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MIDDLE ENGLISH - Coggle Diagram
MIDDLE ENGLISH
HISTORICAL
BACKGROUND
Multilingualism
1080-1150
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Triglostic language situation
- French: government, law, church, administration
- Latin: administration, education, worship
- English: spoken by commoners
1100+: individual multilingualism
- baronial staff communicate with locals
- English learn French to reach upper classes
- Increasing intermarriages
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LINGUISTIC
FEATURES
Morphology
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Some verb endings remained, similar to OE
Likely due to changes in word stress to first syllable
caused auditory problems at the end of words
suffixes first pronounced as neutral vowel shwa
Led to drop in grammatical markers and functions
Leading to case confusion!
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Syntax
Word order becomes crucial!
Free words order develops into SVO word order
Becomes fixed word order in EmE
Emergence of the (postmodifying) prepositional genitive
= the of-genitive, possibly influenced by French 'de la'
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Emergence and spread of do-support in interrogatives, negations, emphasis, verb phrase anaphora, question tags
INFLUENCES
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Lexis
Old Norman French Loanwords, replaced OE!
except for terms such as King, Queen, etc.
Sometimes combinations: gentleman
Sometimes near-symptoms: liberty vs. freedom
Latin Loanwords
especially in Early Middle English
Simultaneous borrowings cause
more near-symptoms! e.g. real, royal, regal
Doublets due to re-borrowings: poor-pauper
Other languages: Dutch, Spanish,
Portuguese, Russian, Arabic
Phonology
THE GREAT VOWEL SHIFT
Due to emergence of a standard variety of English
Language contact (ONF vowels)
Internal linguistic features (decay inflection system)
From 1450-1750, chain reaction started during ME!
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Differences Old Norman French
[kw] rather than [k]: Queen
[K] rather than [tsh]: carrier
-s is lost in ONF but retained in ME: forest