Change in Life, Change in Language: a Semantic Approach to the History

Change in Life, Change in Language Studies in English Medieval Language and Literature Edited by Jacek Fisiak

Advisory Board: John Anderson (Methoni, Greece), Ulrich Busse (Halle), Olga Fischer (Amsterdam), Marcin Krygier (Poznan´), Roger Lass (Cape Town), Peter Lucas (Cambridge), Donka Minkova (Los Angeles), Akio Oizumi (Kyoto), Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (UC Berkeley, USA), Matti Rissanen (Helsinki), Hans Sauer (Munich), Liliana Sikorska (Poznan´), Jeremy Smith (Glasgow), Jerzy Wełna (Warsaw)

Vol. 37 Begoña Crespo

Change in Life, Change in Language A Semantic Approach to the History of English Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

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Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground.

Noah Webster

For my mother

Table of contents

List of abbreviations ...... 9 Prologue ...... 11 Introduction ...... 13

Part I Socio-historical background of the English language (12th-17th centuries) ...... 17 1.1 Middle English in context ...... 17 1.2 Towards the revival of English ...... 22 1.3 Late Medieval and Early Modern English ...... 33

Part II Language change in Medieval and Renaissance England ...... 39 2.1 Theoretical approaches to linguistic change ...... 39 2.2 Factors involved in language change ...... 43 2.2.1 External factors ...... 48 2.2.2 Internal factors ...... 51 2.3 Language interference through contact ...... 51 2.3.1 Interference ...... 53 2.3.2 Other contact situations: bilingualism and diglossia ...... 53 2.4 Changes in different levels of language ...... 60

Part III Semantic change: a change ‘social and linguistic’ ...... 63 3.1 The meaning of the word meaning ...... 65 3.1.1 Related assumptions: the concept of ‘semantic field’ and broad categorisations of reality...... 68 3.2 Changing the meaning ...... 73 3.2.1 Definitions ...... 73 3.2.2 Causes ...... 75 3.2.3 Models to classify changes in meaning ...... 78

8 Table of contents

3.3 Corpus material and methodology ...... 88 3.4 Semantic changes in person-rank nouns ...... 95 3.4.1 Meaning change in combination with other variables ...... 112

Final remarks ...... 117 References ...... 121

List of abbreviations

CA Componential analysis AF Anglo-French AL Anglo-Latin AR Arabian CAT Catalan CELT Celtic CF Central French DU Dutch EML East Midlands Linguistic Atlas EML/NL East Midlands / North Midlands Linguistic Atlas EMO East Midlands Other F French GMC Germanic GR Greek HC Helsinki Corpus HEB Hebrew ME Middle English EModE Early Modern English INDIC Indic IT Italian KL Kentish Linguistic Atlas KO Kentish Other L Latin L Linguistic Atlas LG Low German MDU Middle Dutch MED Middle English Dictionary MFLEM Middle Flemish MHG Middle High German ML Middle Latin MLG Middle Low German MNIR Modern Irish NL North Midlands Linguistic Atlas NO North MidlandsOther NO/EMO North Midlands / East Midlands Other O Other OE Old English OED Oxford English Dictionary OF Old French OHG Old High German OI Old Icelandic ON Old Norse

10 List of abbreviations

ONF Old Norman French OSP Old Spanish SL South Midlands Linguistic Atlas SO South Midlands Other SP Spanish SW Swedish TOE A Thesaurus of Old English WML West Midlands Linguistic Atlas WMO West Midlands Other

Prologue

Within the field of diachronic linguistics, semantic change has not always received the same attention as syntax, phonology or morphology. This monograph is an attempt to demonstrate that it is possible to treat semantics as a discipline in its own right within a diachronic study. The survey of meaning-change in the content of lexical units that follows will be conducted from a socio-historical perspective: lexical units will be classified within a chronological framework that spans six centuries, taking into account all those social, political, economic and cultural events (the Norman Conquest, the loss of Normandy in 1204, the growth of the nationalist phenomenon, the Hundred Years War, the Plague, the peasant revolts, etc.) which may have influenced the semantic development of a given term. We must also bear in mind, of course, that these extra-systemic influences (influences of a non-linguistic nature) gave rise to unique linguistic situations as a result of contact, interference and contagion from other linguistic layers coexisting alongside the basic Anglo-Saxon substratum. By examining semantic change over the course of these six centuries (12th-17th) I will demonstrate the relationship between a term and the concept or external reality to which it makes reference, along with how a term’s meaning changes as society and individuals themselves witness change in the prevailing culture. To this end, the present study is divided into three parts: the first introduces the reader into the linguistic and historical environment of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; in the second part, the sociolinguistic situation of the period is presented in an analysis of the impact of certain social factors and the influence of foreign linguistic strata on the development of the English language. These two parts lay the groundwork for the subsequent survey in Part III which focuses on semantic change. Different possible approaches and models for a semantic survey of this type will be described, together with a discussion of causes, factors and typologies, as a means of establishing an orientation which combines social and linguistic criteria for the classification and explanation of semantic changes. In the final sections of Part III this orientation will be applied to the analysis of person-rank nouns, taken as a representative subgroup of the lexical category of the noun. The treatment of data on semantic change within the historical sociolinguistic framework raises, among other issues, that of the significance of the kind of change known as specialisation, and indeed this will be dealt with towards the end of the study. Last but not least, I wish to thank my family, my mother, Roberto, Pablo, Sara and Clara, for all their help in the creation of this work. I would also like to express my sincere thanks for all the assistance I have received from librarians at the Faculty of Philology, University of A Coruña, at the Universitá degli Studi di Bergamo, and at the Senate House, London. I would also like to make a very special mention of Luis Igle- sias Rábade, who gave me a taste for the history of language and a love of my work. Finally, my deepest gratitude to Isabel Moskowich, a tireless, rigorous and methodical academic, for her constructive comments and for being an endless source of advice and wisdom. Most of all, though, I thank her for her friendship. A Coruña, October 20th 2011 Begoña Crespo

Introduction

The primary objective of the present work is to address the question of semantic change over the course of the history of English. However, given that semantic change is only one of many facets of language change, I will endeavour not to lose sight of those other factors which are, to greater or lesser degree, involved in the diachronic evolution of the language. With respect to the relationship between society, culture and linguistic change, Su Jinzhi (1992) and Moessner (2003) both maintain that it is in the lexicon of a language that we most clearly observe the combination of external factors and their impact on linguistic change. I also believe it difficult to study any aspect of a language without taking into account the socio-historical environment in which the language is used, and for this reason it seems to me appropriate to devote the first part of this treatise to a panoramic view of the circumstances in which English was used in the period under study here. To this end, Part I will include a description of the historical events which influenced the development of the English language between the 12th and the 17th centuries. Having established the socio-historical variables running through this survey, Part II will be devoted to a comprehensive review of the literature on linguistic change. Linguistic change is generally taken as an accepted fact, at times tacitly so. This is the case even with authors who do not deal with the question directly or whose attention is focused on analysing very specific aspects of a given linguistic period; authors, for example, who carry out synchronic studies within a historical framework. Synchronic studies typically describe the state of a phenomenon or form at a specific time and compare it to the situation in modern English. If we can accept linguistic change as a starting point, then, a historical review of the literature will allow us to see how different schools in linguistics have dealt with this issue. In some instances, theoretical positions will be illustrated with practical examples of how a particular model can actually explain the language. I will devote special attention to those schools associated with historical sociolinguistics (and sociohistorical linguistics), looking at writers such as Labov, Leslie and James Milroy and Terttu Nevalainen. I will take into consideration both external and internal factors influencing linguistic change, identifying social motivation as one of the most important of these. Following the review of theoretical frameworks, the next step will be to focus specifically on semantic change. Part III will be devoted to this, and among other things I will attempt to shed some light on the difference between what authors describe as semantic change and lexical change. References to ‘lexico-semantic’ elements are common, but I feel that for a study of this nature, a more precise definition is necessary. Likewise, my semantic survey will focus on meaning, on the content of the various lexical units proposed by Ullmann (1972) and Hock (1996) and discussed by Görlach (2003) and Kastovsky (2006). Meaning, it is argued, becomes apparent through the link between the form of a word and its content. This link is subject at all times to the impact of linguistic or external social factors. In the same way, meaning depends on the use speakers make of a term and the context in which it is found. Similarities of mean-

14 Introduction ing between terms allow speakers to organise the language around broad, flexible groups known as semantic fields, which depict a specific conceptual area. The structuralist approach allows for the classification of those fields which are likely to vary from one author to another, depending on each author’s particular subjectivity and conceptualisation of reality. This explains the existence of different classifications, such as those proposed by Serjeantson (1935), Moskowich (1995), A The- saurus of Old English (1995), or indeed the one in this study. By classifying the lexicon into semantic fields, I can then select the field or fields within which I want to examine in detail the action of semantic change. For this reason, one of the sections in Part III deals with the definitions, causes and classifications that may be found in a survey of this type of change. Any branch of linguistics can to some extent be explained in terms of scientifically formulated laws. It is semantics, though, that pays the most attention to the relationship between language and the outside world (Lehmann 1976: 1) and which is also, therefore, the most open to explanation in terms of the other social sciences. In the words of Palmer (1975: 267) ‘semantic structure is generally a reflection of...the social world’, and in many cases, regardless of the linguistic tools employed, we must resort to social phenomena and/or events to explain the lexicon (Matoré 1988; Robins 1971; Hughes 1988, 1991; Knapp 2000); in other words, ‘the history of the vocabulary of a speech community is a reflection of its general history, since both innovations and losses document changes in the social needs of this community arising from the pressure to adapt to changing external circumstances’ (Görlach 2003: 201-202). Whatever the circumstances, the meaning of a word in many cases is no more than ‘the collective product of generations of cultural history’ (Robins 1971: 56). This is the approach I intend to adopt both in search of semantic change and in an attempt to explain it. In order to determine different types of semantic change, whatever their origin or the reasons for their emergence, I will adopt a sociolinguistic classification using parameters that indicate the manner in which the meaning of a term is transformed, and others that include the value-judgements of speakers with respect to the terms (Ull- mann 1962; Williams 1975; Hughes 1988; Millward 1996; Geeraerts 1997; Closs- Traugott 1999). Although I will not lose sight of the various different theories regarding linguistic change in general and semantic change in particular, the final objective of this study is not so much to decide between the existence or non-existence of change itself (since the working premise here is that it does indeed exist), but rather to attempt to determine the mechanisms through which change occurs. For this purpose, Section 3.3 will briefly describe both the corpus to be analysed here and the tools used for this analysis. Given that my aim is to obtain information relating to how semantic change works in the history of the English language, I will use texts from different periods, so that the survey covers a span of time broad enough for the mechanisms of linguistic change to be seen at work. The historical section of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts (1991) provides an appropriate collection of texts for this purpose. In addition, it is important to establish very clearly all those elements associated with the word class under analysis: the noun, including its meaning, use in context, etymological origin, type of text in which particular examples are found, etc. Introduction 15

This information will provide the data necessary to determine which semantic field provides the greatest number of examples in the corpus, which in turn will serve as the focus for my study of semantic change. Each noun will be analysed in its context, allocated to a semantic field according to the classification adopted, and all additional information will also be taken into account. The overall number of different forms will, as stated above, reveal which semantic field appears most often. Semantic change will then be observed in this field using the componential method. Following the description of the corpus and the tools to be used for its analysis, I will present the findings in relation to change in the history of the English language, from Middle English to Early Modern English. I will devote particular attention to the study of the semantic field that appears most often according to the data available, personal rank nouns, and of the most common type of change in this particular field. The periodisation and dating of texts established by the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts (1991) will be observed throughout. Relevant conclusions will be presented in the final section of Part III.

Part I

Sociohistorical background of the English language (12th–17th centuries)

Before entering into the historical events which served to transform the English language, it seems appropriate to offer a review of the sociolinguistic situation in England at the time. Given that the present work is an attempt to highlight the importance of historical phenomena on linguistic change – more specifically, on semantic change – everything that is socio-external deserves special, if not excessively detailed, mention in the following section.

1.1 Middle English in context

A large number of studies on the external and internal history of English note that the rise and predominance of the French language1 during the 12th and 13th centuries diminished over the following centuries, as a result of the growth among the English of a consciousness which defined their cultural and linguistic identity in terms of geographical borders. The firm attitude of the English people, fighting to defend its interests as a community, finally overthrew the prevailing ‘triglossic’2 situation (Latin, French, English), driving linguistic trends in the country towards the use and celebra- tion of the native language: English. At the end of the 16th century, William Harrison described the linguistic conditions in 13th century England in the following terms: ...for in time of king Edward the first, to wit, toward the latter end of his reigne, the Frenche it selfe ceased to be spoken generallie, but most of all and by law in the midst of Edward the third, and then began the English to recouer and grow in more estimation than before3. Establishing the English language proved a slow process and its lack of prestige would continue to be the object of treatises by intellectuals for centuries. The linguistic habits of Orderic Vitalis (late 11th century) and Walter of Bibbesworth well illustrate the long and changing nature of the co-existence of the three languages (Hall et al., 2010). Nei- ther author had any basic knowledge of French: in Orderic Vitalis’ time the French language was not yet prestigious enough to be considered compulsory for a future member of the religious community whose native language was English (Bernt 1969 and Baugh and Cable 1993). In fact, as Fisiak (1995) points out, although French became the official language in England after the Conquest, there is evidence from both oral and written sources of the continued use of English; at the end of the 12th century,

1 We can perhaps justify the use of the term ‘French’ to refer to the language used by the invaders on the basis that, since ‘the Anglo-Saxons called their Norman conquerors the ‘French’, this generic term could be applied just as well to their language, which was immediately distinguishable in England from both Anglo-Saxon and Latin’ (Clanchy 1993: 217) 2 The term ‘‘triglossia’ relates to the coexistence of three languages in functional disequilibrium. 3 William Harrison, The Description of Britain (1587) in Bolton 1967.

18 Part I for example, a witness declared in English before a court, and the Peterborough Chronicle was written in the vernacular until the middle of the 12th century. French, however, was the language of the aristocracy and of the court. Walter of Bibbesworth, for example, is known to have taught literary French vocabulary to a lady of high standing and to her children who, although members of the aristocracy, spoke English as their native language or L1 (Clanchy 1993: 199). Teaching methods included lists of expressions in French with accompanying glossaries in English. The desire to rise in society led to a period of imitation, in which people attempted to copy aspects of the behaviour typical of the most prestigious social spheres. The most ambitious undertook to learn the L2, ‘unconsciously imposed’ by those in power. This attitude can be observed in Robert of Gloucester’s description of life around the year 1300, and we can find similar comments by the poet Alexander Barclay in his The introductorie to wryte ad to pronounce frenche (1521) where he speaks of the linguistic situation in England in the past (Lambley 1920: 4): ...moreover, in times past, the French language ‘hath ben so moche set by in England that who hath been ignorant in the same language hath not been reputed to be of gentyll blode. In so moche that, as the cronicles of englande recorde, in all the gramer scoles throughout englande small scolars expounded theyr construccyons bothe in Frenche and Englysshe’. The fact that English, alongside French, became a medium for teaching in primary schools was symptomatic of the broader social and linguistic changes that were beginning to emerge. During the second half of the 14th century, England was to find itself in the midst of a process of linguistic standardisation, as a consequence of the revival of the English language. From now on the functional barrier between English and French would gradually fade4. The use of English, which had always been the language of the majority of the people, spread to all strata of society5, and even came to assume the administrative functions traditionally performed by French. The success of the English language was due, ultimately, to the fact that the great majority of the population had never abandoned the vernacular as an instrument of communication, and also that, in turn, a social evolution was making it possible for members of disadvantaged groups to reach more privileged positions within the middle classes. Hence, the native tongue now began to gain a foothold in more influential spheres of power and culture. Elite groups used English as a political tool (to promote hatred of foreigners, ‘chauvinism’ and nationalist attitudes) until English finally became their L1. Regarding nationalist attitudes, many historians of the language concur that the nationalist phenomenon played a significant role, to a greater or lesser degree, in the process of reviving the English language (see Tout 1922; Wilson 1943; Bernt 1969, 1972; McLaughlin 1970; Rothwell

4 We may also speak of a third language, Latin, which has only been mentioned in passing because it remained restricted to the written medium and was only spoken among the privileged circle of prelates and intellectuals. 5 I will attempt, as far as possible, to avoid using the expression ‘social class’ to avoid possible connotations deriving from it and to respect the social divisions corresponding to each period. The ‘social classes’ model is more appropriate when describing industrialised societies. When dealing with the pre-industrial societies of Medieval and Renaissance periods, it is more accurate to speak in terms of hierarchies organised around groups, classes or strata (Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 1996). Sociohistorical background of the English language 19

1975-6; Kibbee 1991; Baugh and Cable 1993; Barber 1993; Fisiak 1995; Graddol, Leith and Swann 1996; and Knowles 1997). Graddol, Leith and Swann, for example, postulate the importance of the nationalist explosion, arguing that nineteenth-century ideals of national identity are evidence for the existence of a national sentiment or essence where there is a shared ethnic origin, territory and language. They employ the same argument later on. Renaissance attitudes to national languages, they note, were confused: in spite of the political necessity of defending a national language, any such language was still perceived as inferior to the classical ones. Nevertheless, the learned classes did not fail to see the importance of language as a tool with which nationalist claims could be forged. The growth of the phenomenon of national identity, and the emerging parallelism between identity and the English language, is recognised by Turville-Petre (1996: 8-9):

...the sense of national identity in the mid-thirteenth century expressed itself in a rich diversity of forms. The nation had a territory, a history, a set of cultural traditions, a body of legal practices expressed in the Common Law, a single economy …. However, it did not, or so it would seem, have a language. ... it was not until near the end of the century that the nationalist associations of the English language find explicit political expression, when Edward I, … accused the French of trying to exterminate the English language. … by the 1290s... the association of nation and language was well established. It seems, then, that all the social groups shared a common enthusiasm for, and interest in, using the native language in all walks of life. As a direct result of this universal feeling, itself the fruit of decisive historical events, there emerges a conscious approval of English in the society of the time (Clanchy 1993: 200-201). In the history of the English language, the Norman Conquest is a watershed event in the evolution of the vernacular. We may consider it a ‘conquest of the aristocracy’, in view of the almost immediate occupation by the French nobility and clergy of government posts, and the simultaneous imposition of their language and culture. By contrast, the peasantry experienced little linguistic change in their daily lives, apart from relations with their feudal lords and the transaction of legal matters; these situations, although not part of the fabric of everyday life, were nevertheless of crucial importance in terms of linguistic interaction. Contact with his immediate superiors forced the peasant to attain a certain level of familiarity with French in order to make communication more effective. In the same way, the peasant needed some knowledge of this language in order to be able to participate in legal proceedings (Woodbine 1943; Kibbee 1991). However, despite its linguistic repercussions, the Norman Conquest in itself may be characterised as a military conflict which was sustained for a relatively short period of time and did not succeed in destroying the foundations of the English language6. Even with the massive importation of lexicon which accompanied the arri- val of the Normans, French could not replace English completely as the language of

6 Even though the ‘scriptoria’ passed into French hands, there is evidence that the English language endured: centres such as Winchester, Worcester and Lichfield continued the native language tradition. In the 13th century works of this kind continued to be produced in the most south-westerly region of the isles; the same did not occur in the east, where the task of keeping the tradition alive posed greater difficulties.

20 Part I the general speech community, which was at this time in the process of defining itself culturally. As proof of the survival of the vernacular in the period following the Con- quest, we may highlight two factors: i) Absence of linguistic resentment between the two ethnic groups The English and French were slow to mix in the immediate aftermath of the Conquest. In fact, integration was a gradual process, developing from initial hate and aversion to a situation of tolerance and peaceful cooperation, though the two communities never merged entirely. Mixed marriages and commercial activities were common, although the Normans preserved a consciousness of their difference and the superiority of their position in society until well after the Conquest7. The fact that there was never full integration between the two communities allowed English and French to coexist on various levels and this prevented the absolute imposition of French, the language of power and prestige. Such coexistence did not preclude a certain degree of resentment, however; a certain atmosphere of bitterness existed between the two groups, although the sentiment seems to have been more social than linguistic in origin (Claiborne 1990). We find, therefore, that linguistic coexistence required an effort, not just on the part of the English community who found itself obliged to try to learn French, but also by the Normans, who attempted to acquire the mother tongue of the natives. On the English side, this would include people such as agricultural labourers and those in administrative posts occupying social positions that brought them into contact with the French nobility. At the same time, members of the lower nobility and the eclectic middle class learnt French in an effort to match the linguistic habits of those in power. For the Normans, the most obvious example is that of William the Conqueror, who himself condescended to learn English, though ‘apparently with no great success’ (Wilson 1943: 45). Likewise, Henry I was expected to be familiar with both languages while his successor, Henry II, is said to have understood English, though he didn’t speak it. There is, indeed, general agreement that the monarchy in England made slow but pro- gressively greater efforts to advance their studies in the native language of their Eng- lish subjects. Considering that this situation obtained at the top of the social pyramid, it is probable that meaningful daily contact also occurred at the lower end of the social scale: in the countryside, where managers of the estates of feudal lords would act as mediators between master and peasant; in the towns, where contact between merchants from the two speech communities would be inevitable. It is therefore eminently possi-

7 Iglesias Rábade (1992: 29) describes the process of integration between the Normans and the Eng- lish as ‘difficult’. He also remarks that the process was a slow one: ‘On the one hand, the Normans did not wish to identify themselves with a culture they considered far less sophisticated; on the other, it took the English some time to accept the reality of the conquest.’ In reference to the process of linguistic integration, Iglesias Rábade identifies two generational phases: the first saw the appearance of an incipient ‘vertical bilingualism’ resulting from relations between the two ethnic groups, the equivalent of Fisher’s concept of ‘diglossia without bilingualism’, which continued to evolve over the course of the 12th century. During the second generation, which had been born in England, integration took the form of a ‘conflictual diglossic bilingualism’ (Iglesias Rábade 1992: 31). This demonstrates that, in spite of the sense of disdain inherent in their status as conquerors, the Normans did learn the spoken language and become native speakers of it. Sociohistorical background of the English language 21 ble that such contact gave rise to the gradual acquisition of English on the part of those speakers of Norman origin other than the King and his court. What is more, these ‘contact groups’ (in social terms) could have spread such a form of bilingualism among their own members (Iglesias Rábade 1992), thus contributing to the later revival of the English language. The native English were not held in contempt for their continued use of their own language in day-to-day life, but rather on the basis of their condition as ‘English’: the invaders viewed the subject population as primitive, untutored and uncouth. This was the most obvious sociological outcome of the Conquest: the conquerors considered themselves superior because they had assumed power over the defeated population. Apart from occasional social differences, however, relations between the English and the Normans were cordial, from the linguistic point of view (Woodbine 1943; Berndt 1969; and Baugh and Cable 1993), until the burgeoning of nationalism in the country. This phenomenon led to the transformation of the English language into a unifying mechanism, part of the means to bring about the expulsion of the foreigner8. ii) Existence of written literature from the period of French domination (12th and 13th centuries) Until the middle of the 12th century, Western Saxon was the most widely used variety for writing of a historical, homiletic or didactic nature. At the end of the century, works written in Middle English, such as Brut by Layamon, The Owl and the Nightingale, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Ancrene Riwle, confirmed the existence of an audience capable of understanding English. Some Anglo-Latin historians, including Wil- liam of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntington, recounted legends about the Saxon Kings in English, claiming that they had heard these stories from the mouths of peasants. Such works demonstrate that, even though the Conquest confined English to culturally less prestigious circles, the language was still used by more educated and cul- tured members of society. History provides a faithful witness to the preservation and survival of English. This allows us to chart the revival of the language on the basis of two parameters of analysis: external factors relating to socio-historical events, and changes within the language itself (lexical and/or semantic changes) caused in large part by changes in society. Smith (1996: 4) echoes Su Jinzhi (1992) when he points out the relationship between extralinguistic phenomena and language change: ...human language is both a cultural and a systematic phenomenon, and that both these characteristics need to be borne in mind when addressing the question of linguistic change. … the prime concern of writers of linguistic history —changes in writing systems, pronunciation, grammar or lexicon— cannot be meaningfully accounted for without reference to the extralinguistic contexts (historical, geographical, sociological) in which these phenomena are situated. Language is plainly a social phenomenon… Smith even emphasises the lack of interest of an asocial approach to the study of language.

8 In Language and Nationalism (1973), Fishman analyses the nationalist phenomenon, what it consists of, and its repercussions at a social level. He concludes by identifying language as a unifying axis for different social groups and consequently as an appropriate means to encourage the defence of common national interests.

22 Part I

From a linguistic point of view, the expansion of English at an oral level (13th and 14th centuries) was followed by its use as a vehicle of written communication (15th- 17th century). After a transitional phase involving contact between French and Eng- lish, from which the latter emerged on top, the English language became the primary object of study and debate in intellectual circles. From a historical perspective, the determining factor in this change was the loss of Normandy in 1204, during the reign of King John. The separation from France unleashed a chain of events culminating in the establishment of England as a nation, with the King of England no longer holding the title of Duke of Normandy. This fundamental change meant that the King would no longer pay homage to, nor receive orders from, the French crown. At another level, the confluence and subsequent interaction among the different social strata that now arose proved to be enduring: the ambitious aim of the English would be to unite the community on the basis of their shared culture, expelling the foreigners in the process. From that moment on, the history of England took a very different direction, as the sequence of events that followed will show.

1.2 Towards the revival of English

At the beginning of the 12th century, William of Malmesbury stated that ‘today no Englishman is a duke, or a bishop, or an abbot: foreigners devour the wealth of Eng- land, and there is no hope of remedy’9. In England, the loss of Normandy prompted the nobility to assume the defence of the nation’s interests. This move, plus the continuing conflicts in France and the successive waves of foreigners who entered England under the reign of Henry II (1233, 1236, 1246), receiving special treatment from the Court, lie behind the signing of The Provisions of Oxford (1258). Drawn up in English, French and Latin, the reforms outlined in the document were not enough to satisfy the English aristocracy. A few years later, in The Barons’ War (1265-1267), members of the aristocracy and the middle classes joined forces to fight for a common cause: the expulsion of the foreigners. As mentioned above, the native nobility in England at this time spoke English as their L1 although they probably had a reasonably good level of French as well. French was used, for example, to inspire bravery in the leaders of the English army fighting in Gasconia: ‘Nous conquerons de français a grand honour...de tout nostre langue’ (Rothwell 1993: 309), and again some years later by Hugh de De- penser (1324). The former example, paradoxical as it is, reflects exactly the kind of contradictory situation which can arise in a bilingual environment. Despite the expansion of English as an oral medium, French remained the language of written communication. However, as we may see from the message itself, soldiers and King associated the idea of language with the courage-engendering nationalist spirit necessary to defeat the enemy. Arrayed in English patriotism, the nobility and others involved in one way or another in the battle, were united in the cause of the recognition and institutionalisation of the vernacular (Brinton and Closs-Traugott, 2005).

9 Willelmi Malmesbiriensis De Gestis Regum Anglorum Libri Quinqui..., R.S. 90, Vol. I (1889), p. 278. In Bernt 1969: 390. Sociohistorical background of the English language 23

The Hundred Years’ War (1337-1456) was to be the last great manifestation of this sentiment. Its repercussions were enormous and widely felt. The war depleted the economic resources and potential of England but contributed directly to the growth of pa- triotic awareness among the people. It coincided with the transformation of urban and rural society in Medieval England, which would culminate in the uprising of 1381 (The Peasants’ Revolt). The causes behind this socio-political confrontation were ‘the extravagance of the court and household, the burden of taxation, the weakness of the executive, and the inadequacy of the national defences’ (Mckisack 1959: 422). The 14th century, and the 1370s in particular, was a period of profound economic change due in part to the appearance and spread of the Black Death, which reached England around 1348. The price of basic foodstuffs fell but salaries did not and this affected the profits of the feudal lords, whose earnings fell considerably. In addition to this, the English still had to fund the continuing wars with France, further diminishing the country’s resources. The final provocation came when, to help finance military cam- paigns overseas, peasants were levied with a poll tax which was not applied to their feudal lords. The broad nature of the causes behind the revolt meant that it was not just peasants who participated but also people from the towns and even, in some instances, members of the landowning class. The protests of this heterogeneous group were presented to Parliament in the form of demands by the commons (Rigby, 2006). Every- thing points to the existence at the time of a middle-level class or to the gradual emergence of such a group. This class was represented in Parliament, and, as a consequence, was strong enough to bring pressure to bear on behalf of the economically weak: native speakers for whom English was their first language. The revolt was finally put down, but the presence of an incipient middle class had left its mark every- where. The final victory of this middle class is clear, at least with respect to the Eng- lish language, in the literary renaissance that was now to emerge in the hands of men such as Chaucer, Gower and Hoccleve10 (Machan, 2009). At the same time, a confrontation of interests between the King and the Pope provoked a wave of anti-clericalism which extended beyond the borders of England. Such socio-political unrest began to grow again in the 1370s as a consequence of ‘the Black Death, trade depression, the renewal of war, reverses abroad, heavy taxation, loss of confidence in Edward III and jealousy of the ecclesiastical ministers’ (Mckisack 1959: 289). Unrest led to the rejection of a wealthy, powerful Church but the emerging movement of protest needed a metaphysical foundation to justify its anti-clericalism. Wycliffe provided this, thus ensuring the success of the movement, by basing his ar-

10 Chaucer’s most significant linguistic contribution lies in the distinctive enrichment of the lexicon of his mother tongue using borrowings from Latin and from the Romance languages. Indeed, ‘his writings were valued for such lexical innovations as enabled a heightening of register by accumulating Romance terms’ (Stephens and Waterhouse 1990: 25-26). Literary historians (see Rogers 1987: 49) admit that neither Chaucer nor Gower were poets by profession and yet it was they who established the tradition that would dominate poetry in the 15th century: they are part of the dynasty of so-called ‘courtly makers’ which also includes Lydgate, Hoccleve, Henryson and Dunbar, among others. Both Chaucer and Gower were members of the incipient bourgeoisie, working in trade but maintaining some kind of relation with the institutions of the state. They imbibed the linguistic atmosphere surrounding them, in education, the various institutions, and in the family, and reflected this in their works.

