This is the first extensive study of Old English to utilise the insights and methodologies of soc... more This is the first extensive study of Old English to utilise the insights and methodologies of sociolinguistics. Building on previous philological and historical work, it takes into account the sociology and social dialectology of Old English and offers a description of its speech communities informed by the theory of social networks and communities of practice. Specifically, this book uses data from historical narratives and legal documents and examines the interplay of linguistic innovation, variation, and change with such sociolinguistic parameters as region, scribal office, gender, and social status. Special attention is given to the processes of supralocalisation and their correlation with periods of political centralisation in the history of Anglo-Saxon England.
Compressed verbal structures are a universally attested linguistic feature. In many languages, th... more Compressed verbal structures are a universally attested linguistic feature. In many languages, they are employed in the domain of adverbial and complement clauses to code information structure and event integration in a given utterance. Can these structures, however, be borrowed from one language and adapted to the syntactic system of another? And are there any typological or language external factors that might facilitate or hinder this process?
This book is based on a corpus study of participial and infinitival constructions in Old English. It revisits the question of Latin influence on the Old English syntax, offering a new evaluation of syntactic interference between Latin and Old English, and, more generally, of the contact situation in the Old English period. It compares data from translated texts against the background of original Old English writings, seeking to establish the typological differences between Latin and Old English in the domain of non-finite syntax, and the role of translation in contact-induced change.
Timofeeva, Olga (2010) Non-finite Constructions in Old English, with Special Reference to Syntactic Borrowing from Latin, PhD dissertation, Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki, vol. LXXX, Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.
Middle English is the essential stage in the development of English second-person pronouns. This ... more Middle English is the essential stage in the development of English second-person pronouns. This is the time when polite singular forms _ye/you/your_ are introduced, as commonly believed under French influence, gradually become default, and eventually oust the inherited singular forms _thou/thee/thi(ne)_ to marked contexts and regionally restricted varieties. This paper addresses the initial stages of these developments dealing with the earliest attestations of polite _ye_ in two Middle English romances that make up the so-called 'Matter of England'. More specifically, its focus is on _Havelok the Dane_ (c.1300) and _The Tale of Gamelyn_ (c.1350), which both have disinheritance as the central conflict and thus narrate stories of protagonists who are socially ambiguous. This essay investigates how this ambiguity is reflected at the level of second-person pronouns when they address, and are addressed by, other characters. Special attention is given to the notion of 'interactional status' theorised by Jucker (2006, 2020) and, in particular, to how it can enlighten several cases of switches between _thou_ and _ye_ pronouns in the chosen romances.
This paper investigates bilingual interfaces between Middle English and Middle Low German in The ... more This paper investigates bilingual interfaces between Middle English and Middle Low German in The Book of Margery Kempe from a sociolinguistic and language-contact perspective and posits Kempe's limited receptive competence in Low German. Her linguistic skills are set against the background of historical facts known about Kempe and her family networks at Bishop's Lynn, Norfolk, and Danzig, Prussia, dominated by the Hanseatic trade, as well as her relationship with a Duche preste at the church of St John Lateran in Rome and other encounters with speakers of Low German. The data for the study come both from the metalinguistic comments on medieval German varieties and their speakers in the Book and from a handful of Low German loanwords present in the text. Their availability also reflects on the transmission of the Book, in particular on the involvement of three male scribes, one of them, likely, Margery's son John, in the drafting and copying of the extant text.
In the summer of 1072, the leading men of Kent assembled in Penenden Heath to hear a plea of Arch... more In the summer of 1072, the leading men of Kent assembled in Penenden Heath to hear a plea of Archbishop Lanfranc against Bishop Odo of Bayeux, who was claimed to have appropriated many lands and privileges of the archbishopric. After a three-day litigation, Lanfranc was able to regain the rights of Canterbury, while William I issued a notice to record both the plea and the reestablished rights. This is how the shire assembly was described in a series of near-contemporary documents (edited by Bates under B69): Precepit ergo rex comitatum totum absque mora considere, et homines comitatus omnes francigenas et precipue anglos in antiquis legibus et consuetudinibus peritos in unum convenire. Qui cum convenerunt, apud Pinendenam omnes pariter consederunt. (B69(i)) 'The king ordered the whole shire to deliberate without delay and all the Frenchmen and especially the Englishmen knowledgeable in the ancient laws and customs to convene in a single gathering. When they had assembled at Penenden, all alike considered the problem.' (trans. by Bates 1998: 315) This case is an important record of business going as usual after 1066, of oral witnesses still being solicited to establish rights to land and privileges,
The protagonist of The Book of Margery Kempe says that _sche cowde non other langage than Englisc... more The protagonist of The Book of Margery Kempe says that _sche cowde non other langage than Englisch_ (i.33). Nevertheless, this autohagiography contains numerous episodes in which Margery Kempe is able both to communicate with speakers of Italian and German and to utter biblical quotations in Latin. This paper investigates such multilingual encounters from a sociopragmatic and language-contact perspective and posits Margery's limited receptive competence in Latin and, especially, Low German. Her linguistic skills are set against the background of historical facts known about Kempe and her family networks at Bishop’s Lynn, Norfolk, and Danzig, Prussia.
In late Middle English, the system of second-person pronouns with singular referents is character... more In late Middle English, the system of second-person pronouns with singular referents is characterized by retractable choices based on the interactional status of interlocutors. This system has until recently been documented mostly in studies based on poetic texts, such as the Canterbury Tales by Chaucer, and, to a lesser extent, private correspondence and early mystery plays. The present essay uses the Book of Margery Kempe as a primary source and offers a perspective of a middle-class female author from the early-fifteenth-century Norfolk. Conventional politeness of Margery Kempe requires the default use of ye/you/your forms, especially when addressees are unfamiliar, older or socially superior, but also in situations of mutual acceptance and deference. Thou/thee/thine forms, on the other hand, indicate social or intellectual superiority as well as, at the interactional level, condescension, contempt, annoyance, defiance, and abuse. Their use, therefore, is typically marked.
