Records of real people : linguistic variation in Middle English local documents / edited by Merja-Riitta Stenroos, Kjetil V. Thengs.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Stenroos, Merja-Riitta, editor.

Thengs, Kjetil V., editor.

Series:

Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics ; 11

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English language--History--Middle English, 1100-1500.

English language.

English language--Dialects--Middle English, 1100-1500.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (322 pages) : illustrations

Place of Publication:

Amsterdam, Netherlands ; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania : John Benjamins Publishing Company, [2020]

Summary:

"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"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Part 1. Approaches to Middle English local documents

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

Grouping and regrouping Middle English documents

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

The geography of Middle English documentary texts

Part 2. Text communities and geographical variation

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

Cambridge: A university town

Knutsford and Nantwich: Scribal variation in late medieval Cheshire

Land documents as a source of word geography

Part 3. Social and pragmatic variation

The pragmatics of punctuation in Middle English documentary texts

Ventriloquism or individual voice: Formulaic language in heresy abjurations

Multilingual practices in Middle English documents.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.