F. "The Early History of, and its Impact upon, the Middle English Dictionary." Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America 23, no. 1 (2002): 48–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/dic.2002.0010.

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Ogura, Michiko. "The Interchangeability of the Endings –endeand –ennein Old and Early Middle English." English Studies 90, no. 6 (December 2009): 721–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00138380903181049.

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Rissanen, Matti. "Ere and before in English historical corpora, with special reference to the Corpus of English Dialogues." Journal of Historical Pragmatics 19, no. 2 (December 31, 2018): 286–301. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/jhp.00023.ris.

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Abstract In this paper, the use of two roughly synonymous temporal adverbial links, ere and before, will be discussed. The survey will cover the history of English, from Old to Present-day English. It is based on historical corpora, particularly on the Corpus of English Dialogues (1560–1760). Ere (Old English ær) was originally temporal, while before (Old English beforan) goes back to the spatial form. In Old English and Early Middle English ere is clearly more common than before; from Late Middle English on, before becomes the more favoured link. The Corpus of English Dialogues and later corpora indicate that the use of ere is remarkably restricted to informal and speech-related discourse.

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Laker, Stephen. "Early Changes of Dental Fricatives: English and Frisian Compared." Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 77, no. 1-2 (June 9, 2017): 243–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18756719-12340074.

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Dental fricatives [θ ð] develop along similar lines in English and Frisian throughout most of the Middle Ages. The consonants were retained in about equal measure, but alterations occurred when next to other consonants. A way of explaining the changes in both languages is by invoking complexity of articulation, a notion that finds empirical support. The parallel developments of English and Frisian undermine the idea that Old English evolved differently from other Old Germanic languages during its earliest stages. However, from the late fourteenth century, Frisian took on a different trajectory of change due to new social circumstances connected with increased language contact and bilingualism, especially with Dutch and Low German.

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Schäfer, Peter. "Jewish Magic Literature in Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages." Journal of Jewish Studies 41, no. 1 (April 1, 1990): 75–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.18647/1511/jjs-1990.

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Journal articles on the topic 'Early Middle English'

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