The Transmission of Anglo-Norman

Language history and language acquisition

Author

Richard P. Ingham | Birmingham City University

Hardbound – Available

ISBN 9789027208262 | EUR 99.00 | USD 149.00

e-Book –

ISBN 9789027273345 | EUR 99.00 | USD 149.00

This investigation contributes to issues in the study of second language transmission by considering the well-documented historical case of Anglo-Norman. Within a few generations of the establishment of this variety, its phonology diverged sharply from that of continental French, yet core syntactic distinctions continued to be reliably transmitted. The dissociation of phonology from syntax transmission is related to the age of exposure to the language in the experience of ordinary users of the language. The input provided to children acquiring language in a naturalistic communicative setting, even though one of a school institution, enabled them to acquire target-like syntactic properties of the inherited variety. In addition, it allowed change to take place along the lines of transmission by incrementation. A linguistic environment combining the ‘here-and-now’ aspects of ordinary first language acquisition with the growing cognitive complexity of an educational meta-language appears to have been adequate for this variety to be transmitted as a viable entity that encoded the public life of England for centuries.

[Language Faculty and Beyond, 9] 2012. xii, 179 pp.

Publishing status: Available

https://doi.org/10.1075/lfab.9

Table of Contents

Preface | pp. ix–xii

1. Introduction to key issues | pp. 1–12

2. Anglo-Norman and L2 varieties of medieval French | pp. 13–26

3. The context of transmission | pp. 27–38

4. Rationale and design of the study | pp. 39–52

5. Anglo-Norman phonology | pp. 53–72

6. The syntax of quantifiers in Anglo-Norman | pp. 73–88

7. Noun gender marking in Anglo-Norman | pp. 89–100

8. Verb second and null subjects in Anglo-Norman | pp. 101–120

9. The order of Attributive Adjective and Noun in Anglo-Norman | pp. 121–138

10. The syntax and pragmatics of discourse particles in Anglo-Norman | pp. 139–158

11. Conclusions | pp. 159–164

Subject index | pp. 173–???

“This macro study of a dialect of medieval French draws on Anglo-Norman (AN) written texts spanning several centuries to consider the intersection of diachronic change and “exceptional” child language acquisition. [...] Ingham’s study is valuable both as a contribution to theoretical scholarship in diachronic change, language acquisition and transmission, and as a source of documentation of Anglo-Norman corpora, particularly those available in searchable electronic form.”

Julia Herschensohn, University of Washington

“[A] significant contribution to research on Anglo-Norman, and a must-read for those working on the impact of contact between French-English as well as historical contact situations in general.”

Devan B. Steiner, Ithaca College, on Linguist List 24.2950 (July 2013)

“L’ouvrage de Richard Ingham apporte ainsi aux études concernant l’anglonormand à la fois une perspective nouvelle et des analyses linguistiques précises et nourries, tout en offrant des réflexions méthodologiques essentielles concernant l’utilisation d’un corpus historique.”

Christel Nissille, in Revue de Linguistique Romane, 315-316 (2015)

“Ingham parvient dans cet ouvrage à faire un cas d’école des théories d’acquisition du langage et du bilinguisme appliquées à l’histoire de la compétence des rédacteurs de l’A-N. Son travail illustre brillamment les nouvelles directions que donnent à la linguistique historique les recherches contemporaines en psycholinguistique et didactique des langues, le développement des ressources électroniques et l’emploi des méthodes quantitatives d’analyse des données.”

Christel Nissille, in Histoire Epistémologie Langage, Vol. 38:2 (2016)

“Richard Ingham presents us with a clearer view of the Anglo-Norman language, one which was completely and correctly learned in a naturalistic context and not, as previously believed, a poorly learned L2 which was heavily influenced by Middle English. [...] Ingham’s work underlines the great need for further corpus studies on Anglo-Norman and overall is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the use and evolution of the language.”

Heather Pagan, in Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur, Vol.126:1-2 (2016). Pages 190-193

Cited by

Cited by 40 other publications

Order by:

BALON, LAURENT & PIERRE LARRIVÉE

2016. L’ancien français n’est déjà plus une langue à sujet nul–nouveau témoignage des textes légaux. Journal of French Language Studies 26:2 ► pp. 221 ff.

Beeching, Kate

2016. Alors/donc/thenat the right periphery. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 17:2 ► pp. 208 ff.

Beeching, Kate

2017. Chapter 17. Just a suggestion. In Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles [Studies in Language Companion Series, 186], ► pp. 459 ff.

Brady, Lindy

2023. Multilingualism in Early Medieval Britain,

Chamberlin, Julie K.

2023. F. In The Chaucer Encyclopedia, ► pp. 693 ff.

Conde-Silvestre, J. Camilo

2021. Multilingualism and Language Contact in the Cely Letters. Anglia 139:2 ► pp. 327 ff.

Critten, Rory G, Cyrille Gay-Crosier & Davide Picca

2022. French lexis in the Auchinleck Manuscript: A digital-philological approach. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 37:2 ► pp. 354 ff.

De Smet, Hendrik & Marlieke Shaw

2024. Missing link: code-switches, borrowings, and accommodation biases. Linguistics Vanguard 0:0

Durkin, Philip

2020. Contact and Lexical Borrowing. In The Handbook of Language Contact, ► pp. 169 ff.

Fox, Susan, Anthony Grant & Laura Wright

2023. Contact Theory and the History of English. In Medieval English in a Multilingual Context [New Approaches to English Historical Linguistics, ], ► pp. 17 ff.

García García, Luisa & Richard Ingham

2023. Language Contact Effects on Verb Semantic Classes: Lability in Early English and Old French. In Medieval English in a Multilingual Context [New Approaches to English Historical Linguistics, ], ► pp. 343 ff.

