Full Description
An Introduction to Middle English combines an elementary grammar of the English language from about 1100 to about 1500 with a selection of texts for reading, ranging in date from 1154 to 1500. The grammar includes the fundamentals of orthography, phonology, morphology, syntax, regional dialectology, and prosody. In the thirty-eight texts for reading are represented a wide range of Middle English dialects, and the commentary on each text includes, in addition to explanatory notes, extensive linguistic analysis.
The book includes many useful figures and illustrations, including images of Middle English manuscripts as an aid to learning to decipher medieval handwriting and maps indicating the geographical extent of dialect features. This introduction to Middle English is based on the latest research, and it provides up-to-date bibliographical guidance to the study of the language.
Contents
LIST OF CHARTS
LIST OF FACSIMILES
LIST OF FIGURES
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
PREFACE
GRAMMAR
I. HISTORY, ORTHOGRAPHY, AND PRONUNCIATION
A. Historical overview
1. The transition from Old to Middle English. 2. The transition from Middle to Modern English.
B. Orthography
3. Phonetic symbols and phonological terms. 4. The alphabet. 5. Sounds andspelling: consonants. 6. Sounds and spelling: vowels. 7. Sample spellings ofstressed vowels.
II. PHONOLOGY
A. Stress and syllables
8. Lexical stress and syllabification. 9. Phrasal stress.
B. Stressed vowels
10. Vowels at the close of the OE period.
Quantitative variation: shortening
11. Shortening before consonant groups. 12. Trisyllabic shortening.
Quantitative variation: lengthening
13. Lengthening before homorganic consonant clusters. 14. Lengthening in open syllables. 15. Compensatory lengthening. 16. Quantity in words borrowed from French.
Qualitative variation: native vowels
17. The OE short low vowels. 18. OE æ. 19. OE ā. 20. OE ý.
21. OE ō. 22. OE diphthongs. 23. The rise of new front diphthongs.
24. The rise of new back diphthongs.
Qualitative variation: non-native vowels
25. Vowels in borrowings from Old Norse. 26. Vowels in borrowings from French.
27. Summary of developments in the stressed vowels. 28. The Great Vowel Shift.
C. Vowels in syllables of lesser stress
29. Centralization and laxing of unstressed vowels. 30. Loss of final -e. 31. Loss of /ə/ in syllables closed by a final consonant. 32. Disyllabic and polysyllabic stems. 33. Vowels of prefixes. 34. Unaccented words.
D. Consonants
35. The consonant system of Middle English. 36. Voicing and devoicing.
37. Assimilation. 38. Deletion. 39. ME ȝ and the development of glides.
40. Metathesis, epenthesis, metanalysis. 41. Some dialectal developments.
III. MORPHOLOGY
A. Nouns
42. Declension in Old English. 43. Reduction of case distinctions. 44. Elimination of grammatical gender. 45. Three declensional classes. 46. Exceptions to the general trend. 47. The inflectional morphology of loaned French nouns.
B. Adjectives
48. Definite and indefinite inflection. 49. Strong and weak inflection in ME.50. Comparison of adjectives.
C. Numerals
51. Cardinal numbers. 52. Ordinal numbers.
D. Pronouns and articles
53. Historical development.
Personal pronouns
54. First and second persons. 55. Third person. 56. Possessive pronouns.
Demonstrative pronouns and articles
57. The definite article. 58. Demonstrative þat. 59. Demonstrative þis.
60. Other demonstratives and articles.
Interrogative pronouns
61. The OE types and their development.
Relative pronouns
62. The OE types and their development.
Indefinite pronouns
63. Inventory.
E. Verbs
64. Background.
Inflections
65. Inflections of the present tense. 66. Inflections of the preterite.
Stems: strong
67. Sample paradigm of a strong verb. 68. Principal parts and chief developments.69. Alternate stem types. 70. The seven classes of strong verbs.71. Strong class 1. 72. Strong class 2. 73. Strong class 3. 74. Strong class 4.75. Strong class 5. 76. Strong class 6. 77. Strong class 7.
Stems: weak
78. The OE background. 79. Sample paradigms. 80. Variant stem typesof regular verbs. 81. Examples of the stem types. 82. Irregular weak verbs.
