Books in the Studies in English Medieval Language and Literature series

This collection of articles deals with the manuscripts, textual transmission, punctuation, spelling, grammar and vocabulary of the "Ancrene Wisse", the Katherine Group and the Wooing Group. A close comparison based on parallel texts substantiates detailed findings about linguistic variation and the role of scribes.

This book is on English historical linguistics. It deals with the history of sounds and spellings (e.g. Old English runes), words and phrases, conjunctions, relative clauses, impersonal and passive constructions. It sheds light on the use of English dialects in literature, the importance of J.R.R. Tolkien, and Chinese translations of Beowulf.

The volume brings together scholars researching topics in various fields of the history of the English language. The book addresses the history of linguistic thought with nine chapters devoted to different linguistic disciplines i.e. sound and spelling changes, historical word-formation processes, selected semantic domains, and manuscript variants.

The essays discuss the development of English during the Middle Ages. A common theme is variation and variability - dialectal, social, temporal, stylistic and idiolectal - with much work fitting under the heading of historical pragmatics. Some of the essays also shed light on everyday life, customs, culture and religious practices.

This study contains various words and expressions of emotion found in Old and Middle English texts. Words and expressions of emotion in medieval English are discussed lexically, semantically and syntactically. Texts are examined to find appropriate examples to illustrate usage, rivalry among synonyms, constructions peculiar to Old and Middle English.

This book focuses on ambiguity in Troilus and Criseyde, one of Geoffrey Chaucer's (1343?-1400) representative works. It examines systematically how and why ambiguity is likely to arise. Ambiguity in Chaucer has not been studied in sufficient detail so far. The work opens new vistas for the study of the phenomenon.

Betwixt engelaunde and englene londe

Presents an analysis of the causes of obsolescence of Scandinavian loanwords in English since the 15th century. This study has mainly been based on the Oxford English Dictionary and the Middle English Dictionary.

The thirteen articles in this volume present a multidisciplinar approach to Old and Middle English language and literature, offering cutting-edge perspectives on different aspects of linguistic and literary developments in those periods and rendering an up-to-date overview of the work on English diachronic linguistics and literary analysis today.

More than any other European language English has been shaped by its contacts with other languages such as Celtic, Latin, Scandinavian and French. This is true not only of the vocabulary, but also of morphology and even phonology and syntax. But also the contact between different varieties of English played an important role, especially in the shaping of the Englishes outside England. The papers contained in this volume deal with such contacts from various points of views. Major topics are: the restructuring of lexical fields by borrowing processes in Old, Middle and Early Modern English, the influence of Scandinavian on the morphology, the influence of Latin on English syntax, the development of Middle English verse meter under Italian influence, the origin of spelling conventions, the role of code-switching and language mixing for the development of the language, and the role of language contact in general in Central Europe.

This volume contains research papers on miscellaneous issues of Middle English studies putting a notable emphasis on up-to-date tools and methodologies. It involves lexical studies, phonology, semantics, morphological and syntactic processes as well as issues of language contacts, variables in manuscripts and dialects and insights into literature.

Grammaticalisation Paths of Have in English

The papers in this volume embrace a variety of research topics and approaches, with particular interest in multilingualism, multidialectalism and language contact in medieval England. The book gives a specialized stance on language change in Middle English at different levels: phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics.

This book provides the reader with a description of the semantic change that took place over two periods of the history of English language: Middle English and Early Modern English. The results of the analysis indicate a tendency towards specialisation in the meaning of lexical categories which runs parallel to specialisation in society.