This paper explores linguistic and sociolinguistic mechanisms that facilitated collaboration betw... more This paper explores linguistic and sociolinguistic mechanisms that facilitated collaboration between English and Norman administrators in the decades following the Norman Conquest. First, a community of royal and episcopal chancellors and scribes is reconstructed from historical and documentary sources and their ties and networks are described. In the second step, two subcorpora are used to illustrate the processes of lexical selection and focusing in their common professional language, Latin: royal writs of William I and circuit returns of the Domesday inquest for the SouthWest. Both parts of the study demonstrate high involvement of Norman actors in the leading bureaucratic positions but, at the same time, point to their wide collaboration with the local administrative and scribal personnel. As a result, the two vernaculars are mutually enriched with new professional vocabulary, while in the written Latin standard, common to both, compromise lexical features emerge.
This paper explores the potential of legal documents for the study of the sociology of Old Englis... more This paper explores the potential of legal documents for the study of the sociology of Old English. It gives a rationale for the use of legal genres, or charters, and introduces research databases and tools that may elucidate the interconnections between practitioners of legal Old English and their linguistic practices. A series of short case studies on wills illustrates what legal genres tell us about the correlation between linguistic variation, supralocalisation, and change and such variables as archive and gender.
Of ye Olde English Langage and Textes: New Perspectives on Old and Middle English Language and Literature, 2020
This study investigates the origin and diffusion of a binominal construction _nith and onde_ 'spi... more This study investigates the origin and diffusion of a binominal construction _nith and onde_ 'spite and hate' in Middle English, by using A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English as the main source. It argues that _nith and onde_ is also used as a lexicalised unit to refer to 'the deadly sin of envy'. Its development towards greater fixedness, or freezing, and the lexicalisation of 'envy' meaning are seen as part of a broader historical process, generated by the ecclesiastical reforms of the thirteenth century. The author examines the semantic field Envy, jealousy in general, which, apart from the binominal, also includes _nith_ and _onde_ as individual words, as well as _aefest_ and _envie_, and establishes their collocates, frequencies, and distributions across regions and subperiods of Early Middle English. It emerges that the binominal has a strong association with the West Midlands, and that around 1225 it is beginning to lexicalise as the equivalent for Latin _invidia_ and French _envie_. The availability of the latter from around 1300, however, challenges this situation, and the English set phrase is gradually ousted into the periphery of the lexical field, while envy becomes established at the centre.
This study analyses two Old English formulae _gret freodlice_ 'greets in a friendly manner' and _... more This study analyses two Old English formulae _gret freodlice_ 'greets in a friendly manner' and _ic cyðe eow þaet_ 'I make it known to you that', which form a salutation-notification template in a document type called writs. It connects the emergence of this formulaic set to previous oral traditions of delivering news and messages and to their reflection in dictation practices from at least the time of King Alfred. Their later routinisation and standardisation is seen as a factor brought about by the centralised production of royal writs and their subsequent adoption as templates in monastic scriptoria across the country. These templates continue to be recycled in the early Middle English period both in English and in Latin writs, ultimately shifting to Latin-only documents during the reign of William the Conqueror. Although this shift does not hinder the continuity of the selected bureaucratic template into the later Middle Ages, it affects the structure of the discourse community associated with the chancery norms, consolidating its core (those literate in Latin who are involved in production and preservation of writs) and marginalising its periphery (English-speakers who used to make up the informed audience for writs in local courts).
This study reconstructs the Alfredian network as consisting of twelve actors. This network is ter... more This study reconstructs the Alfredian network as consisting of twelve actors. This network is termed a coalition, within which a cluster of Mercian actors is further hypothesised. Historical sources and charter evidence suggest that Mercian scribes worked for West Saxon kings and may even have taken part in the establishment of a proto-chancery at the royal court. This writing office can be conjectured to have ties with the Alfredian coalition and described as a community of practice. The whole sociolinguistic reconstruction is supported by three case studies: Angelcynn ‘the English people’ and here ‘band, troop’ in historical-political genres, and gretan freondlice in epistolary genres. The diffusion of these Alfredian norms across time, place and genres is linked to the royal chancery and its distribution channels, as well as to the diachronic sustainability of linguistic practices within professional discourse communities and their archives.
Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature (SELIM), 2018
The religious life of western Europe around 1200 saw a remarkable re-orientation towards greater ... more The religious life of western Europe around 1200 saw a remarkable re-orientation towards greater emphasis on moral instruction of the laity, especially, following the decisions of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and the spread of the mendicant orders from the 1220s onwards (d’Avray 1985: 13–16). It was now obligatory that the Christians of both sexes confessed their sins and received the Communion at least once a year (Jones 2011: 2–3). Obliged to preach, instruct, receive confessions, and perform other spiritual ministrations in the vernacular, the clergy had to approach these tasks with an arsenal of English religious terminology that could name and explain the persons of the Trinity, the main points of the Creed, the seven deadly sins, the sacraments, the Ten Commandments, the formulas used in confession and baptism, and so on. In one of the key subdomains of the religious lexis —terminology for vices and virtues— a peculiar division of vocabulary along etymological lines was taking shape: English-based lexemes were used to denote sins (greediness, lust, sloth, wrath), whereas lexemes to denote virtues were predominantly French in origin (charity, chastity, diligence, humility, patience, temperance). Whether these distributions have a sociolinguistic dimension is addressed in this paper. In particular, I aim at establishing the patterns that have determined survival and loss of old (English) lexemes and adoption of new (French) ones. I take into account frequencies of individual Old English terms (if available) in the Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus (DOEC) and track geographic distributions of old and new terms in early Middle English, by means of A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME) mapping function. As in my previous study (Timofeeva 2018), lexical change in the religious domain is reconstructed against the social changes within the church, such as the new ways of pastoral instruction and preaching, by examining the specificity of social networks within the clergy and between the clergy and secular communities.
