Old English: Pragmatics and Discourse

21 Old English: Pragmatics and discourse 325 Sweetser, Eve E. 1990. From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trim, Richard. 2007. Metaphor Networks: Comparative Evolution of Figurative Language. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Christian Kay, Glasgow (UK) 21 Old English: Pragmatics and discourse 1 2 3 4 5 Old English discourse: data, texts and discourse communities Old English pragmatics as cross-cultural pragmatics Historical discourse analysis Summary References Abstract This chapter suggests that OE pragmatics and discourse should be approached from a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective, rather than seeing Old English as a prestage for the later periods of English. It is its cultural and linguistic “otherness” which makes Old English, in spite of the lack of good data, a particularly interesting area for pragmatic study. The different culture(s) of the Anglo-Saxon world required forms for the negotiation of meaning different from those we are familiar with today. Thus the conspicuous lack of structures attesting to politeness as face work, the existence of distinct speech events such as flyting or the prominent role of silence allow cross-cultural and cross-linguistic comparison which both corroborates and challenges issues like the uniformitarian principle. Similarly, the different typological character of the morpho-syntax of Old English allows a degree of word order flexibility that is exploited by discourse strategies. 1 Old English discourse: data, texts and discourse communities Pragmatics focuses on how meaning is negotiated, i.e., how speakers and hearers in certain contexts – to echo the title of Austin’s (1975 [1962]) groundbreaking lecture – “do things with words”. It thus concerns the analysis of mental processes in speakers and hearers, but also issues of linguistic and social interaction in specific socio-historical and cultural settings. While it is generally, also for speakers and hearers of Present-day languages, hard to isolate the crucial cognitive processes operating in the human minds, the study of OE pragmatics is complicated by at least two further factors: not only, as for all early periods of a language, the lack of good data (see Taavitsainen, Volume 2, Chapter 93), but also the length of the period and consequently and more importantly for the present subject, the changing linguistic and socio-historical conditions during and after the Anglo-Saxon period, which fundamentally affected the bases for and principles of social as well as linguistic interaction. Alex BergsBrought and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics ofMünchen English (HSK 34.1), de Gruyter, 325–340 to you by | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Universitätsbibliothek (LMU) Authenticated Download Date | 8/9/18 10:21 PM 326 III Old English The OE period – traditionally considered to last from the middle of the 5th century to about 1100/1150 – is the longest among the conventional periods of English and covers more than 600 years (see von Mengden, Chapter 2), from the time when Germanic tribes, as pagan pirates and mercenaries, invaded Britain to the late Anglo-Saxon England of the 10th and 11th centuries, when the Anglo-Saxon society was one of the most sophisticated societies of the medieval West, renowned for its ecclesiastical, literary, and cultural achievements. Fortuitously, a wide variety of vernacular OE texts – many more than from any of the other early medieval Germanic societies – are extant from the Anglo-Saxon period. The online database Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus (Healey [ed.] 2005), which consists of at least one copy of every extant OE text, comprises about four million words of Old English, starting with Æthelberht’s vernacular law code from the late 6th century to a collection of diverse texts produced during and after the Benedictine Reform in the 10th and 11th centuries (see also the about 600 – a surprisingly large number – OE words designating textual categories and speech acts collected in Görlach 2004: 91–97). Yet despite this exceptionally good preservation of data, it is still hard to study pragmatic and discourse patterns of the vernacular: Anglo-Saxon England may, at least for the majority of Anglo-Saxons, during its whole period be characterized as an oral rather than a literate society (see Schaefer, Volume 2, Chapter 81), but all of our extant texts are, of course, in the written medium, and all of them are strongly linked to the monastic settings in which most of the manuscripts were produced; accordingly, all of them are strongly influenced by a long literary tradition in Latin. When studying OE pragmatics and discourse, we thus have to be aware – much more than in later centuries – that we have access only to a very small proportion of the language actually used in Anglo-Saxon England. Furthermore, if we take a narrow approach and understand discourse as the spoken equivalent of a text, i.e., a stretch of conversation or dialogue, and discourse analysis as the examination of, for instance, patterns of turn-taking in a dialogue, its methods cannot be fruitfully applied to our OE material. For older stages of a language which are only extant in the written medium, it has been suggested that much can be deduced from socalled “speech-based genres” such as court records, drama or from more colloquial written genres such as personal letters or diaries (see Biber and Finegan 1992). Yet virtually no such speech-based genres are extant from the OE period, except for the didactic dialogues found in the OE version of Ælfric’s Colloquy and the indirect instances of direct speech in OE fictional texts attested in poetry, homilies, or prose narratives such as the OE Apollonius. Most of the homilies and narratives, however, are translations from Latin, so that we cannot be sure whether the speech conventions recorded there echo actual OE speech interaction or whether they were typical of the Latin discourse tradition or a hybrid Anglo-Saxon/Latin tradition. In his study of interjections in the OE part of the Helsinki Corpus (Rissanen et al. 1991), for instance, Hiltunen (2006: 92) finds that OE eala, the most frequent interjection in the corpus (66 instances), is attested in a broad variety of texts as an attention-getter or emphasizer, but only in texts translated or adapted from Latin Christian models. It is thus an OE interjection with decidedly literary, especially Christian, associations (for a similar text-specific distribution of OE insulting epithets, see Chapman 2008 and Section 3.2). Even in the more monolingual context of heroic poetry (which survives in revised Christianized form only) and other instances of oral formulaic poetry (see Schaefer, Volume 2, Chapter 81), such