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A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English

January 19, 2024

A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME) is a digital, corpus-driven, historical dialect resource for Early Middle English (1150–1325). LAEME combines a searchable Corpus of Tagged Texts (CTT), an Index of Sources, and dot maps showing the distribution of textual dialect features. LAEME is headed by the University of Edinburgh's Margaret Laing, and includes contributions from Roger Lass (University of Cape Town), and web-scripts by Keith Williamson, Vasilis Karaiskos (University of Edinburgh) and Sherrylyn Branchaw (University of California, LA).

Dating from 1987, a year after the publication of A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English (LALME),[1] LAEME's parent project, LAEME builds on medieval dialect methodologies developed for LALME, but parts ways with the latter by employing corpus linguistics methods. In its present form, such methods include the lexico-grammatical tagging of a select but comprehensive Early Middle English corpus, to which an ongoing project will add syntactic parsing (see Parsed Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English P-LAEME).[2] Public access to a fully tagged, syntactically annotated corpus should provide unprecedented scope for phonological, lexico-grammatical, semantic, pragmatic as well as dialectal inquiry into a period marked by rapid linguistic change but also by a paucity of surviving texts. At the lexical level, further scope is added by A Corpus of Narrative Etymologies (CoNE, Version 1.1, 2013).[3] CoNE derives a Corpus of Changes (CC) from LAEME's Corpus of Tagged Texts (CTT), giving relative chronologies of lexical forms annotated by Special Codes. CoNE's narrative etymologies are not based on semantic backtracking through cognates, but on the processual narrative of word forms through time.[4]

Background edit

Prior to the advent of modern linguistics, medieval philologists had sought to describe patterns of linguistic variation on the basis of literary language. This approach posed significant problems, as literary language was and is more likely to be imitative, archaizing, or syncretic than everyday documentary language. Texts composed in a literary tradition or copied from literary exemplars, then, are not ideal for use in reconstructing the distribution of dialect features for a given period. Nevertheless, to take the most famous Middle English instance, J.R.R. Tolkien was able to conjecture the AB literary dialect by comparing manuscripts of the Katherine Group ("B") and the Ancrene Wisse ("A"). Drawing on his personal knowledge of Old English and Old Norse, while counting and cataloging thousands of verbs by hand, Tolkien argued for a regional literary standard localized to north-west Herefordshire that preserved Old English elements into the 13th century. His culminating philological essay, Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad (1929), has been called "one of the great triumphs of English philology" but also "philology's last gasp."[5]

In the decade after this pioneering work, Middle English dialect studies went on generational hiatus. LALME, whose initial stages date to 1952, ushered in the next phase. Motivated by strong arguments for scribal normalization, historical dialectologists were no longer constrained by the unevenness of scribal fidelity. Medieval dialect studies would now rely on the relative consistency of scribal translation into a scribe's own language, while developing techniques for discriminating source from scribe. Angus McIntosh, one of LALME's compilers, "observed that most copied Middle English texts were...in language that was dialectally homogeneous,",[6] suggesting scribal conversion of exemplar language into local varieties. Problematically, though, such varieties might not reflect the geographic areas of composition, since scribes often traveled to copying centers from far afield. This and other problems arising from the diversity of scribal practices (e.g. literam, or literal, and mischsprache, or mixed-language copying) placed a premium on texts of explicit local provenance to anchor dialectal domains. Such anchor texts, often correspondence or legal documents, form the basis of LALME's fit-technique. Michael Benskin, another LALME compiler, describes the fit-technique as a "mechanical means of discovering whereabouts in the continuum of accents [an] unfamiliar accent belongs."[7] This is done by comparing word forms in texts of uncertain origin against like forms attested in the anchor matrix, a comparison which "depends on the progressive elimination of the areas to which the individual elements of the accent do not belong."[7] Only frequently attested items of particular dialectal salience are so compared. In the case of LALME, these items were solicited through text questionnaires later converted into Linguistic Profiles (LPs).[8] Questionnaires were not deemed practicable in LAEME's case, since the amount of linguistic information desired from comparatively fewer, comparatively fragmentary texts would have made them unwieldy. Instead, LAEME opted for corpus digitization.