Middle English religious vocabulary is radically different from that of the previous period: whil... more Middle English religious vocabulary is radically different from that of the previous period: while Old English is characterised more by lexical pattern replication of Latin (and Greek) etyma, Middle English is the period of matter replication. Due to the intake of new French religious words, English lexemes and also whole word families undergo semantic transformation and lexical replacement. Other terms, however, survive from the Old English period into the present day, resisting contact-induced pressure. This study shows that the survival of old lexemes into Middle English is largely determined by the extent of their diffusion and frequency of occurrence before the Norman Conquest. It is postulated that two kinds of inherited Old English lexis should be distinguished in the Middle English period: (i) established terms that had belonged to the West Saxon standard and were still preserved in general use by the lower regular clergy, parish priests and the faithful at large, and (ii) terms of limited currency that had failed to spread outside local communities with strong ties and survived for a short time after the Conquest in smaller religious foundations. The innovation and spread of new francophone religious lexis was conditioned by the new preaching practices that began to develop in Europe in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council and the emergence of mendicant orders. Preachers of the new type were the multilingual innovators who generated new lexis in English and at the same time were instrumental in its diffusion, serving as weak ties between the various levels of the medieval society. Urban middle classes, on the other hand, were the most likely English-speaking early adopters of new norms.
Royal writs of William the Conqueror were produced by a multilingual community of clerks whose bu... more Royal writs of William the Conqueror were produced by a multilingual community of clerks whose bureaucratic routines commonly included translation between Latin and the two vernaculars (French and English). These practices encouraged the scribes to generate a professional vocabulary that was essentially identical in all three languages. One part of it consisted of traditional Anglo-Saxon legal lexis, including terminology for right and privileges, land administration, and titles. Twenty-four such terms, extracted from the edition of William’s acta by David Bates, are analysed in this study, and their borrowing and currency reconstructed against the background of a wider corpus of Anglo-Latin and Old English texts and a wider sociolinguistic context of professional post-Conquest trilingualism.
The study of borrowed vocabulary and language contact in the Old English period is technically pr... more The study of borrowed vocabulary and language contact in the Old English period is technically problematic in many ways. Surviving texts give us few clues as to how loans functioned outside the clerical communities, what their regional and register distributions were, and to what extent written sources reflect the circulation of loans in spoken language. This may suggest that a descriptive catalogue of lexical loans is the only approach applicable to the Old English material. This paper, however, aims at an inferential analysis of several loans from Latin and Greek in the religious and educational domain based on contemporary approaches to linguistic innovation, diffusion and change, and the wider cultural context that would have ensured their currency and dissemination – social networks provided by medieval schools and monasteries, and the ecclesiastical community at large. Using a select body of educated loans, it argues that strong ties within monastic communities would generally have prevented contact-induced lexical change from spreading outside the monasteries. Yet the role of individual innovators with both clerical and non-clerical ties and early adopters with elementary Latin proficiency (parish priests) in diffusion of change should not be underestimated.
This is the first extensive study of Old English to utilise the insights and methodologies of soc... more This is the first extensive study of Old English to utilise the insights and methodologies of sociolinguistics. Building on previous philological and historical work, it takes into account the sociology and social dialectology of Old English and offers a description of its speech communities informed by the theory of social networks and communities of practice. Specifically, this book uses data from historical narratives and legal documents and examines the interplay of linguistic innovation, variation, and change with such sociolinguistic parameters as region, scribal office, gender, and social status. Special attention is given to the processes of supralocalisation and their correlation with periods of political centralisation in the history of Anglo-Saxon England.
Compressed verbal structures are a universally attested linguistic feature. In many languages, th... more Compressed verbal structures are a universally attested linguistic feature. In many languages, they are employed in the domain of adverbial and complement clauses to code information structure and event integration in a given utterance. Can these structures, however, be borrowed from one language and adapted to the syntactic system of another? And are there any typological or language external factors that might facilitate or hinder this process?
This book is based on a corpus study of participial and infinitival constructions in Old English. It revisits the question of Latin influence on the Old English syntax, offering a new evaluation of syntactic interference between Latin and Old English, and, more generally, of the contact situation in the Old English period. It compares data from translated texts against the background of original Old English writings, seeking to establish the typological differences between Latin and Old English in the domain of non-finite syntax, and the role of translation in contact-induced change.
Timofeeva, Olga (2010) Non-finite Constructions in Old English, with Special Reference to Syntactic Borrowing from Latin, PhD dissertation, Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki, vol. LXXX, Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.
Middle English is the essential stage in the development of English second-person pronouns. This ... more Middle English is the essential stage in the development of English second-person pronouns. This is the time when polite singular forms _ye/you/your_ are introduced, as commonly believed under French influence, gradually become default, and eventually oust the inherited singular forms _thou/thee/thi(ne)_ to marked contexts and regionally restricted varieties. This paper addresses the initial stages of these developments dealing with the earliest attestations of polite _ye_ in two Middle English romances that make up the so-called 'Matter of England'. More specifically, its focus is on _Havelok the Dane_ (c.1300) and _The Tale of Gamelyn_ (c.1350), which both have disinheritance as the central conflict and thus narrate stories of protagonists who are socially ambiguous. This essay investigates how this ambiguity is reflected at the level of second-person pronouns when they address, and are addressed by, other characters. Special attention is given to the notion of 'interactional status' theorised by Jucker (2006, 2020) and, in particular, to how it can enlighten several cases of switches between _thou_ and _ye_ pronouns in the chosen romances.