as examples of AngloSaxon verbal duelling, we cannot be sure whether we are dealing with actual language Brought to you by | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Universitätsbibliothek (LMU) Authenticated Download Date | 8/9/18 10:21 PM 21 Old English: Pragmatics and discourse interaction or merely literary topoi typical of the literary traditions in the vernacular or in Latin (see the discussion of “flyting” in Knappe 2008 and Section 2.2 below). If we take a broader view of the concept of discourse and capture it as a domain of communication denoting the totality of linguistic practices that pertain to a particular field of knowledge (such as, for instance, the discourses of the courtroom, of law, of news, of science) and the dissemination of information within a certain group of speakers, i.e., a specific discourse community (communities with a common set of assumptions and a shared discourse), the only promising field for Old English is the “discourse of religion” (see also Kohnen 2007a), which is widely attested in translations of the psalms and the gospels as well as translations of works by the Fathers (Gregory the Great, Augustine, Bede) and in text types such as prayers, homilies, monastic rules (St. Benedict, Chrodegang) or penitentials. It is exactly the emergence of new text types and forms of discourse which characterizes the Middle English period (see Traugott, Chapter 30). 2 Old English pragmatics as cross-cultural pragmatics This survey of existing texts and their contexts shows that a comprehensive study of OE pragmatics and discourse would have to cover as diverse concepts as the discourse traditions of the Germanic heroic age and those of a recently Christianized society, and also the scholarly activities in the vein of the Benedictine reform (the last two strongly influenced by Latin literacy and its discourse traditions). Anglo-Saxon culture – or rather, Anglo-Saxon cultures – thus was very much different from later cultures: it not only saw the transition from an oral to a literate society, but also – an aspect relevant for the major principles of social interaction central to pragmatic analysis – the transition from a heroic to a Christian society. The Anglo-Saxon period thus has very different medial and cultural backgrounds compared to later periods of English. Yet the period is sometimes in danger of losing what has come to be called its essential “alterity”, its otherness compared to our habits of mind, modes of expression and principles of social organization (see Jauss 1979; Lerer 1991: 7-8). Very little of this otherness, for example, seems to have been acknowledged in studies of OE pragmatics, most probably because many of the studies are based on the OE corpus material selected for the Helsinki Corpus (Rissanen et al. 1991), which aims at the comparability of genres and text types during the history of English and not their divergence. 2.1 Politeness Some issues of divergence or otherness are enunciated in Kohnen’s more recent discussions of the question whether there was anything like facework in terms of the politeness theory by Brown and Levinson (1987) in Anglo-Saxon England and if so, whether these norms were more oriented towards positive or negative politeness (Kohnen 2008a, 2008b). In his studies on different manifestations of OE directives (Kohnen 2000, 2007b, 2008a, 2008c; see also Section 3.1.2), Kohnen finds no instances of negative politeness, i.e. the wish that one’s actions go unimpeded by the others, in texts set in Germanic or secular contexts. Instead, direct performatives Ic bidde eow þæt … ‘I ask you to …’ or constructions with þu scealt ‘thou shalt’ are preferred. In texts set Brought to you by | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Universitätsbibliothek (LMU) Authenticated Download Date | 8/9/18 10:21 PM 327 328 III Old English within a Christian context, many strategies implying a basic kind of solidarity are attested, such as constructions with hortative uton ‘let us’, stressing the necessity of the required action from both addresser and addressee. Kohnen argues that the solidarity expressed by common ground strategies reflects the Christian and monastic models of ‘humilitas’ and ‘oboedientia’ which, in his opinion, cannot necessarily be taken as strategies of face work (Kohnen 2008b: 143). These findings suggest that linguistic politeness in the sense of face work may not have been important in Anglo-Saxon communication, at least with regard to negative politeness. A similar distribution across text categories is suggested by Kohnen’s study of OE terms of address, such as leof ‘dear one, friend’, broþor ‘brother’, or hlaford ‘master, ruler; lord’. Leof, the most general courteous address in Old English communicating sympathy, affection, and friendship, is neither typically formal nor typically authoritative, but applicable in a wide range of relationships and settings (so that the usual Modern English translations Sir or My/Dear Lord, which imply a certain authoritative hierarchy, are inaccurate). Broþor designates a friendly and affectionate relationship and seems to combine the intimate, mostly affectionate bond associated with blood relationship and the basic solidarity among humans being requested by Christian morals (Kohnen 2008b: 145– 152). In secular texts, the use of hlaford reflects a static hierarchical society, a fixed rank in a hierarchical society characterized by mutual obligation and kin loyalty; in religious contexts, it is used to address God or Christ (translating Lt. dominus, i.e. ‘the Lord’). Kohnen summarizes that the prevalent picture of a warlike society of (secular) Anglo-Saxon England may have followed different underlying assumptions and customs, suggesting that face-threatening acts were not felt as a menace but rather as an accomplishment and that face-enhancing acts, like self-praise and boasting (see Section 2.2 on flyting), were not considered to be embarrassing. Politeness as face work may thus not have played a major role in Anglo-Saxon society. This highlights the intrinsically culture-specific nature of phenomena like politeness and suggests in accordance with other cross-cultural studies that the universal validity or significance of politeness theory – as devised by Brown and Levinson (1987) – is a gross mistake. Negative politeness in particular is fundamentally culturespecific, reflecting the typical patterns of today’s Western, or even more particular, Anglo-American, politeness culture (see also Jucker and Taavitsainen 2008: 7–9). The study of Anglo-Saxon pragmatics thus does not only affect our understanding of the historicity of verbal interaction but also challenges issues of universality. 