Old, Middle, and Early Modern Morphology and Syntax through Texts Elly van Gelderen 6 August 2016 1 Table of Contents List of Abbreviations Chapter 1 Introduction 1 The history of English in a nutshell 2 Functions and case 3 Verbal inflection and clause structure 4 Language change 5 Sources and resources 6 Conclusion Chapter 2 The Syntax of Old, Middle, and Early Modern English 1 Major Changes in the Syntax of English 2 Word Order 3 Inflections 4 Demonstratives, pronouns, and articles 5 Clause boundaries 6 Dialects in English 7 Conclusion Chapter 3 Old English Before 1100 1 The script 2 Historical prose narrative: Orosius 2 3 Sermon: Wulfstan on the Antichrist 4 Biblical gloss and translation: Lindisfarne, Rushworth, and Corpus Versions 5 Poetic monologue: the Wife’s Lament and the Wanderer 6 Conclusion Chapter 4 Early Middle English 1100‐1300 1 Historical prose narrative: Peterborough Chronicle 2 Prose Legend: Seinte Katerine 3 Debate poetry: The Owl and the Nightingale 4 Historical didactic poetry: Physiologus (Bestiary) 5 Prose: Richard Rolle’s Psalter Preface 6 Conclusion Chapter 5 Late Middle English and Early Modern 1300‐1600 1 Didactic poem: Cleanness 2 Instructional scientific prose: Chaucer’s Astrolabe 3 Religious: Margery of Kempe 4 Romance: Caxton 5 Chronicle and letters: Henry Machyn and Queen Elizabeth 6 Conclusion Chapter 6 Conclusion Appendix I Summary of all grammatical information 3 Appendix II Background on texts Appendix III Keys to the exercises Bibliography Glossary 4 Preface This book examines linguistic characteristics of English texts by studying manuscript images. I divide English into Old English, before 1100 but excluding runic inscriptions; Early Middle English, between 1100 and 1300; Late Middle English, between 1300 and 1500; and Early Modern English, after 1500. The end date of 1600 was chosen because I wanted to cover the introduction of printed text as well. The reason is that the shape of the printed letters continues the earlier scribal tradition, as does the variability in spelling. This division reflects an increase of analytic forms and a loss of synthetic ones in the 12th and 13th centuries. The 14th century and after see a stabilization and the development of more synthetic forms due to the lexical influence of French and Latin. The book is meant for readers who are somewhat familiar with the history of English and who want to look at the syntax and morphology using actual manuscripts. It emphasizes the original version and provides a careful, in depth analysis of the text. The book can be used as a companion to a course book on the history of English or on its own. It focusses on morpho‐ syntactic analysis but also paints a certain typological picture. The introductory chapter provides the reader with some background on case, agreement, auxiliaries, and so on. For readers less familiar with grammatical concepts, there is also a glossary of grammatical and linguistic terms at the end of the book. Chapter 2 outlines the major syntactic (and morphological) changes of the last 1500 years. Examples have mainly been taken from the Dictionary of Old English texts (tapor.library.utoronto.ca/doecorpus); in 5 order not to clutter the examples, I don’t give elaborate references or sources. A few of the example sentences and observations are taken from van Gelderen (2014). The chapters after the introductory two each deal with texts from a particular period: Old English in chapter 3, Early Middle English in chapter 4, and Late Middle and Early Modern English in chapter 5. The texts represent stages and registers in the history of English. Some are taken from early poetical material and from some prose, some are well‐known and some lesser known, and they are from different dialect areas when possible. In chapter 3, I have put the easier texts first but, in chapters 4 and 5, the texts are ordered chronologically. Different registers and dialects result in very different language. In Appendix II, there is some information on all the texts. After the two introductory chapters, I emphasize the facsimile versions that the editions are based on so that the reader becomes aware of the spelling, spacing, and punctuation conventions, the frequent lack of a distinction between main and subordinate sentences, the contractions, and the abbreviations. It is important to be able to read the originals since some of our current editions change the text, e.g. Brook & Leslie’s (1963) edition of Layamon’s Brut introduces hyphens where the original lacks them. This gives the wrong impression if one is studying reflexives or prefixes, for instance. There are other advantages to looking at manuscripts. Fischer (2007: 18) mentions this problem of editors having a `modern’ perspective. Fleischer (2009) argues that manuscripts tell us about prosody, something I haven’t noticed in the texts in this book, because they were meant to be read. My