This paper investigates bilingual interfaces between Middle English and Middle Low German in The ... more This paper investigates bilingual interfaces between Middle English and Middle Low German in The Book of Margery Kempe from a sociolinguistic and language-contact perspective and posits Kempe's limited receptive competence in Low German. Her linguistic skills are set against the background of historical facts known about Kempe and her family networks at Bishop's Lynn, Norfolk, and Danzig, Prussia, dominated by the Hanseatic trade, as well as her relationship with a Duche preste at the church of St John Lateran in Rome and other encounters with speakers of Low German. The data for the study come both from the metalinguistic comments on medieval German varieties and their speakers in the Book and from a handful of Low German loanwords present in the text. Their availability also reflects on the transmission of the Book, in particular on the involvement of three male scribes, one of them, likely, Margery's son John, in the drafting and copying of the extant text.
In the summer of 1072, the leading men of Kent assembled in Penenden Heath to hear a plea of Arch... more In the summer of 1072, the leading men of Kent assembled in Penenden Heath to hear a plea of Archbishop Lanfranc against Bishop Odo of Bayeux, who was claimed to have appropriated many lands and privileges of the archbishopric. After a three-day litigation, Lanfranc was able to regain the rights of Canterbury, while William I issued a notice to record both the plea and the reestablished rights. This is how the shire assembly was described in a series of near-contemporary documents (edited by Bates under B69): Precepit ergo rex comitatum totum absque mora considere, et homines comitatus omnes francigenas et precipue anglos in antiquis legibus et consuetudinibus peritos in unum convenire. Qui cum convenerunt, apud Pinendenam omnes pariter consederunt. (B69(i)) 'The king ordered the whole shire to deliberate without delay and all the Frenchmen and especially the Englishmen knowledgeable in the ancient laws and customs to convene in a single gathering. When they had assembled at Penenden, all alike considered the problem.' (trans. by Bates 1998: 315) This case is an important record of business going as usual after 1066, of oral witnesses still being solicited to establish rights to land and privileges,
The protagonist of The Book of Margery Kempe says that _sche cowde non other langage than Englisc... more The protagonist of The Book of Margery Kempe says that _sche cowde non other langage than Englisch_ (i.33). Nevertheless, this autohagiography contains numerous episodes in which Margery Kempe is able both to communicate with speakers of Italian and German and to utter biblical quotations in Latin. This paper investigates such multilingual encounters from a sociopragmatic and language-contact perspective and posits Margery's limited receptive competence in Latin and, especially, Low German. Her linguistic skills are set against the background of historical facts known about Kempe and her family networks at Bishop’s Lynn, Norfolk, and Danzig, Prussia.
In late Middle English, the system of second-person pronouns with singular referents is character... more In late Middle English, the system of second-person pronouns with singular referents is characterized by retractable choices based on the interactional status of interlocutors. This system has until recently been documented mostly in studies based on poetic texts, such as the Canterbury Tales by Chaucer, and, to a lesser extent, private correspondence and early mystery plays. The present essay uses the Book of Margery Kempe as a primary source and offers a perspective of a middle-class female author from the early-fifteenth-century Norfolk. Conventional politeness of Margery Kempe requires the default use of ye/you/your forms, especially when addressees are unfamiliar, older or socially superior, but also in situations of mutual acceptance and deference. Thou/thee/thine forms, on the other hand, indicate social or intellectual superiority as well as, at the interactional level, condescension, contempt, annoyance, defiance, and abuse. Their use, therefore, is typically marked.
This paper explores linguistic and sociolinguistic mechanisms that facilitated collaboration betw... more This paper explores linguistic and sociolinguistic mechanisms that facilitated collaboration between English and Norman administrators in the decades following the Norman Conquest. First, a community of royal and episcopal chancellors and scribes is reconstructed from historical and documentary sources and their ties and networks are described. In the second step, two subcorpora are used to illustrate the processes of lexical selection and focusing in their common professional language, Latin: royal writs of William I and circuit returns of the Domesday inquest for the SouthWest. Both parts of the study demonstrate high involvement of Norman actors in the leading bureaucratic positions but, at the same time, point to their wide collaboration with the local administrative and scribal personnel. As a result, the two vernaculars are mutually enriched with new professional vocabulary, while in the written Latin standard, common to both, compromise lexical features emerge.
This paper explores the potential of legal documents for the study of the sociology of Old Englis... more This paper explores the potential of legal documents for the study of the sociology of Old English. It gives a rationale for the use of legal genres, or charters, and introduces research databases and tools that may elucidate the interconnections between practitioners of legal Old English and their linguistic practices. A series of short case studies on wills illustrates what legal genres tell us about the correlation between linguistic variation, supralocalisation, and change and such variables as archive and gender.
Of ye Olde English Langage and Textes: New Perspectives on Old and Middle English Language and Literature, 2020
This study investigates the origin and diffusion of a binominal construction _nith and onde_ 'spi... more This study investigates the origin and diffusion of a binominal construction _nith and onde_ 'spite and hate' in Middle English, by using A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English as the main source. It argues that _nith and onde_ is also used as a lexicalised unit to refer to 'the deadly sin of envy'. Its development towards greater fixedness, or freezing, and the lexicalisation of 'envy' meaning are seen as part of a broader historical process, generated by the ecclesiastical reforms of the thirteenth century. The author examines the semantic field Envy, jealousy in general, which, apart from the binominal, also includes _nith_ and _onde_ as individual words, as well as _aefest_ and _envie_, and establishes their collocates, frequencies, and distributions across regions and subperiods of Early Middle English. It emerges that the binominal has a strong association with the West Midlands, and that around 1225 it is beginning to lexicalise as the equivalent for Latin _invidia_ and French _envie_. The availability of the latter from around 1300, however, challenges this situation, and the English set phrase is gradually ousted into the periphery of the lexical field, while envy becomes established at the centre.