Corpus and tools edit

The period covered by LAEME is of prime grammatical and phonological interest, as the language was undergoing widespread inflectional loss from OE but at different rates in different regions. Variation within phonological categories and inflectional paradigms possess dialectal and base-grammatical significance. Emergent orthography of phonetically-variable characters yogh, thorn and edh index other changes in the language. Scribes during this period show a proportionally higher preference for literam and mixed-language copying, resulting in a higher proportion of composite texts compared to later periods. Relict usage, where older exemplar forms remain unmodified in a translated text, and constrained selection, where exemplar forms are maintained because of scribal familiarity, pose additional problems for dialectal discrimination.[6] Students of the period must also take into account its pronounced text/speech diglossia, with the majority of texts composed in Latin or French. Because LAEME's anchor matrix is thin and patchy, its dialectal fits are informed approximations subject to revision. LAEME's texts overall are geographically and temporally uneven, extremely sparse for its first half-century and for Northern varieties in general, much denser for Southern varieties and through its latter half-century, where it begins to overlap with LALME.[6]

The above complexities and complications have obliged LAEME's architects to build the atlas around a digitized corpus of lexico-grammatically tagged texts that can be searched and compared according to the research needs of users. Instead of creating Linguistic Profiles from questionnaire responses, text dictionaries - taxonomical inventories of each text language - are derived from tagged texts.[9] Independent searchability multiplies LAEME's usages across disciplines, as scholars and researchers can generate their own Form and Tag Dictionaries, Feature Maps, and Concordances. LAEME surpasses its remit as a dialect resource by offering a suite of multi-function linguistic tools for public use. This versatility accords with Angus McIntosh's progressive vision for LALME, which he saw as "more likely to benefit those concerned with the literature and culture and social structure of medieval England than those primarily concerned with...linguistics."[10]

An example of a multi-function LAEME tool is the Concordance. Users begin by selecting a tag type (suffixes, grammatical words, inflection, lexis), entering a search string, and then a position limiter (initial, medial, final). This search is followed by a filter set allowing users to specify counties, number of words to precede and/or proceed the search string, and sorting parameters (form, tag, date, file). Finally, users may select specific tagged forms generated by the search. Entries in the resulting concordance link to manuscript descriptions and to corresponding text dictionaries.[11] Users are able to view contextualized instances of items indexed to coded sources available in several file types. Similar processes can be used to create Tag and Form Dictionaries with frequency counts, and to generate Feature Maps.

References edit

  1. ^ "A Linguistic Late Mediaeval English, v. 1.0". www.lel.ed.ac.uk. Retrieved 2017-05-01.
  2. ^ "P-LAEME: A Parsed Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English – Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics". www.amc.lel.ed.ac.uk. Retrieved 2017-05-01.
  3. ^ Williamson, Roger Lass, Margaret Laing, Rhona Alcorn, Keith. "Corpus of Narrative Etymologies". www.lel.ed.ac.uk. Retrieved 2017-05-01.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  4. ^ Lass, Robert. "A Corpus of Narrative Etymologies from Proto-Old English to Early Middle English (CoNE) and accompanying Corpus of Changes (CC)" (PDF). pp. 2–3.
  5. ^ Drout, Michael D.C. (2007). "Tolkien's medieval scholarship and its significance". Tolkien Studies. 4: 113–176. doi:10.1353/tks.2007.0013. S2CID 170531214.
  6. ^ a b c Laing, Margaret. "LAEME Introduction Chapter 1, 1.4". www.lel.ed.ac.uk.
  7. ^ a b Benskin, Michael (1991). "The 'fit'-technique explained". Regionalism in Late Medieval Manuscripts and Texts: Essays Celebrating the Publication of a Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English: 9.
  8. ^ McIntosh, Angus. "A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English: General Introduction, 2.1".
  9. ^ Laing, Margaret. "A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English: Introduction, Chapter 1.5.5".
  10. ^ McIntosh, Angus (1991). "Some thoughts on medieval dialectology". Regionalism in Late Medieval Manuscripts and Texts: Essays Celebrating the Publication of a Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English: xii.
  11. ^ "LAEME". School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences.