goal in 6 writing this book has been to go back to manuscripts and not to rely on editions that may, once in a while, make (unfortunate) editorial judgements. This allows the reader to makes his/her own decisions. To make reading the manuscript images possible, I have added transcriptions, word‐by‐ word glosses, and free translations where I thought they were needed. For the transcription, I have mainly followed Clemens & Graham (2007) except where they modernize all letters and eliminate spaces. I have not used a lot of theory‐specific terminology in the analysis sections. In chapter 1, I explain the background to ‘traditional’ grammatical concepts, such as the parts of speech, grammatical functions, and complex sentences, and I briefly discuss grammaticalization. I have tried not to clutter the chapters with references to the vast literature, e.g. on English word order. There is a section at the end of each chapter with some references. These and, especially, the Cambridge History of the English Language, volumes 1 and 2 (Hogg 1992, Blake 1992), and some of the recent Handbooks on the History of English (e.g. van Kemenade & Los 2006, Nevalainen & Traugott 2012, and Kytö et al 2016) should be helpful. There are some other books that use facsimiles, in particular Freeborn (1992, updated in 1998 and 2006). His book predates the ready availability of manuscripts online. The present book, where possible, has links to and images from the manuscripts so readers can actually see the parchment and, for later periods, the paper. Freeborn is more Middle‐English oriented and his focus is sociolinguistic (on the development of a standard language) whereas mine is 7 syntactic. Fischer at al (2000) provides explanations of Old and Middle English syntax with copious example sentences but it doesn’t consider excerpts of particular texts. Other helpful books that include facsimiles and transcriptions are Roberts (2005) and Wright (1969). Thanks to Joe Salmons and David Willis for their encouragement and to the latter for specific comments. Three anonymous referees provided helpful suggestions. Special thanks go to Johanna Wood for discussions on the scope, audience, and content of this book and to Naomi Dalton for highly specific comments that have improved the flow and argumentation a lot. In July 2016, I had the pleasure of teaching a summer school class on this topic and I thank its extremely motivated students for critical comments. List of Abbreviations ACC Accusative case ADV Adverb AUX Auxiliary BNC British National Corpus (http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/) CE Common Era COCA Corpus of Contemporary American English (http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/) DAT Dative case DEM Demonstrative Extr Extraposed 8 F Feminine GEN Genitive case Gr grammar INF Infinitive Lg Language M Masculine ME Middle English ModE Modern English N Neuter NOM Nominative case OE Old English OED Oxford English Dictionary OV Object‐Verb PL Plural PP Prepositional Phrase Pre‐V Preverbal PRT Particle REFL Reflexive REL Relative S Singular, or Subject 9 V2/V3 Verb‐second, verb‐third VO Verb‐Object 1 First person 2 Second person 3 Third person 7 Shorthand in Latin for et ‘and’, taken over in Old and Middle English Ɨ Shorthand for Latin vel ‘or’ between words * Reconstructed 10 Chapter 1 Introduction In this book, we’ll examine linguistic characteristics of several texts throughout the early history of English, using basic grammatical terminology. For each text, we will focus on issues such as the word order, the endings on nouns and verbs, the presence of auxiliaries, articles, and pronouns, the types of pronouns, and the nature of complex sentences. To describe a language, we need to get as close to the sources as possible. For Old and Middle English, that mostly means looking at manuscripts. Examining manuscripts used to be difficult because you’d have to travel to a certain library and get permission to study the manuscript. There were (and are) facsimile editions of some texts but they were often unclear copies. Today, many of the manuscripts have been digitized and can therefore be studied using your computer without the need for travel. The reason that we can’t rely on edited texts is that many of the editors up to the present, when they edit manuscipts for publication, add punctuation, hyphens and capitals, add spacing, and insert `missing’ letters. That’s why it is important to use manuscripts where possible to get close to a text. The main parts of the book, i.e. chapters 3, 4, and 5, provide manuscript images (sometimes from the facsimile edition and sometimes from the online copy) of a part of a text and an approximate transcription of what appears in the manuscript. Where needed, word‐by‐ word glosses and translations are offered. The book also provides an analysis of the texts and 11 some background on the style and dialect variety.