This study analyses two Old English formulae _gret freodlice_ 'greets in a friendly manner' and _... more This study analyses two Old English formulae _gret freodlice_ 'greets in a friendly manner' and _ic cyðe eow þaet_ 'I make it known to you that', which form a salutation-notification template in a document type called writs. It connects the emergence of this formulaic set to previous oral traditions of delivering news and messages and to their reflection in dictation practices from at least the time of King Alfred. Their later routinisation and standardisation is seen as a factor brought about by the centralised production of royal writs and their subsequent adoption as templates in monastic scriptoria across the country. These templates continue to be recycled in the early Middle English period both in English and in Latin writs, ultimately shifting to Latin-only documents during the reign of William the Conqueror. Although this shift does not hinder the continuity of the selected bureaucratic template into the later Middle Ages, it affects the structure of the discourse community associated with the chancery norms, consolidating its core (those literate in Latin who are involved in production and preservation of writs) and marginalising its periphery (English-speakers who used to make up the informed audience for writs in local courts).
This study reconstructs the Alfredian network as consisting of twelve actors. This network is ter... more This study reconstructs the Alfredian network as consisting of twelve actors. This network is termed a coalition, within which a cluster of Mercian actors is further hypothesised. Historical sources and charter evidence suggest that Mercian scribes worked for West Saxon kings and may even have taken part in the establishment of a proto-chancery at the royal court. This writing office can be conjectured to have ties with the Alfredian coalition and described as a community of practice. The whole sociolinguistic reconstruction is supported by three case studies: Angelcynn ‘the English people’ and here ‘band, troop’ in historical-political genres, and gretan freondlice in epistolary genres. The diffusion of these Alfredian norms across time, place and genres is linked to the royal chancery and its distribution channels, as well as to the diachronic sustainability of linguistic practices within professional discourse communities and their archives.
Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature (SELIM), 2018
The religious life of western Europe around 1200 saw a remarkable re-orientation towards greater ... more The religious life of western Europe around 1200 saw a remarkable re-orientation towards greater emphasis on moral instruction of the laity, especially, following the decisions of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and the spread of the mendicant orders from the 1220s onwards (d’Avray 1985: 13–16). It was now obligatory that the Christians of both sexes confessed their sins and received the Communion at least once a year (Jones 2011: 2–3). Obliged to preach, instruct, receive confessions, and perform other spiritual ministrations in the vernacular, the clergy had to approach these tasks with an arsenal of English religious terminology that could name and explain the persons of the Trinity, the main points of the Creed, the seven deadly sins, the sacraments, the Ten Commandments, the formulas used in confession and baptism, and so on. In one of the key subdomains of the religious lexis —terminology for vices and virtues— a peculiar division of vocabulary along etymological lines was taking shape: English-based lexemes were used to denote sins (greediness, lust, sloth, wrath), whereas lexemes to denote virtues were predominantly French in origin (charity, chastity, diligence, humility, patience, temperance). Whether these distributions have a sociolinguistic dimension is addressed in this paper. In particular, I aim at establishing the patterns that have determined survival and loss of old (English) lexemes and adoption of new (French) ones. I take into account frequencies of individual Old English terms (if available) in the Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus (DOEC) and track geographic distributions of old and new terms in early Middle English, by means of A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME) mapping function. As in my previous study (Timofeeva 2018), lexical change in the religious domain is reconstructed against the social changes within the church, such as the new ways of pastoral instruction and preaching, by examining the specificity of social networks within the clergy and between the clergy and secular communities.
Middle English religious vocabulary is radically different from that of the previous period: whil... more Middle English religious vocabulary is radically different from that of the previous period: while Old English is characterised more by lexical pattern replication of Latin (and Greek) etyma, Middle English is the period of matter replication. Due to the intake of new French religious words, English lexemes and also whole word families undergo semantic transformation and lexical replacement. Other terms, however, survive from the Old English period into the present day, resisting contact-induced pressure. This study shows that the survival of old lexemes into Middle English is largely determined by the extent of their diffusion and frequency of occurrence before the Norman Conquest. It is postulated that two kinds of inherited Old English lexis should be distinguished in the Middle English period: (i) established terms that had belonged to the West Saxon standard and were still preserved in general use by the lower regular clergy, parish priests and the faithful at large, and (ii) terms of limited currency that had failed to spread outside local communities with strong ties and survived for a short time after the Conquest in smaller religious foundations. The innovation and spread of new francophone religious lexis was conditioned by the new preaching practices that began to develop in Europe in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council and the emergence of mendicant orders. Preachers of the new type were the multilingual innovators who generated new lexis in English and at the same time were instrumental in its diffusion, serving as weak ties between the various levels of the medieval society. Urban middle classes, on the other hand, were the most likely English-speaking early adopters of new norms.
Royal writs of William the Conqueror were produced by a multilingual community of clerks whose bu... more Royal writs of William the Conqueror were produced by a multilingual community of clerks whose bureaucratic routines commonly included translation between Latin and the two vernaculars (French and English). These practices encouraged the scribes to generate a professional vocabulary that was essentially identical in all three languages. One part of it consisted of traditional Anglo-Saxon legal lexis, including terminology for right and privileges, land administration, and titles. Twenty-four such terms, extracted from the edition of William’s acta by David Bates, are analysed in this study, and their borrowing and currency reconstructed against the background of a wider corpus of Anglo-Latin and Old English texts and a wider sociolinguistic context of professional post-Conquest trilingualism.