2.2 Flyting Similar factors of “otherness” have also been studied – in literary as well as pragmatic investigations – in the analysis of Anglo-Saxon “flyting” (cf. OE flitan ‘strive, quarrel, dispute’), the defiant, proud provocation in verbal duelling in heroic poetry (see Arnovick 1999: 15–40; Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000; Knappe 2008). In particular Byrhtnoth’s flyting in the Battle of Maldon (lines 25–61) or the so-called Unferth episode in Beowulf (lines 499–610) exemplify the Germanic genre with its highly stylized and conventional rhetoric (following the standard sequence “claim – defence – counterclaim”) and also the subtlety of the combination of insult and boast. In flyting, power and status are negotiated on a verbal battlefield; typical topics of the insults are crimes of kinship (cowardice, failure of honor, irresponsible behavior). In the Unferth episode, Brought to you by | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Universitätsbibliothek (LMU) Authenticated Download Date | 8/9/18 10:21 PM 21 Old English: Pragmatics and discourse for instance, Beowulf is invited to tell of his famous victories, but first Unferth addresses Beowulf with an insulting speech, accusing Beowulf of having risked his life for a foolish contest with Breca and for having lost the contest (lines 506–511). In the passage given, (1), Unferth provocatively doubts that Beowulf is going to be successful in his encounter with Grendel (lines 512–515) and Beowulf counters in the appropriate style of flyting by accusing Unferth of being drunk (see Arnovick 1999: 608–609 and Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000: 77–78). (1) [Unferth] “Đonne wene ic to þe wyrsan geþingea ðeah þu heaðoræsa gehwær þohte grimre guðe, gif þu Grendles dearst nihtlonge fyrst nean bidan.” Beowulf maþelode, bearn Ecgþeowes: “Hwæt, þu worn fela, wine min Unferð beore druncen ymb Brecan spræce sægdest from his siðe!” (Beowulf 525–532a) ‘Unferth: “Therefore I anticipate worse outcome for you – though you may always have proved competent in the onslaughts of battle and fierce fighting – if you dare to await Grendel at close quarters for the duration of a night”. Beowulf, son of Ecgtheow, spoke out: “Well now, Unferth, my friend, you have a lot to say about Breca and to tell about this enterprise for one who is drunk with beer!” ’ Ritual insults like these continue beyond the period of heroic poetry in the literary challenges between later medieval knights or its revival as a Scots literary genre in the Renaissance. In cross-cultural approaches, its characteristics have recently also been compared to the – also predominantly oral – ritual insults in the sounding or playing the dozens by African-American adolescents. Both flyting and sounding can be described as rule-governed and therefore ritual, but Anglo-Saxon flyting, arguably (see the discussion in Knappe 2008), lacks the ludic character of the sounding of urban black adolescents in the English-speaking world (for this distinction, see Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000: 77). 2.3 Frame analysis: Old English charms Studies like these call attention to Bax’s (2001) suggestion that comparative frame analysis as conceived by Goffman (1974) may be an effective device for an analysis of the “otherness” of distinct medieval speech events such as ritual challenging. Yet until now very little use has been made of the historical dimensions of frame analysis, such as the recognition of “scripts” or “frames”, i.e., pre-existing knowledge structures for interpreting event sequences with a fixed static pattern (see Yule 1996: 85–89). Related ideas and approaches have, however, been applied in the studies on Anglo-Saxon “flyting” summarized in Section 2.2 and particularly in Arnovick’s (2006) investigation of verbal performatives in a corpus of 463 OE and Anglo-Latin charm incantations from the Lacnunga and the Leechbook. In an interdisciplinary approach inspired by both historical-pragmatic and oral theory, charm incantations are seen as “speech events”, i.e. culturally recognized social activities within a very particular social and linguistic context in which language plays a specific role. Brought to you by | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Universitätsbibliothek (LMU) Authenticated Download Date | 8/9/18 10:21 PM 329 330 III Old English The speech event charm incantation is characterized by a ritual communication with spirits. Arnovick’s analysis concentrates on elements with a clear pragmatic function, most of which cannot be studied by corpus methods because they comprise words with non-propositional meaning (“Speaking Gibberish”; Chapter 2), foreign language elements (“Praying the Pater Noster”; Chapter 3), or use no words at all (“Keeping Silence”; Chapter 5). In her close readings of these charms, Arnovick shows that gibberish utterances, which seem to address the spirits in their own tongue, are used as performative relics which perform the illocutionary work of the charm. Gibberish is thus essentially performative because it is the medium of word magic. Similar functions are established for the Latin Pater Noster and for silence: If the Pater Noster follows a gibberish utterance, it serves to sanctify its command; if the Pater Noster appears as the single incantation in the charm, it shoulders the whole illocutionary burden of this charm. Silence – as a metacommunicative marker of the incantation, introducing or framing the magical utterance – does not only signal respect to the deity addressed, but it also indicates respect to the audience of the ritual. Arnovick’s analyses, which are also based on a detailed analysis of contextual settings as testified by contemporary texts such as monastic Rules, are a pertinent example of how such a close analysis may depict past and no longer existing models of verbal interaction, which thus expose the “alterity” of Anglo-Saxon social and linguistic interaction. 