External links edit

  • "A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, v. 2.0". www.lel.ed.ac.uk. Retrieved 2017-05-01.
  • "An Electronic Version of A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English". www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/elalme/elalme.html
  • "Corpus of Narrative Etymologies, v. 1.1" http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/CoNE/CoNE.html

January 19, 2024
linguistic, atlas, early, middle, english, this, article, multiple, issues, please, help, improve, discuss, these, issues, talk, page, learn, when, remove, these, template, messages, this, article, written, like, personal, reflection, personal, essay, argument. This article has multiple issues Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page Learn how and when to remove these template messages This article is written like a personal reflection personal essay or argumentative essay that states a Wikipedia editor s personal feelings or presents an original argument about a topic Please help improve it by rewriting it in an encyclopedic style May 2017 Learn how and when to remove this template message The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia s general notability guideline Please help to demonstrate the notability of the topic by citing reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond a mere trivial mention If notability cannot be shown the article is likely to be merged redirected or deleted Find sources A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English news newspapers books scholar JSTOR May 2017 Learn how and when to remove this template message This article possibly contains original research Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations Statements consisting only of original research should be removed May 2017 Learn how and when to remove this template message This article needs additional citations for verification Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources Unsourced material may be challenged and removed Find sources A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English news newspapers books scholar JSTOR May 2017 Learn how and when to remove this template message Learn how and when to remove this template message A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English LAEME is a digital corpus driven historical dialect resource for Early Middle English 1150 1325 LAEME combines a searchable Corpus of Tagged Texts CTT an Index of Sources and dot maps showing the distribution of textual dialect features LAEME is headed by the University of Edinburgh s Margaret Laing and includes contributions from Roger Lass University of Cape Town and web scripts by Keith Williamson Vasilis Karaiskos University of Edinburgh and Sherrylyn Branchaw University of California LA Dating from 1987 a year after the publication of A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English LALME 1 LAEME s parent project LAEME builds on medieval dialect methodologies developed for LALME but parts ways with the latter by employing corpus linguistics methods In its present form such methods include the lexico grammatical tagging of a select but comprehensive Early Middle English corpus to which an ongoing project will add syntactic parsing see Parsed Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English P LAEME 2 Public access to a fully tagged syntactically annotated corpus should provide unprecedented scope for phonological lexico grammatical semantic pragmatic as well as dialectal inquiry into a period marked by rapid linguistic change but also by a paucity of surviving texts At the lexical level further scope is added by A Corpus of Narrative Etymologies CoNE Version 1 1 2013 3 CoNE derives a Corpus of Changes CC from LAEME s Corpus of Tagged Texts CTT giving relative chronologies of lexical forms annotated by Special Codes CoNE s narrative etymologies are not based on semantic backtracking through cognates but on the processual narrative of word forms through time 4 Contents 1 Background 2 Corpus and tools 3 References 4 External linksBackground editPrior to the advent of modern linguistics medieval philologists had sought to describe patterns of linguistic variation on the basis of literary language This approach posed significant problems as literary language was and is more likely to be imitative archaizing or syncretic than everyday documentary language Texts composed in a literary tradition or copied from literary exemplars then are not ideal for use in reconstructing the distribution of dialect features for a given period Nevertheless to take the most famous Middle English instance J R R Tolkien was able to conjecture the AB literary dialect by comparing manuscripts of the Katherine Group B and the Ancrene Wisse A Drawing on his personal knowledge of Old English and Old Norse while counting and cataloging thousands of verbs by hand Tolkien argued for a regional literary standard localized to north west Herefordshire that preserved Old English elements into the 13th century His culminating philological essay Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meidhad 1929 has been called one of the great triumphs of English philology but also philology s last gasp 5 In the decade after this pioneering work Middle English dialect studies went on generational hiatus LALME whose initial stages date to 1952 ushered in the next phase Motivated by strong arguments for scribal normalization historical dialectologists were no longer constrained by the unevenness of scribal fidelity Medieval dialect studies would now rely on the relative consistency of scribal translation into a scribe s own language while developing techniques for discriminating source from scribe Angus McIntosh one of LALME s compilers observed that most copied Middle English texts were in language that was dialectally homogeneous 6 suggesting scribal conversion of exemplar language into local varieties Problematically though such varieties might not reflect the geographic areas of composition since scribes often traveled to copying centers from far afield This and other problems arising from the diversity of scribal practices e g literam or