24 Part I gument on the purest Christian principles: he highlighted in particular the importance of maintaining and indeed increasing contact between the Church and the people. His objectives found favour not only among intellectuals at Oxford, but also among the lower clergy, lay groups and the petty nobility. Opposition to the papal tax, coupled with the cost of the interminable war on the continent, fostered resistance to the claims of the Church in Rome and won support for the idea of national Church that would better meet the people’s real needs. Hatred against foreign members of the Church made itself felt, once more, through the various petitions by the Commons to Parlia- ment: in 1346, a request demanded the expulsion of all foreign clergy and the acquisition of their estates by the Crown; in 1377, a new petition requested another expulsion, based on the charge of espionage; the Commons presented further petitions in 1379 and 1380 (Rot. Parl. ii. 162, 367; iii. 64, 96; in Mckisack 1959: 223). Foreigners were condemned as those who ‘came in to compete with your trade, office, ecclesiastical preferment or court favour’ (Tout 1922: 87). The response to these formal petitions came most directly under the reign of Rich- ard II (1377-1399). He unleashed a series of stringent policies on migration, blocking the settlement of French nuns and other social groups in England. At this time, the lower clergy spoke English while those further up the ecclesiastical hierarchy were bilingual, with English as their L1 and French an L2. As Berndt (1969: 357) suggests ‘... as they are freely permitted to speak English at mealtime and on other occasions many of them have become too loquacious and, when dispatched on errands for their houses, are frequently put to shame because of their imperfect knowledge of Latin and French’. In the early part of the 14th century, French was still the standard means of communication for the regular clergy, as well as that of the higher ranks of the secular clergy. Yet, as Berndt (1969: 356) points out, in 1311 the Templar tribunals employed English, because ‘part of its members was entirely ignorant of any other language than their own mother tongue’. These apparently contradictory circumstances are, in fact, complementary. The linguistic situation in England at this time oscillated between two languages in conflict. Although English was generally used more in everyday conver- sations, French was still used for most written production. The proliferation of texts in English would not begin until much later. The gradual movement away from French in clerical circles was seen in the need to create special rules regarding linguistic competence among the clergy, as occurred in the Benedictine provincial synod of 1343. Towards the last quarter of the 14th century, many illiterate people entering religious orders had little knowledge of Latin or French. As a logical consequence of this, French disappeared as a means of day-to-day conversation. Letters and other documents of a less formal nature might now contain a strange combination of English and French, providing further evidence that the use of fluent French was losing ground. Several treatises for the instruction of French as a foreign language were produced to address this decline, among them Anonimalle Chronicle (1380) and Manière de Langage (1396). Although the Church in general was a conservative force for whom linguistic change led to a loss of power, a number of monarchist chroniclers, such as Ranulph Hidgen, defended the native language. Wycliffe and his followers, the Lollards, joined this political struggle for the right of every single Englishman to read the Gospels in Sociohistorical background of the English language 25

English. The group adopted a form of English that was based on the southern ‘central Midlands’ dialect which, together with the London English employed by Gower and Chaucer, led to a national literary standard11. In fact, the English language evolved on similar lines in all spheres of society, religious and secular, high and low. Linguistic development took society in the direction of monolingualism in English, especially among the lower orders, though the insistence on the use of French and Latin in official documents and education receded far more slowly. Even so, diminishing knowledge of the French language, the national impulse to defend the native language as a symbol of ‘Englishness’ (on the part of the nobility as well as the common people), changes in the system of patronage and the intellectual pressure exerted by Wycliffe and his followers, all played a crucial role in the revival, expansion and subsequent establishment of the vernacular (Fisiak 1995). Under the pressure of various social forces, a kind of unofficial plan to elevate the status of the English language began to emerge. In 1325, William of Nassyngton declared that all social classes and ages understood English. At the same time, however, the Oxford University signalled its rejection of the native language by ordering that conversation within the University be conducted in Latin or French. Hence, two contrasting trends coexisted in the first quarter of the 14th century: the first made clear that English was widely extended among the different social classes, while the second reflected the conservatism of some institutions unwilling to give up their position of cultural and linguistic privilege. This latter attitude survived for some time, especially in written communication. A treaty signed between the city of Oxford and its Univer- sity in 1347, for example, was in French. In the first quarter of the 14th century, the ‘Customal’ of Sandwich, containing the ordinances of the city council, was drawn up in English. However, in 1327 we find that the two languages were still operating side by side in legal matters. For example, the Mayor and the Councillor of London persuaded the Civil Governor to draw up all legal documentation in English. At the same time, Roger of Deepham, Secretary to the Governor of London, used French in Parliament. Five years later, a parliamentary statute was enacted to make obligatory the teaching of French to young children, which indicates the level of disuse into which French had fallen in England at the time. The statute also demonstrated that the status of French was now that of an L2, not the spon- taneously acquired native language of the people but one that had to be learned consciously. This indeed is illustrative of the curious phenomenon of bilingualism among the English ruling classes. In legal matters, 1334 saw the first lawsuit in English, and five years later, in the field of education, the mother tongue had become the dominant language in schools. Many linguists, among them Berndt (1969) and Kibbee (1991), accept the approach taken by Trevisa in this translation of Polychronicon, in which it is argued that English was the primary vehicle of instruction in Engish education. Trevisa takes the example of two teachers with Celtic surnames as evidence for the introduction of Eng- lish to schools, deducing from their habits and practices the linguistic development of

11 The controversy raised by the subject of standardisation in the Middle Ages will be dealt with at greater length in subsequent sections, below.

26 Part I a whole nation. However, Cottle (1969) takes issue with the thesis propounded by Tre- visa, and assesses the linguistic habits of the nation on the basis of how the most privileged social group learned Latin. Cottle’s arguments are weakened in that he does not take into account that the University was precisely one of those conservative strong- holds which rejected the introduction of the vernacular. Indeed, the fact that there is evidence of the use of English as a vehicle of instruction in schools almost automatically presupposes the prior establishment of the language in society generally, and the consequent decline of French. The sphere of education may be used in this way as a directly proportional indication of the degree of integration of a language in society: the greater the extent of the use of a language in education, the greater its overall level of integration in society. Hidgen’s chronicle, Tre- visa’s translation with additional glosses, plus treatises on orthography and dialogues written at this time, all support the hypotheses that the use of English was by now dominant in the field of education. At the same time, many scholars have recognised the proliferation of French manuals at this time, key evidence of the transformation of French into a medium of instruction on the margin of day-to-day interaction (Lambley 1920; Suggett 1945; Rothwell 1975, 1993; Kibbee 1991). In the last quarter of the 14th century Caxton wrote his Dialogues in French and English to familiarise himself with French as a foreign language. In Oxford, the instruction process included grammar and ‘artes scribendi et dictandi loquendique Galli- canum ydioma’. Vocabulary lists (Nominale sine Verbale in Gallicis), conjugation tables in French and Latin (Petit Traité sur la conjugaison française), lists containing word types, treatises on the use of French (Tractatus Orthographiae Gallicanae, Or- thographia Gallica) and dialogues in French were all used to teach the language. These texts all date from the middle or the end of the century. Other metalinguistic works, such as Donair français pur briefment entroduyr les Anglois en la droit language de Paris, Liber Donati Femina, Dialogues Français, also exist. The proliferation of manuals in French may even be interpreted as an attempt by the most educated classes to consolidate the language, a kind of linguistic project which would not be realised owing to the special conditions of the period. Ultimately, the motivation to acquire and use French would become instrumental in nature. Its advantage lay, above all, in its use as the language of commercial exchange and as a language of the cul- tured elite; knowledge of French, that is, denoted an air of distinction. French had become a language to be learned, but not acquired. The gradual disappearance of French from social use first began below the level of the court but eventually spread to the court itself. The most important event in the process by which the vernacular became the official language, and simultaneously a useful mechanism for its consolidation was, without doubt, the opening of Parliament in 1362. For the first time, a speech was delivered here in English. From then on Eng- lish would be the language to be adopted, first as the official language of the court, and subsequently as the vehicle of written communication, even though Latin was still used in official state documents12.

12 In fact, Latin continued to be used in the courts of justice until 1733 when a law was decreed to prohibit the use of Latin and French in legal affairs (Bailey 1985). Sociohistorical background of the English language 27

English was now the language used in literature (Chaucer, Gower, Langland, etc.), in testaments, applications (1383), letter-books and other writings in the city of Lon- don, along with books which described the activities of the London guilds (1388-89). What little private correspondence there was during the 14th century still tended to be in French, but the growing ignorance of the language among the general public was underlined by the publication of manuals on epistolography under Richard II. French was now in decline in England and the gradual consolidation of English was irreversible, as illustrated by a private letter sent from Florence by Sir John Hawkwood, which was written English (Chambers and Daunt 1931). The possibility of drawing on more than one language in the written medium gave rise to a peculiar situation, which took hold more firmly in the 15th century as the linguistic situation began to weigh in favour of English. As Helen Suggett (1945: 68) has pointed out, a person could choose between one language or the other as a ‘matter of personal preference’, and to a certain extent this might have been for some speakers a matter of ‘language of convention rather than of preference’. The key expression in Suggett’s characterisation of the use of French is ‘a language of convention’, suggesting that French was used as an instrument, as an artificial language employed in legal and administrative circles and, consequently, a language that it was necessary to learn as one might learn any subject or skill. French was gradually approaching the status of Latin, though it would never occupy its position as a vehicle of formal expression. The prevailing multilingualism of 14th century England settled into a kind of linguistic equilibrium where each language was assigned a role in accordance with its status and condition. In this way, Latin and French coexisted among the higher social strata, but the use of Latin in the verification of documents and in the area of learning as a language of culture and knowledge impeded the rise of French. In the face of the former and in spite of its prestige, French never managed to become a vernacular language promoted socially through external circumstances (Bailey 1985). The change in the linguistic habits of different social groups in Medieval and renaissance times was embodied in the King’s use of the native language. One particular event in 1399 was to open the gates of the 15th century to English. Following his coronation, Henry IV (1399-1414) delivered a speech in English in which he removed Parliament. Although his action was limited to the oral expression of the language, it signalled a growing desire to please the kingdom’s subjects and marked the establishment of the mother tongue in England. This state would become permanent in 1413 with the accession of Henry V (1414-22). The new King’s personal office, the ‘Signet Office’, used English in Henry’s public and private correspondence. This was to prove a determining factor in the defence of national values and a clear example of English patriotism in action. The revival of the vernacular can be charted as a circular process in which a conflict of common interests arises among upper and lower social groups, each attempting to preserve their nation and native language. Popular sentiment reached as far as the Crown, allowing the native tongue to establish itself on a permanent basis: the linguistic habits of members of the highest echelons served as a model for society as a whole, and the circle eventually closed. The 15th century was witness to the second part of this circular movement, depicted below in Figure 1:

28 Part I

CROWN KING 13th-14th c. ASCEND IMITATED BY 15th c. onwards

LOW SOCIAL STRATA

Figure 1. Circular cause-effect relationship

In parallel with these events and the appearance of conversation manuals in the second half of the 14th century, the first private and official documents in English come to light. Although the first official petition in English dates from 1314, similar documents appear only sporadically prior to 1436, with the last two petitions written in French registered in 1441. Writing in English is scarce between the last decade of the reign of Henry III (1262-1272) and 1440, when it begins to appear on a more frequent basis. The last state deeds drawn up in French date from 1456. In the Signet Office, although Latin was the common language, French had been used since the final dec- ades of Edward I’s reign (1272-1307); in 1417, however, the dramatic change came about with the introduction of the vernacular. In 1422 documents in English appear in the first book of the Beer Makers’ Guild of London. The guild’s decision to use Eng- lish was endorsed by the efforts and determination of Henry V to defend the native language, evidence of which we can find in a Latin document from the time (reproduced by Chambers and Daunt in the preface to their 1931 work). However paradoxical it may seem for such a document to have been written in Latin when its aim was to stimulate the use of English, this apparent contradiction merely reflects the prevailing sociolinguistic conditions: the disappearance of French, the establishment of English, and the use of Latin in specialist areas. Commentaries on the linguistic situation of the common people (the King chose English ‘for the better understanding of his people’) and the written language used by lords and in the Com- mons (they used the language ‘to make their matters be noted doun’) are excellent in- dicators of the code-change which was gradually transforming English into the L1 of the entire nation. At the same time, England was witnessing the development of so-called ‘Chan- cery English’ (Fisher 1977), the language of the national bureaucratic system. The Chancery, existing as a hierarchy of state officials, introduced English as the official language of the central administration between 1420 and 1460, a step which constituted a milestone in the history of the language. Blake is more precise in his discussion of the spread of manuscripts written in English during the 15th century. He insists on the special role played by King Henry V, who decided to write some of his own personal letters in English, thus contributing even greater impetus to the language and sharpening the interest of his Signet Office staff in developing the vernacular. Among the different forms of English expression, the spoken variety is especially interesting, and various critical perspectives have been adopted here. Fisher (1977: 738) describes the Chancery Standard as ‘a variant of London English’. According to Sociohistorical background of the English language 29 him, the official language came about as a result of a process of interaction between the language of the central counties (under the influence of Wycliffe and the Lollards) and that of the literary texts of Chaucer, Gower and Hoccleve, principally from the London area. Richardson (1980) is slightly more specific, seeing the Chancery Stan- dard as having been based on the style developed by Henry V’s secretary together with the different dialectal forms of this. Such a mix resulted in what was, in his view, ‘no known contemporary dialect’ (Richardson 1980: 735). For Claiborne (1990: 138) the standard written form was generated in the richest part of the country, the east, although he adds that ‘the London version of East Midland gained added prestige as the language of the Court’, which was in fact the King’s English. He concludes with a qualification regarding the standard variety, which is not purely ‘East Midlands’, but rather a mixture of different forms. More recent work, however, suggests that the standard variety emerged from that of Signet Office staff, spreading from there to the whole Chancery and subsequently to the rest of the country (Benskin 1992; Blake 1996; Wright 1997). Since Samuels’ influential article ‘Some Applications of Middle English Dialectology’, in which he uses the term ‘Chancery English’ for the first time, much attention has been paid to the function of the Chancery variety within the late-Medieval English context. Firstly, Samuels himself (1963: 411) defines ‘Chancery Standard’ as ‘that flood of government documents that starts in the years following 1430. Its differences from the language of Chaucer are well-known, and it is this type, not its predecessors in London English13, that is the basis of modern written English.’ Continuing on the same lines as Samuels, Fisher devoted a series of articles (1977, 1984, 1986, 1992)14 to the consolidation of two basic premises: – 15th century England saw not the establishment of a literary standard, but that of a government-backed standard and legal commercial language. – The distinction between ‘government, business and literary languages’ (Fisher 1996: 9) is an artificial one because the same people originate, construct and use each of the forms. The expansion and promotion of Chancery English was, once again according to Fisher (1992), the product of the desire on the part of royal authority to encourage the development of the English language. Henry IV and especially Henry V were the principal architects of this movement. Richardson (1980: 738-739) supports this notion, adding that Henry’s secretary imitated the official written language of Londoners, with some small variants of his own.

13 Samuels (1963) identifies four varieties of English that contain a degree of dialectal variation lower than the geographical varieties. The first type relates to the documents of Wycliffe and the Lollards’ manuscripts; the main characteristics of the literary standard adopted were to reproduce feaures of the dialects of the central counties. The second type encompasses non- official writings found in London and the surrounding area. The third type is the variety found in the writings of Chaucer, Gower and Hoccleve, Langland and Lydgate, and a selection of other documents dating from the 14th century written in London. The fourth type is the so-called ‘Chancery English’ variety. 14 All these articles are cited in Fisher, 1996.

30 Part I

Henry V was always aware of the value of the language as a propaganda tool. Richardson concludes that whether Chancery English derived directly from the King’s Signet Office or not, he permitted the continued propagation of documents in the vernacular within the Chancery, thereby impelling the creation of a standardised linguistic code for legal and administrative matters. Drawing on the work of Samuels, Fisher and Richardson, various specialists in the history of language15 have arrived at conclusions regarding the origin of Standard Eng- lish based on the following ideas: Geographical delimitation of the original or predominant dialectal variety. There are two different opinions in this respect: the majority favour the West Midlands dialect, with only Strang and Crystal arguing firmly in favour of the Central Midlands dialect as being that which influenced the evolution of Standard English. Others, including Baugh and Cable (1993), opt for a more general basis for the standard, located in the central zone (Midlands dialect). Baugh and Cable reject the influence of a cultural centre such as Oxford, whereas Leith, Barber and Crystal speak of the influence, not only of Oxford, but also of Cambridge and London. Mode of transmission of the standard variety. Only Strang and Crystal mention the mode in which the standard variety was transmitted: they believe transmission occurred through the written texts of Chancery employees (Wright 1996). Criticism of Fisher’s propositions regarding the origin and development of Standard English first appeared in the 1990s. Benskin (1992) does not contradict Fisher’s proposals in relation to Chancery English as a standard variety, but does draw attention to certain aspects of his arguments as a means of introducing new suggestions. Benskin does not deny the importance of the Chancery in terms of the production and dissemination of official documents. In his opinion, however, it was not the English of the Chancery itself that was being propagated, because those working in the Chancery were merely copying texts that arrived from the Signet Office or the ‘Privy Seal Of- fices’ (Spencer, 2010). These offices worked more closely with the King and employed only a small number of scribes (there were only five in the Signet Office, for example) who used a more or less uniform written language. For this reason, Benskin argues the case for ‘The King’s English’ as the variety which from the 15th century would slowly become established in writing: taking advantage of the spread of the written word, the different government institutions were used to disseminate and finally consolidate the ‘King’s’ variety of written English as the standard. Benskin, Fisher and Richardson, then, agree on the decisive role played by Henry V in promoting the use of English in official texts: ‘Henry V’s adoption of English undoubtedly had an effect, and there is explicit testimony on this point’ (Benskin 1992: 80). They diverge, however, as to the exact roots of the standard, with Benskin arguing that institutional groupings were the real origin. For her part, Wright (1994, 1996) criticises not only Fisher’s analysis, in which he limits himself to a single type of text (legal and administrative documents of the Chan- cery), but also the linguistic basis used by Fisher to explain his theory, about which she is scathing. Fisher, for example, examines data on orthography only to determine the

15 Among others, Freeborn 1992; Blake 1992; Pyles & Algeo 1993; Barber 1965; Burnley 1992; Leith 1983; Baugh & Cable 1993; Strang 1970; Crystal 1995. Sociohistorical background of the English language 31 level of standardisation in texts, whereas Wright insists on the need to explore all the subsystems of the language in a study of this type, in order to analyse the development of the sentence in written language, as well as to take into account the extra linguistic context. The criticism levelled by both Wright and Benkin seems justified, and the debate remains an open one (Wright, 2000; 2001; 2003). Standardisation, as well as the fact that those of wealth and social position were now using English, combined assigned status to the vernacular, which gradually became the national language. The crusades, as religious wars between culturally different peoples, would also generate a sense of differentiation and promote the notion of separate cultural interests, which in turn would finally lead to the recognition of distinct ethnocultural communities whose principal symbol of distinctiveness was their own language. The existence of an elite (The Provisions of Oxford, The Barons’ War)16 willing to promote the defence of its own language, together with the socioeconomic changes that emerged during the late Middle Ages (the decline of the feudal system, the Black Death and The Hundred Years’ War), reflected and indeed encouraged nationalist sentiments at this time. At the Council of Constance (1414) ‘the Right of Each nation to be counted as the equal of every other’ (Fishman 1973: 4) was something on which all those in attendance agreed. This ideological current led to the gradual recognition of English as the mode of expression in all spheres of society. External factors created the intra-systemic changes needed for the vernacular to achieve culturally valued status and recognition as a symbol of ‘Englishness’, a sign of national identity which, according to Graddol, Leith and Swann (1996) developed in Renaissance Europe. There is also a link between standardisation and scientific writing which, according to Taavitsainen (2001), was associated with the Central Midland variety. This was an additional benefit for the standardisation of English, as Taavitsainen (2001: 188) points out: ‘Scientific writing is a spearhead of culture in indicating future directions; vernacularisation of texts in this register is important for any nation’ because ‘prestige of fields that require a long training, such as medicine and law, is obvious, and the status of scientific writing has always been high’. Although linguistic thought in the Middle Ages was based on classical moulds, with Greek and Latin dominating intellectual thought on languages, events occurring during the Medieval period led to the slow spread of the vernacular as the national language, and this expansion was itself the consequence of another key process: printing. The period of transition between the Medieval order and that of the Renaissance saw the introduction of printing in England by William Caxton in 1476. This opened the way to a new phase in the development of the English language. The invention of the printing press contributed to the rapid, uniform expansion of the linguistic code established in the late Middle Ages (Nisa 1966: 213). Printing was useful as a mode of disseminating English, not just in helping to consolidate the rules of writing but also to enrich the language with new words, first through translations and later through original coinages. A conscious concern for the nature and condition of English now emerged, the result of the introduction of printing as well as other, external factors. Caxton himself would express this concern for the

16 See section 1.2.

32 Part I language in prologues and epilogues, identifying three important linguistic issues relating to the problematic situation of the vernacular (Hindley 1979: 243-244): first, the changes in spoken English even during his own lifetime; secondly, demands from aca- demics for more sophisticated and recherché vocabulary in his versions of the classics; thirdly, the regional variations of English. The first of these, ‘changes in spoken English’, refers to variability in existing forms of the language at the end of the 15th century, and to the evolution and dyna- mism of those forms. The absence of a fixed set of rules for the language and the proliferation of varieties raised a dilemma for Caxton: how to select the right code. He resolved this problem by adopting the Southeastern Midlands variety. The second point relates to vocabulary, the question of eloquence, and, by extension, prestige and the capacity for persuasion. These considerations lie at the heart of debates regarding the question of how the language might be enriched in order that it acquire the status of a language of culture. The third issue, which is related to the first, is a key element in the process of standardising English: Caxton and the printing press ushered in a tendency towards greater uniformity within the language which, with the passing of time, would effectively diminish the relevance of regional varieties. Nevertheless, English through the 16th and 17th-centuries can still not be viewed as a standard variety, if by that we mean regulated and uniform. The process of producing a uniform standard was slow, reaching its climax during the Renaissance. Blank (1996) offers us a picture of the process, describing how the grammarians, lexicographers and reformers of the time attempted to strengthen the so- called ‘King’s English’ as a unifying national language. Basing this process on one of the existing varieties, the speech community was oriented towards a monoglossia, which would finally do away completely with Latin. At the same time, the expansion in nationalism was reaching its peak, with nationalist sentiment touching all social classes. Intellectuals, steeped in humanist ideals, constantly endeavoured to transmit culture to the least educated members of society. The educational objectives proposed by the Protestant Reformation (1509-1547) provide a good example of this, among other things because they sought an end to the domination of Latin in the Church and in schools. The use of English allowed for the integration of new words from other languages and cultures, in particular those associated with Renaissance ideas. In spite of all this, opinions about the native language were many and varied. While the use of a translation of the Bible was rejected by the Catholic church, deem- ing it ‘rude and barbarous’, protestants insisted on its use. Catholics defended the use of Greek and Latin on grounds of eloquence, and also the very fact of the common people’s ignorance of classical languages; this ignorance allowed the Church to preserve some of the Scriptures’ most highly guarded mysteries. Protestants defended a contrary position, refusing to perpetuate the obscurantism of past ages. Religion, they argued, should be open and accessible to the understanding of all. This situation, from a socio-historical point of view, may be summarised in the following way: Sociohistorical background of the English language 33

RELIGION

CONFLICTS – DIVISION

CATHOLICS PROTESTANTS (pro-Pope) (anti-Pope)

DEFENSE OF CLASSICAL DEFENSE OF THE LANGUAGES VERNACULAR

ELITE POWER DEMOCRATIC PRINCIPLES (knowledge in the hands of a minority) (spread of knowledge to all social levels) Figure 2. Religious fragmentation and opposing linguistic arguments

The most significant linguistic outcome of the Reformation was the translation of the Bible into English, the first translation being completed in 1526. Twenty-three years later, a second translation was used widely in services for the new Church of England, thus severing the traditional link between Christianity and Latin. 1611 saw the publication of the authorised version of the Bible (The King James’ Bible), the classic English version. Translating the Bible was politically significant in as much as it imbued the monarch with authority, against the authority of religion; its linguistic importance resided in the superimposition of the vernacular over Latin, traditionally an international language of prestige and culture. Protestant ideals coincided with the nationalist spirit that pervaded England in the 16th century in an effort to promote and establish a permanent sense of identity among its people. At the same time, England was establishing itself as a powerful nation: the defeat of the Spanish Armada (1588) and the foundation of Jamestown (1607) served to reinforce English national pride. Other developments, including inventions and discoveries, the new science, and a new kind of lifestyle, would all revolve around the new vehicle of expression now consolidating itself throughout the land: the English language. We know that the 16th and 17th centuries saw linguistic debate among intellectuals and the publication of grammars, dictionaries and manuals on language acquisition, as I have mentioned above. Discussions revolved around the capacity of the vernacular to deal with the many novelties that arose from a situation in constant flux, its condition as an eloquent literary form, the advance and improvement of the language (especially in comparison to Greek and Latin) and its dissemination throughout the country. From the 16th century onward, arguments and proposals surface regarding the need to codify, regulate and establish English, as each of its linguistic subsystems developed. This is the period known as ‘Early Modern English’.

1.3 Late Medieval and Early Modern English

The decline of French in England and the growing interest in the national language meant that English became the object of linguistic studies. More than its morphological characteristics, syntactic structures or systems of pronunciation, it was in the area

34 Part I of vocabulary that the language would be developed and enriched, and for this reason became the principal theme of discussion among 16th century intellectuals. Vocabulary is also the most easily modified subsystem of language. Authors including Leith (1983: 61) and Moskowich (1995: 91-92) have pointed out the instability of this area of study, due to the particular proclivity of a lexicon both to incorporate and lose elements, whereas subjectivity is mentioned by Closs-Traugott (2005) as a key issue when dealing with the meanings of words and the processes of lexicalisation and/or grammaticalisation. The speaker’s stance, as well as the common stance of the corresponding social network, play an important role in the evolution of a word and its content. This can be observed in the range of possible semantic changes operating in the lexicon, their conditions and causes: metaphor, metonymy, euphemisms, contamina- tion and folk etymology (Görlach, 2003), amelioration and pejoration (Györi, 2002). The lexicon, then, would seem to be the system where linguistic change is most easily detected, and the causes and nature of lexical change are identified more easily and precisely than the causes of changes at the phonological and syntactic levels. In fact, by looking at the history of the language we can identify the specific cultural origins of our modern English vocabulary. However, it is difficult to speak in terms of laws pertaining to changes of meaning, whereas we can, for example, establish laws for changes in sound systems, as is the case with Grimm’s Law and Verner’s Law. It will therefore be in the lexicon that we discover important innovations in Early Modern English. At this time, the linguistic debate fostered national pride in relation to the vernacular, and simultaneously there was a general advancement in learning, primarily through contact with movements abroad and new discoveries. When we add to this the humanist tendency to imitate the languages of the classical writers as models of eloquence, purity and accuracy, we find that the controversy dominating the Renais- sance period in England ran in two directions: expansion founded on necessity, and expansion through imitation. The lexical void in the native language was an issue that needed to be addressed immediately. To cover all needs of expression, the English vocabulary would have to be expanded (Shay 2008). The unstable external situation and new living conditions in England also demanded this, but pride in being English and the simultaneous importance of the classical inheritance created a dilemma for writers: either turn to native resources to improve the vernacular or borrow words from other languages, especially Greek and Latin. The existence of various learned works discussing the relative merits of these two trends testifies to the polar nature of the predicament: to be for or against borrowing. Those in favour stressed the positive aspects of borrowing, arguing that at their height, Greek and Latin had been enriched by this same linguistic phenomenon. The argument in favour of borrowing from Greek and Latin was that the improvement of a language at the expense of another was a natural process, particularly when the source language for borrowing was already regulated and codified. While some authors, such as Richard Mulcaster, George Pettie and William Bullokar defended the introduction of loanwords into English, such new terms were to become the object of mockery on the part of purists, who referred to them as ‘inkhorn terms’17. These pur-

17 In Historical Linguistics, this controversy is known as the ‘Inkhorn Controversy’. Sociohistorical background of the English language 35 ists, who opposed borrowing, argued that native elements should be combined to form lexical units and new sequences, and thus to fill the lexical voids in the vernacular. Sir John Cheke, Roger Ascham, Sir Thomas Chaloner and Thomas Wilson were among those who championed a purist approach to improving the lexicon. They would not even countenance the use of foreign affixes attached to native roots, although this was already an established part of the language (see Dalton-Puffer 1996; Ciszek, 2006; Ja- kubowsky, 2006; Crespo, forthcoming). Among the purists there were two groups: the ‘revivalists’, who attempted to give new life to old words or ‘Chaucerisms’; and the ‘compounders’, who favoured word-formation processes such as derivation and composition, using lexical sources from the vernacular or complementing a native particle with affixes/roots taken from other languages (Nevalainen 1999; Kremendahl et al. 2006; Nevalainen 2008; Finderup and Fog 2010). However, in spite of their opposition, borrowing did indeed go on, and over time criticism would turn to excesses in the borrowing process rather than the process itself. The victory of borrowing compounded the need to compile the English lexicon, and this task was now undertaken. In keeping with common practice in linguistic matters, the first dictionaries in English followed the classical tradition. Students of Latin needed bilingual English-Latin or Latin-English dictionaries: in response to this de- mand we find works such as Abcedarium Anglico Latinum (1552) by Richard Huloet, Shorte Dictionarie for Younge Begynners (1553) by John Withals, Alvearie (1573) by John Baret, and Bibliotheca Scholastica by John Rider (1589). Latin-English dictionaries were simply lists of words: The Dictionary of Syr Thomas Elyot (1538) by Tho- mas Elliot and his Bibliotheca Eliotae (1545), the revisions by Thomas Cooper of Bib- liotheca (1548) and Thesaurus linguae Romanae et Britannicae (1565), and Dictionar- ium linguae Latinae et Anglicanae (1587) by Thomas Thomas (Wells 1973: 14). At first these bilingual dictionaries were organised according to subject matter, then along etymological lines, and finally in alphabetical order, which would prevail in all works of a lexicographical nature from then on. The first monlingual dictionaries in English date from the beginning of the 17th century and contain lists of ‘hard words’ the meanings of which were new, difficult or simply unknown to the common reader (Wells 1973: 16); for example, Robert Cawdrey’s A Tabel Alphabeticall of Hard Words, published in 1604, announced itself as ‘conteyning and teaching the trye writing, and understanding of hard usuall English wordes borrowed from the Hebrew, Greeke, Latine or French & c.’ As such, dictionaries were the solution to a social necessity. Once more, then, external factors inspired purely linguistic advances. John Bullokar, in his book An English Expositor (1616), adopted a similar line of description, including the explanation and interpretation of difficult terms. The first book of words to include the term diccionary in the title was that of Henry Cockeram The English dictionarie, and was much longer than either Cawdrey’s or Bullokar’s. Cockeram’s dictionary was divided into three parts, containing a list of difficult words accompanied by their definitions; another list with their stylistically more refined equivalents, especially for words considered vulgar; and a section devoted to mythol- ogy, flora and fauna. Glossographia (1656) by Thomas Blunt, The New World of Eng- lish Words (1658) by Philips, and An English Dictionary by Elisha Coles (1636) all follow this traditional model. We have to wait until the turn of the century for a more

36 Part I extensive dictionary: 1702 would see the appearance of A New English Dictionary by John Kersey. Although Blunt had already included etymological explanations in his Glosso- graphia in the 17th century, in An Universal Etymological Dictionary (1721), Nathan- iel Bailey adopted the etymon as a means of getting away from lists of difficult words, dedicating his work to ‘the Generalitie of words in the English Tongue...’ (Bailey 1721: title page). Nine years later, he published a more complete dictionary, the Dic- tionarium Britannicum, which in turn provided the basis for Samuel Johnson’s A Dic- tionary of the English Language (1755). Johnson’s work was a milestone in English lexicography and was to become the model for modern English dictionaries. Johnson offered broad definitions which included the contextualisation of words, their stylistic level, and quite extensive etymological explanations. He included quotations to em- phasise the accurate use of words, and helped to regulate certain problematic areas of orthography. The adoption of words and their meanings was a slow process open to all manner of external influences. In the lexical field, the Renaissance was a time of transition that witnessed peculiar developments such as word and affix combinations, blatant coining, and unusual nominalisations and verbalisations. All this was effectively accepted or rejected by the speech community itself, who at the time constituted the de facto authority responsible for selecting the code, especially the lexicon. Words constructed following either classical or native patterns, or a mixture of the two, would endure or disappear according to speakers’ criteria. Once this process had run its course, the intellectual community would reflect the usage in dictionaries, explaining the content of words which might have undergone some semantic change on the way to arriving at linguistic uniformity. Uniformity was not, however, synonymous with an inexorable resistance to change. From the time of their first appearance, dictionaries and grammars were considered as the primary authoritative source for the regulation, prescription and correction of language use. Some went as far as to argue that there was now no reason for a per- fectly defined and codified language to be exposed or subjected to further modifications of any kind. As Barber (1993: 203) notes: The great classical scholar Richard Bentley observed in 1699 that every language ‘is in perpetual motion and alteration’, but nevertheless believed that ‘it were no difficult contriv- ance, if the Publik had any regard to it, to make the English tongue immutable’. He is perhaps thinking of the possibility of an official body to fix the language, for between about 1650 and 1760 there was quite a strong movement in favour of an English Academy, on the lines of the Acadèmie française. Barber goes on to reject categorically the prescriptive pretentions of Richard Bentley to fix and indeed freeze the language: ‘no language which is being used can be prevented from changing’. Change is inherent to languages, and change provides a crucial framework for the investigation of how the various subsystems of a language develop. In the same way, change allows us to explain and analyse the peculiarities, evolution and constant transformation characteristic of every language. The present study, however, will limit itself to examining semantic change in Medieval and Renaissance Eng- land. Sociohistorical background of the English language 37

In Part II I will look at the different perspectives from which linguistic change has been approached over the course of history, as well as the different models of analysis and their application to the subsystems of the language, with special reference to the lexico-semantic component of English.

Part II

Language change in Medieval and Renaissance England

An in-depth study of the origin and development of linguistic change demands a detailed explanation of the nature of languages and the phenomenon of change itself. From the scholars of classical antiquity to modern-day philosophers, change has been synonymous with historical evolution, the shifting state of things. Language changes because the systems which make up its structure change, thereby generating permanent or at least stable modifications, which in time may in turn undergo further alterations. Millward (1996:8) expresses a conception of linguistic change thus: ‘Because all language is systematic, the history of any language is the history of change in its systems. By change, we mean a permanent alteration.’ Millward underlines the importance of the permanence of the change, thus discounting those linguistic phenomena, involving unpredictability and variability, which fail to become established in the language firmly enough to bring about structural or systematic change. The degree of stability or instability by which we assess the existence or otherwise of change is determined by the use speakers make of the elements in the linguistic system. Following this approach, many modern authors (Labov, Milroy, Trudgill, Trask, Hock, Bakker, Anttila, Robins, Bergs, 2005; Coulmas 2005; Romaine 2006) also use the language-individual ratio as the primary characterisation of any kind of linguistic phenomenon. This view, of course, is typically held by those who favour a sociolinguistic conception of the individual as the instigator of change and external causality as its possible ultimate source (Miller, Vandome and McBrewster, 2009).