3 Historical discourse analysis In addition to these pragmaphilological and interdisciplinary approaches, we find various investigations in the scope of historical discourse analysis (for the term, see Brinton 2001: 139), both function-to-form and form-to-function mappings. Function-to-form mapping, i.e. the identification of OE forms which realize particular discourse functions, is relevant both for larger frames or scripts such as flyting (see Section 2.2 above) or the investigation into certain speech acts (see Section 3.1 below). Form-tofunction mapping, i.e. the explication of pragmatic and discourse functions of a particular OE item, is central for the analysis of, for example, speech act verbs such as biddan and beodan, which are used as performative directives (also see Section 3.1.2) or for investigations into the functions of polyfunctional items such as þa, soþlice, or hwæt, which have been analyzed as discourse markers in Old English (see Section 3.3). If we survey these recent contributions to OE discourse analysis, however, we cannot fail to notice a conspicuous ad hoc character of most of the studies and their rather large conceptual variety and methodological pluriformity. Again, most of these studies prefer analyzing features and patterns attested for Present-day English, sometimes neglecting the fact that Old English differentiated – as a still much more inflecting language – more nominal and verbal categories (grammatical gender, case; mood), which allow the pragmatic exploitation of structures which are no longer possible in Present-day English. For directives, Old English could employ not only imperative, but also subjunctive/optative inflections (Traugott 1991: 398), instead of or in addition to the employment of various speech act verbs comparable to, for example, PDE order (OE beodan) or ask (OE biddan). Similarly, tense-aspect morphology and, in particular, the employment of specific different patterns of word order to signal focus or topic relations (which are no longer applicable in the fixed system SVO in Present-day English), play an important role in foregrounding and narrative segmentation in Old English, instead of or in addition to discourse markers such as þa, hwæt, or soþlice (see Section 3.4). Brought to you by | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Universitätsbibliothek (LMU) Authenticated Download Date | 8/9/18 10:21 PM 21 Old English: Pragmatics and discourse 3.1 Function-to-form mapping: speech acts 3.1.1 Methodological issues In the beginnings of historical pragmatics following Jucker’s (1995) landmark volume, the study of speech act verbs and speech acts was considered to be particularly promising (see the inaugural issue of the Journal of Historical Pragmatics 2000) and so a number of studies on English diachronic pragmatics have dealt with speech acts (for the methodologically most consistent approaches, see Jucker and Taavitsainen 2008 [eds.]). Apart from Kohnen’s intense synchronic investigations into OE directives (see Section 3.1.2), most of these studies aim at comparing certain speech acts through the history of English; see Traugott (1991) on the history of English speech act verbs, Arnovick (1994, 1999: 57–94) on promising and curses, Jucker and Taavitsainen (2000) on insults, and Grzega (2008) on greetings. Accordingly, their primary focus is on regular patterns in language change, such as regularities in the semantic shift from non-epistemic to epistemic in the development of speech act verbs (Traugott 1991) or an increasing subjectification in promising or cursing (Arnovick 1994, 1999). Much of this research is not only inhibited by the lack of comparative data, but also – as Bertuccelli Papi (2000) has pointed out – by the theoretical divergence of the Austinian, Gricean, and Searlian traditions, which emphasize the detailed investigation of the socio-historical context, on the one hand, or, on the other, an essentially cognitive notion of context, i.e., speaker intentions, felicity conditions, and mental attitudes (which are particularly hard to reveal for OE speakers). Many of the studies on English historical pragmatics employ a mixed approach, which is, however, basically structured along the lines of the five types of speech acts distinguished by Searle (1969; representatives, directives, commissives, expressives, and declaratives). Because of the conspicuous synchronic and diachronic variation in speech acts, Jucker and Taavitsainen (2000, 2008) have suggested a prototype approach, viewing speech acts within the “multidimensional pragmatic space” they share with neighbouring speech acts whose coordinates are context-specific, culture-specific and time-specific. The pragmatic space of “antagonistic verbal behaviour” (Jucker and Taavitsainen 2008), for example, would thus include insults and threats as found in medieval flyting, Shakespearian name-calling, or present-day sounding or flaming, since basic patterns of the speech act “verbal insult” are repeated there in slightly modified forms (see Section 2.2 above). Studies following this approach have thus confirmed the importance of long-term investigations in historical pragmatics, since they both corroborate and challenge issues like the uniformitarian principle (for the challenges, see also Section 2.1 on politeness, above). Again, however, it has to be acknowledged that it is in particular divergence which is crucial for the study of OE speech acts. In her pioneering account outlining the chances and challenges of historical pragmatics, Schlieben-Lange (1976) warned that we have to be very careful when transferring our understanding of today’s speech acts and their principles to older stages of a language. Not only were there different, or at least much more important and more highly institutionalized, speech acts, such as BANISHING, OUTLAWING, SCORNING, OFFERING ONE’S SERVICE, but some speech acts and events which seem equivalent to present-day ones may have changed in their pragmatic function. In his study of the Old High German performative formula in the speech event of baptism, Wagner (1994), for example, accordingly finds that the pragmatic functions of certain performatives have changed tremendously: while in the medieval theocentric world view of Brought to you by | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Universitätsbibliothek (LMU) Authenticated Download Date | 8/9/18 10:21 PM 331 332 III Old English the early Middle Ages, the utterance of performative formulas employing the verbs gelouban ‘believe’ and forsahhan ‘forsake’ was an act of abjuring the devils and subjecting oneself to the Christian god, i.e. a declarative speech act in Searlian terms (speaker causes the situation X, direction of fit: words change the world), it is – for many speakers – now rather a solemn profession of faith or a solemn promise and therefore a commissive speech act (the speaker intends X, direction of fit: make the world fit words). 