When arīven Came to England: Tracing Lexical Re-Structuring by Borrowing in Middle and Early Modern English. A Case Study

In contrast to Early Modern English, little is known about address pronouns in Scotland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This paper investigates early Scottish pronoun usage in more detail by presenting a case study on singular pronominal address in Late Middle Scottish and Early Modern Northern English witness depositions from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The source texts drawn from the Criminal Trials in Scotland 1488–1624, the Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots 1450–1700 and A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 are examined with a quantitative and qualitative approach based on historical pragmatics and historical sociolinguistics. Thou is found to be relatively frequent in the Scottish and Northern English data in comparison with the rapid decline in thou recently found in South-Eastern English depositions. However, there are significant differences in the distributions of pronouns, which are explained by an overrepresentation of upper social ranks in the Scottish sub-corpus.

Download Full-text

“Nature’s Bastards”: Grafted Generation in Early Modern England

Renaissance and Reformation ◽

10.33137/rr.v38i2.25622 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 38 (2) ◽

pp. 121-148

Author(s):

Claire Duncan

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Natural World ◽

Early Modern England ◽

The Winter's Tale ◽

Scientific Texts ◽

Winter's Tale ◽

Early Modern English ◽

Reproduction Humaine

This paper examines the shared rhetoric between human and horticultural generation in early modern England, particularly focusing on grafting. Early modern English gardening manuals imagine grafting as a method of controlling generation in the natural world, and early modern English obstetrical treatises imagine the female generative body in horticultural language. Alongside these scientific texts, this article uses Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale as a literary case study of grafting rhetoric. Ultimately, while grafting treatises imagine man’s power over generation in the natural world and obstetrical treatises imagine controlling human generation using horticultural metaphor, The Winter’s Tale complicates this fantasy by depicting Leontes’s efforts at genealogical control as unnecessary and fruitless: not only do Perdita and Hermione survive and flourish after his attempts to kill them, but Perdita is the legitimate and non-grafted offspring of Hermione and Leontes. Cet article examine la rhétorique que partagent la reproduction humaine et l’horticulture en Angleterre au début de l’époque moderne. Les ouvrages portant sur les jardins, à l’époque, représentent la greffe comme une méthode pour contrôler la reproduction dans le monde naturel, tandis que les ouvrages d’obstétrique de la même époque représentent la capacité reproductrice du corps féminin en termes d’horticulture. A côté de ces textes scientifiques, on se sert dans cet article de la pièce de Shakespeare The Winter’s Tale comme exemple de la rhétorique de la greffe. En dernière analyse, tandis que les ouvrages décrivant la greffe représentent la puissance humaine sur la reproduction dans le monde naturel et que les ouvrages d’obstétrique représentent la reproduction humaine avec des métaphores tirées de l’horticulture, The Winter’s Tale vient compliquer cet imaginaire en présentant comme futiles les tentatives de contrôle généalogique de Leontes : non seulement Perdita et Hermione survivent et fleurissent après les tentatives de meurtre, mais encore Perdita est le fruit légitime non-greffé des amours d’Hermione et Leontes.

Download Full-text

Stylistic Devices in The Schoole of Vertue, an Early Modern Manual of Good Conduct for Children

Studia Anglica Posnaniensia ◽

10.1515/stap-2016-0016 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 51 (3) ◽

pp. 95-124

Author(s):

Hanna Rutkowska

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Literary Texts ◽

Second Person ◽

Emotional Closeness ◽

Rhetorical Device ◽

Rhetorical Devices ◽

Early Modern English ◽

The Relationship ◽

Good Behaviour

Abstract This paper is a case study examining the choice and interaction of stylistic devices employed in The Schoole of Vertue, Francis Segar and Robert Crowley’s manual of good manners for children issued between 1582 and 1687. It was designed to convince its readers that particular patterns of behaviour were socially beneficial and worth following. In order to enhance the attractiveness, persuasiveness, and mnemonic qualities of the text, several stylistic devices are employed in the manual, including, for example, rhymes, acronyms, as well as binomials. It is generally agreed that repetitive patterns (especially binomials) are typical of formal registers, and particularly plentiful in legal and literary texts in Early Modern English, but the present study shows that similar rhetorical devices were also readily employed in the less formal and elevated style of manuals of good behaviour. Another rhetorical device frequently used in the manual under consideration consists in addressing the reader directly with the second person singular pronoun, especially in imperative constructions, thus creating an ambiance of emotional closeness, characterising the relationship between the master and the pupil.