The study of borrowed vocabulary and language contact in the Old English period is technically pr... more The study of borrowed vocabulary and language contact in the Old English period is technically problematic in many ways. Surviving texts give us few clues as to how loans functioned outside the clerical communities, what their regional and register distributions were, and to what extent written sources reflect the circulation of loans in spoken language. This may suggest that a descriptive catalogue of lexical loans is the only approach applicable to the Old English material. This paper, however, aims at an inferential analysis of several loans from Latin and Greek in the religious and educational domain based on contemporary approaches to linguistic innovation, diffusion and change, and the wider cultural context that would have ensured their currency and dissemination – social networks provided by medieval schools and monasteries, and the ecclesiastical community at large. Using a select body of educated loans, it argues that strong ties within monastic communities would generally have prevented contact-induced lexical change from spreading outside the monasteries. Yet the role of individual innovators with both clerical and non-clerical ties and early adopters with elementary Latin proficiency (parish priests) in diffusion of change should not be underestimated.
The aim of this paper is to investigate discourse strategies of outgroup construction in the Alfr... more The aim of this paper is to investigate discourse strategies of outgroup construction in the Alfredian period (late ninth century), by using critical discourse analysis and testing its relevance for the Anglo-Saxon data. The study focuses on the Viking outgroup and its presentation in the texts of the period. The analysis also tackles earlier and later sources containing the episodes of the first encounter with the unwelcome “Other” to trace typological features of outgroup construction in medieval political discourse. The genres that are taken into account are historical writings and legislation in Anglo-Latin and Old English. It is postulated that the Alfredian texts are commissioned by the political elite—the West Saxon kingship—and produced by the symbolic elite—writers, chroniclers, copyists, the clergy more generally, with the Alfredian circle being reconstructed as a “Community of Practice” with a distinct political, cultural, and discourse agenda. The Viking raids of the period provide a “bid for counter-power,” to which the elites have to react both militarily and ideologically. The ideologies of the Anglo-Saxon elites are analyzed at the discourse level, concentrating on the strategies of outgroup derogation, e.g., criminalization of the Vikings in the chronicles. It is concluded that the chronicles can be analyzed as analogous to modern press, that they were produced and circulated to shape “public opinion” of politically and economically prominent social groups.
The Greeks were one of those outgroups to whom the Anglo-Saxons had reasons to look up to, becau... more The Greeks were one of those outgroups to whom the Anglo-Saxons had reasons to look up to, because of the antiquity of their culture and the sanctity of their language, along those of the Hebrews and the Romans. Yet as a language Greek was practically unknown for most of the Anglo-Saxon period and contact with its native speakers and country extremely limited. Nevertheless, references to the Greeks and their language are not uncommon in the Anglo-Saxon sources (both Latin and vernacular), as a little less than 200 occurrences in the Dictionary of Old English (s.v. grecisc) testify.
This paper uses these data, supplementing them with searches in the Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus, Brepolis Library of Latin Texts - Series A, monumenta.ch and Medieval Latin from Anglo-Saxon Sources, and analyses lexical and syntactic strategies of the Greek outgroup construction in Anglo-Saxon texts. It looks at lexemes denoting ‘Greek’ and their derivatives in Anglo-Latin and Old English, examines their collocates and gleans information on attitudes towards Greek and the Greeks, and on membership claims indexed by Latin-Greek or English-Greek code-switching, by at the same time trying to establish parallels and influences between the two high registers of the Anglo-Saxon period.
This paper relates diachronic change in discourse strategies of the Viking-age historical writing... more This paper relates diachronic change in discourse strategies of the Viking-age historical writing to political changes of the period and to communities of practice that produce these histories and chronicles. It examines the labels and stereotypes applied to the Vikings and establishes their sources and evolution by applying a fourfold chronological division of historical sources from around 800 to 1200 (based on the political developments within Anglo-Saxon history and on the manuscript history of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle). The data for the study come from both Old English and Anglo-Latin chronicles. The results are interpreted in terms of critical discourse analysis. It is demonstrated that the chroniclers employ strategies of dissimilation exploiting the notion of illegitimacy and criminality of the Viking outgroup. These strategies change over time, depending on the political situation (raiding vs. settlement vs. reconquest period) and communities of practice involved in the maintenance and dissemination of a particular political discourse.
This paper deals with Finnish lexical loans in modern English relating them to external history a... more This paper deals with Finnish lexical loans in modern English relating them to external history and cultural history of Finland. Chronologically the study starts all the way back in the (prehistoric) Old English period and moves on from Beowulf in Finna land to King Alfred’s Cwenas, from Æthelred II’s coins in Finland to the first baroque descriptions of Finland by merchants and travellers, from the Diet of Porvoo to the publication of the Kalevala, from Porthan, Lönnrot and Castrén to Schauman and Bobrikov, Mannerheim and Molotov, with language history documenting this procession in its own peculiar ways. The data for the study come from the Oxford English Dictionary and other lexicographical sources as well as historical and present-day corpora.
Timofeeva, Olga (2013) "The Wor(l)ds of Kalevala: Finnish Lexical Loans in Modern English," in Ex Philologia Lux: Essays in Honour of Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, ed. by Jukka Tyrkkö, Olga Timofeeva, and Maria Salenius, 159-185. Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique XC. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.
This article describes Anglo-Latin and Old English as two codes correlated in Anglo-Saxon England... more This article describes Anglo-Latin and Old English as two codes correlated in Anglo-Saxon England with the same community of practice. Examining the relationship between Anglo-Latin vocabulary connected with the notions of ‘Latin−Latinity’ and ‘Roman−Romanity’ and the way this vocabulary was infiltrated into the evolving written Old English, it claims that the developments in this domain of Anglo-Latin and Old English lexis can be seen as a continuum of practice. Thus the study aims to contribute methodologically in the specific context of Old English lexicon and theoretically to the understanding of bilingual modes in communities of practice.