Haeberli, Eric

2017. When English Meets French: A Case Study in Comparative Diachronic Syntax. In Formal Models in the Study of Language, ► pp. 431 ff.

Huber, Judith

2017. Chapter 6. The early life of borrowed path verbs in English. In Motion and Space across Languages [Human Cognitive Processing, 59], ► pp. 177 ff.

Huber, Judith

2021. Of travels and travails: The role of semantic typology, argument structure constructions, and language contact in semantic change. Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association 9:1 ► pp. 71 ff.

INGHAM, RICHARD

2018. The diffusion of higher-status lexis in medieval England: the role of the clergy. English Language and Linguistics 22:2 ► pp. 207 ff.

Ingham, Richard & Michael Ingham

2015. ‘Pardonetz moi qe jeo de ceo forsvoie’: Gower’s Anglo-Norman Identity. Neophilologus 99:4 ► pp. 667 ff.

Ingham, Richard P.

2023. The Middle English prepositional dative. In Ditransitives in Germanic Languages [Studies in Germanic Linguistics, 7], ► pp. 56 ff.

Ingham, Richard P., Louise Sylvester & Imogen Marcus

2019. Chapter 22. Penetration of French-origin lexis in Middle English occupational domains. In Historical Linguistics 2015 [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 348], ► pp. 460 ff.

Léglu, Catherine

2018. Prose and Image. In Samson and Delilah in Medieval Insular French, ► pp. 87 ff.

Marcus, Imogen

2022. A Comparative Investigation of Anaphoric Reference Devices in Anglo-Norman and Middle English Personal Letters. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 57:1 ► pp. 225 ff.

MOLENCKI, RAFAŁ

2018. Fromsickertosure: the contact-induced lexical layering within the Medieval English adjectives of certainty. English Language and Linguistics 22:2 ► pp. 283 ff.

Percillier, Michael

2020. Allostructions, homostructions or a constructional family?. In Nodes and Networks in Diachronic Construction Grammar [Constructional Approaches to Language, 27], ► pp. 214 ff.

Percillier, Michael

2022. Chapter 2. Adapting the Dynamic Model to historical linguistics. In English Historical Linguistics [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 359], ► pp. 6 ff.

Putter, Ad, Joanna Kopaczyk & Venetia Bridges

2023. Textual and Codicological Manifestations of Multilingual Culture in Medieval England. In Medieval English in a Multilingual Context [New Approaches to English Historical Linguistics, ], ► pp. 407 ff.

Reed, Emily

2023. The Materiality of the Manières de langage. In Medieval English in a Multilingual Context [New Approaches to English Historical Linguistics, ], ► pp. 499 ff.

Roberge, Paul

2020. Contact and the History of Germanic Languages. In The Handbook of Language Contact, ► pp. 323 ff.

Roig-Marín, Amanda

2021. On the Latin-Romance continuum in theDurham Account Rolls. Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 137:2 ► pp. 319 ff.

Roig-Marín, Amanda

2023. Introduction: Reassessing Multilingualism in Medieval Britain. Anglica. An International Journal of English Studies :32/4 ► pp. 5 ff.

Shaw, Marlieke & Hendrik De Smet

2022. Loan Word Accommodation Biases: Markedness and Finiteness. Transactions of the Philological Society 120:2 ► pp. 201 ff.

SYLVESTER, LOUISE

2018. Contact effects on the technical lexis of Middle English: a semantic hierarchic approach. English Language and Linguistics 22:2 ► pp. 249 ff.

TIMOFEEVA, OLGA

2018. Survival and loss of Old English religious vocabulary between 1150 and 1350. English Language and Linguistics 22:2 ► pp. 225 ff.

TIMOFEEVA, OLGA & RICHARD INGHAM

2018. Special issue on mechanisms of French contact influence in Middle English: diffusion and maintenance. English Language and Linguistics 22:2 ► pp. 197 ff.

Trips, Carola

2020. Copying of argument structure. In Historical Linguistics 2017 [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 350], ► pp. 410 ff.

Trips, Carola & Achim Stein

2018. A comparison of multi-genre and single-genre corpora in the context of contact-induced change. In Diachronic Corpora, Genre, and Language Change [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 85], ► pp. 241 ff.

Trips, Carola & Peter A. Stokes

2023. From Original Sources to Linguistic Analysis: Tools and Datasets for the Investigation of Multilingualism in Medieval English. In Medieval English in a Multilingual Context [New Approaches to English Historical Linguistics, ], ► pp. 49 ff.

Trotter, David

2016. Nissille Christel, «Grammaire floue» et enseignement du français en Angleterre au XVe siècle: les leçons du manuscrit Oxford Magdalen 188 (Romanica Helvetica, 133.) Tübingen: A. Francke Verlag, 2014, x + 492 pp. + CD-ROM. 978 3 7720 8508 6 (paperback). Journal of French Language Studies 26:2 ► pp. 239 ff.

van der Auwera, Johan & Daniël Van Olmen

2017. The Germanic Languages and Areal Linguistics. In The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics, ► pp. 239 ff.

Walkden, George, Juhani Klemola & Thomas Rainsford

2023. An Overview of Contact-Induced Morphosyntactic Changes in Early English. In Medieval English in a Multilingual Context [New Approaches to English Historical Linguistics, ], ► pp. 239 ff.

[no author supplied]

2013. PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED. English Language and Linguistics 17:1 ► pp. 227 ff.

[no author supplied]

2022. Sociolinguistic Variation in Old English [Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, 13],

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 16 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Subjects