Cover not available
Part of
Investigating West Germanic Languages: Studies in honor of Robert B. Howell
Edited by Jennifer Hendriks and B. Richard Page
[Studies in Germanic Linguistics 8] 2024
► pp. 80–106

Sound change, analogy, and urban koineization in the regularization of verbs in late fourteenth-century English

| University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
This paper presents a detailed comparison of certain verb forms in Sir Firumbras, a text produced in a relatively remote part of southwestern England around 1380, with those found in texts produced in the London area around the same time. The forms in question reflect a collapse in some dialects of earlier present-tense distinctions between strong verbs and the largest class of weak verbs. This collapse is commonly assumed to have affected southern English in general but the evidence presented here suggests that it may initially have been characteristic only of urban regions with an influx of migrants from other parts of the country.
Keywords: verbal inflection, historical dialectology, word-and-paradigm morphology, proportional analogy
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Terminological preliminaries
  • 3.The Great-English-Verb-Regularization hypothesis
  • 4.Early Middle English verbal inflection
  • 5.Middle English verbal inflection after 1350
    • 5.1Sir Firumbras
  • 6.Quantitative findings from the LAEME corpus, Sir Firumbras, and the MED citations
  • 7.Regularization of strong and Type-1 weak verbs in Sir Firumbras
  • 8.The role of London koineization in the collapse of the Type-1–Type-2 present-tense distinction
  • 9.Summary and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 May 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sigl.8.06fer
References (44)
References
Algeo, John & Thomas Pyles. 2004. The origins and development of the English language. 5th edn. Boston: Thomas Wadsworth.Google Scholar
Baayen, Harald R., Yu-Ying Chuang, Elnaz Shafaei-Bajestan & James P. Blevins. 2019. The discriminative lexicon: A unified computational model for the lexicon and lexical processing in comprehension and production grounded not in (de)composition but in linear discriminative learning. Complexity 2019(1). 1–39. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baugh, Albert C. & Thomas Cable. 2013. A History of the English Language. 6th edn. Boston: Pearson.Google Scholar
Bennett, J. A. W. & G. V. Smithers. 1968. Early Middle English verse and prose. 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Benskin, Michael, Margaret Laing, Vasalis Karaiskos and Keith Williamson (eds.). 2013. An electronic version of A linguistic atlas of Late Mediaeval English [[URL]] Edinburgh: The University of Edinburgh.Google Scholar
Blevins, James P. 2016. Word and paradigm morphology. Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blevins, James P., Farrell Ackerman & Robert Malouf. 2019. Word-and-paradigm morphology. In Audring, Jenny & Francesca Masini (eds.), Oxford handbook of morphological theory, 265–284. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Blevins, James. P., Petar Milin & Michael Ramscar. 2017. The Zipfian paradigm cell-filling problem. In Kiefer, Ferenc, James P. Blevins & Huba Bartos (eds.), Perspectives on morphological organization, 141–158. Leiden: Brill. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brunner, Karl. 1951. Die englische Sprache ihre geschichtliche Entwicklung, vol. 2. Halle: Niemeyer.Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan. 1995. Regular morphology and the lexicon. Language and Cognitive Processes 10(5). 425–455. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Carroll, Ryan, Ragnar Svare & Joseph Salmons. 2012. Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of German verbs. Journal of Historical Linguistics 2(2). 153–172. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Smet, Isabeau & Freek Van de Velde. 2020. A corpus-based quantitative analysis of twelve centuries of preterite and past participle morphology in Dutch. Language Variation and Change 32(2). 241–265. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Enger, Hans-Olav. 2013. Inflectional change, ‘sound laws’, and the autonomy of morphology. Diachronica 30. 1–26. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fertig, David. 2009. Are strong verbs really dying to fit in? Talk presented at the 15th Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference (GLAC 15), Banff. ([URL])Google Scholar
Gradon, Pamela (ed.). 1965. Dan Michel’s Ayenbite of Inwyt or Remorse of conscience... Richard Morris's transcription now newly collated with the unique manuscript British Museum Ms. Arundel 57 (Early English Text Society). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Gray, Tyler J., Andrew J. Reagan, Peter Sheridan Dodds & Christopher M. Danforth. 2018. English verb regularization in books and tweets. arXiv:1803.09745 [cs.CL]. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Herrtage, Sidney J. (ed.). 1879. Sir Ferumbras, (The English Charlemagne romances, part I) (Early English Text Society). London: Trübner.Google Scholar
Horobin, Simon. 2005. ‘In London and Opelond’: The dialect and circulation of the C version of Piers Plowman. Medium Ævum 74(2). 248–269. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Howell, R. 2006. Immigration and koineisation: the formation of early modern Dutch urban vernaculars. Transactions of the Philological Society, 104. 207–227. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Keene, Derek. 2000. Metropolitan values: migration, mobility and cultural norms, London 1100–1700. In Wright, Laura (ed.), The development of Standard English 1300–1800. 93–114 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kerswill, Paul & Ann Williams. 2000. Creating a New Town koine: Children and language change in Milton Keynes. Language in Society 29(1). 65–115. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Labov, William. 1994. Principles of linguistic change, vol. 1: Internal factors. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
LAEME. See Laing 2013.