Download Full-text

Between Homonymy and Polysemy: The Origins and Career of the English Form Dialect in the Sixteenth Century

Anglia - Zeitschrift für englische Philologie ◽

10.1515/ang-2016-0072 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 134 (4) ◽

Author(s):

Raf Van Rooy ◽

John Considine

Keyword(s):

Sixteenth Century ◽

Early Modern ◽

Language Variation ◽

English Word ◽

Detailed Case ◽

Early Modern English ◽

History Of

AbstractThe emergence of the form dialect in early modern English is often mentioned in histories of the language, but important as it is, the evidence for it has never been analyzed as a whole, and its treatment in the revised OED entry for dialect leaves room for modifications. This article presents and re-evaluates the evidence for dialect in sixteenth-century English sources. It demonstrates that there were two homonyms with this form, one a shortening of English dialectics and one a borrowing from post-classical Latin dialectus, from its Greek etymon διάλεκτος, and, less often, from French dialecte. After treating dialect ‘dialectics’ briefly, it explores the known attestations of dialect ‘kind of language’, showing the range of senses in which this word could be used, and the ways in which it can be shown to have spread from one user of English to another, beginning with one clearly defined expatriate learned circle in the 1560s, entering more general learned use in the 1570s and 1580s, and becoming a fully naturalized literary English word in the 1590s. The paper therefore offers a detailed case-study of the naturalization of a learned word in early modern English and also contributes to the history of the conceptualization of language variation in sixteenth-century England.

Download Full-text

The intertwining of differentiation and attraction as exemplified by the history of recipient transfer and benefactive alternations

Cognitive Linguistics ◽

10.1515/cog-2019-0042 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 31 (4) ◽

pp. 549-578

Author(s):

Elizabeth Closs Traugott

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Middle English ◽

Significant Role ◽

Levels Of Abstraction ◽

Dative Alternation ◽

Early Modern English ◽

History Of

AbstractDe Smet et al. (2018) propose that when functionally similar constructions come to overlap, analogical attraction may occur. So may differentiation, but this process involves attraction to other subnetworks and is both “accidental” and “exceptional”. I argue that differentiation plays a considerably more significant role than De Smet et al. allow. My case study is the development of the dative and benefactive alternations. The rise of the dative alternation (e.g., “gave the Saxons land” ∼ “gave land to the Saxons”) has been shown to occur in later Middle English between 1400 and 1500 (Zehentner 2018). Building on Zehentner and Traugott (2020), the rise of the benefactive alternation (e.g., “build her a house” ∼ “build a house for her”) in Early Modern English c1650 is analyzed from a historical constructionalist perspective and compared with the rise of the dative alternation. The histories of the alternations exemplify the rise of functionally similar constructions that overlap, and show that differentiation from each other plays as large a role as attraction. Both attraction and differentiation occur at several levels of abstraction: verb-specific constructions, schemas and larger systemic changes.

Download Full-text

Changes in argument structure in Early Modern English with special reference to verbs of DESIRE: A case study of lust

Research in Corpus Linguistics ◽

10.32714/ricl.07.07 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 7 ◽

pp. 129-154

Author(s):

Noelia Castro-Chao

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Special Reference ◽

Middle English ◽

Argument Structure ◽

Nominative Case ◽

Early Modern English ◽

Verbal Agreement ◽

Early English

In Old and Middle English, several verbs of DESIRE could be found in impersonal constructions, a type of morphosyntactic pattern which lacks a subject marked for the nominative case controlling verbal agreement. The impersonal construction began to decrease in frequency between 1400 and 1500 (van der Gaaf 1904; Allen 1995), a development which has been recently investigated from the perspective of the interaction between impersonal verbs and constructional meaning by Trousdale (2008), Möhlig-Falke (2012) and Miura (2015). This paper is concerned specifically with the impersonal verb lust (< ME lusten) as a representative of Levin’s (1993) class of verbs of DESIRE, some of which developed into prepositional verbs in Present-day English. The main aim here is to explore the changes undergone by lust during the two centuries after it ceases to appear in impersonal constructions, as well as to reflect upon some of the possible motivations for such changes. The data are retrieved from Early English Books Online Corpus 1.0, a 525-million-word corpus, and the examples are analysed manually paying attention to the range of complementation patterns documented in Early Modern English (1500–1700).

Download Full-text