Records of Real People

Linguistic variation in Middle English local documents

Editors

Merja Stenroos | University of Stavanger

Kjetil V. Thengs | University of Stavanger

Hardbound – Available

ISBN 9789027207951 | EUR 99.00 | USD 149.00

e-Book –

ISBN 9789027260482 | EUR 99.00 | USD 149.00

English local documents – leases, wills, accounts, letters and the like – provide a unique resource for historical sociolinguistics. Abundant from the early fifteenth century, they represent the language and concerns of people from a wide range of social, institutional and geographical backgrounds. However, as relatively few documents have been available digitally or in print, they have been an underresearched resource.

This volume shows the tremendous potential of late- and post-medieval English local documents: highly variable in language, often colourful, including developing formulae as well as glimpses of actual recorded speech. The volume contains eleven chapters relating to a new resource, A Corpus of Middle English Local Documents (MELD). The first four chapters outline a theoretical and methodological approach to the study of local documents. The remaining seven present studies of different aspects of the material, including supralocalization, local patterns of spelling and morphology, land terminology, punctuation, formulaicness and multilingualism.

[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, 11] 2020. ix, 310 pp.

Publishing status: Available
Published online on 22 November 2020

https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.11

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements | pp. vii–viii

Note on the cited texts and conventions | pp. ix–9

Part I. Approaches to Middle English local documents

Chapter 1. Local documents as source material for the study of late medieval English

Merja Stenroos and Kjetil V. Thengs | pp. 3–22

Chapter 2. Grouping and regrouping Middle English documents

Martti Mäkinen | pp. 23–36

Chapter 3. The categorization of Middle English documents: Interactions of function, form and language

Merja Stenroos, Geir Bergstrøm and Kjetil V. Thengs | pp. 37–68

Chapter 4. The geography of Middle English documentary texts

Merja Stenroos and Kjetil V. Thengs | pp. 69–92

Part II. Text communities and geographical variation

Chapter 5. Regional variation and supralocalization in late medieval English: Comparing administrative and literary texts

Merja Stenroos | pp. 95–128

Chapter 6. Cambridge: A University town

Geir Bergstrøm | pp. 129–154

Chapter 7. Knutsford and Nantwich: Scribal variation in late medieval Cheshire

Kjetil V. Thengs | pp. 155–174

Chapter 8. Land documents as a source of word geography

Merja Stenroos | pp. 175–202

Part III. Social and pragmatic variation

Chapter 9. The pragmatics of punctuation in Middle English documentary texts

Jeremy J. Smith | pp. 205–218

Chapter 10. Ventriloquism or individual voice: Formulaic language in heresy abjurations

Kenneth Solberg-Harestad | pp. 219–248

Chapter 11. Multilingual practices in Middle English documents

Merja Stenroos and Delia Schipor | pp. 249–277

References

List of cited documents | pp. 297–306

Index | pp. 307–310

Cited by (5)

Cited by five other publications

Order by:

Cahill, Lynne

2023. The standardisation of spelling in Middle English. Written Language & Literacy 26:1 ► pp. 131 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.

Oudesluijs, Tino

2023. Scribal Networks and the Language of Urban Administration. Linguistica 63:1-2 ► pp. 41 ff.

Timofeeva, Olga

2022. The Art of Dying: Making a Will in Old English and Its Sociolinguistic Context. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 57:1 ► pp. 109 ff.

[no author supplied]

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

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 19 july 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