3.1.2 Directives in Old English In general, Schlieben-Lange (1976) suggested that indirect speech acts, ambiguous in their illocution or perlocution, were rare, reflecting the different social contexts in a strongly hierarchical society. For Old English, these suggestions were corroborated for directives and their development, the as yet only systematically studied OE speech act (see Kohnen 2000, 2008a, 2008c). In an early study, Kohnen (2000) found that performative directives, i.e., instances in which the speaker explicitly refers to the act of requesting or commanding, were more common in Old English than in Present-day English, where directives are often realized in indirect or hedged form (e.g. Could you give me a hand? or Will you do me a favour?). The following examples, (2a, b) from Ælfric’s letter to Wulfsige and the OE laws of King Canute illustrate the “typical explicit performative pattern”, i.e. constructions with verbs in 1P SG active, (preferentially) an object referring to the addressee, and a subordinate clause introduced by þæt naming the requested action: þæt (2) a. And we beodað and man Cristene men we command-1P.PL.ACT that [SUB. CONJ.] one to lytlum huru to deaþe for ealles Christian men-ACC.PL for all–GEN.SG ne forræde to little (things)–DAT.PL certainly to death-DAT.SG not sentence–3P.SG.ACT.SUBJ ‘And we command that Christian men be not sentenced to death for the slightest reason’ (c.1020 LawIICn, 2.1; Kohnen 2000: 304) b. ic bidde I eow þæt ge gymon ask-1P.SG.ACT you-2P.PL.ACC that [SUB. CONJ.] you-2P.PL.NOM take care–2P.PL.ACT.SUBJ eowra sylfra swa eowere your-2P.PL.GEN selves-2P.PL.GEN as bec eow wissiað your-2P.PL.GEN books–NOM.PL you-2P.PL.ACC instruct-3P.PL.ACT ‘I ask you to take care of yourselves in such a way as your books instruct you’ (c.1000 ÆLet 1 [Wulfsige Xa] 117; Kohnen 2000: 304) In Old English, the performative function was found to be restricted to only five out of the altogether 40 relevant speech act verbs, namely biddan ‘ask’, læran ‘teach’, halsian ‘implore’, bebeodan ‘bid’, and beodan ‘command’. This means that only those directive acts were prominent which imply an unambiguous and asymmetric relationship between addresser and addressee: Either the addresser holds a superior rank (as in the case of socalled beodan verbs such as beodan, bebeodan, hatan ‘command’, læran ‘instruct’, mynegian ‘exhort’, manian ‘exhort’) or the addresser is not in a superior position (as in the case of so-called biddan verbs such as biddan, gebiddan ‘ask’, halsian). Furthermore, the conspicuous lack of verbs denoting suggestion and advice such as PDE suggest or recommend shows that indirect directives and, consequently, the tendency to avoid face-threatening acts seem to have developed relatively late in the history of English, in Early Modern English (see Kohnen 2002, 2007b; see also Section 2.1, above). Brought to you by | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Universitätsbibliothek (LMU) Authenticated Download Date | 8/9/18 10:21 PM 21 Old English: Pragmatics and discourse In his following studies, charting the complete inventory of the various manifestations of directives, Kohnen finds that the manifestations of directives fall into four classes: performatives, imperatives, modal expressions, and indirect manifestations (see Kohnen 2007b and 2008c). Over the history of English, performatives, modals, and in particular imperatives, with 2P imperatives as their unmarked manifestation, have been most frequent (Kohnen 2008c: 309). The most problematic class of directives for all periods of English are indirect directives, in which an utterance contains neither imperatives, nor the relevant modals, nor performatives; in his OE data, Kohnen could not find any instances of such indirect directives (Kohnen 2008c: 301): both their frequency and their variability increase only over the centuries. All in all, the findings thus again suggest that negative politeness did not play a major role in Anglo-Saxon communication (see also Section 2.1). 3.1.3 Other speech acts In her study on the history of promises in English, Arnovick (1994, 1999: 57–71) similarly proposes a “straightforward nature of the promise” in Old English: promises in Old English are described as direct, sentence-length utterances; many of the promissory statements rely upon sculan or willan, such as in (3): (3) Nu ic, Beowulf, þec, secg betsta, me for sunu wylle freogan on ferhþe. (Beowulf 946b–948a) ‘Now, Beowulf, best of men, in my heart I will love you as a son’ Arnovick further argues that the development of will and shall from deontic modals to epistemic tense markers, marking predominantly futurity and no longer obligation, results in an expansion of the discourse needed to convey the illocutionary force of promising in the course of the history of English. In the development of the manifestations of SWEARING/CURSING, Arnovick also finds a movement toward greater subjectivity from Old English, when curses were so standard as to appear formulaic and had an exclusively deontic, religious meaning (Arnovick 1999: 73–94 “Subjectification in the Common Curse”). Analogous stylized forms have also been found for the related speech act INSULT in Old English (cf. Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000 and the account of OE flyting, also Section 2.2 above). 3.2 Form-to-function mappings 3.2.1 Insulting epithets With respect to form-to-function mapping, i.e., the explication of pragmatic and discourse functions of particular OE items, a similar importance of stylized forms is seen in Chapman’s (2008) study of insulting epithets in Old English, which highlights the highly conventional character of insulting epithets. OE speakers/writers use common, well-worn words, which are frequently repeated in the epithets (earm and earmig ‘poor’ are most versatile; there are only four hapax, such as wambscyldig ‘belly-guilty; sinful’) and they fall into a fairly well defined set of semantic categories, typical of insults in other Brought to you by | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Universitätsbibliothek (LMU) Authenticated Download Date | 8/9/18 10:21 PM 333 334 III Old English languages, such as “low social standing” (e.g. earm/earmig ‘poor; miserable, wretched’, ungesælig ‘unfortunate; miserable, wretched’), “intellectual, mental deviations” (e.g. dysig ‘foolish’, stunt ‘foolish’), “individual deviations in character” (e.g. lyþre ‘wicked, evil’, wælhreow ‘cruel, barbarous’), or “individual transgressions of societal norms”, in Old English overwhelmingly characterized as sins (e.g. druncene ‘drunk’, leas ‘vain, false; lying’, wlanc ‘proud’, licettere ‘hypocrite’, wedloga ‘oath-breaker’). In sum, Chapman finds a preponderance of terms naming sins or other moral shortcomings, such as wedloga ‘oath-breaker’ or licettere ‘hypocrite’. Notably missing from the OE data are sexual and scatological epithets, which appear to have been common in Germanic traditions, but which might not be attested because of the predominance of religious genres in the surviving OE texts (Chapman 2008: 4). The most creative expressions are found in addresses to devils and in an exceptional passage in an OE debate between the body and the soul from the Vercelli Homilies, where the soul accuses the body of getting them both damned: (4) La, ðu eorðan lamb & dust & wyrma gifel, & þu wambscyldiga fætels & gealstor & fulnes & hræw, hwig forgeate ðu me & þa toweardan tide? (HomU 9 [ScraggVerc 4] 207) ‘Hey, you mud of the earth and dust and food for worms, and you belly-guilty bag and pestilence and foulness and corpse, why did you forget me and the future?’ (translation Chapman 2008: 2) While this passage may indeed allow a better idea of spoken OE interaction, the common conventionality of insults is not specific to Old English, but has already been noted for many other languages. Indeed, this speech act actually invites conventionality, because an inherent characteristic of an insult is that the insulting label must be recognized as such by the target and other listeners. 3.2.2 Interjections Single OE elements with pragmatic function which have received some attention in the literature are interjections and, in particular, discourse particles. Some approaches propose a cline between interjections and discourse markers (see the review of scholarship in Hiltunen 2006: 93–94) and there are a number of polyfunctional items such as OE hwæt ‘what’, which may function as interjections or discourse particles. The main difference between interjections and discourse markers, however, is that while the latter work on the textual and interpersonal level only, interjections predominantly function as full speech acts, i.e., as equivalents to a full sentence (PDE Wow! ‘I am surprised’, PDE sh ‘I want silence here’). The studies on interjections have until now mainly concentrated on charting the inventory of interjections in Old English by means of a corpus analysis (Hiltunen 2006) and investigations into the use and descriptions of OE interjections (and their relation to Latin ones) in OE texts and also metalinguistic sources such as Ælfric’s Grammar (Hiltunen 2006; Sauer 2007, 2008). An investigation of Ælfric’s Grammar shows that Ælfric was aware of the role and significance of interjections in English, since he discusses them in some detail. A more functional approach to interjections is likely to yield not only further insights into interjections but also, since they signal full speech acts, into speech acts and their analysis. Brought to you by | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Universitätsbibliothek (LMU) Authenticated Download Date | 8/9/18 10:21 PM 21 Old English: Pragmatics and discourse 3.2.3 Discourse markers Starting with Enkvist’s analyses of OE þa ‘then; when’ (Enkvist 1972, 1986) and, in particular, Brinton’s pioneering monograph on “mystery features” of Old and Middle English (Brinton 1996), most attention in OE pragmatic research has until recently been paid to what have been termed “discourse markers” (Schiffrin 1987) or “pragmatic markers” (Brinton 1996). Due to the difficulties of sentence and discourse segmentation arising from the lack of punctuation in OE manuscripts and also due to the oral or oral-literate character of OE texts in general, the discourse-structuring function of adverbs and phrases which segment OE texts was registered in philological approaches to Anglo-Saxon literature before the beginning of historical pragmatics as a discipline proper. OE adverbs such as her ‘here’ and nu ‘now’, for example, have been described in their text deictic, i.e., textual, functions (Clemoes 1985; Fries 1993; see also Lenker 2000). Much valuable material can also be found in glossaries and introductions to editions of OE texts or monographs discussing the language of individual Anglo-Saxon authors (for the Alfredian works, see, e.g., Wülfing 1894–1901), material which tends to be neglected in studies based on language corpora such as the Helsinki Corpus (Rissanen et al. 1991). The OE items best studied for their various functions are þa ‘then; when’ and hwæt ‘what’, not only in linguistic but also in literary and philological studies hwæt in particular because of its prominent appearance at the beginning of several well-known OE poems such as Beowulf, Andreas, The Dream of the Rood, Exodus, Fates of the Apostles, Judgement Day II, Solomon and Saturn, and Vainglory (see Brinton 1996: Chapter 7 and Stanley 2000). Yet, with the advent of text linguistics and pragmatics, the investigations into these items have become much more methodological. Brinton’s pragmatic analysis of the uses of OE hwæt, for example, shows that it – in addition to its employment as an interrogative and complementizer – serves as an attention getter and as a marker of shared knowledge (Brinton 1996: 187–189). OE þa may be employed as a temporal adverb ‘then’ or as a temporal conjunction ‘when; then … when’. Within a discourse perspective, þa has been seen to function as a discourse marker denoting foregrounding action, narrative segmentation, or shifts on the discourse level (see, for example, Enkvist 1972, 1986; Enkvist and Wårvik 1987; Kim 1992; Brinton 2006). In most of the studies, word order patterns (mainly verb-second, i.e., þa V…) are considered to analyze and highlight the various text-structuring function of þa (Wårvik 1995, 2011; see also below, Section 3.4). Similar functions have been found for two collocations comprising þa: hwæt þa ‘what then’ moves the narrative forward, expressing the fact that the event that follows can be inferred from the previous event (Brinton 1996: 193–199). The phrases þa gelamp / gewearþ / wæs (hit) (þæt) ‘then it happened that’ – termed gelamp-constructions by Brinton (1996: Chapter 5) – serve as episode boundary markers, expressing the “subsidiary foreground”, the instigating event of an episode. Comparable to OE þa and OE þa gelamp hit, OE soþlice and witodlice, lit. ‘truly, verily’, may not only be employed as manner adverbs with a scope within the predicate or as truth-intensifying emphasizers, but, more often, as pragmatic markers functioning as highlighters or – denoting episode boundaries – as markers of discourse discontinuity in OE prose (Lenker 2000). Brought to you by | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Universitätsbibliothek (LMU) Authenticated Download Date | 8/9/18 10:21 PM 335 336 III Old English 3.2.4 Word order and information structure Recent work has highlighted the relevance of information structure to the choice of word order options in Old English. Again, it is the difference of Old English vs. Middle (and Present-day) English structures which has to be stressed: much more than in later periods of English, morphological features (tense-aspect inflection) and distinct word order patterns were central for text-structuring. Tense-aspect morphology, which serves the function of placing events in time (with aspect dependent on the speakers’ perspective), played an important role in foregrounding and narrative segmentation: In his analysis of fore- and backgrounding in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Hopper suggests that the foreground in OE narratives, in accordance with general principles of grounding, is indicated by the perfective aspect (single dynamic, punctual, or telic events), whereas the background (durative/iterative/habitual/atelic processes) is indicated by the imperfective aspect. Foregrounding may also be indicated through VS and OV structures and backgrounding by SV structures (Hopper 1979: 