2.1 Theoretical approaches to language change

One of the key general considerations here, then, is to explain the link between language and speaker, including all the implications of that link, both from an individual and a social point of view. To this end, we should recall the arguments of those linguists whose vision of linguistic change centres on such a link. For example, Robins (1971: 16): Human speech is transmitted from generation to generation by a process of learning on the part of children, often accompanied by conscious teaching by their parents or others. It is not instinctive or inherited, though, of course, the physiological and neurological capacity for speech is. This transmission through successive generations gives the occasion for the phenomena of linguistic change, the material of historical linguistics. From this this it can be supposed that linguistic change originates in a human being’s very nature, in the communicative capabilities and habits inherent to the individual. The transfer of these habits to the next generation opens a linguistic breach, and this provokes change. Logically, this change will never occur in so dramatic a manner as to constitute an obstacle to communication between generation A and generation B: ‘...change is most unlikely to occur in catastrophic ways, altering the whole structure of a language and rendering inter-generational communication impossible’ (McMahon

40 Part II

1994: 6). However, although the language does not undergo dramatic change, it does find itself in a constant state of flux. This is the basic argument on which Dixon (1997: 9) founds his theory regarding the birth and decline of languages, in which continuous changes affecting any language or dialect are visible in the speech of two generations, whose means of communication are only slightly different. In a similar way, the above extract from Robins reveals the premises on which he bases his conception of linguistic change. His vision is shared by other authors who stress the need to study the language within a social framework, abandoning the earlier theories of Schleicher, Schmidt and the neo-grammarians18, who viewed language as an objective entity, indivisible and independent of its speakers. They held that the language should be subjected to scientific analysis, like any other system or phenomenon that can be observed and tested in isolation. Years later, not even Saussure (1959), who adopted a structuralist vision in place of the atomist view of language prevalent among 19th century linguists, had made any progress in explaining linguistic change. The homogeneity perceived by structuralists in the system of relations surrounding a language as an autonomous entity prevented them from comprehending factors that favour change such as mutation and variability. Indeed, this is the theoretical stance upon which the paradox of Saussure rests19. Saussure’s confusion arose, primarily, from his synchronic view of the language. This approach denied the existence of variation and social stratification as a reason for that variation, as determining factors of linguistic change, or as the axis of any diachronic study of the phenomenon. In the 1960s, the emergence of the new discipline of sociolinguistics saw the resolu- tion of the Saussurian paradox. Authors such as Labov, James and Leslie Milroy, Trudgill and Trask paved the way for subsequent studies in which the structuralist view of language would accommodate social factors contributing to change, with change itself at the heart of all linguistic subsystems. In their influential article on linguistic change, ‘Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change’, Weinrich, Labov and Herzog (1968) postulate that change results from the generalisation of one particular alteration. They posit the existence of a heterogeneous linguistic structure through which changes are made general; the process by which the change spreads is gradual and ir- regular because it ‘involves the covariation of associated changes over substantial periods of time’. Drawing on the empirical work of other authors (Bright and Ramanujan, Gumperz, Friedrich, Ferguson, McCormack, Kelley, Levine and others) they go on to stress the importance of social factors in change (Weinrich et al. 1968: 182):

18 For the Neogrammarians, the impact of historical events on linguistic phenomena held no interest; neither did any possible fluctuation that could rupture the unity of a language. Likewise, they viewed linguistic phenomena as isolated events, not as a whole. The neogrammarian approach was characterised by phonetic laws founded on the principle of regularity and analogical constructions to explain any possible irregularities. 19 Saussure (1959: 77) states that ‘a language never exists apart from the social fact’, from which we may deduce that like any other social entity, language is subject to change. However, on examining the changes experienced by Latin during the Germanic invasions, he describes these as ‘self-generated’, demonstrating an unwillingness to acknowledge the effect of external influences on these changes (Crespo and Moskowich, 2004). Language change in Medieval and Renaissance England 41

Linguistic and social factors are closely interrelated in the development of language change. Explanations which are confined to one or the other aspect no matter how constructed will fail to account for the rich body of regularities that and be observed in empirical studies of language behavior. In a similar vein, Lesley Milroy (1982: 216) categorically defends the social nature of linguistic change in the terms of the collective acceptance of changes. A change can be understood as such because speakers agree to use it to introduce innovations in their linguistic resources. It is in this sense that changes in language are social changes, assumed and accepted by the corresponding speech community. And from this it follows that the state of a language at any given time cannot be explained by making reference to purely intra-linguistic phenomena. Extra-linguistic circumstances must also be accounted for. Such a view is also taken by Paul Roberge in his more recent ‘Language History and Historical Sociolinguistics’, Sociolinguistics. An International Handbook of the Science of language and Society (2006). Variation within the system is not arbitrary but rather exists as a regulating tendency, conditioned by the different social variables which define a group or speech community. Sociolinguistic theories draw on three maxims: variation in language is the norm; linguistic variables often carry a social significance; variation occurs within a temporal framework. The paradox brought about by Saussure is thus resolved if we take into account that ‘changes can proceed without disrupting the system of a language because the vehicle of change is variation, and variation is always present — indeed, it is a central characteristic of speech (Trask 1996: 281). Within this brief survey, the modern sociolinguistic approach helps us identify the key elements in the interpretation of language as a whole, organised around two coor- dinates: i) language-speaker binomial ii) language = system comprising various subsystems. For this reason McMahon (1994: 8) warns that we should consider language not as a single, isolated entity, but as ‘amorphous masses made up of accents, dialects and ultimately individual idiolects’. Likewise, the language-speaker pairing should be addressed in terms of a dual structure that is at once contrasting and complementary: the individual aspect and the collective. In the case of the individual, the relationship between the private act of speaking and the human mind is a matter for the field of psy- cholinguistics20. However, the individual operates as an integral part of the speech community, with other individuals sharing his or her linguistic habits; that is, a collective. Sociolinguistics deals with the study of the characteristics and habits of a speech community as a whole. The phenomenon of change affects language in both respects (individual and social): a change that results from the isolated attitude of a speaker, if spread throughout the community, may become established as a new form. Whatever perspective we adopt with respect to the speaker, it is this individual that will be the main agent of any change. Hence, historical linguistics should not ignore the kind of

20 Robins (1971: 371) states that within the scope of psychology ‘we find subjects such as the use of language in the formation of concepts, and in learning, abstraction and other related processes’.

42 Part II

‘ahistoric’ behaviour that is not seen to entail the significant role of speakers (Hock 1996: 19). It is in fact the speaker who is responsible for introducing innovations, which will then be propagated via the speaker’s relationships within a social network, thereby generating subsequent linguistic change (Milroy 1993). The importance of the relationships between language-individual and language-collective is embraced by Bakker (1998: 3) in his definition of linguistic change. Following the principles of Labov (1982), he states that linguistic change should be viewed in relation to both the whole speech community and in relation to each of its speakers. In this sense, change is the result of the interaction of different processes within the speech community, including communicative needs, individual creativity and contact with other communities. Through communication (the foundation of language) speakers, either consciously or unconsciously, promote changes which must be considered as social in nature if they are transmitted, renovated or eradicated over the course of successive generations. If we understand language as a structured system comprising various different areas (morphology, phonology, syntax and semantics), change may affect all or just some of these areas, and to varying degrees. However, owing to the evolution of the language, and to restrictions imposed by speakers on any given linguistic element or the conditions in which the speakers find themselves, certain areas are more available to change than others. This is the case with phonology, which is traditionally the area in which variability and change have received most interest, including that of the neogrammarians (Hermann, Paul, Sievers, and others), Saussure, Martinet, Jespersen, etc. Traditional approaches to change and variation, especially those of the neogrammarian and structuralist schools, have tended to reject the speaker’s position as an integral part of the definition of language, on the basis that language is an autonomous entity, isolated and independently resourced. Language, though, is a complex and dynamic system and must be analysed as such, and it should always be borne in mind that it is the speakers themselves who give life to the system. Lass (1980: 120), for example, defines language as: ...a ‘possession’ of speakers, something that they ‘know’, ‘do’, and ‘participate in’, in such a way that the speakers are obviously our central topic of concern, because it is their transactions with it that in some way are responsible for change. Lass rejects the application of functional laws or patterns to explain linguistic change21, arguing instead that the only reasonable ontological explanation is the language-speaker relationship, with change understood to be a phenomenon inherent to the language itself, just as the individuals who use the language are inherent to it. This argument forms the basis of the parallelism Lass establishes between ‘change’ and ‘primitive term’, change being as primitive, though it may seem naive, as the speakers themselves (Lass 1980: 127). Although Lass maintains a doubtful position with respect to the inclusion of the speaker (as the germ of the social language) in a definition of

21 Like Lass, Anttila (1989) and Fox (1995) mention the impossibility of establishing laws to define linguistic change in general. They both agree that a broader, less restrictive approach should be adopted, one that looks at linguistic change in terms of trends and generalisations, not norms that turn into indispensable conditions of change. Language change in Medieval and Renaissance England 43 language, his theories regarding change appear to tilt the scales in the speaker’s favour. He (1980: 128) states that: ...the most obvious way to introduce mutability... would be to take language as a self- regulating OPEN system, i.e. to introduce an extralinguistic world, and make change a function of something like the relationship between an organism and its ecological surround. This new, broader perspective, which incorporates non-linguistic elements in a notion of the language, is in keeping with the ideas underpinning Lass’ linguistic precepts. It draws, in particular, on the inseparable language-speaker pairing defended relentlessly by sociolinguists (Labov, Milroy and Trudgill) as the fundamental cause of change in languages. Lehmann (1992) and Smith (1996), meanwhile, argue for a sociolinguistic model of change based on the theories proposed by Weinreich, Labov and Herzog (1968). These draw on existing ideas regarding the nature of change and its function within the language and establish a series of general patterns as a framework for the study of all kinds of change: language is characterised as a heterogeneous, structured, organised whole in which changes begin within a small social group and extend to the whole community. This expansion is neither uniform nor instantaneous, however, on account of the social and linguistic variables which influence change and which are analysed as intrinsically related. In every change, we encounter variability and heterogeneity. The sociolinguistic model also provides the foundation for the explanations of linguistic change put forward by Trask, Labov, Milroy and Anttila. Other authors look at such elements as speed of transmission and examine in more detail the process by which change establishes itself. Robins (1971), for example, discusses the continuous but gradual change in languages, and McMahon (1994) also claims that changes are ‘slow and steady’. This is at odds with Dixon’s (1997) thesis that changes are sudden and not gradual, although he does admit that there are also exceptions to this. He explains linguistic change in terms of the social ‘punctuated equilibrium model’ (Dixon 1997: 67). This model supposes a state of equilibrium and stability during which linguistic characteristics spread among the languages of a given geographical area, only for this state to be punctuated in turn by extralinguistic phenomena. In other words, the state of equilibrium may undergo drastic changes, and might even break away and create other languages or dialects from a shared linguistic ancestor. What we will focus on in the next section explores the forces which lie behind language change, since at this stage in our survey it is useful to consider the range of possible factors which may have given rise changes, and to determine which ones will help us explain semantic change in Middle and Early Modern English within the framework of historical sociolinguistics (Nevalainen, 2003; 2011; Bergs, 2005; Ro- maine, 2006).

2.2 Factors leading to linguistic change

In the final quarter of the 19th century, the neogrammarians, with their positivist view of language, were at pains to point out that it was not enough merely to describe linguistic change; they needed to explain its causes22 (Polomé 1990: 3). This contrasted

22 Hermann Paul focuses primarily on phonetic change although he does not ignore semantic and

44 Part II with the approach of earlier linguists such as Grimm, whose focus had been on descriptive studies. I also believe that causality is an important factor in the explanation of linguistic change. To use the biological analogy, if language is a natural endowment, a characteristic inherent to every individual human being, and each individual has an individual and unique life, then language is by definition subject to change. Following this assumption, I will attempt to establish the basic teleological principles underlying that change. This assumption, of course, is applicable to the study of all languages, and will be especially useful here in an analysis of English. Most authors try to answer the question: in what does linguistic change consist? The question had already been noted by the philosophers of classical antiquity: their enquiries led them to define the terminology itself more precisely, while at the same time trying to understand the phenomenon in terms of its root causes. Weinrich et al. (1968: 99-100) describe the principles which should underpin any theory regarding linguistic change. These forecast the changes that will probably arise as a language develops from one particular state (although ‘few practising historians of language would be rash enough to claim that such a theory is possible’), and then explain the obstacles that change is likely to encounter. Language itself is taken to be a heterogeneous whole, as Weinrich notes: A “theory” of language change in the rigorous sense can be visualized in a relatively strong form and in a weak form. In its strong form the theory would predict from a description of language state at some moment in time, the course of development which that language would undergo within a specified interval. Few practicing historians of language would be rash enough to claim that such a theory is possible. In a more modest version a theory of language change would merely assert that every language constantly undergoes alteration and it would formulate constraints on the transition from one state of a language to an immediately succeeding state. In a relatively recent work on linguistic change, Lass (1997: 332) reaffirms certain attitudes adopted at the beginning of the 1980s and maintains that linguistic change is ‘inexplicable in any epistemically satisfying sense’ since this change is not regulated by any scientific laws as such. According to Lass, linguistics is merely a hermeneutic science which accepts interpretation as a legitimate source of knowledge. His position does not preclude the possibility of accelerating factors or agents of change, though it does rule out scientific patterning laws strictu sensu. ‘That there are no laws in the domain of language’ does not mean that linguistic change, despite its unpredictable nature, is not available to explanation. Rudi Keller (1994), one of those opposed to Lass’s position, postulates the existence of what he terms ‘invisible-hand explanations’ with which to diagnose and consequently analyse (though not predict) linguistic change. It would appear to be feasible, then, to produce

syntactic change altogether. The ultimate cause of change, he claims, is ‘the ordinary speech activity of the individual’ (Jankowsky 1986: 5). Like his contemporary Edward Sievers, Paul approaches the generational transparency or transmission of a language as a vehicle of change. Jespersen extends this argument in recognising the existence of factors other than mere transference or individual will that influence change. Language change in Medieval and Renaissance England 45 a reasonable diagnosis of the phenomenon of change, while understanding the structure and organisation of the causes behind it. These causes, in turn, draw on theoretical suppositions which serve to reinforce each case-specific explanation of linguistic change. Nonetheless, it remains difficult to say whether we might accurately predict future changes in any of the subsystems of a language. Vennemann (1983) also rejects the equivalence established by Lass between accounting for and predicting linguistic change, reasoning that the changes cannot be predicted and consequently cannot be explained. Instead, Vennemann suggests the creation of a catalogue of possible answers to the question ‘What is and what is not a possible language change?’, and on the basis of this constructs various theories in relation to change, just as Kiparsky (1968) and Enkvist (1979) had done previously. Work- ing along the same lines and using the ideas of Lass as a point of contrast, Tejada Caller (1999: 37-40) has drawn up a summary-guide to the different ways in which linguistic changes come about. She presents different tendencies in the process of change: a move from contextualised to decontextualised, such as from lexicon to grammar or to derivative morphology; from the more specific to the more abstract, as in the case of the expression of a physical entity which becomes that of a temporal or symbolic entity; from marginal status to core or central status, such as a shift from ambiguity to accuracy. All these examples represent general, heterogeneous tendencies, encompassing possible changes at all levels of language. In the light of the various challenges to Lass’s ideas, it is not unreasonable to conclude that certain identifiable catalysts of linguistic change do exist. In what follows, then, I will draw on these authors’ rigorous efforts to determine the causality underlying change and those elements of the language affected by this change in English. To begin this analysis, I will look diachronically at what provoked change. Since the Middle Ages, Western thought has attempted to identify the original causes of linguistic change, paying particular attention to three characteristics of the development of languages: the nature of the internal evolution of the language, extralinguistic factors, and social-stylistic variation in the oral and written media. In De Vulgari Eloquentia, Dante deals with the first of these aspects: ...since man is on the whole an extremely instable and changeable creature, it (language) cannot remain the same or unchangeable, but must change like everything else in us, namely like customs and habits, according to differences in space and time23. Extralinguistic factors (ethnic, cultural and socio-historical variables, as well as all manner of hypotheses relating to linguistic contact) also reached their peak in the Me- dieval period. In fact, Europe at this time was witness to many instances of bilingual encounters or ‘marked contact’ (Martinell Gifre and Cruz Piñol 1996), and these contacts, during the Renaissance period, would being taken by grammarians and language philosophers to be an integral element of change in English, together with other evo- lutive principles inherent to languages in general. In relation to the third aspect, claims relating to sociocultural and ethnic issues have brought about a reevaluation of linguistic values as a symbol of distinction and as a means of promoting nationalist sentiments following the reconstruction of a linguistic past. Medieval ideas, based princi-

23 Kontzi 1978: 3. In Ureland 1989: 239.

46 Part II pally on the study of Latin and the Romance languages, clearly reveal the social dis- tinctions associated with the use of the different channels of oral and written communication. In the case of Latin, for example, during the Roman occupation Classical Latin was the vehicle of expression (oral and written) used by the intellectual elite, while Vulgar Latin provided the vehicle of oral communication for the vast majority of the illiterate population (Ureland 1989). In Medieval England, the Latin and later French languages were used in the written medium, while oral communication generally transpired in English. And it was in its role as the vehicle of oral communication that change in English arose, as a result of the manner in which it was used by its speakers. Writers from the time say as much: ‘Ye knowe ek that in forme of speche is chaunge withine a thousand yeer and wordes tho that hadden pris now wonder nyce and straunge us thinketh hem and yet thei spake hem so’ (Chaucer, Troilus II 22-25). A diversification of functions emerged among coexisting languages in Medieval England. Having examined the social situation in post-Conquest England, Berndt (1969) analyses the communicative habits of different social groups and the levels of use per- ceptible for each of the contact languages. In relation to the rural population, he says that they remained monolingual native speakers of English, explaining this in terms of the unlikelihood that even a single word in French as a second language would have been acquired. He adds that the same occurs among the people living in English cities at the end of the 12th century. With respect to the clergy, lower ranked members remained monolingual speakers of English, with no knowledge of Latin and a generally low level of culture. The habits of the high clergy were different, however: their native language was English or French and they tended to speak Latin fluently. For members of the aristocracy, French was the main vehicle of communication, although from the 13th century onwards they were likely to have had some knowledge of English. In the 19th century, methodological approaches to linguistic change in English and to the factors giving rise to it were transformed. Nevertheless, the new models de- signed to explain change – the comparative, biological, geological and social variation models – continued to be marked by the basic concepts formulated by Medieval and Renaissance intellectuals. Certain theories regarding linguistic change are based on general explanations applicable to all aspects of human behaviour. This was the approach adopted by Vico, according to Vizmuller-Zocco (1995: 237). Vico maintained that the reasons for change lay in the course of a nation’s history, in the inevitable transformations in human institutions, language, religion and law. Change was a consequence of the human capacity to represent the world and influence it. Other authors have also looked briefly at the causes of or reasons for change in general terms. For example, Coseriu (1952; in Andersen 1989: 6) states that the causes in themselves are unknown, although we witness them daily in that they are inherent in the conditions of the speech act and are part of the speaker’s experience. The core of this argument goes further than merely the speaker and his/her environment and experience; Andersen himself (1989) proposes the ‘universal principles of use and structure, which are not subject to human will’ as a framework for the causality of change. Linguists such as Robins, Anttila, Vennemann, Williams and Aitchinson have insisted on the importance of applying a bi-factorial analysis in the study of the reasons for change with respect to internal and external factors (Robins, Aitchinson). Robins Language change in Medieval and Renaissance England 47

(1971) assumes that continuous, gradual change occurs at all levels of a language, and offers a two-sided generic formula as a possible approach to examining the reasons behind this: external influences and internal processes. In the case of external influences, the relationships among speakers of different languages may lead to situations of linguistic contact and bilingualism and/or diglossia. The main agent in the cause- effect relationship here is the interaction across different linguistic substrata. Other authors, such as Hudson (2000: 411), seem to have inverted the terms of the cause- effect relationship, proposing as causes of change certain phenomena which could be considered direct consequences of change itself: a) ease of articulation, b) expression of new meanings, c) desire for novelty, d) regularization or rule extension, e) redundancy reduction, f) metaanalysis, g) obsolescence of meanings, h) language contact. The elements b), d), e) and g) could in fact be interpreted as needs or products deriving from change. Since language is constantly subject to influences and transformations, meanings may be rendered obsolete or may give rise to new words or extend the meaning of the original term. Turning to internal processes, these refer to the characteristics and generational transmission of speech habits24. In this approach, social and psychological factors are analysed separately – that is, the collective is distinct from the individual, the sociolinguistic is separate from the psychological – though no clear delineation is drawn between the two. Aitchinson (1981: 118-119) shares Robins’ view regarding the division of causes of change into two groups. Once again, we find external factors, that is, social factors, operating separately from the language system and at a more superficial level. At the same time, we see a combination of psychological and linguistic factors. These latter, which are inherent to the language itself, differ from psychological factors in that they are internal and more deeply embedded, in that linguistic factors relate to the mind of the speaker and the structure imposed on the language by that speaker. If we examine each of these factors in isolation, we see that Anttila (1989) finds it difficult to delimit the mechanisms and factors of change and to differentiate them from its causes, although he admits that the general tendency is to speak in terms of external and internal causality. He draws on the same duality proposed by Vennemann (1988) whereby the causes originate in the mind of the human being, in the structure of the linguistic sign, and in the social organisation of the speech community and their communicative needs. In the 1970s Williams (1975: 36) briefly mentioned two types of causes which lead to linguistic change: ‘external social forces’ and ‘internal structure of grammar itself’. He explains the first of these by reference to the history of the English language: the Scandanavian and Norman invasions, the printing press, the 14th century social revolution and the advances in science and technology, whereas ‘internal transformations’ within grammar are said to be the effect of the law of minimal effort, by which the speaker simplifies grammatical structures, generational transmission of language, and errors of learning. External causality is defended by Danchev (1988) using

24 The same dichotomy is observed in MacMahon’s (1994: 8) concept of language: according to her, a language ceases to be a merely linguistic entity and at a certain point becomes ‘a socio- political matter’; he does not ignore, however, that it is ultimately the speakers who are responsible for altering and transforming languages.

48 Part II an interdisciplinary approach: contact linguistics and translation provide evidence for external causality and the support needed to sustain it. Authors including Dorian (1993) and Ureland (1989) also set out an external-internal causes dichotomy, though from different points of view. Dorian explains the dichotomy on the basis of a distinction between convergent change (resulting from external causes) and divergent change (resulting from internal causes) arising in situations of language contact. Ureland (1989), for his part, outlines two ways of looking at the phenomenon of change: the macrolinguistic perspective (encompassing external social agents) and the microlin- guistic perspective (relating to internal intrasystemic processes). In a brief survey of the different theories relating to changes in language, Campbell (1998: 283-285) mentions the following factors which have been examined as causes per se: ‘climatic or geographical determinism’, ‘racial and anatomical determination’, ‘etiquette, social convention and cultural traits’, ‘indolence’, ‘ease and simplification’, ‘foreign influence (substratum-) borrowing’, ‘desire to be distinct and social climbing’ and ‘external historical events’. All of these factors appear to fit into a generic bipolar scheme comprehending internal causality (psychological or cognitive factors and physiological factors) and external causality (factors of a social nature, such as social, political or linguistic considerations, contact between languages, etc.). From the 1960s to the present day, causes of a social nature (external causes) have been widely discussed by writers, including Ullmann (1962), Weinreich et al. (1968), Labov (1982), Bynon (1983), Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985), Thomason and Kauffman (1988), Polomé (1990) Milroy (1992) and Labov (2001). Even key figures in transformational generative historical linguistics (Kiparsky, King) acknowledge the strength of arguments for a symbiosis of social context and linguistic change (Sal- mons 1990). Summarising, we find that the authors noted above tend to coincide in indicating social causes as the basis of linguistic change. In the same way, Millward (1996: 13) proposes a distinction between ‘internal and external pressures for change’, and looks to the history of the English language to illustrate her point: ‘The outer history is the events that have happened to the speakers of the language leading to changes in the language’ as was the case with the influence exerted by the Norman Conquest. Likewise, ‘the inner history of a language is the changes that occur within the language itself, changes that cannot be attributed directly to external forces’ like phonological changes. Language and society would seem, therefore, to sustain an intricate system of relationships. This system permits us to discern and to classify the possibilities of linguistic change, either on the basis of those purely linguistic causes that lie behind them, or on the basis of external factors of a social, cultural, economic or political nature. 2.2.1 External factors

At the beginning of the 20th century, Meillet (1906: 17) drew attention to the need to include social factors in discussions of linguistic change since social factors were the most obvious stimulants of change. Labov confirmed this by resolving the Saussurian dichotomy and demonstrating the importance of external events in the development of a language. Thomason (1997) sustains Labov’s position, invoking the contact between Language change in Medieval and Renaissance England 49 two previously discrete languages as an indispensable condition for establishing the external causes of linguistic change. He even differentiates between situations of past and present contact: situations of present contact are easily determined by the knowledge we may have of them. With respect to situations in the past, on the other hand, it is believed that historical indications can provide us with the key to the social conditions prevailing in a situation of past contact. As a result, we must examine historical events in order to verify the degree of contact and interaction between two or more linguistic systems. In the case of Medieval and Renaissance England, he argues, relations between English, French and Latin provide the framework to chart the evolution of the vernacular. On the same lines, Thomason and Kaufmann (1988: 212-213) make clear their support for the importance of social factors: The major determinants of contact-induced language change are the social facts of particular contact situations, not the structural linguistic relations that obtain among the languages themselves. Language shift, for instance, is a social fact with linguistic implications. Lin- guistic factors do influence the linguistic outcome of a situation but only secondarily. The main linguistic factors that must be considered in predicting the results of language contact are universal markedness and typological distance between corresponding grammatical subsystems of the languages in contact. These factors operate close to the surface and activate or accelerate processes at a deeper level, trends which may remain latent or even hidden within a language (Aitchison 1981). Social factors may be defined, in general terms, as the totality of the contacts with different languages and cultures which a language experiences over the course of its history (Su Jinzhi 1992). Military invasions, commercial relations, technological advances and discoveries, immigration and the social prestige attached to the foreign language (Millward 1996) may affect the system from outside, ultimately becoming responsible, indirectly, for the variations incorporated by speakers into their everyday speech. In the case of the history of English, the following can be counted among the most significant factors:

– Colonisation and military invasions: Scandinavian and Norman – Commercial relations: with the Netherlands and all the German lowlands – Technological advances and discoveries: technological developments from the time of the Renaissance and from the discovery of America – Emigration: from the continent to the island – Migration: towards the area of London – Social prestige assigned to the foreign language: Latin and French were the languages of power and prestige A different classification of the potential factors responsible for change was proposed by Aitchinson (1981), and included fashion, foreign influence and social necessity. After a brief discussion of foreign influence and social necessity, below, I will deal with the issue of fashion. Foreign influence A given historical event (military conflict, invasion, etc.) or even the geographical proximity of two cultures, may promote contact between similar or distinct languages.

50 Part II

This supposed contact is invoked in the so-called ‘theory of the substrata’, defined by Bynon (1983: 252) as ‘the survival of features of a language formerly spoken in an area in the language which has replaced it’. By following the external history of a language we get an idea of the different linguistic substrata and superstrata involved in the process which created and moulded the language into its present system, or indeed which continue to influence the process of change still in progress. One of the most immediate effects of situations of contact is borrowing, by which the receiver language adopts more or less adaptable terms. Underlying the acquisition of a borrowed word there is a markedly social, though a ‘linguistically unmarked’, principle: prestige (Bynon 1983). Although there are a number of reasons for a language to borrow terms from another language, the mark of social prestige which a term may entail is an indisputable attraction for the speaker; especially if the speaker’s set of values associates prestige with social advancement. Social necessity Society itself effectively promotes change, in that languages adapt to the needs of those in a society. The cause here is functional in nature since change arises as a means of serving a specific purpose or compensating for the non-availability of an existing term. Speakers exploit the possibility of change, and change itself, for their own linguistic benefit. Social necessity is particularly important in questions of lexicon, as Meillet (1906: 176) pointed out at the beginning of the 20th century. This view is reinforced by analysing the language diachronically from a semantic perspective: social agents, beginning with individuals, exploit the changeable nature of words to resolve lexical voids and deficiencies which any kind of external advance is likely to create in a language. Fashion We should understand that fashion (also known as ‘contemporary trends’) is conditioned by chance: it is a capricious form of behaviour, and as such an unstable factor which appears, spreads and disappears in unpredictable ways. For the present study, fashion should be viewed as a factor associated with the social prestige of a language at a given moment in its history; it is fashion that makes one term, sound or syntactic construction prevail over another. The most arbitrary of the three aspects outlined in this section, fashion is not subject to any one condition in particular, but rather to a whole set of circumstances operating at any moment. In contrast to scholarship in previous centuries, external or social factors now occupy an important role when it comes to explaining the history of English. Languages are no longer deemed to be independent entities working in separatation from their speakers. A language is both an individual and a social phenomenon, and as such any study of that language, be it synchronic or diachronic, must consider the context which involves its speakers. Undoubtedly these factors bring about changes in the language. However, all change cannot be accounted for through reference to extra-systemic parameters. The internal dynamics of a language also plays an important part. Language change in Medieval and Renaissance England 51

2.2.2 Internal factors

Internal factors are closely related to the linguistic system itself, and also to certain individual actions on the part of the speaker. Some linguistic changes may be accounted for by internal factors, among them the law of minimum effort, the principle of language economy, analogy and mimesis, and imperfect learning of the language. All these possible explanations, however, are also dependent on individual speakers and the context or circumstances in which their linguistic habits develop. Paraphrasing Coseriu, Andersen (1989) employs the logical course of reasoning that leads scholars to consider the speaker as the ultimate cause of linguistic change. The law of minimum effort may be explained by the tendency among speakers to use all necessary means to simplify their discourse. Something similar occurs with the principle of language economy and with analogy: the use of analogous forms is merely another way of ensuring minimum of effort. Finally, the process of language acquisition depends in each case on the individual involved, who may distort aspects of the language transmitted to him or her during that process. Thomas Berg (1998) bases his explanation for linguistic change on the existence of psycholinguistic data relating to speaker-listener interaction. He turns to phonology to support his theory, arguing that change is dependent on derivations from the norm or imperfections resulting from the learning or transmission process. From the point of view of production, the process leads to what Berg calls ‘slips of the tongue’ or ‘slips of the ear’, which occur during the perception phase, thus: O Sax. Hros? OE hors ‘horse’ (Berg 1998: 168). He argues that errors in acquisition or subsequent use are the seeds of possible changes, having the potential to become the norm. Andersen also mentions the innovative element of Coseriu’s theory which views the speaker as the key to change: both change and stability occur deliber- ately and consciously. On the other side of the debate, we find Jahr (1989) who starts from the premise that any change that does not form part of a linguistic plan must be considered invol- untary and unconscious; these are the kinds of changes traditionally analysed by linguists. Conscious changes arise when ‘a linguistic community takes action actively and intentionally in order to obtain a linguistic change’ (Jahr 1989: 99). Whether changes are consciously or unconsciously evolved by speakers, what seems to be true is that changes within any given speech community arise, in large part, as a result of contact with other languages. In the sections that follow I will describe the phenomena especially associated with language contact (i.e. interference, bilingualism and diglossia) in order to offer a sociolinguistic approach to the history of the English language (Fennell, 2001; Stockwell and Minkova, 2010) in the periods covered by the present study. This should provide us with a clearer understanding of language change in general and of semantic change in particular.

