This edited book examines the multilingual culture of medieval England, exploring its impact on the development of English and its textual manifestations from a multi-disciplinary perspective. The book offers overviews of the state of the art of research and case studies on this subject in (sub)disciplines of linguistics including historical linguistics, onomastics, lexicology and lexicography, sociolinguistics, code-switching and language contact, and also includes contributions from literary and socio-cultural studies, material culture, and palaeography. The authors focus on the variety of languages in use in medieval Britain, including English, Old Norse, Norn, Dutch, Welsh, French, and Latin, making the argument that understanding the impact of medieval multilingualism on the development of English requires multidisiplinarity and the bringing together of different frameworks in linguistics and cultural studies toachieve more nuanced answers. This book will be of interest to academics and students of historical linguistics and medieval textual culture.
Table of Content
Chapter 1: Introduction
Part I Research Contexts
Chapter 2: Contact Theory and the History of English
Chapter 3: From Original Sources to Linguistic Analysis: Tools and Datasets for the Investigation of Multilingualism in Medieval English
Part II Medieval Multilingualism and Lexical Change
Chapter 4: Contact-Induced Lexical Effects in Medieval English
Chapter 5: The West Germanic Heritage of Yorkshire English
Chapter 6: Reframing the Interaction between Native Terms and Loanwords: Some Data from Occupational Domains in Middle English
Chapter 7: Cheapside in Wales: Multilingualism and Textiles in Medieval Welsh Poetry
Chapter 8: Caxton’s Linguistic and Literary Multilingualism: English, French and Dutch in the History of Jason
Part III Medieval Multilingualism and Morphosyntactic Change
Chapter 9: An Overview of Contact-Induced Morphosyntactic Changes in Early English
Chapter 10: Traces of Language Contact in Nominal Morphology of Late Northumbrian and Northern Middle English
Chapter 11: Origin and Spread of the Personal Pronoun They: La Estorie del Evangelie, a Case Study
Chapter 12: Language Contact Effects on Verb Semantic Classes: Lability in Early English and Old French
Chapter 13: Exploring Norn: A Historical Heritage Language of the British Isles
Part IV Textual Manifestations of Medieval Multilingualism
Chapter 14: Textual and Codicological Manifestations of Multilingual Culture in Medieval England
Chapter 15: Adapting Winefride in Welsh, Latin and English
Chapter 16: Let Each One Tell its Own Story: Language Mixing in Four Copies of Amore Langueo
Chapter 17: The Materiality of the Manières de langage
Chapter 18 Afterword
About the author
Sara M. Pons-Sanz is Reader in Language and Communication at Cardiff University, UK. She led the AHRC-funded network Medieval English (ca600-1500) in a Multilingual Context and co-led the AHRC-funded Gersum Project. She is the author of The Lexical Effects of Anglo-Scandinavian Linguistic Contact on Old English, and other books and articles on medieval English.
Louise Sylvester is Professor of English Language at the University of Westminster, UK. She co-edited the
Bilingual Thesaurus of Everyday Life in Medieval England and the multilingual database
Lexis of Cloth and Clothing in Britain c700-1450. She has published widely on the effects of contact with French on the vocabulary of Middle English.
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