Investigating language change using Anglo-Norman spoken and written register data
Ingham, R. (2016) Investigating language change using Anglo-Norman spoken and written register data. Linguistics, 54 (2). pp. 381-410. ISSN 00243949 (ISSN)
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
Language change is generally considered to originate in the spoken mode before spreading to the written mode, although the latter provides all our available data for language change until recent times. While written mode representations of speech, such as fictional dialogue, can be used, their authenticity is hard to verify. This study addresses these issues by comparing the language of the Year Books, texts which attest to oral pleading in medieval courts, and include very extensive dialogue, with legal register written-mode origin texts, in the Parliament Rolls of Medieval England. Both sets of texts were written in Anglo-Norman, arose within a fairly homogenous speech community, and cover the same time period - late thirteenth century until c. 1350. It is shown that changes known to have occurred in later medieval French are instantiated at this time in the dialogic texts, but to a lesser degree or not at all in the written register texts. Features of morphology, lexical semantic extension, and discourse syntax in these sources indicate in each case that the innovation arose and spread first in the spoken origin source. Support from diachronic change is thus offered for a continuity assumption for the primacy of the spoken mode in present and past states of language. © 2016 by De Gruyter Mouton.
| Item Type: | Article | ||||||
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| Identification Number: | https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2016-0004 | ||||||
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| Uncontrolled Keywords: | Anglo-Norman, change, Old French, orality, register | ||||||
| Subjects: | CAH19 - language and area studies > CAH19-01 - English studies > CAH19-01-07 - linguistics CAH19 - language and area studies > CAH19-01 - English studies > CAH19-01-01 - English studies (non-specific) CAH19 - language and area studies > CAH19-01 - English studies > CAH19-01-06 - others in English studies |
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| Divisions: | Faculty of Arts, Design and Media > Birmingham Institute of Media and English > School of English | ||||||
| Depositing User: | Users 18 not found. | ||||||
| Date Deposited: | 08 Nov 2016 15:41 | ||||||
| Last Modified: | 03 Mar 2022 15:59 | ||||||
| URI: | https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/id/eprint/504 |
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