2.3 Language interference through contact

Of crucial importance in language change are those phenomena in which factors of contact and subsequent linguistic contagion between two or more languages predominate. Contact among languages can be defined in the following way: ‘...two or more

52 Part II languages will be said to be IN CONTACT if they are used alternatively by the same persons. The language-using individuals are thus the locus of the contact’ (Weinreich et al 1968: 1). Such a definition is from the perspective of the speaker; it is individuals who, as a result of their competence in an active use of two languages, determine the degree of contact between them. Bynon (1983: 216) adopts a more comprehensive approach, linking the notion of contact with cultural phenomena, activities typical of the collective, and even the geographical situation of the languages in question. Bynon’s concept of language contact allows for the analysis of all relations between the relevant languages, from the deepest to the most superficial, and however similar or different the cultural backgrounds of these languages are. Her approach includes the adoption of a wide-reaching criterion by which not only geographical proximity but any type of relationship between languages, commercial or cultural, may provide the basis for a given situation of language contact. Such a loose definition makes it possible to differentiate typologically between situations of marked or unmarked linguistic contact. In the former, the immediate and intense contact is illustrative of phenomena such as interference, bilingualism and diglossia, as well as the linguistic changes arising from them. If contact is superficial, the degree to which these phenomena are present and active is reduced. Such an approach allows us to establish two levels within situations of linguistic contact, which, following Trudgill (1989), we might call high and low-level contact. Both types of contact can be broken down further according to the following two criteria:

(i) the influence of the degree of contact on the speed with which change forms and spreads; (ii) the types of change produced in each case. The high-contact type is illustrated by languages which evolve in continuous contact and interrelation with others. This is the case with Danish, whereas a language such as Faroese, also descended from Old Norwegian, has not experienced the same changes as Danish. In the case of ‘high-contact contexts’ changes may imply a ‘change from analytic to synthetic structure, reduction in redundancy, and increase in regularity’ (Trudgill 1989: 231), which include, among other things, complex forms of grammatical agreement, case-endings or verbal-person inflections, etc. These types of change may be related, grosso modo, to the state of the English language in the period of transition from Old to Middle English, with changes consolidated under the influence of the Scandanavian languages, Norman French and Latin. For the purposes of the present study, I will concentrate on high-contact relations since this was the prevailing type of relation during the periods of the English language dealt with here. Addition- ally, relations of this type tend towards the simplification of forms, and the ‘degree of contact is an important influence on rate of change’ (Trudgill 1989: 228). Different terminology is used by Milroy (1992: 84-85) who does not mention ‘high-contact contexts’ but instead uses the term ‘close-contact situations’ to define situations which provoke and accelerate linguistic change. He also offers a perspective on change which explores its real causes at a deeper level. He proposes that we aban- don the idea of contact between languages or systems and take a much more realistic view, acknowledging that the phenomenon is ultimately about contact between speak- Language change in Medieval and Renaissance England 53 ers, not languages. Contact between speakers of different languages results in changes which spread to the whole speech community, with changes disseminated among members of the community until a state of generality is achieved in which the changes may be consolidated. Milroy’s view of language contact, which coincides with his social model for explaining linguistic change, compartmentalises responsibility for contact between languages and the resulting mutations. With this approach in mind, I will now try to classify the principal phenomena mentioned above, those of interference, bilingualism and diglossia, which arise from high-contact linguistic situations. 2.3.1 Interference

The advance of linguistic interference in contact situations revolves around the joint action of a number of structural and non-structural factors. Structural factors are intrasystemic while non-structural factors are caused by extralinguistic influences. Interfer- ence phenomena can be observed at various levels of the language: phonology, grammar and lexicon. It is in the lexicon, however, that external or cultural non-structural agents represent the most probable cause of interference itself. After interference, transference, defined as ‘any change in a language whose entire or partial source lies in the linguistic properties of another language’ (Thomason 1997: 184), develops through a series of mechanisms, among which are ‘code switching’ or code change, and transference in the acquisition of a second language. All this may be influenced by other factors, such as the use bilingual speakers make of each language in different contexts, passive knowledge of another language or dialect, adapting grammar or lexicon to that of the interlocutor, and altering the language in a conscious and deliberate manner. 2.3.2 Other contact situations: bilingualism and diglossia

A great deal has been written about the sociolinguistic phenomena of bilingualism and diglosia. It is not my intention to review the literature here in detail, but rather to present some basic and traditional definitions which may contribute to a better understanding of the development of Medieval and early Modern English. Weinreich (1968: 1) defines bilingualism as ‘the practice of alternately using two languages’ and goes on to note the possible incidence of interference phenomena when a bilingual community exhibits deviations from the norms of each of the languages in contact. Tabouret-Keller (1997: 184) points out that the phenomenon of bilingualism includes ‘various and complex cases of the modes of contact in a given population’. These modes include bilingualism, bilinguality and diglossia, defining the term ‘bilinguality’ as ‘various and complex behavioural modes in the individual ways of using the languages’. In her description of bilingualism, Romaine (1989: 10) includes the definitions of other authors, such as that of Bloomfield (1933: 56) – ‘native control of two languages’ – and that of Haugen (1953), for whom bilingualism signifies that a speaker of one language is capable of producing meaningful sequences in another. Sociolinguists Svejçer and Nikiol’ski (1986: 3) include in their definition of bilingualism what has traditionally been understood as diglossia:

54 Part II

Bilingualism is the coexistence of two languages within the same language (speech) community, using them in different communicative domains depending on the social situation and other parameters of a communicative event. Serving the same community, both languages form a single communicative system and are in functional complementation to each other... This combinaton becomes more obvious when they identify the domains of the languages existing side by side: ‘using them in different communicative domains depending on the social situation and other parameters of a communicative event’. In the present study I will assume the existence of bilingualism and diglossia as independent phenomena, but ones which maintain a certain relatedness in as much as diglossia develops primarily as a result of the existence of bilingual speakers; these speakers are not, however, necessarily diglossic. In my view, then, bilingualism can exist with or without diglossia. Applying this idea of a bilingual community to the situation in medieval England, Iglesias Rábade (1992: 89) describes how the linguistic behaviour of the ruling classes change from Anglo-Norman monolingualism to individual and collective bilingualism after the second half of the 12th century; this latter situation was initially diglossic, but would develop into English monolingualism, attested from the second half of the 14th century onwards. Iglesias Rábade goes on to identify the types of attitude adopted among the intermediate classes, which run from an initial monolingualism in English, through individual bilingualism and then collective bilingualism (of a subordinate and diglossic nature), before moving back towards monolingualism in English around the middle of the 14th century. Lastly, he claims that monolingualism in English prevailed among speakers at the lowest social levels, although isolated cases of individual bilingualism also existed. The following, therefore, offers an appropriate synthesis of the conglomeration of linguistic attitudes and how they developed during the Medieval period in England (post-Conquest – 1350 on):

Table 1. Evolution of linguistic attitudes in Medieval England

Social Stratum Language used Sociolinguistic Attribution monolingualism-bilingualism-monolingualism High French-both-English

diglossia monolingualism-bilingualism-monolingualism Middle English-French/ English-English diglossia monolingualism-bilingualism-monolingualism Low English only

diglossia linguistic subordination and conflict

Following the Conquest, linguistic attitudes among the various social strata evolved in separate ways before converging in a single monolingualism in English. Language change in Medieval and Renaissance England 55

This applied both to those for whom French was their mother tongue, as was the case for the groups with greater social standing, and those whose native language was Eng- lish, such as the incipient bourgeoisie and the common people. Whatever the circumstances, Medieval English society underwent an intermediate phase of diglossic bilingualism between its two phases of monolingualism. This is illustrated in table 2:

Table 2. Overall attitude in Medieval English society

English Society Middle Ages Upper classes French-English-English monolingualism-bilingualism-monolingualism Anglo-Norman diglossia

Based on the information included in tables 1 and 2 we can deduce that linguistic contact in England went through various phases before reaching a state of monolingual normality: an initial state of monolingualism was affected by bilingualism and diglossia before the community became monolingual once again. Fishman (1972) lists four types of relation involving bilingualism-diglossia: 1. bilingualism and diglossia; 2. bilingualism without diglossia; 3. diglossia without bilingualism; 4. neither bilingualism nor diglossia. Of these, the first type, bilingualism and diglossia, best represents the linguistic situation in England at the time, though the action of both bilingualism and diglossia in this instance was partial only. At the initial stage, both languages existed side by side, the distribution of linguistic functions being determined by the ‘prestige’ factor. The unequal distribution in the use of linguistic codes in dominant and non-dominant communities created a situation of conflict. In addition, structural characteristics of the native language were brought to bear on the learning of the imposed language. To the phenomena of bilingualism and diglossia we must therefore add conflictive situations and linguistic subordination. Diglossia, a term coined by Ferguson in the 1950s, is in fact closely related to bilingualism, and describes the coexistence of two languages and the situation of imbalance and inequality between them. The phenomenon appears, principally, when languages in contact within a single social framework are subjected to a distribution of functions which, in overall terms, limits the ways in which the speaker can use the language in particular social environments or circles. The functional imbalance between the two languages is conditioned by the social prestige of each of them: the languages are employed in contexts of greater or lesser formality, depending on the status attributed to each of them by the members of the speech community. However, according to Ferguson (1959), diglossia only arises in cases of dialects and standard varieties (in the most traditional sense of the terms). Likewise, he is categorical in his insistence that no social sector would use the formal or ‘A variety’ over the informal or ‘B variety’ in everyday conversation. Authors such as Fishman and Fasold broaden the concept of diglossia, refining and improving Ferguson’s definition. Fishman (1979: 40) states that the phenomenon of diglossia may be observed between ‘several separate codes’ and admits the existence of ‘any degree of linguistic difference’ between codes. These additions to the original theory open the way for speculation regarding the types of divergence be-

56 Part II tween contact languages: divergence may be total or simply deviation of a stylistic nature. We may therefore accept what Fishman terms ‘whole language diglossia’, in that the greater range of this new approach permits a more accurate portrayal of the situation of linguistic contact in Medieval England. Fasold (1990: 53) defines his concept of ‘broad diglossia’ as: ...the reservation of highly valued segments of a community's linguistic repertoire (which are not the first to be learned, but are learned later and more consciously, usually through formal education), for situations perceived as more formal and guarded; and the reservation of less highly valued segments (which are learned first with little or no conscious effort), of any degree of linguistic relatedness to the higher valued segments, from stylistic differences to separate languages, for situations perceived as more informal and intimate. Although more recently linguists have added timely contributions to the initial definition of diglossia, Ferguson (1959) qualifies his own account by proposing a series of features that should be present in languages which are in conflict in order for the situation to be characterised as diglossic. Table 3 below outlines these features, and how they occur in each of the codes likely to provoke a diglossic situation with the community and period pertaining to our study:

Table 3. Diglossic features of the language in Medieval England

Characteristics English French Function Oral Written Informal Formal Prestige Inferior language Superior language Literary Existing literature Literature held in high esteem Heritage Learning / Family environment Via rules / norms acqusition Lack of studies relating to regularisa- History of grammatical studies Standardisation tion and/or normalisation Stability Approximately 2 to 3 centuries Grammar Differences between grammatical structures Lexicon Matching items Phonology Certain differences between phonological systems

The ‘function’ feature is very significant because it determines the contextual equilibrium of both codes within the society. In this case, English is assigned to the informal speech register of oral communication, and French predominates in formal conversation and in writing. The function assigned to each of the languages derives from the prestige in which each is held. Pre-diglossia ‘literary inheritance’ relates to the level of literary production achieved in the past by languages A and B (high and low varieties, respectively). In a situation of diglossia, literary production in language B decreases in quantity and perceived value on the part of the community, while written work in language A gains importance. With regard to acquisition, the same duality Language change in Medieval and Renaissance England 57 applies between languages A and B. The acquisition of a language is a natural and spontaneous process because it is the mother tongue of the speech community. This is the case with language B. Language A, on the other hand, is learned through conscious study using dictionaries, grammars, etc. Here the level of standardisation in the language (much greater in French than in English) is an important influence on the process of learning.25 Stability is the first criterion by which both codes may be analysed in broad terms. It took the inhabitants of the island two or three centuries to reach a degree of linguistic stability. Grammatical, lexical and phonological criteria were established, highlighting the similarities and differences between the two languages. Differences existed in grammar and phonology, but the lexicon exhibited a series of parallelisms reflecting their diglossic coexistence. Some of the terms were either total or partial synonyms of common concepts and were manifested in two ways: the oral version, in language B, and the written form in language A. The most illustrative examples of this occur between pairs of words which distinguish between the meat of an animal and the living beast:

Table 4. Word Pairs

English (animal) French (meat) swine pork ox beef calf veal sheep mutton

Other examples: Anglo-Saxon French hut cottage cloth(es) dress friendship amity help aid, assist folk people hearty cordial holy saint deep profound lonely solitary indeed in fact give, hand present, deliver dale valley deed action begin commence hide conceal find discover feed nourish

25 To compare this with a similar situation between a different pair of languages, see Crespo, 2004.

58 Part II

hinder prevent look for search inner, outer interior, exterior Having applied these theoretical hypotheses to the specific context of Medieval Eng- land, I believe that it is reasonable to conclude that the situation of speakers in this period was probably bilingual and, to a greater or lesser degree, diglossic. High-contact situations may lead to the evolution of a language or to a state in which a language shows greater or lesser signs of the influence of a dominant language. Essentially, what is at issue here is pidginisation and creolisation, which, as we will see, some authors have discussed in relation to the situation of English and French in the Middle Ages. Pidgin languages arise as a consequence of the communicative needs of disparate speech communities, and feed linguistically on the grammatical and phonological structures of the native languages of the groups who use them (Smith 1996). The lexicon, on the other hand, is borrowed from the most prestigious of the native languages in contact (the ‘lexifier’). Initially there are no native pidgin speakers but generational transmission gives rise to a generation of native speakers of the new code, the moment at which a pidgin becomes a creole. Both pidgins and creoles are characterised by two fundamental features: reduction and restructuring. Reduction refers to the loss of syntactic rules and the disappearance of lexical differences. The simplification of grammatical and lexical forms is accompanied by a reworking of the structures of the original language towards the expansion of the syntactic functions of lexical elements and the semantic context of lexical units (Hancock 1989). It is precisely the multiplication of the semantic possibilities of a term that is of interest here because this phenomenon has the potential to influence change. Various authors have attempted to look at the history of the English language in terms of pidgin and creoles, examining those situations marked by linguistic contact between ‘English’ and the Scandanavian languages, and between ‘English’ and Nor- man French during the Middle Ages. Bailey and Maroldt (1977), for example, have suggested the existence of a creole language in two particular moments:

(i) during the 10th and 11th centuries, between Old English and Viking Norwegian; (ii) from the Norman invasion (1066) to the 13th century, between English and the French brought by the invaders. The creole language that came about after 1066 is termed ‘Middle English’ and, according to Bailey and Marold (1977: 38) is nothing more than ‘a heavy admixture of Anglo-Saxon elements into Old French’. This ‘French creolisation’ evolved in two stages: ‘a major creolisation before 1200 and a minor one (mainly with Central French) that involved massive borrowing during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries’ (Bailey and Maroldt 1977: 27). With regard to this division it is important to point out that the first stage of creolisation should be considered as a Norman, rather than French, creolisation. In the immediate aftermath of the Conquest it was oral Norman and not written French that coexisted as a linguistic substratum with English. Milroy (1984) supports the position of Bailey and Maroldt (1977), arguing that Middle English had already developed a highly simplified morphology and had estab- Language change in Medieval and Renaissance England 59 lished a fixed, SVO-type word order which was, apparently, not the order which had characterised English in earlier periods. Thomason and Kauffman (1988: 307), however, do not accept that a process of pidginisation or creolisation occurred during the first interlude, during contact between English and the Scandanavian languages, due to the linguistic proximity of the two languages: Though it cannot be denied that Norse influence on English was extensive ... The very close similarity between the two languages makes the emergence of a pidgin language as unlikely on linguistic grounds as it is on social grounds: linguistically, communication could be ef- fected without drastic elimination of linguistic complexities and, socially, the need (at least in most places) was for an all-purpose language not merely for a restricted-purpose minimal language.... Creolization is also unlikely on social grounds and again the languages seem too close linguistically for such an extreme response to communication difficulties. With regard to the second interlude (French-English), Thomason and Kauffman (1988) argue that the simplifications and reductions which the English language underwent between the 11th-13th century while in contact with Norman French were the logical consequence of internal processes already operating within the language at the time of the Norman invasion. We find, for example, that ‘the main changes in the endings of verbs being due to the need for ambiguous expression of grammatical meaning are...the product of purely internal factors’. Claims on the same lines have been made elsewhere, thus: ‘the reduction of OE diphthongs to what was in effect their first element had set in before the Conquest...’ (Bennett and Smithers 1968: xlviii-xlix). Trudgill (1983: 106) favours the use of the term ‘creoloid’ in order to identify more accurately the situation of linguistic contact prevailing in Medieval England. This situation appears not to have fulfilled the criteria of reduction, simplification, stability and unintelligibility necessary for pidginisation: We know of many creole-like varieties which demonstrate mixture and simplification but which have probably never been pidgins. A useful term for varieties of this type is creoloid (...). Norwegian is, relative to Old Norse, also a creoloid. And Middle English, (...) is a creoloid, relative to Old English. Görlach (1986) also considers it wrong to speak in terms of creolisation in Middle English and favours a concept more like Trudgill’s ‘creoloid’, although he makes no explicit statement to that effect. Unlike authors such as Poussa (1982: 84), who explain the process of creolisation on the basis of ‘loss of grammatical gender, extreme inflectional simplification, certain types of loanwords’, Görlach believes that Middle Eng- lish exhibits no typically pidgin or creole characteristics: pronouns retain their gender and case, nouns their number, and verbs their tense markers and person endings. The massive importation of lexicon after the Norman Conquest is in sharp contrast to the scant grammatical influence that this language exerted on English. For this reason, a great deal of confusion and a lack of consensus have arisen in the interpretation of the situation. The lack of consensus regarding the accuracy of the term ‘creole language’ in relation to Middle English might also be a question of differing criteria among authors (Tejada Caller 1999). However, what they do appear to agree on is that, on the whole, English did undergo a process of simplification and ‘relexification’. The reduction or expansion of forms and meanings which this involved, and which are the

60 Part II key to determining the phenomena of pidginisation and creolisation, allows us to study the way in which linguistic change developed. For the purposes of this preliminary presentation of the subject, I will not try to offer any solutions to the problem or adopt any specific position. It seems clear that the terminological conflict is an attempt to tackle the root of the problem. By using a combination of linguistic characteristics and external conditions, the issue is essentially about accounting for a situation capable of generating constant change and transformation in all the subsystems of a language in evolution. That, in the end, is what matters to us. The following section deals with the types of change usually studied in relation to the different subsystems or levels of a language.

2.4 Changes in different subsystems/levels of language

There is wide agreement that different types of change exist within a language and that these can develop within the different subsystems. Table 5 below illustrates different types of change examined in a number of studies:

Table 5. Types of change phonological morphological syntactic semantic lexical lexico- semantic Bynon26 X X (1983) Lehmann27 X X X X (1992) McMahon X X X X (1994) Smith X (1996)

Lehmann (1992: 183) defines phonological change as the combination of ‘modifications that lead to the introduction of new phonological elements in a language, to loss or to realignments of old elements...’. Phonological change has proved to be one of the most interesting objects of study in the field of historical linguistics because the evolution of phonology allows us to observe clearly the diachronic transformations of specific linguistic elements. So-called ‘Great Vowel Shift’, affecting the phonetic reali- sation of long vowels, is one clear example of this. Lehmann also deals with morphological change. The morphological system is a much more highly structured conglomeration of elements than the phonological system. Moreover, morphological forms are subject to the influence of analogy. Examples of this include the move away from grammatical gender that came about during the development from Old to Middle English, and the tendency to simplify inflected paradigms.

26 Bynon (1983) does not deal with morphological change but instead combines morphological and syntactic criteria and looks at changes in the grammatical structures. 27 According to Lehmann, changes operating at different levels of the language may be grouped together under what he refers to as cultural linguistic change / linguistic and cultural change. Language change in Medieval and Renaissance England 61

Changes in syntax are more difficult to address, because ‘syntactic sequences are more open to pragmatic variation than are those of morphology and phonology’ (Leh- mann 1992: 237). Thus, the high level of variability associated with syntax makes it more difficult to locate and identify changes. Nevertheless, it is possible to calculate variations among some basic syntactic patterns, such as the evolution of the auxiliary do in interrogative and negative clauses during the Early Modern English period (Iyeiri, 2004). Lastly, semantic, lexical or lexico-semantic change explores changes affecting the vocabulary of a language. Part III is devoted to this type of change, especially semantic change, and to how it develops in the particular conditions of contact under discussion here.

Part III

Semantic change

As discussed in Part I, the external history of England during the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance bore witness to the development of English as a language of culture and a symbol of the nation. During this process, one of the most controversial linguistic questions was that of the urgent need to incorporate terms to express both daily and literary realities. At the time, the English vocabulary was undergoing changes in its form and content. Debate among intellectuals throughout the 16th century clearly attest to the revolution taking place in the vocabulary of the vernacular. The development of the language, together with the cultural change that took place between the Medieval and Renaissance periods, had opened the way for changes in the referential value of words. Socrates remarked that time leaves its mark on the form of a word and that this phenomenon helps us to distinguish between ‘meaning’ and ‘sense’. In distinguishing these two components within a single word, he provided an outline of the concept of semantic change. Sense is eroded over the course of time, and it is therefore sense which provides the conceptual basis of a term which may be transformed and thus give rise to new meanings. As we can see, such an approach foregrounds the meaning of words, although in classical times there were no generalisations, theories or even terminology for this kind of analysis. The term ‘semantics’ appeared for the first time in the 17th century in A Discourse concerning Prodigies by John Spencer (1663), but it was used here in a philological rather than a strictly linguistic sense. The first use of the term from a linguistic perspective did not occur until well into the 19th century when the French linguist Michel Bréal (1893) introduced and defined semantics as ‘la science des significations’. Bréal was followed by Arsène Darmesteter who employed the term in a diachronic study. From then on, scholars involved in the study of meaning began to use the terms ‘semantics’ and ‘semasiology’ interchangeably, with the first of these ultimately prevailing, and by the beginning of the 20th century, semantics was defined as the school of thought concerned with the fields of meaning of words. Initially, semantics was understood to be the study of historical semantics. Years later, Firth (1935: 65) would differentiate between two approaches to the study of meaning, using these two terms: semasiology is concerned with the study of changes in meaning, while semantics is used for ‘situational and experiential study’ of meaning (see also Brown, 2009; Luraghi and Bubeník, 2010). While ‘semasiology’ itself appears to have fallen into disuse, the same cannot be said of the Saussurian parameters of synchrony and diachrony, which have come to be used in all branches of linguistic study. For this reason, what we undertake these days in attempting to study meaning change is historical semantics, which, in the words of Rothwell (1981: 146), ‘tries to concentrate on the alterations of meaning occurring in individual words though centuries’. The term creates the idea of offering a representation of meaning over time (Grygier and Kleparski, 2007) and today the limits of synchronic and diachronic study within the area of semantics have been clearly marked .

64 Part III

The most confusing element of semantics is the distinction between the adjectives ‘lexical’ and ‘semantic’: authors tend to use these terms ambiguously, even interchangeably. In this study, I intend, for methodological reasons, to focus on semantic change and it therefore seems appropriate that I attempt to clarify these terms. The main confusion stems from the fact that, in both cases, the object of study is the word. Saussure’s distinction between ‘signifiant’ and ‘signifié’ may offer a solution here; alternately, we might consider Ogden and Richards’ triangle, which draws on the relationship between ‘name’, ‘sense’ and ‘thing’ in an attempt to explain what ‘meaning’ is. According to both of these theories, lexical change would relate to the ‘signifiant’ (in Saussurian terms) or ‘name’ (in Ogden and Richards’ terms), whereas semantic change would refer to meaning or ‘sense’. The distinction between meaningful and meaning is employed by Van Hoecke and Goyens (1990) when they define semantic change from two points of view: semasiological and onomasiological. The semasiological perspective distinguishes various meanings for a single form. It is in this range of meanings that changes occur (semantic change); the onomasiological perspective identifies one meaning which manifests itself in different forms (Koch, 2008). The emphasis is on form, not meaning. ‘Cape’ and ‘mantel’ provide an example of semasiological change. ‘Cape’ is derived from the Vulgar Latin ‘cappa’, meaning ‘a kind of head-dress, hood’, while in Old French the meaning of ‘cape’ was ‘a utilitarian coat which protects from the cold and the rain’. As time went by, ‘cape’ eventually acquired the same meaning as ‘mantel’, ‘a smart piece of clothing, made of rich material, which is part of a dress suit’. Onomasiological change is illustrated by the Latin forms ‘coxa’ and ‘femur’. In Classical Latin, ‘FEMUR has the acceptation which the form deriving from COXA has acquired in the vulgar language’ (Van Hoecke and Goyens (1990: 109-110). Anttila (1989: 134) also proposes a dichotomy between ‘semasiology’ or the ‘study of meanings’ and ‘onomasiology’, the ‘study of forms’ (Koch, 2008). This dichotomy is reasserted by Zgusta (1990: 389) who claims that ‘onomasiological lexical change’ is ‘caused by changes in the denoted things which can belong to any of the following three categories: 1) new things come into existence or are discovered; 2) things cease to exist and/or fall into oblivion; 3) things change’. In some works on semantic change the term ‘lexical’ is employed. In my view, this term is best understood in the sense in which Ullmann (1972: 344) uses it. Ullmann argues that semantics is no more than the study of lexical meaning, where the adjective ‘lexical’ simply arises through confusion between the terms lexeme and lexical unit28. Similarly, Hock (1996: 216) identifies ‘semantics’ with ‘the meaning of individual words’, which he terms ‘lexical semantics’. Other approaches, such as the generativist perspective of Evens et al. (1980: 172- 173), describe lexical and/or semantic relations through different hierarchical levels between elements. Different categories of super or sub-ordinate relations are necessary in order that semantic relations, or relations of meaning, can exist. Such relations can

28 The lexeme, lexical unit or lexical item refers to the basic structural form common to different morphological variants of the same word. For example, in bottle, bottles and bottled the lexeme is ‘bottle’ and the three items in italics constitute words. Huddleston (1984: 1) resolves the dilemma by using ‘word for the less abstract concept, lexeme for the more abstract one’. Semantic change 65 be understood in terms of a paradigmatic axis. Lexical relations, or relations of form, are accounted for on the syntagmatic axis of the language, including contrasts and col- locations. The terms ‘lexicon’ and ‘semantics’ might also be understood in the sense used by Ullmann, whereby ‘semantic change’ is only used in relation to the different changes in content, that is, changes in meaning that words in the English language may experience. It does not account for other possible types of changes, such as morphological or phonological, which affect the form of the word. Since changes in meaning are to be the object of this study, I should first attempt to capture the meaning of the very term ‘meaning’ with some precision.

3.1 The meaning of the word meaning

There is evidence to suggest that in the 16th century, writers were already concerned with the subject of meaning. Salmons (1990: 33-34) explains this concern in terms of three extralinguistic factors:

1. The conflict between Renaissance attitudes and Scholasticism; 2. The debate about the nature of words arising from the religious nature of the period; 3. A linguistic movement among the lower classes (in parallel with the Catholic- Protestant controversy at the heart of the Church) which called for the terminology used among the more learned social groups to be replaced by that used for everyday interaction and literary production. Semantic studies and similar work from the Renaissance period in England were not wholly original, since they were typically based on Platonic-Aristotelian debates regarding the relationship between noun and object and the existence of universals. Another element in the debate surrounding meaning at this time was that of the status and power of words, particularly in relation to translating religious messages such as those in the Bible. Renaissance authors rejected the Medieval idea of literal, allegorical, moral or analogical interpretation, substituted it with a more modern notion: that meaning did not depend on a strict relation between word and object, but on its use in a given context. Some of the concepts developed by Renaissance intellectuals in relation to meaning established the framework for subsequent studies, as we shall see later. At the beginning of the 20th century, Stern (1931) analysed meaning from two points of view: the psychological and the logical. The psychological perspective relates to the physical nature of the content of the mind and the cognitive and emotional elements comprised by that content. Within the cognitive aspect, ‘meaning may be represented by imagery in a word’ (Stern 1931: 50) so that sign and meaning merge to the extent that the image resembles its own referent. The emotional aspect, on the other hand, refers to the subjective attitudes of both the speaker and the hearer. The semantic aspect of a term is usually composed of these emotional elements. This is partly what the cognitive perspective presents, through the use of different models in the construction of meaning (Evans, 2009).

66 Part III

The logical perspective relates to the notional content of a term and the different elements that make up the content. Stern (1931: 68-70) distinguishes between ‘actual’ and ‘lexical’ meaning, defining the former as ‘the meaning of a word in actual speech’, that is, in a context; meanwhile, ‘lexical’ meaning is defined as ‘the mental content attached to an isolated word or phrase’, which would equate to a dictionary definition. The two points of view adopted by Stern in his study of meaning, the psychological and the logical, have provoked much comment in subsequent work in the field. Some authors have taken issue with a specific aspect of the approach, while others have attempted to combine the two perspectives in their own definitions. Waldron (1979: 18- 23), for example, describes two different ways of examining meaning using psychological criteria:

1. Equating meaning and image 2. Equating meaning and concept However, he goes on to make a case against both of these approaches. With the equation of meaning and image, he argues, there is no way to guarantee that everybody thinks in terms of images; what is more, not all types of words can be represented in image form. The second equation, in Waldron’s estimation, lacks clarity because ideas and concepts are inherently vague and inexact and the word ‘concept’ itself implies a movement away from feelings, emotions and other aspects of the human experience so closely connected with language. Finally he rejects any definition of meaning which focuses exclusively on the understanding of the speakers and which does not take into account the institutional aspect of a language, where by ‘institutional’ he means com- monly defined and accepted. In his view meaning derives from the collective consciousness of speakers agreeing to convene the significance of a particular vocabulary item or construction. Lexicalisation and institutionalisation are, therefore, two necessary processes in the consolidation of a semantic reference (Brinton & Closs-Traugott, 2005). So, it seems that the psychological or individual criterion is not enough to explain meaning. We must combine psychological considerations with social aspects of the language in order to understand meaning in the broadest sense of the term. Waldron’s final approach analyses the meaning of a word in conjunction with other lexical items or grammatical units, and he also claims that the conceptualist theory needs to be re- evaluated in order to explain semantic change. Ullmann (1972: 344-351) reviews the definitions of meaning proposed by a variety of linguists, from Ogden and Richards (1923) onwards. He concludes that all these definitions can be classified according to two criteria: analytical and operationalist. The former looks at the definition itself, separating it into its constituent parts; the latter examines the function of meaning. Corresponding to the analytical approach we find the work of Ogden and Richards, for whom meaning comprises three basic components: the symbol or name, a physical representation of the word; the thought, reference or sense, that is, the information communicated by the word; and the referent or object, ‘thing’, the non-linguistic phenomenon referred to by the word. Their theory is represented graphically by the well-known triangle:

Semantic change 67

sense

name------thing

(Ogden and Richards 1923: 11)

The dotted line indicates that there is no direct relation between the referent and its denomination (arbitrary linguistic sign). The relation consists, rather, of reference, information, sense. Some authors, including Waldron (1979), suggest that the connection between sign and meaning could simply be the consequence of use and custom. A second analytical definition, the so-called dualist or conceptual theory (Palmer 1975) defended by Saussure and his followers, is based largely on Odgen and Rich- ards’ approach and might indeed be viewed as a reworking of it. Accordingly, in the dualist theory the non-linguistic nature of the ‘object’ or ‘thing’ is entirely irrelevant for a definition of meaning. In Saussurian terms, meaning is the reciprocal and reversible relationship between the ‘signifiant’ and the ‘signifié’, which, as noted earlier, we can denote as the name and sense29. Wittgenstein’s (1953) definition is one of the ‘operative definitions of meaning’ proposed by Ullmann (1972). According to Wittgenstein (1953: 20; in Ullmann 1972: 347) words are tools and the meaning of a word is nothing more than ‘its use in the language’. The same idea was developed by Firth (1957: 19) when he stated that ‘meaning...must be considered as a complex of contextual relations’. These ‘contextual relations’ include important aspects such as the speakers’ actions (both verbal and non- verbal), difference of status or social position, relations between members of the speech community, the effects of verbal actions, etc. (Robins 1971). In line with the proposals of Wittgenstein and Firth, Waldron (1979) asserts that the characteristic feature of lexical meaning is its dependence on context and user. Just as meaning cannot be ascribed to a word in isolation (even dictionary definitions contain an implicit context), so the user of a given linguistic code will employ a different terminological repertoire for every speech act depending on the situation, experience or social condition. Waldron demonstrates in this way the importance of the theory and the social nature of meaning. While not coming out firmly on the side of the contextualists, Kleparski (1986) acknowledges the importance of context in componential analysis, which had emerged precisely in response to the intense distributionalist arguments that preceded it. Con- text is particularly helpful in terms of the structure it provides for the various semantic components of a term, maintaining a hierarchical order and thereby avoiding repetition in the description of meaning. Other authors also deal with the subject of meaning by referring to the characteristics or environment in which meaning is developed, arguing

29 One of the severest criticisms levelled at analytical definitions centres around the term ‘sense’, the vagueness and intangibility of which precludes all possible scientific formulation (Lyons 1963).

