Rethinking Middle English

The Editors: Nikolaus Ritt studied, and now teaches English linguistics at the University of Vienna. He was visiting professor at Eötös Lorand University, Budapest and Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań. He is presently developing a memetic framework for the study of language change. Herbert Schendl studied English and French philology in Vienna and Paris. He is Professor of English linguistics at the University of Vienna. Major research interests include EModE variation, language contact and historical code-switching.

• Contents: Herbert Schendl/Nikolaus Ritt: Introduction – Derek Brewer: Understanding chivalry in earlier English literature – David Mills: Playing the Show, showing the Play: the Chester Plays in search of a genre – George R. Keiser: Robert Thornton’s Liber de Diversis Medicinis: text, vocabulary, and scribal confusion – Frances McSparran: Following the scribal trail: the BL Cotton Caligula A. ix copy of LaZamon’s Brut – Christian Liebl: Two unnoticed Early ME versions of Candet Nudatum Pectus – Joanna Bugaj: Middle Scots burgh court records: the influence of the text type on its linguistic features – Irma Taavitsainen: Standardisation, house styles, and the scope of variation in ME scientific writing – Hans-Jürgen Diller: Chaucer’s emotion lexicon: passioun and affeccioun – Przemysław Łozowski: Polysemy in context: meten and dremen in Chaucer – Rafał Molencki: The confusion between thurven und durren in Middle English – Tibor Őrsi: Ways and means of French lexical influence in the Cotton version of Mandeville’s Travels – Thomas Honegger: ‘wyZe welcum iwys to this place’ - and never mind the alliteration: an inquiry into the use of forms of address in two alliterative ME romances – Cynthia Lloyd: Experience or experiment? Some distinctions between French nominal suffixes in Middle English – Maurizio Gotti: Prediction in Middle English: a comparison between shall und will – Lilo Moessner: The verbal syntagm in ME conditional clauses – Letizia Vezzosi: The development of himself in Middle English: a ‘Celtic’ hypothesis – Hans Platzer: The development of natural gender in Middle English, or: sex by accident – Donka Minkova/Robert Stockwell: Clash avoidance in morphologically derived words in Middle English. (Why [-hUd] but [-dm]?) – Roger Lass/Margaret Laing: Are front rounded vowels retained in West Midland Middle English? – Merja Stenroos: Spelling conventions and rounded front vowels in the poems of William Herebert – Albertas Steponavičius: The Great Vowel Shift as a paradigmatic restructuring of the Late ME vowel system – Jerzy Wełna: Now you see it, now you don’t, or the fates of the ME voiced labial stop in homorganic clusters.