Laing, Margaret. 2013. A linguistic atlas of Early Middle English, 1150–1325, Version 3.2 [[URL]]. Edinburgh: The University of Edinburgh. (Last accessed 08 September 2021.)Google Scholar
LALME. See Benskin et al. 2013.
Lass, Roger. 1993. Proliferation and option-cutting: The strong verb in the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. In Stein, Dieter & Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (eds.), Towards a standard English, 81–114. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2006. Phonology and morphology. In Hogg, Richard & David Denison (eds.), A history of the English Language, 43–108. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lewis, Robert E., Hans Kurath & Sherman M. Kuhn (eds.). 1952–2001. Middle English Dictionary. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. (Online edition in Frances McSparran et al (eds.). Middle English Compendium. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Library, 2000–2018). <[URL]>. (Last accessed 08 September 2021.)Google Scholar
Lieberman, Erez, Jean-Baptiste Michel, Joe Jackson, Tina Tang & Martin A. Nowak. 2007. Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language. Nature 479. 713–716.Google Scholar
Lounsbury, Thomas Raynesford. 1908. Conflicts of usage. Harper’s 1908(10). 701–706.Google Scholar
MED = Middle English Dictionary. See Lewis et al. 1952–2001.
Michelau, Erich. 1910. Der Übertritt starker Verba in die schwache Coniugation im Englischen. Doctoral dissertation, Albertus-Universität zu Königsberg im Preußen.Google Scholar
Morris, Richard (ed.). 1866. Dan Michel’s Ayenbite of Inwyt or, Remorse of Conscience, (Early English Text Society). London: Trübner.Google Scholar
Mossé, Fernand. 1952. A handbook of Middle English, translated by James A. Walker. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nübling, Damaris. 2000. Prinzipien der Irregularisierung. Tübingen: Niemeyer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
OED Online. 2021. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Last accessed 08 September 2021.)
Paul, Hermann. 1886. Principien der Sprachgeschichte. 2nd edn. Halle: Niemeyer.Google Scholar
Pinker, Steven & Alan Prince. 1988. On language and connectionism: Analysis of a parallel distributed processing model of language acquisition. Cognition 28. 73–194. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Samuels, M. L. 1963. Some applications of Middle English dialectology. English Studies 44. 81–94. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Trask, R. L. 1996. Historical linguistics. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
van Gelderen, Elly. 2006. A history of the English language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wright, Joseph & Elizabeth Mary Wright. 1908. Old English grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Wright, Laura. 2005. Medieval mixed-language business discourse and the rise of Standard English. In Skaffari, Janne, Matti Pelkola, Ruth Carroll, Risto Hiltunen & Brita Wårvik (eds.), Opening windows on texts and discourses of the past, 381–399. Philadelphia: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wurzel, Wolfgang Ullrich. 1989. Inflectional morphology and naturalness. Boston: Kluwer.Google Scholar