68 Part III that in order to understand meaning the speakers of a language must have a shared semantic competence, and that meaning presupposes knowledge of the language and the world. Hence, meaning presupposes knowledge of the symbols or signs, their referents and the context in which they are used (Leech 1974). On occasions, a direct definition of the concept of meaning is avoided in the literature on account of its inherent diffi- culty (Lehrer 1974), although these approaches tend to include relations of synonymy (within a language) and equivalency (between two languages A and B), as well as situation and context-dependent elements such as connotation and register. Such works may therefore be said to examine nuances or aspects of the concept of meaning, but they do not define it. Contrariwise, Kleparski (1986)30 takes a clearer stance, defining himself as a defender of the mentalist postulate which assumes that the meaning of lexical items may be inferred from the way in which native speakers conceptualise these items and by studying the most important contexts in which they appear. Mean- ing is understood here as a mental concept while referents and linguistic signs are re- garded as physical objects. So, meaning can be considered as a link between the two plains represented by a lexical item: form and content (in the words of Hjelsmslev) or, significant and signifier (in Saussurian terms). The link is psychological in origin, reciprocal and reversible. It may be modified by the action of strictly linguistic or non-intrasystemic factors which represent the surrounding extralinguistic world. The association of form and content should be analysed in use and in context, so I will employ the two analytical and operationalist criteria under which Ullmann classes the definitions of meaning. On these lines, the psychological element underlying the association between an ‘image’ and a ‘concept’ is clear, and is present in every instance where meaning can be observed. For this reason, I do not feel it is necessary to set great store by it in the definition of meaning. The lexicon of a language may be structured in terms of meaning. By grouping different lexical units according to meaning, we create various different semantic fields (Kittay and Lehrer 1987), as I will go on to discuss in the following section. 3.1.1 Related assumptions: the concept of ‘semantic field’ and broad categorisations of Medieval reality.

In the 1930s, Jost Trier (1931) proposed a new way of looking at the vocabulary of a language: not as a list of terms, but as a conglomerate of items in which each item could be classified in terms of different semantic fields or conceptual areas. According to this theory, the members of each field are interrelated and mutually defined and delimited (Kleparski 1986). Trier distinguished between lexical field31 and conceptual field, with the lexical field responsible for the division of the conceptual into several parts. Trier applied his theory of fields to Medieval German and focused his study on the field of the intellect, establishing comparisons and attempting to determine instances of change across the different historical periods. Around the 13th century, he found three terms:

30 Kleparski identifies three basic theories: his own mentalist approach, the non-conceptual mentalist hypothesis, and the conceptual mentalist approach. 31 Trier uses the expression ‘lexical field’ for what we refer to as ‘semantic field’. In explaining the ideas of the author, we will employ his terminology. Semantic change 69

Wîsheit, Kunst and List. Wîsheit was a general term that related to the conceptual field. The remaining two corresponded to lexical fields: Kunst implied ‘courtly knowledge’ and social behaviour, while List was used in reference to abilities or knowledge of a more technical nature. A century later, the conceptual field of the intellect had changed and the same terms were employed with different nuances of meaning. Wîsheit acquired a mystical or religious sense, Kunst began to be used to refer to everyday abilities or knowledge, and List disappeared from this lexical field to be replaced by Wissen, which referred to art. One objection to Trier’s thesis is the presumption of an exact division of a lexical area from the conceptual area. However, authors such as Lehrer (1974) have demonstrated that the division is not perfect and that there are ‘gaps’ and ‘overlaps’. Trier is not always clear about the division between lexical field and conceptual field, and occasionally we find the two terms confused in his work. The relationship which should exist between the lexical and the conceptual is of a descriptive nature in that the organisation of items into linguistic fields constitutes a conceptualisation of the external reality, that is, the mental process by which the speaker interiorises the external reality. Likewise, there are serious problems with Trier’s view of lexical fields as closed, defined, delimited groups. There are different degrees in the ratio of relevance between a term and a semantic field, as we will see later in the present study. Within the domain of a given semantic field, we should draw a distinction between core or basic terms and peripheral terms (Bloomfield 1933) and following Prototype Semantics, descriptions should be based on central meanings (Görlach, 2003). This last point relates, in a way, to Trier’s organisation of lexical fields in terms of systems of opposition and difference while describing associations between words as tenuous and unpredictable. The work of other authors here has shown that the lexicon is merely a network of relations between the different items which, consequently, may be organised in a number of equally ac- ceptable ways. Studies carried out with Navaho speakers illustrate this idea well; separate individuals using different methods classified a group of words relating to food, yet each person could agree with those classifications made by others. A different view is offered by Kleparski (1986), according to whom lexical items should not be seen as isolated entities, but as elements capable of a hierarchical organisation within a greater whole. He supports this claim through reference to the connection between the theory of fields and componential analysis. This relationship consists of three main premises: the members of a group share characteristics (a fact re- vealed by componential analysis); both the theory and the method presuppose the structure of the language; and the link between theory and method allows us to examine the paradigmatic relations between members of a field. In addition, semantic field (or ‘subject area’) can be defined as ‘a group of words intimately related in terms of meaning, often classifiable under a general term’ with a view to examining the semantic structure of the lexicon (Lehrer 1974: 1). Kleparski points out that it is necessary to establish subgroups within a given field to facilitate a semantic analysis. He also provides examples of his attempts to demonstrate the relationship between semantic fields and the influence they may exert on semantic change in general. For this purpose, it is necessary to qualify the concept of field, bearing in mind that: ‘A semantic field is a set of lexemes which cover a certain conceptual domain and which bear certain speci- fiable relations to one another’ (Kittay and Lehrer 1981: 32).

70 Part III

Exploring the theory of fields, Lyons (1963, 1977, 1995) emphasises the importance of context when it comes to analysing a term; this idea was already familiar to scholars during the Renaissance and would continue to be seen in the work of later authors such as Wittgenstein, Firth, Waldron, etc., as we saw in Section 3.1 above. An analysis of the meanings of a word must look at that word’s use and the contexts of use; in other words, it is necessary to examine its semantic possibilities and its relation to other terms within a specific domain, not in general or by taking the word in isolation. Lyons (1963: 58) defines the meaning of a word as ‘a function of its relationship to the other terms in the lexical field and these relationships (synonymy, antonymy, class inclusion, etc.) are primitives in this theory’. A few years later, we find Lyons reasserting this position, drawing on the same basis to define semantic field (1977: 268), in that it is the semantic relationship between lexemes of a given linguistic system that defines them as belonging to the same semantic field. Palmer also considers it important to consider context as a necessary tool for in- terpreting utterances, defining context literally as ‘that which is woven with or related to’ and, in addition, the situation surrounding the interlocutors and ‘their knowledge of the world or cultural conditioning’. More recently, Van Hoecke and Goyens (1990: 109) identified the need to recur to context to determine possible changes in meaning, since it is through a rigorous study of the contexts in which a particular form occurs in its established meaning that possible changes of meaning can be detected. Stathi (2009) offers a particular example of this in her paper ‘The Origin of Semantic Change in Discourse Tradition: A Case Study’. All these proposals and definitions are part of a synchronic view of meaning. However, meaning may also be viewed as the identity of a word which is subject to constant change over the course of time, this change caused by contact and interference. This is known as externally motivated change (Jones and Singh, 2005), an entity influenced by both external factors and purely intra-linguistic phenomena. Using representative texts from each of the historical periods under examination, Serjeantson’s A History of Foreign Words in English (1935) presents a traditional classification in terms of semantic fields of the borrowings introduced over time into Eng- lish under the influence of each of the linguistic substrata and superstrata of the language. For example, for Middle English and Early Modern English, Serjeantson points out the importance of the Scandanavian, French, Latin and Greek strata. Less important strata included the German (High and Low German), Italian, Spanish and other European languages such as the Celtic languages, Portuguese, the Slavic languages, Hungarian, etc. She also draws attention to the influence exerted by languages such as Arabic (magazine < makâzin ‘storehouses’ 1583; lemon < laimûn c.1400), the Indian dialects (sandal < çandana c. 1400), Persian (salamandar < samander 1340; jackal < shagâl 1603), the Turkish dialects (caviar (e) < khâvyâr 1591), Dravidian (paria < paraiyar 1613), the Semite dialects (cherub < k’rûb 1382), Tibetan-Chinese (galin- gale ‘an aromatic root’ < ko-liang-kiang c.1305) and Japanese (bonze < bonzô ‘religious person’ 1588) (Serjeantson 1935: 216-239). The Malayo-Polynesian, Australian and African languages appear to be of minimal influence during these periods, yet we still find a few examples: from Malayo-Polynesian (sago < sâgû 1555) and from Afri- can languages (ebony, turnip 1533). Semantic change 71

With respect to the French stratum in the 12th century, the most important semantic fields are those relating to person or rank (abbat, cuntesse), finances (rent, tresor), buildings (celle), laws and social relations (iustise, priuilegie), religion (miracle, processiun), the military (standard, werre), nature (bêst, leun), textiles (sendal, mante), home and other objects (basin, furneis), physical action, appearance, the human faculties (cachen, savour, semblant), moral and intellectual affairs (clergie, meistrie), miscellaneous (feverer, Latin) and food (feste). In works written between 1200-1250 (the Nero manuscript of the Ancrene Riwle, King Horn, the Owl and the Nightingale, Sawles Warde, the East Midland Genesis and Exodus, and the Bestiary) the classification changes, with far more technical-religious words (caliz, chastien, ercsie) and abstract concepts. The latter requires a subclassifi- cation, and the field of moral and intellectual affairs may be broken down into: states of mind, qualities (kunscence, daunger, pacience), mental action or action affecting the mind (akointed, asaumple), other abstractions (manere, spece, efficace) and, lastly, writing, painting, learning and other arts (chapitre, descrinen). Serjeantson supplies three more fields for the first half of the 13th century: medical (cancre, lepre), hunting (triste, tryst, station) and nautical (galeie, galley). Between 1250-1300 (Havelock the Dane, Floris and Blaunc hefur, Kentish Homi- lies, Jacob and Josep) we find new terms for people (barun, parlement), together with new articles of food and drink (super ‘supper’, broys ‘broth’, piment ‘sweet spiced wine’), buildings (stage ‘floor, stage’) and terms relating to nature (oniche ‘onix’, crestel ‘crystal’). For the 14th century texts, Serjeantson repeats the classifications used in previous centuries, in the case of the Cursor Mundi, for example, while devoting more attention to French as a ‘donor language’ for abstract terms (Handlyng Sunne). Additionally, she presents descriptive extracts which make use of a specialised vocabulary. These include Ipomadon (describing precious stones), Anturs of Arther (describing hunt scenes) and Sir Gawayne or the Grene Knight where we find descriptions of the knights’ clothing. The tendency in Romance literature to introduce descriptive pas- sages with a high proportion of French lexicon continued right into the 15th century. The classification adopted in previous periods was preserved. One interesting development was the specialisation of the vocabulary of cookery terms, observed in the ‘cookery books’ of the time (almondes, oystres, mynce, pouder, motton). In the 16th century, borrowings occur primarily in the semantic fields relating to naval and military affairs (corsair, colonel, rendezuous, cartridge, pilot). We also find new terms in the areas of commerce (palliasse) and society (sirrah, partisan, bourgeois), and in art and literature (scene, grotesque). The area of naval, military and diplomatic (stock- ade, brigade) affairs continued to predominate throughout the first half of the 17th century. Serjeantson’s taxonomies for lexical items of French origin can be summarised as follows:

– Terms relating to person or rank: abbat, cuntesse, curt, duc, prior – Finances: rent, tresor – Buildings: celle – Laws and social relations: iustise, priuilegie

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– Religion: miracle, processiun – Military affairs: standard, werre – Nature: bêst, leun, aromat – Textiles: sendal, mantel, purpre – Home and other objects: basin, furneis, lamp – Physical action, appearance, faculty: cachen, chagen, savour, semblant – Moral and intellectual affairs: clergie, bout, meistrie, reisun – States of mind, qualities: kunscence, daunger, pacience, gentile, ipocrisie – Mental action or action affecting the mind: akointed, asaumple – Other abstractions: manere, spece, efficace – Writing, painting, learning and other arts: chapittre, descrinen – Miscellaneous: feverer, Latin – Food: feste – Medicine: cancre, lepre – Hunting: triste ‘tryst, station’ – Nautical matters: galie ‘galley’ Borrowings from the Scandanavian languages may be grouped in terms of the following taxonomies:

– Reference to people (hsbonde, dring ‘warrior’) – Terms relating to the sea (naven) – Social and legal vocabulary (laze) scot ‘tax’ – Commerce (tîðing ‘tidings’) – Everyday objects (cnif, before 1150) – Miscellaneous (here we can also include the closed categories of words altered by the influence of the Scandanavian languages, among them pronouns (nïe, þei), bâðe ‘both’, conjunctions, prepositions (till), etc.) The following list includes the semantic fields in Middle and Early Modern English32 which were affected by the classical languages, especially Latin:

– Religion (requiem) – Laws (executor) – Abstractions (depression) – Sculpture and learning (index, library) – Technical terms in various areas: 1. Medicine (ligament) 2. Alchemy (mercury) 3. Astronomy (ascension) 4. Botany (cardamom) 5. Zoology (locust) 6. Mineralogy (adamant)

32 For the periods after 1500 Serjeantson introduces a list of terms for each period up to (and excluding) the 20th century, but does not classify them semantically. Lexicon of Greek origin is of a predominantly technical nature. Semantic change 73

The consideration of semantic fields differs so much from one author to another that the approach adopted would seem to depend on a given author’s own conception of the extralinguistic reality. For example, Moskowich (1995: 100-101), in her study of the Scan- danavian world and lexical change in Medieval English, draws on Serjeantson’s classification, with particular reference to that which relates to the introduction of French terms. Her study, however, introduces new parameters, identifying a total number of 35 fields: terms referring to person or rank, referring to assemblies or groups, finance and commerce, buildings, beliefs and rites, war and military affairs, nature, geographical characteristics, animal life, clothing, textiles, household items and other objects, physical action, food, drink and culinary arts, states of mind, qualities, mental action or action affecting the mind, abstractions, writing, knowledge, painting and other arts, agriculture and vegetation, farm duties, medicine and anatomy, the human body, hunting, fishing, falconry and other sports and games, navigation and the sea, time, climate and atmospheric weather, weights and measures, trades, sex, customs, history and traditions, miscellaneous, manner, mode, place, position, suffixes in people’s names and place names, physical appearance, physical ability, movement, quality. An even more detailed semantic description of reality is possible in the terms presented by the authors of A Thesaurus of Old English, in which reality is classified according to 18 main fields, with these subdivided as necessary. The 18 main fields are: physical world, life and death, material and measure, material necessities, existence, mental faculties, opinion, emotion, language and communication, possession, action and utility, social interaction, war and peace, law and order, property, religion, work, free time. The creation of different linguistic slots to classify the world has always hinged to some extent on the speaker’s perception of that world. This means that the speaker’s knowledge, mental activity, and general psychological functions will always act as one of the determining factors in the elaboration of a taxonomy of the referential world (Brisard, 2006; Pérez Hernández, 2011). Given this prevailing subjectivity in classifications of external reality according to semantic fields, the one adopted for the present study, based in large part on that proposed by Moskowich, is person-rank nouns. This field seems to be relatively less vulnerable to subjective decisions, in that it includes roles and posts well-established in society and well-accepted by the speech community.

3.2 Changing the meaning

To define, classify and attempt to identify the factors responsible for semantic changes or changes in the meaning of English words, a particular conception of change is needed, in order to work from a specific point of view with respect to the semantic organisation of the language. Here I will take a structural point of view, as explained in the previous section, exploring various fundamental ideas related to the phenomenon. 3.2.1 Definitions

Definitions of semantic change proposed by different authors tend to encompass two main areas: the purely linguistic and the social. Among those definitions of a linguistic

74 Part III nature, which take the view of language as a unit organised around a structure of elements and relations, we find Bloomfield (1933), Ullmann (1951), Werth (1974), Palmer (1975), Campbell (1998) and Fortson (2003). Definitions range from broad explanations to particular, detailed accounts of the concept. Bloomfield (1933: 425) presents a generic picture of semantic change, which he understands as a matter of innovations altering the lexical meaning but not the grammatical function of a form. It is a question of changes occurring in the content of a word. However, he offers more details in relation to the real sense of semantic change by adding that change in meaning is caused by a modification in the use of the form itself and other forms related to it, and ends by listing briefly the types of change he distinguishes, concluding that: ...when we find a form used at one time in a meaning A and at a later time in a meaning B, what we see is evidently the result of at least two shifts, namely, an expansion of the form from use in situations of type A to use in situations of a wider type A-B, and then a partial obsolescence by which the form ceases to be used in situations which approximate the old type A, so that finally the form is used only in situations of type B. (Bloomfield 1933: 430) This conception of change as a process of expansion and obsolescence is not entirely original, since it had already been propounded by Hermann Paul about a quarter of a century earlier. Bloomfield is, in this sense, recalling his neogrammatical inheritance. An alternative proposal was posited in the fifties by Ullmann (1957: 171) who assumed a different view of meaning in his determination of what semantic change consisted of, arguing that if meaning can be understood as a reciprocal relationship between name and sense, a semantic change must consist of adding a new sense to the name, or vice versa. Semantic change is thus explained in terms of Saussure’s dualist theory which views meaning as an existing relationship between ‘name’ and ‘sense’ (see section 3.1). Furthermore, according to Ullmann (1962), whenever meaning change occurs, there is inevitably a relationship of association between the old meaning and the new. This association is a sine qua non condition to defend the existence of meaning change. He proposes two theories in this respect:

(i) Association between isolated lexical items as the detonator of semantic change (ii) Association between fields to which isolated units belong Both types of associations occur between the senses or names of the terms involved. If there is no link between the senses and names of words, no change will occur. To be more precise, Palmer (1975: 425) adds that a shift of meaning is slightly more limited than a mere association between the senses and names of words because it is a question of ‘an alteration in the range of senses’, that is, in a number of the elements sus- taining the reciprocal relationship. Only the content changes, not the form. From the perspective of generative theory, Werth (1974: 377-378) expresses change in the language of formal logic. Given that ‘a lexical item a, hitherto associated with a semantic A, comes to associate with the new, but related (polysemous) semantic configuration A’, which may co-exist with, or replace, A’. This is the formula behind any semantic change. As can be inferred, once again the basic unit exhibits a specific content or meaning (semantic configuration) which may be altered and converted to a new configuration (related in some way to the original) for that word. The phenome- Semantic change 75 non is illustrated in the change undergone by the word hearse between Middle and Modern English. Similarly, if we compare the approaches of Ullmann and Werth, we observe the following agreement: according to both, changes in meaning imply an association between the old and new meanings. More recently, Campbell (1998) and (Hickey, 2010) have set out with great clarity a most convincing explanation of exactly what semantic change consists of. The per- spicuity of Campbell’s definition is the result of an emphasis on the alteration of concept, not of form, involved in semantic change. Meanwhile, the role of cognitive processes is suggested by Marcyn Grygiel (2004: 159, 153), who defines semantic change as the ‘conventionalisation of context-dependent modification of usage’ and general- ises on semantic change, claiming it occurs as a ‘natural consequence of language usage directly related to cognitive processing’. The definitions expounded by authors such as Anttila (1989) and Berndt (1989) stress the social element of the language. Anttila (1989: 133) highlights the importance of the social and cultural context as determining factors (though not exclusive ones) in the process of meaning change; Berndt (1989: 73) offers a similar interpretation. In reference to earlier opinions on the subject, Ullmann (1972) describes changes in the meaning of a word as: ...the form of meeting new demands on the lexical resources of a language which arise in the course of social, scientific and technological progress or in connection with other changes in the socio-historical conditions of the life of the language community. In this he is anticipating an extra-linguistic explanation for language shift which rein- forces the society-dependent nature of language. There are other intermediate stances on this issue, such as that of Arlotto (1972: 165), who describes semantic change as ‘changes removed from the linguistic mechanisms par excellence relating to the life and culture of the speech community, affecting the lexicon or vocabulary which is the most variable subsystem of any language’. In Arlotto’s opinion, semantic change involves linguistic as well as social explanations; both types are necessary and interdependent. For this study, I am inclined to adopt this last approach because it is the broadest and most interdisciplinary, as well as the best suited to my sociolinguistic analysis. As noted above, semantics is the branch of linguistics where the relationship between language and the outside world is best reflected (Stathi, 2009), and consequently the branch which best accommodates explanations based on social criteria. For the same reason, I intend not only to analyse the meaning of nouns, but also the meaning of the different uses (if such uses exist) of each one. The analysis will be presented in Section 3.4. 3.2.2 Causes

The causes of semantic change are naturally varied, and are defined and described by different authors in a variety of ways in relation to linguistic change in general (see Section 2.2). Meillet (1906) divides these causes into linguistic, historical and social ones. He ascribes linguistic causes to the phenomenon of contagion. Contact between terms of different types gives rise to associations which may ultimately result in a semantic

76 Part III change (the negative use of pas, personne, point, rien, jamais, as a consequence of their syntagmatic relationship with negative referential items). Among the historical causes of change, we find that an object, idea, institution or scientific concept may change over the course of time while the word used to designate it remains unchanged (plume: first, ‘a bird’s feather’; then, ‘a writing implement’). Social reasons explain those changes which occur when meaning expands as it passes from a limited area of use to a broader one (arrive ‘arrive’, taken mainly from the Latin ad-ripare used as ‘arrive’ in nautical contexts). In parallel with this, items originally used to designate a broad concept can find their meaning restricted when borrowed to designate a nar- rower field (the meaning of the Latin ponere is restricted in its French equivalent pon- dre, where it is used to refer to the area of agriculture)33. Around twenty years later, an alternative picture is offered by Sperber (1930) who, approaching the subject from a psychoanalytical perspective, claims that emotional causes are at the heart of language change. The subjects which define a speech community become ‘centres of expansion’ and ‘centres of attraction’. These centres tend to grow on the basis of attracting analogical forms from other fields, primarily in relation to the possibilities presented by metaphor and the emotional power which this has on the speaker. Ullmann’s work in the 1950s (1951, 1957) reflects his efforts to formulate a broader explanation of the linguistic causes of semantic change than in the case of Meillet. To this end, he says that it is the flexibility of language that is responsible for the polysemantic nature of human speech: its contextual ambiguity, the vagueness of sense which may be influenced by emotional factors, the fluidity of semantic borders, cultural taboos, the very structure of the vocabulary itself which is fluid and unstable, etc. However, Ullmann (1962) subsequently decided to systematise the causes of semantic change, combining the proposals of Meillet and Sperber to produce a new approach, which may be synthesised as follows:

Table 6. Causes of semantic change, according to Ullmann

1. Linguistic causes 2. Historical causes – specialisation 3. Social causes – generalisation 4. Psychological causes 4.1. Emotional factors 4.2.1. fear 4.2. Taboo (euphemism) 4.2.2. tact 4.2.3. decorum 5. Foreign influences 6. Need of new names

33 Ullmann (1957) considers Meillet’s theory inadequate because it does not mention causes of a psychological nature; this omission does not occur in Sperber’s studies, as we will see further on. Semantic change 77

The addition of the last two sections seems questionable: section 5 could be included under social causes if we broadened the scope of ‘social’ to indicate not only the relation and interchange between groups (as proposed by Meillet) but also the influence that one society may exert over another. Similarly, section 6 could be incorporated under the same heading, given that social, scientific and technical progress aug- ment the need for new terms or, at least, the need to represent new referents linguistically. With these modifications, I believe the scheme would be much better balanced because it would ascribe the same degree of generality to all of the causes (5 and 6 refer to more specific aspects). In the same way, historical and social causes could be merged into a single grouping of social or sociohistorical causes; what authors term social often has a historical background. From my point of view, therefore, the scheme of causes would be limited to the following points:

1. Linguistic causes 1.1. Vagueness and imprecision of sense 1.2. Flexibility of meaning 1.3. Instability of form-content relationship 1.4. Analogy 2. Social (socio-historical) causes 2.1. Referent is transformed over the course of time 2.2. Scientific and technological progress 2.3. Differences in ascription in the area of operation 3. Psychological causes 3.1. Emotional sensibility of speaker 3.2. Influence of different cultural taboos Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (1985: 298) combines social and psychological factors in an attempt to explain the reasons for semantic change. She argues that it is not just the external reality that influences change, but also the specific, individual perception that each speaker has of that reality. Changes are the result of associations created by the speaker on the basis of what he or she considers correct or incorrect, or by ‘perceptive, functional, emotional’ con- nections among the properties or characteristics of various objects or ideas (metaphor, metonymia), as explained, for instance, by Robert (2008). The individual’s perception of reality, emotions and beliefs, which cannot be ascribed to pre-existing patterns, and alterations in the outside world, together form the referential framework for semantic transformations, variations and changes. I maintain the view that forces of different types, not just social or psychological but also purely linguistic forces (law of minimum effort, analogy), interact to create semantic changes (Grygier and Kleparski, 2007). It is also especially important to consider the role of cognitive models in the construction of meaning as well as the process of semantic hybridization that may develop under certain circumstances: preexisting semantic features may intersect in hybrid formations, be redistributed in polysemous stages of a word, or may even result in the creation of new semantic patterns (Talmy, 2003; Croft and Cruse, 2004; Evans, 2009).

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3.2.3 Models to classify changes in meaning

In this section I will look at various different classifications representing different trends in the field of linguistics. Going back to the 1950s and ’60s, the works on semantics by Ullmann (1951, 1957, 1962) became influential. He examined the types of classifications possible with respect to semantic change, the basic theories about them, and the categories encompassed by each type. He proposed the following classification:

– Logical-rhetorical – Genetic 2.1. Causal genetic 2.2. Functional genetic – Eclectic – Empirical34 From all these classifications Ullmann selects the functional genetic type. This classification of Saussurian origin is based mainly on the premise of linguistic innovation as the cause of change. The idea of innovation allows the author to establish the further subcategories within the functional-genetic classification, namely:

1. Transference of name 1.1. by similarity of senses 1.2. by association of senses 1.3. by proximity of senses

2. Transference of senses 2.1. by similarity between names 2.2. by association between names

3. Compound changes This classically rhetorical-logical approach (Ullmann 1951, 1957, 1962), identifies the subcategories above with rhetorical figures of speech in the following manner: similarity of senses is manifested through metaphor, hyperbole and even mechanisms such as irony. The author distinguishes four types of metaphor: anthropomorphic, synesthetic, relating to animals, and those which transform real into abstract. The use of real terms to describe an abstract concept (grasp – to catch physically or to catch ‘mentally’, understand) is to give them a figurative or metaphorical sense. On the other hand, hyper-

34 The rhetorical-logical classification is based on the principles of the same classical school of thought responsible for the tripartite classification of reduction, expansion and transference of meanings. The causal-genetic classification focuses exclusively on the causes that create or eliminate any extralinguistic factor, deriving from an influence external to, or intentional on, the part of the speaker. Carnoy’s (1927) eclectic classification combines psychological reasoning and the categories of the classical rhetorical-logical school of thought, identifying both cognitive changes and changes that involve a value judgement. Lastly, the empirical classification proposed by Stern (1931) is achieved using data analysed against a theoretical background. This approach consciously incorporates both the logical and psychological perspectives but ascribes different significance to each. Semantic change 79 bole or exaggeration inflates phrases, expressions or fashionable terms which lose their power of expression and effectiveness when their initial meanings fall into disuse (‘tremendously happy’, ‘simply magnificent’). Saying the opposite of what one means (in ironic expression) is another example of change in meaning due to similarity between senses, as occurs in colloquial contexts when terms of abuse are used in an af- fectionate sense: ‘Many mothers call their children little rascals’ (Ullmann 1951: 73). Closeness or contact between senses is expressed through metonymy and may be based on relations of space or time, or indicate pars pro toto as explained by Ullmann (1951: 73-74) recalling the meaning of the word bureau: Bureau can mean today either a writing desk or an office or government department. Obvi- ously there is no similarity between the two senses; but there exists between them a different kind of relationship: the desk is situated in the office. The two ideas are thus in contact in the speaker’s mind; they belong to the same mental context. As can be inferred, the relevant point about metonymy is that, in one way or another, some kind of relationship exists between the first sense and the second. Popular etymology may be used as an index of similarity between nouns because it draws together nouns with a similar meaning, even when that similarity lies in the distant past. Two words with a similar form may also undergo a change in meaning. The archaic adjective sand-blind (‘dim-sighted’, ‘purblind’) was originally written sam-blind where sam was equivalent to semi- making its original meaning ‘nearly blind’. The formal similarity between sand and sam caused the change in meaning. Finally, the figure of speech referred to as ellipsis illustrates association between names. When contact occurs between the nouns or forms of a word, the result may involve simultaneous transference of meaning by contagion: this occurs with daily when used associatively with paper, so that we now interpret the single word daily with the meaning of the full expression ‘daily paper’. This transference of meaning by proximity results in the transformation of the adjective daily into a noun carrying the full semantic weight of the original expression. Another approach to studying the consequences of semantic change is offered by Ullmann in his 1962 work. Once an association arises between the senses or names of the given lexical items, this will have repercussions for the range of reference of the term affected by the change and/or for its evaluation. According to the term’s new range of reference, possible changes are considered restrictions or expansions of meaning. These changes are in turn deemed to be pejorative or ameliorating. This new form of classifying semantic change whereby change is determined in terms of the effect it yields on the sense of the affected term may be summarised as follows:

widened referential value restricted term positive or ameliorating estimation negative or pejorative Figure 3. Semantic models

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As the above discussion suggests, semantic change has been classified in various different ways and from various different points of views. Indeed, an author may adopt divergent approaches, though keeping within a single current of thought. This is the case with Ullmann who, while not abandoning his functional genetic view of the subject, with its rhetorical overtones, attempts to establish categories of change, be it in terms of the causes behind them, or of the consequences deriving from them. Years later, as a result of the appearance of the new discipline of sociolinguistics, some of Ullmann’s theoretical propositions regarding the different categories of semantic change were accommodated within a new type of classification which focuses more on the sociolinguistic dimension of meaning change (Györi, 2004). According to these categories, the three dimensions to be borne in mind for the study of semantic change are: the change in meaning a word undergoes, the lexical changes this may involve, and its adaptation to the social context (Hughes 1988). The process of change itself is generally followed by the linguistic phenomenon (the introduction or disappearance of words) which is linked to the external circumstances surrounding the speech event. The act of selecting the most suitable term in relation to register is determined by one of the social aspects of semantic change: the context of use. The in- volvement of the social group or linguistic community in a change of meaning leads us to another aspect of the social relations which form part of this linguistic process. As Lehmann (1992) points out, ‘significant linguistic changes come about under the influence of social and linguistic factors’. These factors include sociohistorical conditions of appearance, development and decline of a given word; new demands, the evolution of society, and the subsequent need for new expressions to represent a new reality, are some of these factors. Communicative needs lead to changes in meaning, and parallels may be drawn here between a constantly changing speech community and the language representing it. From a diachronic perspective, these changes do not come about immediately, but slowly, over the course of time. The process is likely to lead to a state in which a relationship of polysemy is present. The erosion of the meaning of a term and the gradual adherence of a new one, the sense of which is usually related to the first, gives rise to a period of coexistence between the two meanings. Sweetser (1991: 9) presents this idea in the following terms: ‘No historical shift of meaning can take place without an inter- vening stage of polysemy’. We may deduce from this that it is possible to include a synchronic-relational dimension within an analysis of these variations over time. This approach offers a static perspective of a dynamic phenomenon which is ultimately ab- sorbed by the internal structures of the language and the society that uses it. The change finally comes to form an inherent part of the community and its language (Lehmann 1992). Changes may relate to individual words or groups of words. In the first case, cultural or technical innovation, the use of a word in different contexts or with different purposes on the part of the speaker, probably accounts for isolated changes. If the change extends to operate over a group of related terms, we are looking at a change of the second kind. Other important factors which may also have a bearing on the creation of new meanings include the acquisition of prestige, desire for one’s language to have greater Semantic change 81 impact, and the need to fill a void left by a lexeme after it has fallen into disuse, and simple language economy35. When the material culture of a civilisation transforms its objects, concepts and referents, we find historical reasons to justify a semantic change which may or may not be connected with social causes such as register (social strata) or the inherent variability of a society transformed over time. From a sociolinguistic point of view, therefore, there are several classifications, some of which are summarised in Table 7:

Table 7. Classifications of types of semantic change from a sociolinguistic point of view WILLIAMS (1975) HUGHES (1988) BERNDT (1989) MILLWARD (1996) Reduction Distortion Substitution Generalisation Expansion Dysphemism Extension Specialisation Metaphor Emotional intensifica- Regrouping Improvement Metonymy tion Popular etymology Deterioration Shift Verbicide Semantic replacement Strengthening Synecdote Opposite shift Specialisation Weakening Weakening Popular etymology Generalisation Abstraction Euphemism Semantic replacement Figurative use of an Concretion Popular etymology Improvement existing form Connotative meaning Semantic replacement Deterioration Euphemism shift Errors Improvement Denotative meaning Deterioration shift Stylistic use of terms

ANTTILA (1989) ROOM (1991) GEERAERTS (1997) FORTSON (2003) Extension Functional transference Specialisation Metaphoric extension Restriction Restriction Generalisation Metonymic extension Pejorative evaluation Deterioration Metonymy Broadening Expansion Metaphor Narrowing Associated transference Improvement Melioration Abstraction Deterioration Pejoration Improvement Analogical changes Weakening Scientific accuracy False etymology Reinforced meaning

Williams (1975) divides the different changes according to the elements involved in the process: a) form and content, which refer to the purely linguistic perspective; b) form, content and social environment, which refer to the sociolinguistic perspective. In a) we can include reduction, expansion, metaphor, shift and other more minor phenomena such as popular etymology, semantic replacement and errors. By contrast, b), which includes the social context, covers improvement, deterioration and euphemism; here, the cognitive reaction of speakers, either individually or collectively, also plays a part.