Timofeeva, Olga (2013) “Of ledenum bocum to engliscum gereorde: Bilingual Communities of Practice in Anglo-Saxon England,” in Communities of Practice in the History of English, ed. by Joanna Kopaczyk and Andreas H. Jucker, 201–224. Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 235. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
This article claims that there are major problems with existing classifications of Latin loanword... more This article claims that there are major problems with existing classifications of Latin loanwords into Old English. These deficiencies spring not so much from the paucity of the Old English linguistic record, as a comparison with several much better documented Finnish loans into Modern English shows, but rather from methodological imprecision, which results in many lexical items being too hastily labelled with the umbrella term "lexical loan". Alternative terms are suggested for the twelve Finnish and six Old English words investigated in the article, based on their frequency, integration, the registers that they belong to, and the historical and cultural developments that they document.
Timofeeva, Olga (2013) “Latin Loans in Old English and Finnish Loans in Modern English: Can We Distinguish Statistics from Myth?” in Selected Proceedings of the 2012 Symposium on New Approaches in English Historical Lexis (HEL-LEX3), ed. by R.W. McConchie, Teo Juvonen, Mark Kaunisto, Minna Nevala, and Jukka Tyrkkö. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. http://www.lingref.com/cpp/hel-lex/2012/paper2845.pdf
Bringing together fifteen articles by scholars in Europe and North America, this collection aims ... more Bringing together fifteen articles by scholars in Europe and North America, this collection aims to represent and advance studies in historical lexis. It highlights the significance of the understanding of dictionary-making and language-making as important socio-cultural phenomena. With its general focus on England and English, the book investigates the reception and development of historical and modern English vocabulary and culture in different periods, social and professional strata, geographical varieties of English, and other national cultures. The volume is based on individual (meta)lexicographical, etymological, lexicosemantic and corpus studies, representing two large areas of research: the first part focuses on the history of dictionaries, analysing them in diachrony from the first professional dictionaries of the Baroque period via Enlightenment and Romanticism to exploring the possibilities of the new online lexicographical publications; and the second part looks at the interfaces between etymology, semantic development and word-formation on the one hand, and changes in society and culture on the other.
... English as - She looked like a pixie sometimes, her eyes darting here and there, forever watc... more ... English as - She looked like a pixie sometimes, her eyes darting here and there, forever watchful (BNC CCM 98); - My first acquaintance with her was when I heard her sing (BNC CFY 2215); -Charles the Bald was said to resemble his grandfather physically (BNC HPT 175). ...
The aim of this paper is to investigate discourse strategies of outgroup construction in the Alfr... more The aim of this paper is to investigate discourse strategies of outgroup construction in the Alfredian period (late ninth century), by using critical discourse analysis and testing its relevance for the Anglo-Saxon data. The study focuses on the Viking outgroup and its presentation in the texts of the period. The analysis also tackles earlier and later sources containing the episodes of the first encounter with the unwelcome “Other” to trace typological features of outgroup construction in medieval political discourse. The genres that are taken into account are historical writings and legislation in Anglo-Latin and Old English. It is postulated that the Alfredian texts are commissioned by the political elite—the West Saxon kingship—and produced by the symbolic elite—writers, chroniclers, copyists, the clergy more generally, with the Alfredian circle being reconstructed as a “Community of Practice” with a distinct political, cultural, and discourse agenda. The Viking raids of the per...
This study analyses two Old English formulae gret freodlice (‘greets in a friendly manner’) and i... more This study analyses two Old English formulae gret freodlice (‘greets in a friendly manner’) and ic cyðe eow þæt (‘I make it known to you that’), which form a salutation–notification template in a document type called writs. It connects the emergence of this formulaic set to previous oral traditions of delivering news and messages, and to their reflection in dictation practices from at least the time of King Alfred. Their later routinisation and standardisation is seen as a factor brought about by the centralised production of royal writs and their subsequent adoption as templates in monastic scriptoria across the country. These templates continue to be recycled in the early Middle English period both in English and in Latin writs, ultimately shifting to Latin-only documents during the reign of William the Conqueror. Although this shift does not hinder the continuity of the selected bureaucratic template into the later Middle Ages, it affects the structure of the discourse community ...
This study reconstructs the Alfredian network as consisting of twelve actors. This network is ter... more This study reconstructs the Alfredian network as consisting of twelve actors. This network is termed acoalition, within which a cluster of Mercian actors is further hypothesised. Historical sources and charter evidence suggest that Mercian scribes worked for West Saxon kings and may even have taken part in the establishment of a proto-chancery at the royal court. This writing office can be conjectured to have ties with the Alfredian coalition and described as acommunity of practice. The whole sociolinguistic reconstruction is supported by three case studies:Angelcynn‘the English people’ andhere‘band, troop’ in historical-political genres, andgretan freondlicein epistolary genres. The diffusion of these Alfredian norms across time, place and genres is linked to the royal chancery and its distribution channels, as well as to the diachronic sustainability of linguistic practices within professional discourse communities and their archives.
The Greeks were one of those outgroups to whom the Anglo-Saxons had reasons to look up to, becaus... more The Greeks were one of those outgroups to whom the Anglo-Saxons had reasons to look up to, because of the antiquity of their culture and the sanctity of their language, along those of the Hebrews and the Romans. Yet as a language Greek was practically unknown for most of the Anglo-Saxon period and contact with its native speakers and country extremely limited. Nevertheless, references to the Greeks and their language are not uncommon in the Anglo-Saxon sources (both Latin and vernacular), as a little less than 200 occurrences in the Dictionary of Old English (s.v. grecisc) testify.This paper uses these data, supplementing them with searches in the Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus, Brepolis Library of Latin Texts - Series A, monumenta.ch and Medieval Latin from Anglo-Saxon Sources, and analyses lexical and syntactic strategies of the Greek outgroup construction in Anglo-Saxon texts. It looks at lexemes denoting ‘Greek’ and their derivatives in Anglo-Latin and Old English, examine...
