Records of Real People

Linguistic variation in Middle English local documents

Editors
Merja Stenroos | University of Stavanger
Kjetil V. Thengs | University of Stavanger
HardboundAvailable
ISBN 9789027207951 | EUR 99.00 | USD 149.00
 
e-Book
ISBN 9789027260482 | EUR 99.00 | USD 149.00
 
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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
Table of Contents
Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

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. DOI logo
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. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 15 march 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

Main BIC Subject

CFF: Historical & comparative linguistics

Main BISAC Subject

LAN009010: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / Historical & Comparative
ONIX Metadata
ONIX 2.1
ONIX 3.0
U.S. Library of Congress Control Number:  2020032626 | Marc record