35 Ullmann cites this as a factor in change.

82 Part III

A study of the linguistic form and meaning of a lexical unit has to consider various different aspects. The first two, reduction and expansion, are opposite trends: reduction, also known as specialisation, involves a word acquiring a more restricted meaning with respect to its original sense. The semantic spectrum of a term is reduced when its specialised meaning prevails completely over the general meaning. This happens with the OE word doer > ME deer (Berndt 1989: 83). In contrast, when the meaning of a word is extended or the word is generalised, the word absorbs new meanings or extends its primary meaning through the different connotations of the term. A word like chest, for example, is the result of the technological change undergone by the word box. The same thing happens with the terms ‘hunting’ and ‘falconry’ which have acquired a broader meaning, having gone from belonging to a specialised language to being used in everyday conversation (Ullmann 1962). Metaphorical extension operates where there is a certain similarity between two or more actions or objects, or where at least one of them has no name (Fortson, 2003; Eckardt, 2006; Nerlich, 2006; Robert, 2008). A minimum of similarity will allow the name to be transferred. There is a relationship, for example, between the abstract and real meanings of certain terms: grasp means, on the one hand, ‘to seize or grab with the hand’ and, on the other, ‘to understand’. This coincides with what Ullmann refers to in his functional genetic classification as similarity between senses. The physical image is transferred and converted into a mental concept. We construct the semantic area of language by means of metaphors, but without restricting or extending them; their function is confined to the transmission of the name. The semantic connotations mentioned earlier provide us with the key. Another type of change provides us with a new category: ‘semantic shift’. Wil- liams (1975: 185-186) describes the phenomenon as occurring when some discrete element or feature of the general meaning of a word:

1. ‘takes its name from the name of the larger structure; 2. gives its name to the larger structure; 3. shifts to or takes its name from another element within the larger structure.’ This is what occurs in the case of toilet, as we will observe in Berndt’s classification (1989), which we will look at subsequently. Lastly, Williams (1975) takes a look at some of the more marginal types of semantic change, popular etymology and semantic replacement, which had already been mentioned by Ullmann (1951) and later by Hughes (1988) and Berndt (1989). Popular etymology occurs when the speaker does not correctly understand the meaning of a term in another language and creates mistaken associations between that language and the structures of his own. What Williams describes as semantic replacement is really just a type of loan, a ‘loan-shift’. The English word preserves its own form but adopts the meaning of another word from a second language. This happens, for example, in the case of the English word synn; the word’s original meaning was ‘wound’/‘injury’ but under the influence of Latin it took on the meaning of the word peccatum. In relation to errors, the confusing of terms can lead to the existing word being ascribed a new meaning; the morphological and phonological aspects of the word may also contribute to this process. Misinterpreting the meaning of words, such as principal / prin- Semantic change 83 ciple, compare / contrast, continuous / continual, may lay the basis for a future semantic change, or indeed for any other kind of change. Williams’ concerns in relation to mistakes seem too general to include them in a separate category. Weakening as a type of semantic change means taking on the meaningful aspects of a closed area of knowledge. A word may take on the meanings or, at least, some of the characteristics of the meanings of other words from similar semantic fields. This happens in the case of mischief (contemptible behaviour > mischief) (Williams 1975: 188-189). A second group of semantic changes comprises changes which bring existing forms into contact with new nuances of meaning and the value judgements of the speaker or social environment. The positive or negative judgement of a given lexical item will give rise to either an ameliorative or a pejorative change, respectively. ‘Ame- lioration’ or ‘pejoration’ of the meaning are two of the basic changes a word may undergo when subjected to a value judgement or to an emotional load (Grygiel and Kleparski, 2007; Borkowska and Kleparski, 2007). The term knight is an example of the favourable association of a word with positive components: the term was originally linked to the word knave which lost its meaning of ‘servant’ but preserved that of ‘man of arms, nobleman’s aide’ (OED). The opposite process, involving an unfavourable relation between the evaluative components, can be observed particularly in terms which denote social status. The deprecatory implications of these terms reflect an attitude of contempt in a society towards one of its groups or members; the sentiment of the people is transmitted through the words, which in turn become terms of contempt. This is what happens in the case of the word aristocracy, which went from being a positive term to a negative one as a result of historical events and the perspective from which the aristocracy was judged by the general population (Hughes 1988). Euphemism and dysphemism are further kinds of semantic change, occurring against a distinctly social and psychological background. One of the factors triggering semantic change is engrained in the mind of the speaker, in his/her individual perception of certain areas of the social reality. When a psychological factor impedes the use of a given term from a conflictive field such as sex, religion, sickness, race, death or curses36, we are dealing with the phenomenon of taboo, in which a barrier or restriction on the use of certain words which refer explicitly to certain fields exists. The language, however, creates a mechanism of substitution to cover the necessary areas: euphemism. Both euphemism and dysphemism derive from the offensive connotations that can derive from a particular word or expression and are especially connected with a search for more appropriate alternatives (Allan, 2001). The phenomenon of euphemism deploys whatever linguistic resources necessary to cover items which, under the influence of the taboo, we would term ‘unmentionable’. Thus, in an effort to avoid the sexual connotations of the word cock, American English invented rooster as an equivalent to cockere to describe the male hen. With regard to the different possible factors implicated in the rise of a taboo, Ullmann (1962) describes three: the taboo of fear (fear of supernatural beings), the taboo of tact (to avoid naming unpleasant objects or concepts) and the taboo of social decorum or conventions (relating more to cultural

36 Every culture has its taboos. However, they seem to be most common among western cultures.

84 Part III references, especially with respect to sexual parts of the body and to oaths). This classification offers a useful framework for different kinds of euphemistic expressions. Hughes (1988) adds emotional intensity, lexical change, shift to opposite, verbicide, distortion and dysphemism to Williams’ classification. Emotional intensity is based on purely psychological circumstances. The change is conditioned by the degree of emphasis a speaker places on the pronunciation of a given linguistic sequence. The psychological circumstances rarely have any very specific meaning and may consequently become confined to the world of personal sensations. The point is that these circumstances transmit intensity and personality to any linguistic sequence. Terms such as phenomenal and categorical are included in this group. The type of change is known as lexical change: this refers to the gradual loss of meaning by a word and its consequent disappearance as a lexical unit (rædesmen). A further semantic change involves altering meaning A of a word to new meaning B, where the latter is completely distinct from the original. This is called ‘shift to opposite’ and is illustrated by the word fast which in Anglo-Saxon meant ‘fixed, firm’ and in Modern English means ‘quickly’. Verbicide (the term used by Lewis 1960), or weakening, is described as a process by which terms such as tremendous, monstrous and ghastly are applied indiscrimi- nately to trivial matters, these terms thereby losing their original adjectival force (Hughes 1988:14). Verbicide is usually the product of the linguistic behaviour adopted by speakers in the more powerful social groups. In some cases these speakers tend to exaggerate by using a word which is too forceful for a particular context, especially with terms to which value judgements may be attached, where the negative content of the term is effectively diminished. Intensifiers, for example, lose their original meaning in sequences such as awfully impressive, frightfully boring, etc.: the intensifier re- linquishes some aspects of its semantic potential to give expression to a value judgement on the part of the speaker, one which is transmitted with a certain emotional charge. Such a change, then, involves the intensity of the original term being reduced due to the influence of an emotional factor. Dysphemism produces the opposite effect to euphemism. It consciously violates the taboo, with the meaning transmitted in a discourteous, even unpleasant manner. In present-day English, the verbal phrase ‘to push up daisies’, meaning ‘to die’, is a good example of this oppositional approach to confronting taboos. Proximity and inclusion are important aspects of two types of meaning change: metonymy and synecdoche. Metonymic words are the product of combining properties and attributes, or objects and ideas. For this reason, we may use crown when we mean king because the object is intrinsically linked to the role. If we establish a relationship between the part and the whole (using hand instead of work, for example), the type of change in question in synecdoche. A type of change which involves the opposite of metaphorical extension is concretisation. Williams makes no reference to this, but Millward (1996) does, giving the example of the noun lordship illustrates the change from an abstract meaning of ‘authority, control’ to the real meaning of ‘he who has authority or exerts control’. In relation to the processes of reinforcing and weakening, Millward (1996) points out that speakers tend not to moderate their speech and neutralise its meaning, but Semantic change 85 rather to exaggerate, thereby bringing about a weakening of the semantic content of a word. To illustrate this widespread tendency, Millward cites the change undergone by the noun awe, the meaning of which changed from ‘terror, dread’ to ‘reverential fear or respect’ when it was used in relation to attitudes about God. With regard to this change, Millward (1996: 209) notes that ‘the weakened meaning suggests that fears of unworldly or future things are not as strong as immediate, worldly fears’. ‘Shift in connotation’ relates to the stylistic level of a term. As a consequence of the penetration of the English language by the vast French lexicon following the Con- quest, native words, whose corresponding French synonyms were considered more elegant and refined, were often relegated to the informal register. This is the case with Old English smierwan (smear) ‘anoint, salve, smear’ which, after the incorporation of the equivalent French anoint, acquired connotations of crudeness and low prestige. In ‘shift in denotation’ a peripheral or secondary meaning becomes the primary one. This occurred with Old English tid, originally used to refer to a ‘period of time’ but subsequently to designate the tides on account of the word’s connection with time. All these types of changes remain unchanged by the author in the third edition of A Biography of the English Language (Millward and Hayes, 2011). Geeraerts (1997: 101-102) distinguishes between onomasiological and semasiological changes. He divides the latter, those which relate to the semantic content of a term, into denotative and non-denotative changes. Denotative changes include specialisation, generalisation, metonymy and metaphor, whereas non-denotative semasiological changes include improvement and deterioration. Lastly, analogical changes appear in the group of denotative semasiological changes and are based on the associative link between the expression that is subject to the semasiological expansion and the expression that offers the model for the expansion. In attempting to explain different kinds of semantic change, we should not over- look Sturtevant’s (1961: 86) notion of change of emphasis, although he views this as a general characteristic of the phenomenon as a whole, rather than as a separate category of its own. An external change may cause variations in the principal characteristics of a lexical item and ‘the emphasis on one element of a complex idea may be so strong that the other elements are forgotten’. Obviously, the result may be positive or negative depending on the context in which the speech act occurs, and at the same time, generally speaking, it may signify an expansion or a reduction of the meaning. We should include here Ullmann’s arguments (1962: 235) regarding the existence of ‘intermediary terms’ the original neutral content of which may take on a positive or negative sense depending on the circumstances in which they are used. This happens in the cases of fortune, chance and luck. In the introduction to Dictionary of Changes in Meaning, Room (1991: 2-4) attempts to synthesise the most common semantic changes in the English language in eleven sections, while acknowledging the systems of categorisation adopted by other authors. Room’s classification contains the following categories:

1. Functional transformation of meaning: this involves a transformation of the object or idea designated by a word. Examples include bayonet, chorus and rosary. 2. Reduction

86 Part III

3. Deterioration 4. Extension 5. Associative transference of meaning: this type of change involves an association between the original meaning and the subsequent meaning. Barbecue is an example: the word originally designated a structure of sticks used for roasting mutton and went on to mean a type of meal characterised by eating meat cooked in this way. 6. Abstraction 7. Improvement of meaning 8. Weakening of meaning 9. Scientific accuracy or adjustment of meaning: in this category we find words of Greek origin used to denote scientific phenomena the referents of which have been altered as a result of advances in scientific knowledge; such is the case of the term planet, for example. 10. False etymology 11. Reinforced meaning: this refers to cases where a word with a neutral or weak sense takes on greater force, such as disgust, which went from meaning ‘not like’ to a wholly negative emotional experience. Some of the categories are already well-known and have been dealt with elsewhere by other authors, whereas some others are new proposals, such as functional transformation of meaning, associative transference of meaning, and reinforced meaning. Anttila’s (1989: 148-149) classification is simpler than earlier accounts. It is based on two axes: dimension or control, and evaluation. Two categories are proposed for each of the axes. With respect to dimension, the change may involve an expansion or a restriction; the evaluation of the change may be positive or ameliorating, or negative (pejorative). Berndt’s (1989: 80-96) functional classification ties in with those proposed by Ullmann (1951, 1957, 1962) and Stern (1931):

1. specialisation and generalisation (of meanings) 2. semantic shift37: substitution, regrouping and expansion (of the components of the semantic structure) 3. figurative use of an existing form 4. euphemistic use of lexical items: changes related to the addition or loss of valuative components (improvement or deterioration) 5. changes affecting the stylistic use of terms Berndt identifies each of the aspects capable of encouraging the appearance of semantic shift by using what he calls ‘semantic functional components’:

1. Substitution. The omission of one component and the adoption of another in the semantic structure of a word. 2. Expansion. The function of a semantic component with a view to attributing it a broader meaning.

37 Bernt (1989) uses ‘semantic shift’ or ‘shift of meaning’ to distinguish this type of change from ‘narrowing’ and ‘widening’. Semantic change 87

3. Regrouping or role change. New and old meanings are connected within a single semantic structure. Shift involves the gradual transformation of certain nuances which serve to extend the content of a term without dispensing completely with its original meaning. The new meaning, then, would appear to be the result of the convergence of primary semantic characteristics and the extralinguistic reality, and of the change deriving from it. Thus the Latin form tela ‘web/structure/framework’ is the etymological origin of the Old French teile > toile ‘a piece of cloth’ > English toilet. This is an example of semantic shift. The following componential diagram depicts the different stages of the change:

OF teile < toile [+ a piece of cloth]

[+ to wrap clothes] {specialisation}

[+ cloth] [+ to Project with a cloth] {shift} [+ combing her hair]

[+ cloth]

[+ cover the dressing table] {shift }

[+ objects on the table] { shift }

[+ furniture containing objects] { shift }

[+ room containig objects] { shift } [+ dressing room] The original meaning of ‘piece of cloth’ was specialised through reference to a specific use of the cloth. From there, a series of associations among the different features of the cloth finally led to a new meaning of ‘dressing room’. The diagram above provides us with a synthesis of the nature of the semantic change together with its causes and typological classification: the lexical units which form part of the linguistic reality are subject, not just to the influence of linguistic factors, but also to the action of other factors not related to language which may be of a social or psychological nature. Points of contact among lexical units (comprising form and content, or name and sense) give way to changes (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, popular etymology, ellipsis and compound changes) which may spread to other elements in the same semantic field. Other changes, such as reduction or expansion, weakening, shift, lexical change and concretisation, also operate among the relationships between the names and senses of terms. The joint action of social and psychological factors leads to the following types of change: improvement, deterioration, distortion, dysphemism, emotional or affective intensification, verbicide and shift to opposite. Some of the semantic changes mentioned in the previous paragraphs will be analysed in more detail in what follows, in the analysis of nouns denoting person-rank. These have been extracted from the samples in the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts

88 Part III corresponding to period 1250 to 1640. The data and methodology used in this analysis will be described in the following section.

3.3 Corpus material and methodology

The corpus for this study is drawn from the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts: Dia- chronic and Dialectal (Rissanen, M., Ihalainen, O. et al. 1991). The HC contains a diachronic section (dating from 750 to 1710) and a synchronic section dealing with dialects. I will use the first part only. In order to make my selection from among all the text catalogued in the HC, I have followed two criteria: textual typology and periodisation. Accordingly, I have taken a sample of each text type in each subperiod, observing at all times the compila- tion criteria adopted by the authors of the HC. From the HC time frame I have selected the subperiods of Middle English and most of the subperiods of Early Modern English (from 1150 to 1640). This time range encompasses the resurgence and consolidation of the vernacular and the confluence of various linguistic strata involved in the development of semantic change. The typological model contains the same number of text- types as that established previously by the compilers of the HC for this time period. The model places each term in context according to the characteristics of the text, thereby providing a structure for the semantic aspect of this study. My corpus comprises samples of 2000-2500 words from separate texts representing each of the different text-types and its corresponding subperiod. I have opted for texts selected by the original compilers with this number of words; where this has not proved possible, texts have been cut at the end of a paragraph to reflect this size. The final figures give a total of 174,818 words. The corpus contains close to 175,000 words in total. Even though nowadays linguists often work with far larger corpora, this is most common with morphological or syntactical studies involving a synchronic survey within a diachronic one, where a larger sample than the one here would perhaps be called for. However, given the nature of the present study and the large number of variables to be considered, the size of the sample seems more than sufficient to obtain a reliable picture of the direction followed by semantic change over the course of the history of the English language. From all the terms contained in the corpus, I have ignored grammatical content words in favour of categories or classes of lexical content words, and from these I have discarded adjectives, verbs and adverbs. This leaves only nouns, the part of the sentence where semantic change is best observed (Room 1991). In his doctoral thesis on the diachronic, semantic classification of religious vocabulary in the English language, Chase (1988) states that, for religious vocabulary at least, semantic primacy within the sentence belongs to the noun. Working under the hypothesis that language conceptualises reality in terms of states and events, which are represented by verbs, and things, which are represented by nouns, we must bear in mind that the majority of vocabulary items are used to designate things. The most important lexical category is therefore the noun, and I concur with Room and Chase in the belief that the noun predominates over the other categories and is, consequently, better suited to any kind of semantic study. Semantic change 89

Early grammar, operating more on philosophical than linguistic precepts, subdivided the name category into noun name and adjective name. Where a conflict arises between a morphological or syntactic classification, syntax will almost always prevail (Robin 1971: 233); I have done the same in ascribing the lexical elements of the corpus to one category or another. The subtotal of nouns in ME is 17, 945 while the subtotal for eModE is 13,401. The whole corpus contains 31,346 nouns. The criteria I have applied in selecting the forms for this lexical category are the following:

1) Forms ending in -ing functioning as nouns (endunge, biginnunge, tacunge, duel- ling, blessing) have been included. 2) Nominalisations of other categories, such as adjectives, have not been considered: pe ryche, pe pore... 3) Nationalities, proper names and place names have been excluded because it is very difficult to observe semantic change in such cases: ‘anie englishe shippes’, ‘all englishe mens gooes’, ‘Caius, the French Doctor’, John More, Richard Norbury, William Essez, Englond, Caleis, London, Caunturbury, York... After collecting all the nouns to be analysed according to these guidelines, I created the database, which will now be described. Created using Microsoft Access 97, the database contains 22 fields, organised as follows: Item, Period, Semantic Field, Origin 1, Origin 2, Origin 3, Final Origin, Use in Context, New Field, Frequency, Reference, Dialect, Verse or Prose, Type of Text, Prototype Textual Category, Translation, Oral or Written, Sex, Age, Social Rank, and Audience. I will now describe these 22 different fields in more detail. The majority are text-based fields; those of period, frequency and age are numerical; use in context is a binary (YES/NO) variable. Item. The lexical units, in this case nouns. Period. The time division from the HC. Our own sample therefore covers two large periods, in turn divided into six sub-periods:

MIDDLE ENGLISH (1150 – 1500) 1150 – 1250 1250 – 1350 1350 – 1420 1420 – 1500 EARLY MODERN ENGLISH (1500 – 1710) 1500 – 1570 1570 – 1640 Semantic field. I now list and describe in greater detail the 29 fields that have been used to classify the nouns in the corpus: Abstractions, Physical activity, Mental activity, Agri- culture and vegetation, Farm duties, Physical appearance, Hunting (fishing, falconry and other sports and games), Climate and atmospheric weather, Food, drink and culinary arts, Construction (buildings, decoration and architecture), Artistic activities, Finance and commerce, War and military matters, Laws, Medicine, Anatomy / human body, Household items and other objects, Miscellaneous, Physical world, Navigation / Sailing

90 Part III and the sea, Trades, Weights and measures, Reference to assemblies or groups, Refer- ences to person or rank, Family and social relations, Religion, beliefs and rites, Clothing and textiles, Animal life, Technology and science, Technology and administration. ‘Abstractions’ includes qualities, ideas and the substance of things, as opposed to the extant item itself, individualised and defined as a member of the particular sort of thing to which the idea refers: hardnes, elaboration, pitie, annoyance, pleasure, diffi- cultie, shame, wickednes, pride, harm. Qualities, sensations, feelings, states and behav- iours all belong to this field. ‘Physical activity’ includes nouns which refer to any kind of movement or effort of the human body, both in a general and a specific sense. Examples include nouns such as weork, working, exercise, laboure, trauailles. ‘Mental activity’ encompasses nouns which relate to the processes of the mind, such as thoughts, purpose, oppinion, wyl, raunsom, desires. ‘Agriculture and farm duties’ naturally covers nouns referring to field work and other activities taking place on the farm, as well as the names of the crops: corn, frute, herueste, stubble. ‘Physical appearance’ includes nouns relating to the external appearance or features of human beings: complexion, countenance, gesture, looking, appearance, semblant, chere. ‘Hunting, fishing, falconry and other sports and games’ includes nouns related with these activities, such as baiting, sport. ‘Climate and atmospheric weather’ contains nouns relating to different climatic conditions and atmospheric or meteorological phenomena. Examples of nouns of this type include coole, storme, wether, tempeste, froste. ‘Food, drink and culinary arts’ includes all the food products and nouns which denominate the different meals of the day: apple, egges, mete, grapys, wyne, bread, cheese, ale, eced, buteran, companage, brekefaste, dyner. ‘Construction: buildings, decoration and architecture’ contains terms relating to buildings of any kind (chambre, towers, walles, hus, cirice, cathedrall) as well as aspects of ornamentation and architecture, and also construction materials: ornament, tile, dore, bricke, bedde. ‘Artistic activites’ includes terms which describe the intellectual activities and development of the individual, together with nouns used to name intellectual products for artistic purposes (song, story). ‘Finances and commerce’ includes nouns of an economic nature relating to mone- tary affairs, commercial transactions and trade, along with other terms which, though bordering on the abstract, are essentially economic in nature. Examples include boott, mony, treature, pryse, marchandis, pension, wages, toll, dette, mynte, bysyness, mar- ket, buyinge, trade. ‘War and military matters’ is for nouns of a military nature, such as war and conflict, as well as those relating to weapons/armed forces or groups of people intended for some kind of military activity: batayll, armye, insurrection, warre, weapon, sheath, bullets, helmet. ‘Laws’ is a very extensive field, and covers any type of legal issue or process, normative or law, and the infringement thereof: artycles, actes, byll, proclamacyon, murder, offencys, justice, plee, court, benche, iudgment, trial, statute. Semantic change 91

‘Medicine’ contains the names of illnesses, therapies, medicines and other curative processes: wound, sekenes, incision, health, disease, headache, cure, decoction, chi- rurgery, plaister, swelling, healsgund, læcecræft, flebotomye. ‘Anatomy, human body’ is closely related to ‘Medicine’ and includes nouns which designate parts or organs of the body, as well as the actions or functions of certain organs (vision, smell): bone, skul, hart, body, hande, blode, flesh, guts, humours, lyms. ‘Household items and other objects’ is for household utensils and objects associated with the home, and also those instruments, tools and objects in general which cannot be classified in any of the other fields: cup, cloke, hammer, box, panne, bor- stax, knif. ‘Physical world’ contains nouns relating to life and death, nature in general, geographical features, plants and metals: moone, lyfe, deth, golde, ground, tree, hill, watir, braunches, claye, stone, onyx, montayne, rokes, ryver, fyre. ‘Miscellaneous’, as the name suggests, is intended for nouns of various different types which it was not possible to include in any of the other field, or which classification would greatly increase the number of fields needed: thing, matter, place, issures, name, maner, end, schift. ‘Navigation / Sailing and the sea’ includes all the nouns relating to nautical activities, such as names of ships and living beings found at sea: fysshe, shippe, fleet, sea, boat, pympernoll, carakys. ‘Trades’ comprises the different social functions performed by individuals within the community: goldsmyth, mariner, parter, fynour, grocer, butcher, cooke. ‘Weights and measures’ features terms used to describe quantities and measures. Here we have also included nouns used to designate parts of the day, month, etc., since these are measurements of time: mydde, parte, porcion, yere, day, night, mossell, ster- lyng, yard, moneth, minute, halfe, brace, mylls, handfuls. ‘References to assemblies or groups’ contains collective nouns which may refer to associations, meetings, celebrations or simply groups of people: company, band, peple, audiens, corporat, throng, meeting, hird, faire. ‘References to person or rank’ includes the different nouns used to denominate person types on the basis of a particular feature of their personality, behaviour, etc. We also find nouns which indicate institutional or administrative posts, status, hierarchy and social position: gouernour, marshall, chaunceler, walkers, scholler, baron, knyght, erle, lorde, duke, tenaunt, mair, lady, sir, writer, geometricians, voucher, wager. ‘Family and social relations’ encompasses all the terminology relating to kinship and other relationships as well as nouns of a general nature which suggest a relationship between two or more people: marriage, mother, childe, enemye, progenytour, wyf, neybours, husbondy, amysse, kinde, generations. ‘Religion, beliefs and other rites’ comprises abstract nouns such as faith and grace, nouns of rank such as arcebissop, and nouns from the field of construction such as churche. Religious symbols such as rode tre are also included here: rode, spirites, iuell, masse, holyenesse, resurrection, hevyn, aungell, sepulcre, sowle, curat, vycare, saint. ‘Clothing and textiles’ includes nouns used to designate fabrics, material for cloth, textile ornaments and items of clothing, including footwear: hoode, furre, bonet, gyrdyll, sylke, shooes, cloth, coates, typet, breche.

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‘Animal life’ is for nouns for animals and parts of their bodies: turke, coke, bullis, birdys, hors, tayle, shepe, flye, feasonts, foul, egle, dove, horne. ‘Technology and science’ includes specific terms for processes or tools which may be separated into sub-fields for astronomy or astrology, and geometry: phisicke, figures, semidiameter, secant, arise, chord, computation, compasse, amgle, degre, riet, lyne, nader, zodiak, succident, astrelabie, equinoxial, triangle, syscangle, cercle, centre. ‘Technology and administration’ encompasses nouns relating to the administrative organisation, politics and government of the country: realme, chauncerye, countray, citie, office, towne, shier, rolles, estate, guildhall, manor. This is the semantic classification I propose to employ for this study. Origin 1, Origin 2, Origin 3 and Final Origin. These four Origin fields refer jointly to the etymological origin of the noun under analysis. Three Origin fields and a Final Origin are used because in both of the dictionaries used to determine the root of the noun (MED, OED), a great variety of references are offered, only some of which indicate the ultimate origin of the term. I have endeavoured to respect and preserve the information contained in the MED and the OED, and to that end I have created these four fields to convey the etymological information as catalogued therein. Semantic change. From among all the semantic fields established by the classification, I will select the field that contains most tokens, and from this determine the types of change present in accordance with the parameters laid down in Section 3.3.3. Use in context. This field, unlike the previous two, does not relate to numbers or text, but to a binary (YES/NO) variable. Nouns may be classified on the basis of their original or primary meaning but an alternative sense may arise if the noun is used in certain contexts. This new sense may cause the noun to be transferred to a different field. New field. This refers to the ‘new semantic field’ to which a noun belongs, based on its use in context. Here I have followed the same semantic classification as that employed in the Semantic field category described above. Frequency. This indicates the number of times a noun is repeated in a single text with the same meaning and, therefore, within the same semantic field. One should note that all occurrences of the noun, in other words, all its uses, are analysed together: this is because I believe that it is precisely those uses (the influence of socio-external factors) which contribute to change. Another group of fields in the database, text and its references, contains the following fields: Reference, Dialect, Verse or prose, Type of text, Prototype textual category, Translation and Oral or written. The values pertaining to each of these fields are taken from COCOA headers used to classify each of the samples in the HC. In the Reference field I have reproduced the title exactly as it appears in the COCOA, followed by the sample which I have selected for the corpus here. The values adopted for the other fields (Dialect, Verse or prose, Text type, Prototype textual category, Transla- tion and Oral or written) correspond to the qualifying parameters used in the HC. In the third section, dealing with author and audience (Sex of Author, Age, Social Rank and Audience), the values have also been taken from the COCOA headers from the HC. Each noun is ascribed to a particular semantic field (see Section 3.2.1) taking into account, first, its original meaning, and secondly, its meaning in context, ie. the possi- Semantic change 93 bility that the context of use may have altered its original meaning, generating a new sense of the word; the Use in context variable is only applied when this is the case. In the New field category we enter the name of the semantic field to which the noun in that particular context belongs. Each entry therefore refers to a specific meaning of a noun in the text it is taken from, with the possibility that this meaning may be altered by the context, in which case the noun moves into a new field. If the same noun appears in a single text but with different meanings, there will be as many entries as semantic fields to which the noun belongs. In each case, we will take note of the frequency with which the noun appears in relation to a particular semantic field. This will allow us to classify the noun semantically with reference to its original meaning and its use in context. Then, using the MED for the Middle English period and the OED for the two sub-periods of Early Modern English, we will introduce the etymological origin of the noun. The method adopted here comprises three stages: use of componential analysis, consultation with dictionaries, and, finally, classification of semantic changes. In the remainder of this section each of these stages will be examined.

1. Componential analysis (CA): This method consists of a technical description applied to the study of the vocabulary of a language. It is useful as a means of breaking down meaning into its different semantic levels, allowing nuances of meaning to be discerned, which in turn will help to classify the type of change that characterised a noun38, as I illustrate in Section 3.3. Carter (1998: 17) has described these benefits of CA, and identifies two fundamental aspects of the method: the procedure followed, that is, the analysis of the basic features or components; and the aim of CA, the description of the semantic relations, to which he ascribes the utmost importance. He also highlights the universal nature of the semantic features of a word from the perspective of the cognitive process. Mean- ings are, he argues, decompositional, built up from an infinite set of primitives combined through several principles. The internal structure of a word has a somewhat al- gebraic composition which allows for several combinations generating different meanings (Jackendoff, 2010). However, one of the main objections to the CA method is the broad range of characteristics which may be used to categorise or sub-categorise lexical units, as illustrated by the following example: seal +Animal Human seal Feather Hair +Amphibious +Mammal (Carter 1998: 18) Kleparski (1990: 30) sees this as arbitrariness, explaining that it is: ...due to the existence of rival but equally suitable dimensions and parameters among which the analyst of semantic structure must often choose arbitrarily and even when the choice is made a number of alternative solutions remain.

38 CA became more influential in the sixties with the semantic theories of Weinreich (1972) and Katz and Fodor (1963) (this theory was subsequently altered in Katz and Postal 1964).

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More interesting for the purpose of the present study, however, is that Kleparski (1990: 30-31) expands the componential method to include diachronic semantics: I believe that to define componentially the meaning of a lexical item, say man, is to propose an analytically justified definition which is not a goal in itself, but which serves for the purpose of distinction both in the synchronic and in the diachronic study of meaning. The basic function of CA is therefore to demarcate the different stages in the evolution of a change. This is the purpose for which I intend to employ the componential method in my work.

2. Use of dictionaries: In order to explore the meaning of each noun, three dictionaries have been used as reference resources: the OED (Oxford English Dictionary), the MED (Middle English Dictionary) and The Barnhart Dictionary of English Etymology. The first two allow us to determine the semasiological value of a term as defined by Van Hoecke and Goyen (1990) and Geraaerts (1997), the OED from a diachronic perspective; they also include a wide range of nuances, which facilitates the task of classifying semantic changes. The MED, by contrast with the OED, is presented from a synchronic point of view, looking at the meanings of words over a specific period: Middle English. We should remember that all the dictionaries have been used as sources previously in this study, in determining the etymological origin of the nouns under analysis.