literal and mischsprache or mixed language copying placed a premium on texts of explicit local provenance to anchor dialectal domains Such anchor texts often correspondence or legal documents form the basis of LALME s fit technique Michael Benskin another LALME compiler describes the fit technique as a mechanical means of discovering whereabouts in the continuum of accents an unfamiliar accent belongs 7 This is done by comparing word forms in texts of uncertain origin against like forms attested in the anchor matrix a comparison which depends on the progressive elimination of the areas to which the individual elements of the accent do not belong 7 Only frequently attested items of particular dialectal salience are so compared In the case of LALME these items were solicited through text questionnaires later converted into Linguistic Profiles LPs 8 Questionnaires were not deemed practicable in LAEME s case since the amount of linguistic information desired from comparatively fewer comparatively fragmentary texts would have made them unwieldy Instead LAEME opted for corpus digitization Corpus and tools editThe period covered by LAEME is of prime grammatical and phonological interest as the language was undergoing widespread inflectional loss from OE but at different rates in different regions Variation within phonological categories and inflectional paradigms possess dialectal and base grammatical significance Emergent orthography of phonetically variable characters yogh thorn and edh index other changes in the language Scribes during this period show a proportionally higher preference for literam and mixed language copying resulting in a higher proportion of composite texts compared to later periods Relict usage where older exemplar forms remain unmodified in a translated text and constrained selection where exemplar forms are maintained because of scribal familiarity pose additional problems for dialectal discrimination 6 Students of the period must also take into account its pronounced text speech diglossia with the majority of texts composed in Latin or French Because LAEME s anchor matrix is thin and patchy its dialectal fits are informed approximations subject to revision LAEME s texts overall are geographically and temporally uneven extremely sparse for its first half century and for Northern varieties in general much denser for Southern varieties and through its latter half century where it begins to overlap with LALME 6 The above complexities and complications have obliged LAEME s architects to build the atlas around a digitized corpus of lexico grammatically tagged texts that can be searched and compared according to the research needs of users Instead of creating Linguistic Profiles from questionnaire responses text dictionaries taxonomical inventories of each text language are derived from tagged texts 9 Independent searchability multiplies LAEME s usages across disciplines as scholars and researchers can generate their own Form and Tag Dictionaries Feature Maps and Concordances LAEME surpasses its remit as a dialect resource by offering a suite of multi function linguistic tools for public use This versatility accords with Angus McIntosh s progressive vision for LALME which he saw as more likely to benefit those concerned with the literature and culture and social structure of medieval England than those primarily concerned with linguistics 10 An example of a multi function LAEME tool is the Concordance Users begin by selecting a tag type suffixes grammatical words inflection lexis entering a search string and then a position limiter initial medial final This search is followed by a filter set allowing users to specify counties number of words to precede and or proceed the search string and sorting parameters form tag date file Finally users may select specific tagged forms generated by the search Entries in the resulting concordance link to manuscript descriptions and to corresponding text dictionaries 11 Users are able to view contextualized instances of items indexed to coded sources available in several file types Similar processes can be used to create Tag and Form Dictionaries with frequency counts and to generate Feature Maps References edit A Linguistic Late Mediaeval English v 1 0 www lel ed ac uk Retrieved 2017 05 01 P LAEME A Parsed Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics www amc lel ed ac uk Retrieved 2017 05 01 Williamson Roger Lass Margaret Laing Rhona Alcorn Keith Corpus of Narrative Etymologies www lel ed ac uk Retrieved 2017 05 01 a href Template Cite web html title Template Cite web cite web a CS1 maint multiple names authors list link Lass Robert A Corpus of Narrative Etymologies from Proto Old English to Early Middle English CoNE and accompanying Corpus of Changes CC PDF pp 2 3 Drout Michael D C 2007 Tolkien s medieval scholarship and its significance Tolkien Studies 4 113 176 doi 10 1353 tks 2007 0013 S2CID 170531214 a b c Laing Margaret LAEME Introduction Chapter 1 1 4 www lel ed ac uk a b Benskin Michael 1991 The fit technique explained Regionalism in Late Medieval Manuscripts and Texts Essays Celebrating the Publication of a Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English 9 McIntosh Angus A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English General Introduction 2 1 Laing Margaret A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English Introduction Chapter 1 5 5 McIntosh Angus 1991 Some thoughts on medieval dialectology Regionalism in Late Medieval Manuscripts and Texts Essays Celebrating the Publication of a Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English xii LAEME School of Philosophy Psychology and Language Sciences External links edit A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English v 2 0 www lel ed ac uk Retrieved 2017 05 01 An Electronic Version of A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English www lel ed ac uk ihd elalme elalme html Corpus of Narrative Etymologies v 1 1 http www lel ed ac uk ihd CoNE CoNE html Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English amp oldid 1152574495, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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