Preterite-present verbs
83. Background. 84. Inventory.
Athematic verbs
85. Background. 86. The verb ben. 87. The verb don. 88. The verb gon.
89. The verb willen.
IV. MORPHOSYNTACTIC CHANGE, SYNTAX, AND SEMANTICS
A. Historical overview
90. Syntactic and morphosyntactic change.
B. The noun phrase and its elements
Morphosyntactic properties of nouns and adjectives
91. Gender. 92. Case. 93. Number. 94. Substantive adjectives. 95. Adjectivecomplements. 96. Comparison of adjectives and adverbs. 97. Placement ofadjectives. 98. The position of quantifiers.
Articles and pronouns
99. Rise of the indefinite article. 100. The particularizing pronoun one.
101. Reflexive pronouns. 102. Familiar and formal pronouns in forms of address. 103. Relative pronouns and their antecedents. 104. Ellipsis of relative pronoun.
Subjects and direct objects
105. Ellipsis of the subject. 106. Pleonastic subjects. 107. Compound subjects. 108. Ellipsis of the object. 109. Pleonastic object.
C. The prepositional phrase
110. The preposition of. 111. The prepositions mid and wiþ. 112. The preposition to.
113. The preposition into. 114. The expression of agency in passive constructions.
115. Postpositive prepositions. 116. Preposition stranding. 117. Prepositions with pronominal objects.
D. The verb phrase
118. Tense and aspect. 119. Mood: imperative. 120. Mood: subjunctive. 121. Mood: interrogative. 122. Impersonal and passive constructions. 123. Existential constructions. 124. Negation. 125. Auxiliaries. 126. Infinitive constructions.
E. The clause
127. Position of adverbial elements. 128. Position of objects. 129. Extraposition fromclauses. 130. Subordinating conjunctions. 131. Placement of the verb.
V. REGIONAL DIALECTOLOGY
Factors in dialect variation
132. Orthography and phonology. 133. Mischsprachen. 134. The nature ofregional variation.
Dialect maps
135. The Middle English dialect atlases. 136. LALME maps.
137. Some major isoglosses: introduction. 138. Some major isoglosses:descriptions.
VI. POETIC FORM
139. Poetic types.
A. Isochronous verse
Scansion
140. Metrical feet. 141. Unstressed vowels. 142. Trisyllables. 143. Synizesis.144. Metrical properties of borrowings from French.
Forms
145. Narrative forms. 146. Lyric forms. 147. The septenarius.
B. Anisochronous verse
148. Historical background. 149. Early ME alliterative verse. 150. The AlliterativeRevival. 151. The alliterative form in the fourteenth century.
TEXTS
A NOTE ON THE TEXTS
TWELFTH CENTURY
The Peterborough Chronicle
The Soul's Address to the Body
The Ormulum
Poema morale
THIRTEENTH CENTURY
Ancrene Wisse
La3amon, Brut
Kentish Sermons
The Physiologus
Seinte Marherete
The Proverbs of Alfred
The 1258 Proclamation of Henry III
The Fox and the Wolf
Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?
The Thrush and the Nightingale
King Horn
The Owl and the Nightingale
Havelok
The Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester
FOURTEENTH CENTURY
Cursor Mundi
Robert Mannyng of Brunne, Handlyng Synne
Dan Michel of Northgate, Ayenbyte of Inwyt
Laurence Minot, The Siege of Calais
Richard Rolle, Three Exempla
The Stanzaic Morte Arthur
Patience
The Alliterative Morte Arthure
William Langland, Piers Plowman
John Barbour, The Bruce
John of Trevisa, Translation of Ranulph Higden's Polychronicon
Petition of the Company of Mercers of London to Parliament (1388)
John Gower, Confessio Amantis
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Nun's Priest's Tale, from The Canterbury Tales
FIFTEENTH CENTURY
Thomas Hoccleve, La male regle
John Lydgate, The Siege of Thebes
The Book of Margery Kempe
Margaret Paston, Two Letters to John Paston I (1444, 1448)
The Wakefield Second Shepherds' Play
Robert Henryson, The Testament of Cresseid
APPENDIX
GLOSSARY
REFERENCES