3. Semantic classification: As for the ascription of nouns to a particular type of semantic change, I have decided to follow the classifications of Williams (1975), Hughes (1989) and Millward (1996) because they take a two-sided view of change: as a purely linguistic phenomenon, and as a sociolinguistic one incorporating form, content and social environment. My classification combines the proposals of all three authors with a view to creating the most appropriate method of classifying semantic changes within the historical sociolinguistics framework. The classification is laid out in Table 8. The precise definition of each parameter has been explained earlier in this section.

Table 8. Types of semantic change

SEMANTIC CHANGES Form+Content Form+Content+Social context Reduction Improvement Expansion Deterioration Metaphor-metaphorical extension Euphemism Metonymy Distortion Type Shift Dysphemism Synechdote Emotional intensification Weakening Verbicide Lexical change Concretion

Semantic change 95

All the different types which have been presented from a theoretical perspective in the preceding discussion have been subsumed here under ten classes, in some instances this being the consequence of combining two types, as we will see below.

3.4 Semantic changes in person-rank nouns

In the ‘Reference to person or rank’ semantic field I have found eleven types of change. These, according to the terminology of Williams, Millward and Hughes (see Section 3.2), are: deterioration, lexical change, extension, concretion, specialisation / deterioration, metaphorical extension, metaphorical extension / specialisation, metaphorical extension / deterioration, shift, shift / deterioration. Within the semantic field of concern to us here I have found both nouns which undergo changes and nouns which meaning remains unchanged. Those not undergoing changes amount to 1207, or 29.06% of the total 4153 tokens recorded. I have created a sub-classification in order to explain their apparent semantic immutability: nouns con- serving their historical sense and used in historical contexts: bailif, cauleiro, ralles, etc.; and nouns of a general nature whose semantic range does not alter over time: beginner, straunger, executor, hearer, helper, accusator, adeursairs, commers, enemy, reader, promotour, etc. Finally, I have also detected nouns that start to experience change in the 16th century, which is the case of curat, such changes falling outside the scope of this study. +tralles in text (1) provides an example of a noun belonging to the ‘absence of semantic change’ group, since the term retains its original semantic content over time and its use, from a more recent chronological perspective, does not transform that content:

(1) ah me were leuere wi+t lawe leose my lyf +ten so to fote hem falle. shal y to fote falle for mi fo? +ge, monie byswyke+t heo swo. of +tralles y am +ter +trat, +tat sitte+t swart and for-swat; +ter y mot hente me en hat er ich hom go. Satire on the Consistory Courts (1250-1350) The OED defines þrall as ‘one who is in bondage to a lord or master; a villein, serf, bondman; slave’. As a result of social changes, this type of peasant or slave ceased to exist, but the term survived, allowing the speaker to refer to the past without having to explain or paraphrase the extralinguistic reality represented by the term. Nouns such as beginner in (2) ‘he who begins’, accusator ‘he who accuses’ in (3), and helper ‘he who helps’ in (4), illustrate why it is difficult for the phenomenon of change to operate on nouns used to convey a broad external referent:

(2) My lord Somerset taken into the counsel. Guidotti, the beginner of the talk for peax, recompensed with knightdom, a thousand crounes reward, a crounes pension, and his son with crounes pencion. The Diary of Edward VI (1500- 1570) (3) Accusator Herke sere pharysew and sere scrybe A ryght good sporte I kan +gow telle I vndyr- take +tat ryght a good brybe We all xul haue to kepe councell A fayre +gonge

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qwene here-by doth dwelle both ffresch and gay upon to loke And a tall man with here doth melle the wey in to hyre chawmere ryght evyn he toke. Ludus Coventriae or the Plaie called Corpus Christi (1420-1500) (4) And the Lorde God sayd: it is not good that man shulde be alone, I will make hym an helper to beare him company: And after yt the Lorde God had make of the erth all maner beastes of the felde, and all maner foules of the ayre, he brought them vnto Adam to see what he wold call them. The Old Testament In each of these cases the general nature of the noun can be specialised, as demonstrated by the OED in detailing all the possible variations in meaning. However, context shows that the general meaning always prevails and the term is not, therefore, considered to have undergone any change. Another group of nouns manifest changes in meaning in periods after that covered by this study. For example, in (5) curat maintains its original meaning of spiritual pas- tor (Room 1991), but from the 16th century it acquires the sense of ‘assistant to the parish priest’.

(5) And because his wyfe and other pabbceyuyd him very syk and lyke to dye they exortyd hym to be confessyd and broughtye curate vnto him whych when they had causyd hym to sey Benediciteye curat bad hym cry god mercy and shew his syn- nys. A Hundred Mery Talys , (1500-1570) The remaining 70.94% of nouns in the analysis are forms where meaning change does occur. Of the different types of change observed, the most notable is specialisation with 1238 forms, followed by expansion and shift. I have not used all the change types proposed by the authors discussed earlier, since I have not found examples which correspond to all of these. I have, though, observed instances of two or more changes operating on the same noun. Table 9 below presents the total number and percentage of forms corresponding to each of the types of change indicated.

Table 9. Types of change

SEMANTIC CHANGE Number of forms % 1. Deterioration 20 0.7 2. Lexical change 53 1.8 3. Expansion 911 30.9 4. Concretion 66 2.2 5. Specialisation 1243 42.2 6. Specialisation / deterioration 16 0.5 7. Metaphorical extension 44 1.5 8. Metaphorical extension / specialisation 3 0.1 9. Metaphorical extension / deterioration 2 0.1 10. Shift 586 19.9 11. Shift / deterioration 2 0.1 TOTAL 2946 100.0

Semantic change 97

Specialisation includes nouns relating to titles of nobility indicating status and position within the social scale (queen, erle, duke, baron, marquis, knight, prince, nobles, souverain), names of adminstrative and institutional posts (aldermen, chancellor, chamberlaine, gouernour, officer, schereffe, secretary, steward), religious positions (abbot, bishop, cardinal, dækenn), and the professions (attorney, auctor, counsellores, doctoure, marchant, notaryes, philosophers, scribe, scholmaster, tresorer, usshers, warden, wryter, phisitians, poet); nouns which indicate the position and function of a person while at the same time serving as forms of address (capitaine, dame, lieftenent, lordinges, madame, master, mistres); and others (berer, burgessys, grom, host, kepar, mayden, prisoners). We will begin our analysis of the titles of nobility using the noun erle from The Life of Saint Edmund in (6):

(6) Seint edmund +to at canterburi spousede to vr kinge +Te erles do+gter of prouence elianore to wiue Tuelf hundred as in +ger of grace and +tretti and fiue Sir henri of alimaine +te erles sone of cornwaile +Tulke +ger ibore was al so wi+toute faile. The Life of Saint Edmund (1250-1350) The first meaning provided by the OED with respect to erle is ‘a man of noble rank, as distinguished from ceorl, CHURL, or ordinary freeman’. This original meaning did not endure past the period of Old English because the social transformations which came about subsequently altered the content of the term. However, in the Old English period itself we observe the poetic use or metaphorical extension of the word, con- sisting of the addition of an element relating to brave conduct on the battlefield. To- wards the end of the period, under the Danish monarchy, a man of noble birth or eorl had come to mean the rank immediately below the King and consequently a governor of one of the seven kingdoms of the heptarchy. What we are witnessing is the beginning of a process of specialisation that culminates in the post-Norman period, as we can see from the componential outline presented below:

1. [+ male] [+ noble]

2. [+ male] [+ noble] [+ immediately inferior to the king] What appears to be happening, therefore, is an attempt to define the position of the title of eorl within the social pyramid. After the Norman Conquest, the conceptual distance between eorl and count (

1. [+ male] [+ noble]

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2. [+ male] [+ noble] [+immediately inferior to the king]

3. [+ male] [+ noble] [+ inferior to the king] [+ governor of a county] In text (7) we find duke, another noun used to designate high-ranking status:

(7) to knowe whether he wolde kepe trewes taken bitwix vs and hym or no, and the same poursuaunt is comen ayein, and hath fully enfourmed vs the sayd duke casteth hym to yeue vs the bataill, and so we holde hym our ful enemy, and he is now at Parys. The New Chronicles of England and France. (1500-1570) The first denotative meaning of duke (derived from Latin) is ‘leader, commander, general’. The process of specialisation which it underwent consisted of the ‘leader, chief or governor’ becoming, in various European languages, ‘leader of a small state or duchy’, and in post-Conquest England the title was used to indicate ealdorman or eorl.

1. [+ male] [+ leader]

2. [+ male] [+ leader] [+ leader of a territory] As in example (6), here too the general meaning of leader, chief or governor was specialised through a process of defining what the object of government or leadership was: a duchy. Hughes (2000: 113-114), reaffirming the sociolinguistic perspective of the evolution of the English language in his analysis, considers the division of titles of nobility in post-Conquest England to be one of the semantic correlations of the coming of the Normans. The Normans adopted a number of Anglo-Saxon titles (king, queen, lord and lady, among others) and supplemented the existing titles with further appellatives taken from the Norman hierarchy. The resulting hierarchy of titles in the period can be summarised as shown in Table 10. This structure was not always observed to the letter, with Anglo-Saxon and Nor- man titles kept separate. Hughes himself points out that baron was used to refer to nobles of different ranks within the Anglo-Saxon hierarchy and in the case of eorl, countess and duke the titles’ referents remained unclear for some time. The configuration of the noble stratum in Norman England constitutes a clash of cultures expressed linguistically. Changes to the intrasystemic structures of a language occur not only as a result of direct contact between languages, but as the reflection of a different way of thinking. Thus argues Wurm (1987), while also asserting the existence of a stage in language which acts as an intermediary for intercultural communication and gives rise to pidgin and creole languages. This claim could serve to lend validity to the open de- Semantic change 99 bate regarding the relevance or not of pidginising and creolising phenomena in Middle English, mentioned in Section 2.3.2 above.

Table 10. Hierarchy of titles Anglo-Saxon Norman King Queen Prince Duke Marquess Earl Countess Lord Lady Viscount Baron Knight Squire Franklin Sheriff Bailiff Reeve Sergeant Yeoman Page Groom Churl Villein Serf

In text (8) below we find another example of a noun of rank the meaning of which changed at the same time as the corresponding social reality:

(8) Certen prisoners for light maters dismissed. Agreed for delivery of French prisoners taken in the warris. Petre Van sent embassadour to Venice. Lettres directed to certein Irish nobles to take a blind legat coming from the pope, calling himself bishop of Arcman. Commissions for the delivery of Boulein, Lodres, and Dunglas. The Diary of Edward VI (1500-1570) Nobles refers to a preeminent social group within a community. The term’s core meaning was affected by peripheral nuances which served to transmit the weight of social values to the linguistic form. Magnificence, superiority and splendour, prestigious social position and power are just some of the characteristics the absence or presence of which may lead to a change in meaning. A similar change takes place in nouns such as gouernour in text (9): this example relates to an institutional or administrative position which, as in the case of nobles, finds its original meaning changing at the same time as the social reality. A governor in the 14th-17th century was traditionally someone who governed or exercised authority and control over his inferiors, but this power was exercised over different, separate administrative or political units: provinces, cities and colonies, for example. The governor’s exercise of authority, and hence his social func-

100 Part III tion, adjusted itself to the institutional changes then taking place, with the result that the content of the term itself changed.

(9) Huanne +tou him clepest uader +tou beknaust +tet he is lhord of house. +tet is of heuene and of er+te: and heaued and ginnynge and welle huerof alle ssep+tes and alle guod come+t. and +tus +te beknaust his mi+gte. Efter- ward ze+t+te +tet he ys uader he is di+gtere and gouernour and porueyour to his mayne`. an nameliche of his children +tet is of man +tet him-zelf he+t y- mad and yssape to his anliknesse. Ayenbite of Inwyt (1250-1350) A further example of a noun indicating an administrative or institutional position is chauncellor:

(10) My lord Chauncellor therwith sodenly went right to the justises bothen, and called to hym Nicholas Ayssheton at that tyme beynge there, and leide theire iiij. heddis negh to gedder.... Shillingford (letters) (1420-1500) In this instance the outline for the semantic evolution of the term would read as follows:

1. [+officer of a court] [+official secretary]

2. [+official secretary to a nobleman] [+official secretary to the king]

3. [+first judicial functionary of the throne] + [+member of the royal cabinet] In the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, the word ‘Chancellor’ was recorded in 1137 (Hughes, 2000) as an official secretary. From the specialisation of meaning in 3 above, we get the usages found in expressions such as Chancellor of England, Lord Chancellor, Lord High Chancellor and King’s Chancellor (OED). In texts (11) and (12) below, we find two examples of specialisation in nouns used to indicate religious posts. These specialisations occurred before the nouns were incorporated into the English language, indicating the importance of the words in their languages of origin (Greek and Latin, respectively). In the original speech communities, religious subjects and their representatives constituted what Sperber (1930) in his psychoanalytical approach to semantic change calls ‘centres of expansion’ and ‘centres of attraction’ (see section 3.1 above); these centres tend to develop particularly as a result of the speaker’s emotional state:

(11) Also we do yow to witte +tat we haue granted vnto oure welbeloued clerc Wil- liam Toly +te pension of +te abbot of Bataille. wher vpon we wol +tat oure said clerc haue suche lettres vnder oure grete (seel) Henry V. Letters, London. (1350-1420) (12) But for all his conferens with him, he sawe nothing of such force as coulde in- duce him to chaunge his opinion therein: which notwithstandinge, the Bishoppe shewed himself in his reporte of him to the kings highnes so good and favorable Semantic change 101

that he said he found him in his graces cause very towarde,... The Lyfe of Sir Thomas Moore (1500-1570) In the case of abbot, specialisation occurred prior to the noun’s introduction into Eng- lish. Its original meaning of ‘monk’ was restricted, and in the end would refer only to the highest-ranking person in a monastery; this was the meaning that would enter English. In example (12) the original sense of bishoppe (which derives from Latin, but comes ultimately from Greek) is ‘overlooker, overseer, watcher’. It was used in Greek and Latin with this general meaning, and also as an official civil title. In Christian vocabulary the term was ascribed the specific sense of ‘religious officer’ within the Church. As the word developed, it then underwent further specialisation. Meanwhile the Church began to organise its hierarchical structure. The semantic profile for bishop, therefore, permits the following definition: ‘A clergyman consecrated for the spiritual government and direction of a "diocese", ranking beneath an archbishop (where these exist) and above the priests or presbyters, and deacons’ (OED). It was with this denotative semantic content that the term was adopted into the English language. The two examples above help to illustrate that the phenomenon of linguistic change, and semantic change in particular, is universal and develops in a sociocultural ambit which is partly determined by the importance that the community attaches to an aspect, issue or subject affecting it. As Kastovsky (2006: 201) has put it: ‘If the vocabulary of a language reflects the perception of the world by a speech community, it will have to be adapted to its changing needs’. Example (13) contains nouns used to designate professions:

(13) Alas and in Engelond what hurte doon the aduocates men of lawe and attor- neyes of court to the comyn peple of the royame... The Prologues and Epilogues of William Caxton (1420-1500) Originally, attorney refers to someone who acts in the place of another. If we follow the progress of the meaning of the term, we see how this general meaning was specified to a situation in which one person represents another: in business, legal matters, etc. Work as a legal representative became a professional occupation, the term attorney finally came to mean a legal specialist. In text (14) the noun wryters is another instance of semantic change in the professions.

(14) Grete thankynges lawde & honoure we merytoryouslyben bounde to yelde and offre vnto wryters of hystoryes /whiche gretely haue prouffyted oure mortallyf / that shewe vnto the reders and herers by the ensamples of thynges passyd / what thynge is to be desyred / The Prologues and Epilogues of William Caxton (1420- 1500) As we can see from the context in which wryter appears in text (14), the meaning of the word is not just ‘a person who writes’; the content must be described more exactly together with the manner in which the work is written, the work’s purpose, etc. In this case, the writer’s work is of a literary nature, so the meaning of the noun is specialised, in this context at least. We should bear in mind, as Waldron (1979) and Cook (2011) note, that the meaning of any word is subject to its use in a given context.

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(15) And Captain Skevington was the fyrst that sowght to bring anye quarel to the ripping up, so that dyvers of our saylers were much offended and sayd, set a begger on horsbacke and he wyl ryde unreasonablye. An Elizabethan in 1582: the Diary of Richard Madox (1570-1640) Captaine in text (15) indicates social position and function and the term can also be used as a form of address. The following componential outline illustrates the semantic progression of the term:

1. [+ authority, + leadership] > [+ authority, + military leadership]

2. [+ military officer, + high rank] > [+ high-ranking military officer] The meaning of the Latin capitaine-us, ‘chief, visible head, leader’, was specialised within the military field to mean ‘person who leads or exercises authority over persons’, thereby indicating the individual’s very position on the military ladder. The significant element responsible for expanding the semantic content of the word is [+ military] which, in turn, derives from the concept of authority or leadership when applied to a hierarchy. Another example of a noun used to indicate rank and featuring specialisation as a form of semantic change is host:

(16) Mi. Page. So will I: if hee come vnder my hatches, Ile neuer to Sea againe: Let's bee reueng'd on him: let's appoint him a meeting: giue him a show of com- fort in his Suit, and lead him on with a fine baited delay, till hee hath pawn'd his horses to mine Host of the Garter. The Merry Wives of Windsor (1570-1640) As the OED explains, the meaning of the term evolved along the following lines:

1. ‘A man who lodges and entertains another in his house.’ 2. ‘A man who lodges and entertains for payment.’ The semantic element [+ economic remuneration] may be taken to determine the specialisation. Once again, the componential method has helped me to identify the differ- entiating element in the evolution of the meaning of a word, thereby revealing the existence of a change or alteration in its content. The word is in turn subject to the economic contingencies of a society moving towards specialisation in the realm of labour; the social and economic situation, then, provides a backdrop for the addition or definition of meanings involved in specialisation. The second type of change (in order of importance) is expansion or generalisation. Harlot in (17) and (18) is an example of expansion:

(17) of rybaud+g y ryme ant rede o mi rolle, of gedelynges, gromes, of colyn and of Colle, harlotes, hors-knaues, bi pate and bi polle to deuel ich hem to-lyure ant take to tolle! Satire on the Retinues of The Great. (1250-1350) (18) Stow +tat harlot sum erthely wyght that in advowtrye here is ffownde. Juuenis +giff Any man stow me +tis nyth I xal +geve a dedly wownde. If Any man my wey doth stoppe or we departe ded xal I be I xal +tis daggare putt in his croppe Semantic change 103

I xal hym kylle or he xal me. Ludus Coventriae or the Plaie called Corpus Christi (1420-1500) The progression of the term exposes the expansion of its meaning:

[+ male] 13th c. [+ low social status]

[+ jester / clown / servant] 14th c. [+ female] 15th c. [+ low social status]

[+ immoral] [+ disrespect / insult] The texts in my corpus verify this evolution. Male sex and low social position (example 18) combine to create a sense denoting immorality, indecency, lewdness: a jester or servant employed to entertain his masters and make them laugh would not hesitate to recur to all manner of themes of a scatological or sexual nature. By maintaining this function as a characteristic of the word harlot and applying it to the female sex, we expand its terms of reference and create the sense of harlot as a prostitute, as it appears in (17). The case of harlot illustrates how language can reflect the emotional interests of the society it represents (Kastovsly, 2006). In this instance the componential method also includes the chronology of the changes, indicating that the change took place over the course of approximately three centuries: the 13th, 14th and 15th. De la Cruz (2001) repeats the examples cited by Millward (1996) of the most common semantic changes in Early Modern English, describing harlot as an example of specialisation. This leads me to think that there are different perspectives from which semantic change might be interpreted, which would explain the arbitrariness of the semantic structure proposed by Kleparski (1990). It also suggests that it is necessary to bear in mind the chronology of changes in order to determine the type of change to which a noun may have been subjected. This, in turn, would explain why Millward and De la Cruz class harlot as an example of specialisation. The difference lies in the fact that I have endeavoured to analyse the change from the point when the term was introduced by the Normans in the 13th century to the 16th century (Heller et al. 1984: 83), giving priority to the fact that its use extended to both sexes: ...from the 13th to the 15th century, harlots were ‘young male rogues of slovenly habits’. By the end of the 14th century, however, harlotry came to be applied to the slovenly behavior of both sexes, hordome and harlotry being a common boxed set of vices said to have been practiced by ‘vagabond’ women of the day. During the 16th century the sense of harlot as ‘a slovenly, obscene woman’ was well on its way toward displacing the original meaning, although men could still be harlots for another hundred years. In fact, Heller et al. posit the existence of another possible change which may have worked on the term in the 16th century: ‘folk etymology’, in this case the assocation with Arlette, mother of William the Conqueror, bearing in mind that William was known as ‘the Bastard’ before he ascended the throne.

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A further example of expansion is found in (19):

(19) Vbi est qui natus est rex iudeorum. We redeth i +to holi godespelle of te dai ase ure louerd godalmichti ibore was of ure lauedi seinte Marie i +te cite of beth- leem. Kentish Sermons (1250-1350) The content of lady underwent the following progression:

[+ lady of a fief] [+ wife] [+ title indicating social position] [+ female referent of high social position] The rank of lady within the Medieval hierarchical order was consolidated by the acquisition of noble status (title) and was used by extension to designate any woman holding a certain power in society. According to Bammesberger (1984: 98) the noun lady is a clear example of the combination of linguistic and social change. Hughes (1988) states that the most prevalent semantic change in the history of the English language as a heterogeneous whole accommodating social, political and tech- nocratic transformations is the phenomenon known as generalisation or expansion. His definition is in keeping with the sociohistorical theory of the 19th century French historian Tocqueville, which Hughes uses as the basis of his own proposals. Tocqueville had defined himself as a democratic historian founding his arguments on ‘a broad evo- lutionary social dynamic of liberation’ (Hughes 1988: 34). For my part, I agree with the use of a historical perspective which focuses on dy- namism, evolution and social expansion, but I think the case for a hypothesis of specialisation makes more sense, considering that specialisation was characteristic of the period of transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and is a symptom of the evolution of languages in general. In this respect, the words of Williams (1976: 177) sound more convincing: It is harder to find a pattern for widening than it is for narrowing. It is not entirely certain, but meanings seem to widen somewhat less frequently than they narrow. As a culture becomes more diversified and more complex with more areas of knowledge and activity, those areas require a vocabulary. Because every language has a finite number of words and because speakers are not inclined to coin completely new forms for new concepts, the simplest way to deal with new areas of knowledge is to use the current vocabulary. Borrowing, derivation, compounding, and so on operate here. But perhaps even more frequent is narrowing. Hence we can conclude that, in keeping with the law of minimum effort described by some authors as a chief motivator of semantic change (Ullman 1951, 1957, 1964; Berndt 1989), it seems more likely that speakers would have used and altered existing vocabulary to fit the new external reality, rather than resort to processes by which new words would be created. What does appear to be certain and inevitable is the need to adapt the lexicon to an external reality, and in the process transform the content of the items affected. Shift as change may be understood as a progression or evolution through different layers of meaning where new definitions are added but where older nuances are preserved as a link with past layers. In texts (20) and (21) we find some examples of this: Semantic change 105

(20) SONG OF THE HUSBANDMAN39 Ich herde men vpo mold make muche mon, hou he be+t itened of here tilyynge: gode +geres and corn bo+te be+t agon; Song of the Husbandman (1250-1350)

(21) and to make their words to haue the more credite, they had got a Chaplaine of King Richardes called Madeleine, so like to hym in all proportion and fauor, ... The Chronicles of England from Brute unto this present yeare of Christ (1570-1640) The semantic content of husbandman is based on the following definition provided by the OED: ‘a man who tills or cultivates the soil’. It refers, in its original sense, to a man dedicated to cultivating the land. From this occupation, the term develops a sense of possessing the land under cultivation and, consequently, of being the owner and manager of this portion of land and the work carried out on it. This husbandman is probably associated not only with the land and the work done on it, but also with the family; thus does he become a husband and head of the family. Room (1991) confirms that husbandman, originally defined in terms of a man’s domestic situation and duties, was retained until the 13th century when it began to take on the meaning it has today. The noun chaplaine, on the other hand, exhibits the following meanings:

1. Clergyman or minister of a chapel. 2. Clergyman or individual responsible for religious services in a privately owned chapel belonging to a member of the nobility, individual of high institutional rank, etc. 3. Nun responsible for reading minor religious services in a convent chapel. Between 1 and 2 a process of specialisation appears to have taken place, given that the clergyman or minister in 2 officiates in a specific kind of chapel. Furthermore, a similar role may be carried out by another member of the religious community, although female, in similar circumstances and context. What we encounter, therefore, is a shift of nuances of meaning, leading to the new meaning we observe in 3. We should point out, however, that in this instance the second layer of meaning was also retained. Lexical change makes the complex stratification of a speech community visible. Examples of this phenomenon extracted from the corpus include drihhtin and rædes- men.

(22) Forr Drihhtin haffde +tanne sett, +Tatt nan ne shollde wurr+tenn +Ta sett to wurr+tenn prest, butt iff He prestess sune w+are. The Ormulum (1150-1250) (23) Henri, +tur+g Godes fultume King on Engleneloande, Lhoauerdon Yrloande, Duk on Normandi, on Aquitaine, and Eorl on Aniow, send igretinge to alle hise holde, il+arde and ileawede, on Huntendoneschire. +T+at witen +ge wel alle +t+at we willen and vnnen +t+at, +t+at vre r+adesmen alle, o+ter +te moare d+al of heom, +t+at beo+t ichosen +tur+g us and +tur+g +t+at loandes folk on vre kuneriche, habbe+t idon and shullen don in +te wor+tnesse of Gode and on vre

39 In this instance, the noun to be analysed appears in the title of the text.

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treow+te, for +te freme of +te loande +tur+g +te (...) The Proclamation of Henry III (1250-1350) All the nouns found in this type of change belong to the first two periods of the corpus: 1150-1250 and 1250-1350, and are of Anglo-Saxon origin. As a result, some of the referents in question may later be designated using terms imported from other languages, depending on the language dominating the socio-external situation. This can be clearly observed in the replacement of lexical items during the Norman influence (e.g. rædesmen was substituted by councellors in later centuries). Another kind of semantic change is concretion, which, as Millward (1996) notes, is the converse of abstraction or metaphorical extension. This type of change occurs when an abstract idea or concept is embodied in a particular person or figure. This happens with warde and witnes in (24) and (25) respectively:

(24) and thider kom Richard Norbury and William Essex, and ther it was accorded that the mair, John Norhampton, sholde sende after the persones that thilk tyme wer in the comun conseil of craftes, and after the wardeyns of craftes, so that thei sholde kome to the goldsmithes halle on the morwe after, and ther the mair sholde speke with hem, to loke and ordeigne how thilk eleccion of Sir Nichol Brembre myght be letted; The Appeal of Thomas Usk (1350-1420) (25) on payne that everie pabbson that soe shall sell give exchange or put awaye anye Horse Mare Gildinge Coulte or Fillie, without beinge knowen to the Tol taker or other Officer aforesaide, or without bringinge suche a Voucher or Wit- nes, causinge the same to be entred as aforesaide, and everie pabbson makinge anye untrue Testymonye ... The Statutes of the Realm (1420-1500) In both examples the noun designates an individual who performs the function that was implicit in the earlier general concept:

VIGILANCE > ‘he who watches or protects’

KNOWLEDGE, WISDOM > ‘he who observes, knows, testifies’ In both cases it is even possible to track a subsequent stage of specialisation: warde can be used to designate an officer or regent or ‘viceroy’; witnes is specialised when it takes on its legal nuance and comes to be used specifically in judicial matters. The semantic change known as deterioration involves applying a social perspective in the analysis of the language. Negative or pejorative associations established by speakers between terms and ideas, and which they use to evaluate the semantic content of nouns, are illustrated in examples (26) and (27):

(26) Fal. Reason, you roague, reason; thinkst thou Ile endanger my soule, gratis? at a word, hang no more about mee, I am no gibbet for you: goe, a short knife, and a throng, to your Mannor of Pickt-hatch: goe, you'll not beare a Letter for mee you roague? you stand vpon your honor: ... The Merry Wives of Windsor (1570-1640) Semantic change 107

(27) If any brybour do bragge or blowe a+gens my bost I xal rappe +to rebawdys and rake +tem on rought With my bryght bronde +Ter xal be neythey kayser nere knyge But +tat I xal hem down dynge lesse +tan he at my byddynge be buxum to myn honde. ... Ludus Coventriae or the Plaie called Corpus Christi (1420-1500) The OED offers a definition for roague as ‘one belonging to a class of idle vagrants or vagabonds’. It is an individual of low-status, worthy of socially disdain on account of the uselessness of his/her role in the community, and even suggesting servile individuals who infringe the law and commit reprehensible acts. The word thereby becomes a term of abuse, a linguistic reflection of social contempt. In (27) brybour illustrates two types of change: deterioration and expansion. The former may be observed in the change from ‘vagabond’ to ‘wretch, rascal’ and, finally, to ‘thief, robber’ (OED):

[+ vagabond] [+ rascal] [+ thief] [+ accepts bribes] Social contempt directed towards a type of individual who performs no function in society, making him a social parasite, becomes established as the new pejorative sense acquired by the term, which itself becomes even stronger before the semantic content of the word is in turn expanded to ‘one who exacts or accepts bribes... one who offers or gives a bribe’ (OED). In both cases the common denominator is determined by the social function performed by the individual or referent, particularly so because such individual belongs to a disadvantaged social group, and it is the prestige groups in society who lay down models or trends of opinion and values, which are then transmitted through language (Vanhove, 2008). The collective evaluation that speakers make of certain terms can be detected in these examples. A combination of specialisation and deterioration changes manifests itself in terms such as knaue and truant:

(28) Tak powdir of alom glase & temper it with womans mylke +tat hase a knaue childe & do it in thyn eghne. ... The Liber de Diversis Medicinis' in the Tornton MS (1420-1500) Knaue was originally used to refer to a boy or child of low social status, a servant. This general meaning was restricted to designate a type of man characterised by his behaviour, a dishonest, unprincipled man (De la Cruz, 2001). This degradation or deterioration seems, once again, to arise as a result of the low esteem in which such member of society was held by the social group above him. As before, the word may be taken as a term of abuse and contempt. The same explanation may be applied to truant:

(29) Go hom, truant! +te porter sede, Scherewe houre sone, y +te rede, Fro +te gate: Boute +tow go hennes also swi+te, ... The Romance of Sir Beues of Hamtoun (1250-1350)

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The following outline is an attempt to synthesise the semantic evolution of the term:

[+ vagabond] [– social prestige]

[+ male] [= social prestige] [+ dishonest] [+ wrongdoer] [+ social layabout] A pejorative social evaluation, brought about by a change of attitude towards a type of person situated at the base of the social pyramid, causes the deterioration of the semantic content of the term and simultaneously defines the referent in greater detail by pro- filing the type of person in question. All this confirms the hypothesis proposed by Hughes (1988: 45) in which he claims that ‘words which originally denoted inferior social status become terms of moral disapproval’, mentioning the ‘moralization of status words’ as one of the semantic trends involved in the change referred to as generalisation. When accounting for the conditions and causes of semantic change, then, formal, social and attitudinal aspects can be seen to interplay (Görlach, 2003). Metaphorical extension or transference of sense effects change in a particular direction: from the concrete to the abstract. The process may be observed in (30) and (31) below:

(30) Peter is the chefe membre of the vnyuersall chirche. Paule and Andrew and Io- han what els be they but heedes of certayne and synguler people wherby it ap- pereth that as they were chefe euery man of the people that they had cure of. So saynt Peter was chefe of the vnyuersall chyrche. ... Sermons by John Fisher (1500-1570) The concrete meaning of chef (OED) is employed with a figurative sense in the following manner:

CONCRETE TRANSFERENCE PERSONAL NON-PERSONAL OF SENSE REFERENT REFERENT

Chef ‘head Individual with ‘Head of body of men, top’ these characteristics organisation, state, town, party, “ruter”’

The meaning of ‘head’ or ‘upper section’ is transferred to a ‘human being who acts as the head or upper section of’ a group, organisation, institution, etc. This is what, in Ullmann’s terms, we refer to as the transference of names on the basis of the similarity between their sense, using his genetic functional classification with rhetorical overtones. Shrewe in example (31) also illustrates the phenomenon of metaphorical extension:

(31) he shrape+t on is shabbes ant drawe+t huem to dewe; sene is on is browe ant on is e+ge-brewe, +tat he louseth a losynger, and shoye+t a shrewe. ... Nou be+t Semantic change 109

capel-claweres wi+t shome to-shrude;hue boske+t huem wy+t botouns, ase hit were a brude, wi+t lowe lacede shon of an hayfre hude, hue pyke+t of here prouendre al huere prude. Satire on the Retinues of the Great (1250-1350)

CONCRETE TRANSFERENCE PERSONAL NON-PERSONAL OF SENSE REFERENT REFERENT Shrewe ‘insectivorous Individual with ‘wicked, malignant (OED) mammal’ these characteristics man’ The most striking characteristic of the original referent is personalised, thereby causing the semantic change known as metaphor or metaphorical extension. Prophete, in (32), provides us with an example of semantic change caused by the figurative use of a term:

(32) For the noble kynge and prophete Dauid, kyng of Israell whom almighty god said that he had chosen as a man accordinge to his harte or desire duringe his lyfe, delited in musike: The boke named The Gouernour (1500- 1570) By using the componential method to break down the noun into its most important semantic elements we can more clearly determine and demonstrate on what aspect or aspects of the word the change is based. The original meaning was formulated in a religious environment. The change occurred when this meaning was applied to other areas in a figurative sense and, in a certain way, can be seen as a sort of extension or expansion of meaning:

+ that who predicts + predicts divine designs RELIGIOUS CONTEXT

[+ predicts the future] FIGURATIVE USE

OTHER CONTEXTS In text (33) we encounter an example of metaphorical extension and specialisation in the word cardinal:

(33) And as touching oure gouernaunce and tithing si+t our last departyng fro Caen, we com afore our Toun of Louiers & wan it by assiege, to +te which place com to vs +te cardinal of Vrsin fro our holy fader +te pope, fro to trete for +te good of pees Betwix bo+te Reaumes, and is goon ayein to paris fro to diligence +tere in +tis same mater,... Henry V. Letters, London. (1350-1420) Deriving from the Latin cardinl-is, the adjective meant ‘fundamental, principal; of particular importance’ and was subsequently employed in a religious context in ‘the cardinal virtues’ and ‘the cardinal sins’. From there its use was extended to ecclesiastic figures holding important positions within the Church; the OED, for instance, offers the following definition:

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one of the seventy ecclesiastical princes who constitute the pope’s council, or the sacred college, and to whom the right of electing the pope has been restricted since the third Lateran council in 1173. Specialisation here is illustrated by all these additional nuances which, in a way, serve to define the function performed by the person referred to by the noun. We find, once again, that the importance of religious affairs within the Medieval social order influences the definition of semantic contents more generally in society. In text (34) we find an example of metaphorical extension with an added pejorative sense. That is, the metaphorical use of the term has led simultaneously to the deterioration of its meaning:

(34) Come forth +tou stotte com forth +tou scowte com forth +tou bysmare and brothel bolde com forth +tou hore and stynkynge bych clowte how longe hast +tou such harlotry holde. ... Ludus Coventriae or the Plaie called Corpus Christi (1420-1500) Here the context in which the denotative meaning of bych as ‘the female of the dog’ (OED) can be used is extended to include human beings, specifically women, thereby bringing about a transposition of the meaning of the term. The deterioration of meaning is clear, in that bych is used in relation to a sensual, lascivious kind of woman, and would in time acquire the connotative sense of ‘a malicious or treacherous woman’ (OED). De la Cruz (2001) points out that as early as 1931 Stern dealt with this kind of transposition (animal – person) and the resulting uncomplimentary forms of reference. It is also curious to note (though not relevant to our study) that the noun also refers to men with these characteristics but with a less degrading connotative sense. All these examples of deterioration, metaphorical extension, etc. seem to correspond to what Closs-Traugott (1990: 499-500) describes as a trend whereby ‘[m]eanings based in the external described situation > [change to] meanings based in the internal (evaluative/perceptual/cognitive) situation’. Changes originate mainly as a function of the subjectivity of speakers, who tend to transfer their own perceptions onto the language, however much these perceptions may have been influenced by the social circumstances. Meanings which are subject to the influences of the extrasystemic environment become transformed into meanings conditioned by the speaker’s evaluation or perception of the situation in which communicative interaction occurs. Within this tendency, therefore, we can include the processes by which a term is evaluated positively or negatively, together with the transference of a concrete sense to an abstract one, and that of a social and physical sense to an emotional and psychological one. Constabylle and Marshall in (35) and (36), respectively, illustrate shift and specialisation:

(35) yf soo be that they be nott rescwyde be batayle of the kynge hyr lorde, or Dolfyn, hys eldyste sone, or by the Constabylle of Fraunce.... Gregory's Croni- cle (1420-1500) (36) After whiche possessyon soo by hym taken anon he made newe Offycers as the Erle of Northumberlande he made Constable of Englonde the Erle of Westmer- Semantic change 111

lande was made Marshall syr Iohnn Serle Chaunceler Iohnn Newebery esquyer Tresorer and syr Rycharde Clyfforde Knyght keper of the pryuey Sygnet ... The New Chronicles of England and France (1500-1570) Both nouns derive from a common semantic denominator: ‘stable-man’ (OED). In the case of constabylle in (35) the term referred to the head of the stable who went on to become the chief officer of a feud at the time of the Frankish kings and, ultimately, commander in chief of the army. This evolution occurred before the term was introduced to the English language. In 12th century England, a constable was ‘the chief officer of a nobleman’s household’ (Hellet et al. 1984: 50). In the 14th century, the sphere in which he operated was reduced, with constable becoming the ‘appointed officer of the peace’ of a parish or county. The constable’s authority diminished in tandem with the disappearance of the administrative sectors under his command (parish, county, etc.) A similar evolution can be observed in the following break-down of the semantic elements of the term marshall:

[+ male]

[+ stable-hand]

[+ functionary of a feud] [+ functionary of the state] [+ high-ranking functionary with responsibility for military affairs] The social function of marshall was transformed by the ascent from stable to feud and subsequently to state. The organisational framework necessitated by affairs of state restricted the role of the marshall to the military sphere, preserving his privileged social position. Some authors (Heller et al. 1984) see this change as an improvement owing to the rise in status as conveyed by the word. The promotion in rank obtained by the referents of these terms in the move from stable to feud may have been the result of the social esteem attached to horses by the Norman invaders (Hughes, 2000). The Normans had developed the art of horseman- ship and brought it with them when they invaded the island. Those who practised the art of fighting on horseback were usually the youngest sons of Norman noblemen and held no territorial title. When they settled in England they became knights, acquiring a certain power and status due in large part to victories attained using the horse as a means of battle. The significance of the new equestrian culture is felt linguistically in the origin of the semantic change at work in constabylle and marshall. Cherl in example (37) refers to a man in general terms, a human being of the male sex; in Old English, cherl was a male individual with no rank or social status of any description. This shortcoming gave way to his identification as a ‘serf, peasant, rustic’ and, consequently, the negative evaluation or pejorative use of the term as a rogue or miscreant.

112 Part III

(37) Ich mot legge my wed wel +gef y wolle, o+ter sulle mi corn on gras +tat is grene. + get I shal be foul cherl, +tah he han +te fulle; +tat ich alle +ger spare, +tenne y mot spene. Satire on the Consistory Courts. (1250-1350) Moskowich (forthcoming) claims that a ceorl was a very complex figure, differenti- ated from a serf by his condition as a free individual possessed of legal rights and obli- gations. Ceorles could be farmers, artisans or merchants and their economic prosperity could lead to promotion within the social scale, right up to the lower rungs of the nobility. It is reasonable to suppose that this last aspect may have generated negative value judgements on the part of the nobility, who may have viewed them as social climbers who could never match their prestige and who would always be associated with the ceorles, ultimately no more than peasants. This kind of resentment was probably the cause behind the deterioration of the noun (Romano Mozo, 2001). 3.4.1 Meaning change in combination with other variables

Having reviewed the predominant types of semantic change in the field of nouns, in the second part of this analysis40 I propose to look at the different types of change from the perspective of other fields in the database: period, origin 1, origin 2, origin 3, final origin, dialect, type of text and audience. The process has produced some interesting results. In combining the types of change with the period variable, we find that the period containing the highest number of forms is 1420-1500, followed by 1500-1570, then 1570-1640. This may be because 1420-1500 was when the revival of the English language began to be substantiated by the appearance of a growing number of written texts, the authors of these texts demonstrating their confidence in the vernacular by expanding its sphere of use. It seems logical, therefore, that a greater use of the language should result in a greater number of changes. This trend is sustained in the predominance of the ‘Reference to person or rank’ field in relation to the total number of changes, nouns and words. The fourth period in terms of number of changes is 1250- 1350, then 1150-1250, and finally 1350-1420. In each case, except for the period 1350-142041, specialisation is the most common type of change (cniht, alldermenn, knaue, erl, mastur, apostle, barons, tenauntys, attorney, captaine). Although the general tendency is for the predominance of specialisation, it is greatest in those periods that contain the greatest number of words, and it is interesting to note that in relation to the number of different types of changes that arise in each period the proportion is inverted: the periods with the least number of forms present a greater number of types of changes:

40 For this type of analysis I have used the SPSS 10.0 statistical package. 41 For the period 1350-1420, for the statistical category ‘Mode’ the prevailing type of change is expansion (lord, monkys, neeborwus). Semantic change 113

Table 11. Types of change in each period

PERIOD TOTAL TYPES TYPES 1150-1250 5 Lexical change, expansion, specialisation, metaphorical extension, shift. Drihhtin, louerde, alldermenn, wreches, king 1250-1350 10 Deterioration, lexical change, expansion, concretion, specialisation / deterioration, metaphorical extension, metaphorical extension / deterioration, shift / deterioration. Nipinge, pautener, harlotes, nytesse, eorl, truant, wrace, bonde, porueyour, marescal 1350-1420 7 Deterioration, lexical change, expansion, concretion, specialisation, metaphorical extension, metaphorical extension / specialisation, shift. Prikasour, ladi, wardeyns, abbot, disciple, cardinal, clerkus 1420-1500 10 Deterioration, lexical change, expansion, concretion, specialisation / deterioration, metaphorical extension, metaphorical extension / specialisation, metaphorical extension / deterioration, shift. Hasardoures, leghere, tirauntis, gardeyn, officers, knaues, virgyn, chefe, bych, es- chequer 1500-1570 6 Deterioration, expansion, concretion, specialisation, metaphorical extension, shift. Companions, veladme, emperours, magest, duke, chiefe, constable 1570-1650 7 Deterioration, expansion, concretion, specialisation, specialisation / deterioration, metaphorical extension / specialisation, shift. Gent, vo- ague, priste, principall, merchante, knaves, cheef, chaplaine

For the period 1250-1350 I have detected a total of 10 types of change, excluding metaphorical extension / specialisation. It makes sense that we should encounter a greater variety of changes at a time when English was attempting to assimilate a massive lexico-semantic influx from the languages with which it was in contact as well as trying to overhaul its whole lexical subsystem. Similarly, we must bear in mind the numerous significant events and social transformations which arose during this period and which undoubtedly influenced the evolution of English. The high number of changes recorded between 1250-1350 may well be due to the consolidation of English, which at this point reinforced its own resources in face of the impositions of foreign languages. We must remember that during this period all social levels united in defence of the vernacular (The Provisions of Oxford, The Barons’ War); the fruits of this common defence against the invader would be felt most tangibly from the 15th century onwards. For the period 1420-1500 the same number of types of changes were recorded as in 1250-1350. Following these, the periods 1350-1420 and 1570-1640 each yielded seven types, then 1500-1570, with six types, and finally 1150-1250, with five. What we find, therefore, is a greater variety of types of change in the periods of greater sociolinguistic volatility. After the initial period of calm between 1150-1250, the number of transformations of all kinds rose rapidly until about the 16th century (1500-1570) when linguistic concerns changed course and became more focused on codifying, defining and regulating the language. The previous period was one of lin-

114 Part III guistic revolution in which many loanwords were incorporated, sometimes with tinges of meaning provided by speakers’ value judgements. The kind of sociolinguistic behaviour provoked by the Norman Conquest emanated and developed within a framework in which both linguistic and non-linguistic concerns intervened in the ensuing vocabulary changes (Machan, 2009). Origin (the four Origin fields) is the next variable we will consider for which Pearson’s chi-squared tests will be used to establish a relationship of dependence. The ‘mode’ parameter, as calculated for the permutation Semantic Change* Origin 1, indicates that the most characteristic type of change in the predominant Origin 1 language, Old English, is expansion (e.g. lord). Old French and Latin, on the other hand, occupying the second and third places in descending order of appearance, are characterised by specialisation (barons, secretary); so too are French (lieutenant), Anglo-French (sew- ers), Anglo-Latin (aldermen) and Middle Latin (apothecaries), and High Old German (kasserking). The most common tendency with Old Norwegian is lexical change (capel-claweres), while Dutch is characterised by shift (ligier). In the five cases where the origin of the word is unknown, the most habitual type of change present is deterioration (roague). The fact that in the three main origins we encounter two different types of change may also be interpreted as a linguistic response to the social situation. On the one hand, in the Anglo-Saxon substratum the content of nouns was expanded to accommodate new nuances of meaning in the changing socioeconomic and cultural reality. On the other, forms deriving from French or Latin became more restricted in meaning, becoming specialised to designate increasingly more specific referents, perhaps because the social order they represented demanded a greater degree of structure and specialisation of the roles performed by its members. Lastly, in the Final Origin field we find the following trends: in nouns deriving from Latin (duke) the most common type of change is specialisation, as is the case with Arabic (admiral). Expansion or extension of meaning characterises origins such as Greek (prest), Old French (nonne) and Old Icelandic (lac). For Old Norwegian (husbandman) and Germanic (marchal) changes stem from shift. The most common types of change are reduction of meaning or specialisation, expansion or extension of meaning, and shift. The most prominent languages are Old English, Old French and Latin. For forms deriving from Old English expansion is the leading type of change, although there are also instances of specialisation. The opposite occurs with Old French and Latin, where specialisation is the most significant type of semantic change (equally, for some Old English forms deriving from French and Latin, the meaning of the term has been extended). These results may be interpreted as an example of the socio-external situation affecting the language which attempts to filter away the latter’s impurities to transform it into a national language embodying the identity and culture of the people. The expansion of meaning in forms deriving from Old English reflects attempts to make the basic substratum of the language more effective; reducing the meaning of terms derived from French or Latin meant integrat- ing and adapting them to the changing reality in which the language operated. This process may have been influenced by those Renaissance intellectuals who defended the introduction of classical vocabulary in order to lend splendour and eloquence to the Semantic change 115 language; or perhaps it was simply out of observance of the fashion in Medieval and Renaissance Europe for attaching special importance to classical culture; or simply the dictates of status. Whatever the reasons, nouns of one or other origin underwent changes in opposite directions. Shift, the third most common type, is found in forms deriving from languages such as Dutch, Latin, Old Nordic and Germanic. Another variable we need to bear in mind in our study of change is the dialectal variety corresponding to the text from which the nouns have been taken. The majority of the forms belong to English, the value known by the code Dialect for texts after 1500. The type of change recorded here is specialisation. Among the different dialectal varieties of Middle English reduction of meaning is also recorded in forms taken from texts from the West Midlands and the southern region. In the West Midlands dialects we also encounter instances of shift. A further type of change, expansion of meaning, characterises forms recorded in texts from the East Midlands, cases in the northern region and the Kentish dialect. Only two instances of specialisation and deterioration are found for the northern region. For Middle English, the majority of forms recorded belong to texts written in the East Midlands variety where the predominant type of change is expansion of meaning. The prevailing origin here is Old English. Hence, the basic stratum of the language and the area of greatest prestige and economic power converged to create the variety of English we know today as Standard (Fisher, Richardson, Blake, Benskin, Wright). So in English the type of change setting the trend is specialisation. This is matched by the predominance of nouns of French and Latin in the language following the imposition of Norman control. With respect to the permutation between Semantic Change and Type of Text, un- surprisingly the two most common types of change in the Type of Text variable are expansion (accounting for 12 of the 30 instances) and specialisation (accounting for 18 of the 30). The most frequent types of semantic change are recorded in the following text-types: specialisation in documents, scientific-medical texts, sermons, religious treatises, prefaces and epilogues, historical texts, texts dealing with travel, fiction, private letters, non-private letters, other scientific texts, educational treatises, juridical records, personal diaries, autobiographies, other biographical texts, drama texts (plays) and X (non-classified) texts. Expansion is observed in legal texts, astronomy manuals, medical manuals, other manuals, philosophical texts, sermons, regulations, juridical procedures or records, hagiographical texts, romances, drama texts (allegorical religious plays) and Biblical texts. Expansion is the semantic change detected in the remaining text-types. The most common type of change in the texts in our corpus is specialisation. The first three text-types in order of importance (historical texts, non-private letters and fiction) reflect this. The fourth and fifth-place text-types (laws and sermons, respectively) illustrate the secondary role of expansion, the second most significant semantic change in our study of nouns relating to person or rank. The final variable considered here refers to different types of audience. Most of the time, the audience of the text is unknown but when this is not the case, where the audience is classified as ‘professional’, the most common type of change is specialisation. Extension or expansion of meaning prevails where the audience is classed as non-

116 Part III professional. Findings related to this variable are in line with the trends previously seen for the variables origin and even dialect. Specialisation is observed in nouns with a classical origin, in texts written in the conservative southern variety, and in a number of forms recorded in the West Midlands dialect and in the supradialectal variety applied to texts after 1500: ENGLISH. All texts of this kind were aimed at a professional audience or, at least, at one capable of understanding a steadily greater number of nouns in their new restricted sense. At the same time, extension of meaning was applied to nouns of Saxon origin belonging to texts from the East Midlands, the north, and the Kentish dialect. These texts were aimed at a non-professional audience for whom it was more practical to employ the resources of the native language when it came to expressing the social reality. We find, consequently, a widening of the semantic range of the words contained in the basic substratum of the language. In conclusion it seems appropriate to note that this study of nouns to designate person or rank would appear to echo the trends outlined by Ullmann (1957, 1962) of expansion and reduction of meaning as preponderant in semantic change, as Greenough and Kittredge (1902) had already claimed at the beginning of the 20th century, confirmed more recently by Geeraerts (1997) and Grygiel and Kleparski (2007). The reader will note that I have preserved the term ‘trends’ or tendencies because I do not believe that the processes of semantic change can be viewed as scientifically formulated laws: to my mind, these processes are subject to the variability of a speech community which transforms its means of expression in accordance with the prevailing needs of its society and the individual emotional demands of its speakers. Final remarks

In this last part I will offer an overview of the main theoretical issues discussed in Parts I, II and III as well as the conclusions which can be drawn from the analysis. The socio-historical framework necessary to contextualise the linguistic data under study here is provided in Part I, in which the main aspects of the external history of English between the 12th and the 17th centuries are described, with special emphasis on the English lexicon. This introductory socio-cultural approach aims at providing the necessary basis to apply the tenets of historical socio-linguistics. The external history is, in many situations, inextricably linked to the internal history of a language, and can thus serve to justify and explain certain linguistic phenomena (Thomason 1986; Mill- ward 1996). In this particular case it helps to clarify the process of language change through semantic change, which, as we have seen in the preceding pages, moves towards the specialisation or narrowing of meanings. For this reason I decided to devote Part I to the contextualisation of late Medieval and Renaissance England and Part II to the description of language change in this period, followed by a detailed examination of semantic change, the core of the study, in Part III. The part devoted to language change includes the views of some authors on the topic which in general justify language change from a diachronic point of view. Also discussed are the extra- and intra-systemic factors that provoke change and the phenomena that derive either from language contact or from any other type of relationship among languages, such as bilingualism, diglossia or pidginisation and/or creolisation. Along with Labov, Aitchinson, Thomason, Thomason and Kaufmann and Mill- ward, among others, I firmly believe that external factors are motors of change. Such factors include military invasions, colonisations, commercial relations, technological advances and scientific discoveries, migratory movements and the social prestige of the foreign language in opposition to the vernacular. All these factors have been considered here in the present assessment of semantic change because of the socially influential nature of semantic change itself. Indeed, the classification of semantic changes that I have proposed takes into consideration not only the form and content of the changes themselves but also the way in which they transmit changing social values. The theoretical background for the study has been described in Parts I and II, as well as sections 3.1 and 3.2 in Part III, where information about the methodology used and the subsequent analysis of data can also be found. My corpus comprises a selection of texts drawn from the HC and dating from 1150 to 1640. All the text types present in the original corpus have been maintained. The resulting corpus contains around 175,000 words, from which 31,346 correspond to the lexical category noun. These nouns have been classified into 29 semantic fields (see Section 3.1), the one with the highest frequency of occurrence being ‘reference to person-rank nouns’. Automated analysis (MS Access, MS Excel 2003 and SPSS 10.0) has allowed me to reach some partial conclusions on the nouns from the corpus, classified into the 29 semantic fields and also assessed from the perspective of the other variables included in the database: Item, Period, Semantic field, Origin 1, Origin 2, Origin 3, Ultimate origin, Use in con-

118 Final remarks text, New field, Frequency, Reference, Dialect, Verse or prose, Type of text, Prototype textual category, Translation, Oral or written, Sex, Age, Social rank, and Audience. From my analysis of the general database used for the study of semantic change I can conclude that the prevailing semantic field is that of nouns denoting person-rank. The evaluation of this semantic field, the constant in my analysis, against the remaining fields of the database plus the different variables therein, has generated some interesting and significant findings. Even if it is true that this kind of noun stands out in the sub-period between 1420 and 1500 and in the two sub-periods of Early Modern English, 1500-1570 and 1570- 1640, it is worth noting that a higher number of person-rank nouns can be found in texts written immediately after the Conquest than, for instance, in texts produced during the second half of the 14th and the beginning of the 15th centuries. At this point it is necessary to consider that the coming of the Normans brought about a metamorpho- sis in the social structure of the Anglo-Saxon world, especially in the upper strata, and one of the linguistic corollaries was the introduction of new vocabulary items and the modification of the referential meaning of some existing words. As for the predominant origin of person-rank nouns, there is a clear preponderance of OE, although, in consonance with the influence exerted by other linguistic superstrata upon this Anglo-Saxon base, some other origins are also influential, which can be ordered according to their frequency of occurrence as follows: OFr, L, Fr and A-F. As regards intermediate origins, Latin is the outstanding language, although since the number of cases processed in each case amounts to less than 20% of all the forms, these are of scant relevance. A similar situation obtains for the variable of ultimate origin, where Latin again shows an overwhelming presence (which corresponds to 25.9% of all the cases), followed by Greek. The data analysed in this study is indeed rich with the presence of the classical languages. Contrariwise, other languages, such as Arabic, Old Norse, Germanic or Old Icelandic, are hardly represented. We must also recognise that in most cases in which OE is the immediate etymological origin of the noun, the ultimate origin has not been traced, which, in all likelihood, would render a good number of terms with a Germanic origin. The majority presence of items whose Origin 1 is OE confirms the kind of basic linguistic strata that predominates in English in the field of person-rank nouns. Yet, the proximity in number of forms coming from either French or Latin shows that this field has been heavily influenced by the organization and linguistic habits of Norman society. In addition, we must note the remarkable role played by Latin, a language of culture and a source of knowledge which has undoubtedly left its trace on the Medieval and renaissance speech communities of Anglo-Saxon England. This is corroborated by the preponderance of Latin in the variables Origins 2, Origins 3 and in the ultimate origin. As far as usage in context is concerned, this variable is not relevant to us, operating in only 13.8% of the forms under analysis. The four new fields to which these new meanings could be ascribed, taking context into account, were ‘Religion, beliefs and rites’, ‘Law’, ‘Family and social relations’ and ‘War and warfare’, in order of frequency. Final remarks 119

Most of the texts in which nouns denoting person or rank have been detected are written in prose using the West Midlands dialect and, as could be expected, fit into the category of history, official letters, fiction or documents. These are texts written in the vernacular which may be symptomatic of the degree to which the French and Latin lexicon is established, a lexicon which would later undergo semantic changes exactly as with Germanic words. As for authors and audience, the characteristics that define the authors of these texts point to a male writer, where the sex is known, between 40 and 60 years old and belonging to a professional social rank. Despite the fact that the audience to whom these texts are addressed is in many cases not known, what information does exist reveals that the audience also fits into the professional category. Therefore, a definition of the medium in which nouns denoting person or rank most frequently occur, as well as the users of that medium, would be: a prose text on a historical topic, written in the vernacular in the west Midlands dialect by a professional author and addressed to a professional audience. This is perhaps unsurprising if we consider that in the Medieval period culture was in the hands of a few. The opening up of culture and knowledge, and their transmission to laypeople, is something that only really begins to occur from the 16th century onwards. The professionalisation of writing affects authors who, apart from being civil servants, also devoted their time to the composition of literary works, scientific treatises, etc., in sum, a type of text different from purely administrative ones. The prevailing type of semantic change among the nouns under study is the so- called specialization or narrowing. In most cases the meaning of these nouns undergoes a reduction that runs parallel to social evolution. Inasmuch as the socio-economic structures of a speech community transform also does the vehicle of communication this uses. If we can take for granted that a language adjusts to the patterns established by society, then the socio-historical and cultural background gives us the clue for the interpretation of semantic change. The type of change referred to as specialisation can occur alone or combined with another type of change, pejoration, especially when a negative value judgement is added to the meaning of the word. I have also detected some examples of metaphorical expansion which later underwent a specialization process. This demonstrates that a change operating in a noun can act alone or in combination with other types of change. It is for this reason that identifying the particular type of change that a noun has undergone is not easy. In the light of the results obtained after the analysis of nouns indicating person or rank between 1150 and 1640, I can conclude that the predominant type of change is specialization, especially abundant in those forms which do not come from the prevailing Anglo-Saxon stratum but from French or Latin. Linguistic specialization runs parallel to the social specialization of the corresponding speech community and in this phenomenon contact with other languages caused by colonisations, invasions, commercial relations, and scientific and technological advances have been of paramount importance. In the heavy degree of lexical and semantic change attested in the English language during the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, a set of external factors that detail and outline the

120 Final remarks economic organization and the socio-political structure of post-Conquest England play a decisive role. All this is transmitted through language change. Semantics, as the linguistic mirror of the outside world, reflects this transformation through variation in the meaning, in this particular case, of person-rank nouns, fostering specialization and favoring lexical enrichment by importation from other languages. Semantic change has always been one of the most immediate and useful resources that a language has in adapting to the social environment and to language users. I cannot foretell with any certainty whether this will continue to be so in the future, although everything seems to indicate that it will, it is certainly the case that with the semantic field that has been analysed in detail in the present study, both texts and history testify that semantic change has been one of the prime actors in the evolution, strengthening and consolidation of today’s English. References

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Studies in English Medieval Language and Literature

Edited by Jacek Fisiak

Vol. 1 Dieter Kastovsky / Arthur Mettinger (eds.): Language Contact in the History of English. 2nd, revised edition. 2003.

Vol. 2 Studies in English Historical Linguistics and Philology. A Festschrift for Akio Oizumi. Edited by Jacek Fisiak. 2002.

Vol. 3 Liliana Sikorska: In a Manner of Morall Playe: Social Ideologies in English Moralities and Interludes (1350-1517). 2002.

Vol. 4 Peter J. Lucas / Angela M. Lucas (eds.): Middle English from Tongue to Text. Selected Papers from the Third International Conference on Middle English: Language and Text, held at Dublin, Ireland, 1-4 July 1999. 2002.

Vol. 5 Chaucer and the Challenges of Medievalism. Studies in Honor of H. A. Kelly. Edited by Donka Minkova and Theresa Tinkle. 2003.

Vol. 6 Hanna Rutkowska: Graphemics and Morphosyntax in the Cely Letters (1472-88). 2003.

Vol. 7 The Ancrene Wisse. A Four-Manuscript Parallel Text. Preface and Parts 1-4. Edited by Tadao Kubouchi and Keiko Ikegami with John Scahill, Shoko Ono, Harumi Tanabe, Yoshi- ko Ota, Ayako Kobayashi and Koichi Nakamura. 2003.

Vol. 8 Joanna Bugaj: Middle Scots Inflectional System in the South-west of Scotland. 2004.

Vol. 9 Rafal Boryslawski: The Old English Riddles and the Riddlic Elements of Old English Poetry. 2004.

Vol. 10 Nikolaus Ritt / Herbert Schendl (eds.): Rethinking Middle English. Linguistic and Literary Approaches. 2005.

Vol. 11 The Ancrene Wisse. A Four-Manuscript Parallel Text. Parts 5–8 with Wordlists. Edited by Tadao Kubouchi and Keiko Ikegami with John Scahill, Shoko Ono, Harumi Tanabe, Yoshi- ko Ota, Ayako Kobayashi, Koichi Nakamura. 2005.

Vol. 12 Text and Language in Medieval English Prose. A Festschrift for Tadao Kubouchi. Edited by Akio Oizumi, Jacek Fisiak and John Scahill. 2005.

Vol. 13 Michiko Ogura (ed.): Textual and Contextual Studies in Medieval English. Towards the Reunion of Linguistics and Philology. 2006.

Vol. 14 Keiko Hamaguchi: Non-European Women in Chaucer. A Postcolonial Study. 2006.

Vol. 15 Ursula Schaefer (ed.): The Beginnings of Standardization. Language and Culture in Four- teenth-Century England. 2006.

Vol. 16 Nikolaus Ritt / Herbert Schendl / Christiane Dalton-Puffer / Dieter Kastovsky (eds): Medieval English and its Heritage. Structure, Meaning and Mechanisms of Change. 2006.

Vol. 17 Matylda Wodarczyk: Pragmatic Aspects of Reported Speech. The Case of Early Modern English Courtroom Discourse. 2007.

Vol. 18 Hans Sauer / Renate Bauer (eds.): Beowulf and Beyond. 2007.

Vol. 19 Gabriella Mazzon (ed.): Studies in Middle English Forms and Meanings. 2007.

Vol. 20 Alexander Bergs / Janne Skaffari (eds.): The Language of the Peterborough Chronicle. 2007.

Vol. 21 Liliana Sikorska (ed.). With the assistance of Joanna Maciulewicz: Medievalisms. The Poetics of Literary Re-Reading. 2008.

Vol. 22 Masachiyo Amano / Michiko Ogura / Masayuki Ohkado (eds.): Historical Englishes in Va- rieties of Texts and Contexts. The Global COE Program, International Conference 2007. 2008.

Vol. 23 Ewa Ciszek: Word Derivation in Early Middle English. 2008.

Vol. 24 Andrzej M. Bcki: Grammaticalisation Paths of Have in English. 2010.

Vol. 25 Osamu Imahayashi / Yoshiyuki Nakao / Michiko Ogura (eds.): Aspects of the History of English Language and Literature. Selected Papers Read at SHELL 2009, Hiroshima. 2010.

Vol. 26 Magdalena Bator: Obsolete Scandinavian Loanwords in English. 2010.

Vol. 27 Anna Cichosz: The Influence of Text Type on Word Order of Old Germanic Languages. A Corpus-Based Contrastive Study of Old English and Old High German. 2010.

Vol. 28 Jacek Fisiak / Magdalena Bator (eds.): Foreign Influences on Medieval English. 2011.

Vol. 29 Wadysaw Witalisz: The Trojan Mirror. Middle English Narratives of Troy as Books of Princely Advice. 2011.

Vol. 30 Luis Iglesias-Rábade: Semantic Erosion of Middle English Prepositions. 2011.

Vol. 31 Barbara Kowalik: Betwixt engelaunde and englene londe. Dialogic Poetics in Early English Religious Lyric. 2010.

Vol. 32 The Katherine Group. A Three-Manuscript Parallel Text. Seinte Katerine, Seinte Marherete, Seinte Iuliene, and Hali Meiðhad, with Wordlists. Edited by Shoko Ono and John Scahill with Keiko Ikegami, Tadao Kubouchi, Harumi Tanabe, Koichi Nakamura, Satoko Shimazaki and Koichi Kano. 2011.

Vol. 33 Jacob Thaisen / Hanna Rutkowska (eds.): Scribes, Printers, and the Accidentals of their Texts. 2011.

Vol. 34 Isabel Moskowich: Language Contact and Vocabulary Enrichment. Scandinavian Elements in Middle English. 2012.

Vol. 35 Joanna Esquibel / Anna Wojty (eds.): Explorations in the English Language: Middle Ages and Beyond. Festschrift for Professor Jerzy Wena on the Occasion of his 70th Birthday. 2012.

Vol. 36 Yoshiyuki Nakao: The Structure of Chaucer´s Ambiguity. 2013.

Vol. 37 Begoña Crespo: Change in Life, Change in Language. A Semantic Approach to the History of English. 2013. www.peterlang.de