This paper relates diachronic change in discourse strategies of the Viking-age historical writing... more This paper relates diachronic change in discourse strategies of the Viking-age historical writing to political changes of the period and to communities of practice that produce these histories and chronicles. It examines the labels and stereotypes applied to the Vikings and establishes their sources and evolution by applying a fourfold chronological division of historical sources from around 800 to 1200 (based on the political developments within Anglo-Saxon history and on the manuscript history of the
... Published in: Selected Proceedings of the 2008 Symposium on New Approaches in English Histori... more ... Published in: Selected Proceedings of the 2008 Symposium on New Approaches in English Historical Lexis (HEL-LEX 2) edited by RW McConchie, Alpo Honkapohja, and Jukka Tyrkkö Table of contents ISBN 978-1-57473-430-0 library binding vi+194 pages publication date ...
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Books by Olga Timofeeva
This book is based on a corpus study of participial and infinitival constructions in Old English. It revisits the question of Latin influence on the Old English syntax, offering a new evaluation of syntactic interference between Latin and Old English, and, more generally, of the contact situation in the Old English period. It compares data from translated texts against the background of original Old English writings, seeking to establish the typological differences between Latin and Old English in the domain of non-finite syntax, and the role of translation in contact-induced change.
Timofeeva, Olga (2010) Non-finite Constructions in Old English, with Special Reference to Syntactic Borrowing from Latin, PhD dissertation, Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki, vol. LXXX, Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.
Drafts by Olga Timofeeva
Published papers by Olga Timofeeva
shows that the survival of old lexemes into Middle English is largely determined by the extent of their diffusion and frequency of occurrence before the Norman Conquest. It is postulated that two kinds of inherited Old English lexis should be distinguished in the Middle English period: (i) established terms that had belonged to the West Saxon standard and were still preserved in general use by the lower regular clergy, parish priests and the faithful at large, and (ii) terms of limited currency that had failed to spread outside local communities with strong ties and survived for a short time after the Conquest in smaller religious foundations. The innovation and spread of new francophone religious lexis was conditioned by the new preaching practices that began to develop in Europe in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council and the emergence of mendicant orders. Preachers of the new type were the multilingual innovators who generated new lexis in English and at the same time were instrumental in its diffusion, serving as weak ties between the various levels of the medieval society. Urban middle classes, on the other hand, were the most likely English-speaking early adopters of new norms.
This book is based on a corpus study of participial and infinitival constructions in Old English. It revisits the question of Latin influence on the Old English syntax, offering a new evaluation of syntactic interference between Latin and Old English, and, more generally, of the contact situation in the Old English period. It compares data from translated texts against the background of original Old English writings, seeking to establish the typological differences between Latin and Old English in the domain of non-finite syntax, and the role of translation in contact-induced change.
Timofeeva, Olga (2010) Non-finite Constructions in Old English, with Special Reference to Syntactic Borrowing from Latin, PhD dissertation, Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki, vol. LXXX, Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.
shows that the survival of old lexemes into Middle English is largely determined by the extent of their diffusion and frequency of occurrence before the Norman Conquest. It is postulated that two kinds of inherited Old English lexis should be distinguished in the Middle English period: (i) established terms that had belonged to the West Saxon standard and were still preserved in general use by the lower regular clergy, parish priests and the faithful at large, and (ii) terms of limited currency that had failed to spread outside local communities with strong ties and survived for a short time after the Conquest in smaller religious foundations. The innovation and spread of new francophone religious lexis was conditioned by the new preaching practices that began to develop in Europe in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council and the emergence of mendicant orders. Preachers of the new type were the multilingual innovators who generated new lexis in English and at the same time were instrumental in its diffusion, serving as weak ties between the various levels of the medieval society. Urban middle classes, on the other hand, were the most likely English-speaking early adopters of new norms.
This paper uses these data, supplementing them with searches in the Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus, Brepolis Library of Latin Texts - Series A, monumenta.ch and Medieval Latin from Anglo-Saxon Sources, and analyses lexical and syntactic strategies of the Greek outgroup construction in Anglo-Saxon texts. It looks at lexemes denoting ‘Greek’ and their derivatives in Anglo-Latin and Old English, examines their collocates and gleans information on attitudes towards Greek and the Greeks, and on membership claims indexed by Latin-Greek or English-Greek code-switching, by at the same time trying to establish parallels and influences between the two high registers of the Anglo-Saxon period.
Timofeeva, Olga (2013) "The Wor(l)ds of Kalevala: Finnish Lexical Loans in Modern English," in Ex Philologia Lux: Essays in Honour of Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, ed. by Jukka Tyrkkö, Olga Timofeeva, and Maria Salenius, 159-185. Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique XC. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.
Timofeeva, Olga (2013) “Of ledenum bocum to engliscum gereorde: Bilingual Communities of Practice in Anglo-Saxon England,” in Communities of Practice in the History of English, ed. by Joanna Kopaczyk and Andreas H. Jucker, 201–224. Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 235. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Timofeeva, Olga (2013) “Latin Loans in Old English and Finnish Loans in Modern English: Can We Distinguish Statistics from Myth?” in Selected Proceedings of the 2012 Symposium on New Approaches in English Historical Lexis (HEL-LEX3), ed. by R.W. McConchie, Teo Juvonen, Mark Kaunisto, Minna Nevala, and Jukka Tyrkkö. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
http://www.lingref.com/cpp/hel-lex/2012/paper2845.pdf