220–226). The idea that discourse relations are signalled by specific word order patterns is thus not new, but research into the relation of information structure and word order has seen an upsurge of interest in recent years. So Los (2000) finds that different word orders with onginnan/beginnan ‘begin’ in the works of Ælfric yield identifiable discourse effects: on-/beginnan in V1 position invariably indicate discourse discontinuity, i.e. mark episodes in which the narrative takes a dramatic turn, whereas main clauses introduced by þa + finite on-/beginnan take a bare infinitive and mark discourse continuity. In her examination of word order patterns in Old English non-coordinate and coordinate clauses, i.e., clauses introduced by coordinating conjunctions, Bech (2008) finds that verb-final main clauses (SXV) are likely to signal coordinating discourse relations, for example Narration or Continuation. In a number of recent articles, van Kemenade and colleagues highlight the fact that Old English possesses a number of morpho-syntactic properties which allow a degree of word order flexibility that is exploited by discourse strategies and, in particular, suggest that particular adverbs (mainly þa and þonne ‘then’) functioned as “discourse partitioners” in Old English (van Kemenade and Los 2006; van Kemenade et al. 2008). Their examination of word order patterns with OE þa and þonne leads them to claim that these adverbs (or rather, particles) should be seen as “focus particles” with a fixed position in the clause structure, with a topic area to the left of the particle and a focus area on the right (for an alternative view on the discourse functions of adverbs in “post-first-position”, i.e. the position after the first sentence constituent, see Lenker 2010: 67–72). In sum, these studies suggest that Old English is tailored to allow a certain amount of discourse flexibility: the syntactic and – undisputed – discourse properties of þa/þonne show that the syntactic organization of the clause in Old English is closely interwoven with discourse organization, while the transition to Middle English is one that results in a more strictly syntactic organization of the clause (see also Traugott, Chapter 30). 4 Summary The studies of OE pragmatics and discourse reviewed here, though as yet very diverse in their approaches and methodologies, have shown that it is indeed possible to obtain an understanding of how meaning was negotiated in Anglo-Saxon times, in spite of the Brought to you by | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Universitätsbibliothek (LMU) Authenticated Download Date | 8/9/18 10:21 PM 21 Old English: Pragmatics and discourse lack of good, especially spoken or speech-based, data. It is in particular the “alterity” of Anglo-Saxon England culture(s), i.e. the very different socio-historical conditions, and the typological difference of the still largely inflecting structure of Old English as compared to Present-day English, which make Old English a very interesting field for the study of pragmatics. It might thus be advisable to approach OE pragmatics more like cross-cultural, contrastive studies, rather than viewing it – as many studies so far seem to have done – as a pre-stage for Middle English, Early Modern English, and Modern English. Contrastive cross-cultural approaches to speech acts (especially by Blum-Kulka and associates; see Blum-Kulka et al. 1989) should thus be methodologically significant for the study of OE pragmatics, since they compare the realization of a particular speech act in different cultural and linguistic contexts. Although many aspects of the history of larger speech events and speech acts may prove to be cultural ones in the final analysis, it is thanks to linguistic, i.e., pragmatic, studies of Old English that many complex stories of linguistic and cultural interaction in Anglo-Saxon England have already been exposed. 5 References Arnovick, Leslie K. 1994. The expanding discourse of promises in Present-day English: A case study in historical pragmatics. Folia Linguistica Historica 15: 175–191. Arnovick, Leslie K. 1999. Diachronic Pragmatics. Seven Case Studies in English Illocutionary Development. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Arnovick, Leslie K. 2006. Written Reliquaries: The Resonance of Orality in Medieval English Texts. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Austin, J. L. 1975 [1962]. How to do things with words. In: J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (eds.), The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 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Pragmatic Markers in English: Grammaticalization and Discourse Functions. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Brinton, Laurel J. 2001. Historical discourse analysis. In: Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen, and Heidi E. Hamilton (eds.), The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, 138–160. Oxford: Blackwell. Brinton, Laurel J. 2006. Pathways in the development of pragmatic markers in English. In: van Kemenade and Los (eds.), 307–334. Brown, Penelope and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals of Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapman, Don. 2008. “You belly-guilty bag”. Insulting epithets in Old English. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 9: 1–19. Clemoes, Peter. 1985. Language in context: Her in the 890 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Leeds Studies in English 16: 27–36. Brought to you by | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Universitätsbibliothek (LMU) Authenticated Download Date | 8/9/18 10:21 PM 337 338 III Old English Enkvist, Nils Erik. 1972. Old English adverbial þa – an action marker? Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 73: 90–96. Enkvist, Nils Erik. 1986. More about the textual functions of the Old English adverbial þa. In: Dieter Kastovsky and Aleksaner Szwedek (eds.), Linguistics across Historical and Geographical Boundaries: In Honour of Jacek Fisiak on the Occasion of his Fiftieth Birthday, Vol. I, 301–309. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Enkvist, Nils Erik and Brita Wårvik. 1987. Old English þa, temporal chains, and narrative structure. In: Anna Giacalone Ramat, Onofrido Carruba, and Guiliano Bernini (eds.), Papers from the 7th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, 221–237. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Fischer, Olga, Annette Rosenbach, and Dieter Stein (eds.). 2000. Pathways of Change: Grammaticalization in English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Fries, Udo. 1993. Towards a description of text deixis in Old English. In: Klaus R. Grinda and Claus-Dieter Wetzel (eds.), Anglo-Saxonica: Festschrift für Hans Schabram zum 65. Geburtstag, 527–540. Munich: Fink. Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. New York: Harper and Row. Görlach, Manfred. 2004. Text Types and the History of English. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Gotti, Maurizio, Marina Dossena, and Richard Dury (eds.). 2008. English Historical Linguistics 2006. Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL 14), Bergamo, 21–25 August 2006. Vol. I: Syntax and Morphology. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: Benjamins. Grzega, Joachim. 2008. Hāl, Hail, Hello, Hi: Greeting in English language history. In: Jucker and Taavitsainen (eds.), 165–193. Healey, Antonette di Paolo (ed.). 2005. Dictionary of Old English Corpus (DOEC). Web Corpus. with John Price Wilkin and Xin Xiang. University of Toronto: Centre for Medieval Studies, Dictionary of Old English Project. http://www.doe.utoronto.ca/pages/pub/web-corpus.html Hiltunen, Risto. 2006. “Eala, geferan and gode wyrhtan”: On interjections in Old English. In: John Walmsley (ed.), Inside Old English. Essays in Honour of Bruce Mitchell, 91–116. Maldon, MA: Blackwell. Hopper, Paul J. 1979. Aspect and foregrounding in discourse. In: Talmy Givón (ed.), Discourse and Syntax, 213–241. New York: Academic Press. Jauss, Hans Robert. 1979. The alterity and modernity of medieval literature. Trans. Timothy Bahti. New Literary History 10: 181–227. Jucker, Andreas H. (ed.). 1995. Historical Pragmatics. Pragmatic Developments in the History of English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Jucker, Andreas H. and Irma Taavitsainen. 2000. Diachronic speech act analysis: Insults from flyting to flaming. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1: 67–95. Jucker, Andreas H. and Irma Taavitsainen. 2008. 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In: Oliver Auge, Felix Biermann, Matthias Müller, and Dirk Schulze (eds.), Bereit Brought to you by | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Universitätsbibliothek (LMU) Authenticated Download Date | 8/9/18 10:21 PM 21 Old English: Pragmatics and discourse zum Konflikt. Strategien und Medien der Konflikterzeugung und Konfliktbewältigung im europäischen Mittelalter, 32–46. Ostfilden: Jan Thorbecke Verlag. Kohnen, Thomas. 2000. Explicit performatives in Old English: A corpus-based study of directives. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1: 301–321. Kohnen, Thomas. 2002. Towards a history of English directives. In: Andreas Fischer, Gunnel Tottie, and Hans Martin Lehmann (eds.), Text Types and Corpora: Studies in Honour of Udo Fries, 165–175. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Kohnen, Thomas. 2007a. Connective profiles in the history of English texts: Aspects of orality and literacy. In: Ursula Lenker and Anneli Meurman-Solin (eds.), Clausal Connection in the History of English, 289–308. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kohnen, Thomas. 2007b. Text types and the methodology of diachronic speech act analysis. In: Susan M. Fitzmaurice and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), Methods in Historical Pragmatics, 139– 166. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Kohnen, Thomas. 2008a. Directives in Old English: Beyond politeness. In: Jucker and Taavitsainen (eds.), 27–44. Kohnen, Thomas. 2008b. Linguistic politeness in Anglo-Saxon England? A study of Old English address terms. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 9: 140–158. Kohnen, Thomas. 2008c. Tracing directives through age and time: Towards a methodology of a corpus-based diachronic speech-act analysis. In: Jucker and Taavitsainen (eds.), 295–310. Lenker, Ursula. 2000. Soþlice and witodlice: Discourse markers in Old English. In: Fischer et al. (eds.), 229–249. Lenker, Ursula. 2010. Argument and Rhetoric: Adverbial Connectors in the History of English. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Lerer, Seth. 1991. Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press. Los, Bettelou. 2000. Onginnan/beginnan + to-infinitive in Ælfric. In: Fischer et al. (eds.), 251–274. Rissanen, Matti, Merja Kytö, Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, Matti Kilpiö, Saara Nevanlinna, Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen, and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg. 1991. The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts. In: ICAME Collection of English Language Corpora (CD-ROM), 2nd edn., eds. Knut Hofland, Anne Lindebjerg, and Jørn Thunestvedt, The HIT Centre, University of Bergen, Norway. For manual, see http://khnt.hit.uib.no/icame/manuals/hc/index.htm Sauer, Hans. 2007. Ælfric and emotion. Poetica. An International Journal of Linguistic-Literary Studies ( Japan) 66: 37–52. Sauer, Hans. 2008. Interjection, emotion, grammar, literature. In: Amano Masachiyo, Michiko Ogura, and Masayuki Ohkado (eds.), Historical Englishes in Varieties of Texts and Contexts, 387–403. Bern: Peter Lang. Schiffrin, Deborah. 1987. Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schlieben-Lange, Brigitte. 1976. Für eine historische Analyse von Sprechakten. In: Heinrich Weber and Harald Weydt (eds.), Sprachtheorie und Pragmatik, 113–119. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Searle, John R. 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stanley, Eric G. 2000. Hwæt. In: Jane Roberts and Janet Nelson (eds.), Essays on Anglo-Saxon and Related Themes in Memory of Lynne Grundy, 525–556. London: King’s College, Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1991. English speech act verbs: A historical perspective. In: Linda R. Waugh and Stephen Rudy (eds.), New Vistas in Grammar: Invariance and Variation, 387– 406. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Wagner, Andreas. 1994. Wie sich Sprechakte historisch verändern. Vorstudien zu einer Typologie des historischen Wandels von Sprechakten am Beispiel von SEGNEN im Althebräischen und BEKENNEN im Deutschen. In: Dieter W. Halwachs and Irmgard Stütz (eds.), Sprache – Sprechen – Handeln. Akten des 28. Linguistischen Kolloquiums Graz 1993. Bd. 2, 181–187. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Brought to you by | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Universitätsbibliothek (LMU) Authenticated Download Date | 8/9/18 10:21 PM 339 340 III Old English Wårvik, Brita. 1995. Peak marking in Old English narrative. In: Brita Wårvik, Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen, and Risto Hiltunen (eds.), Organization and Discourse. Proceedings from the Turku Conference, 549–558. Turku: University of Turku. Wårvik, Brita. 2011. Connective or “disconnective” discourse marker? Old English þa, multifunctionality and narrative structuring. In: Anneli Meurman-Solin and Ursula Leuker (eds.), Connectives in Synchrony and Diachrony in European Languages. Helsinki: VARIENG. http:// www.helsinki.fi/varieng/journal/volumes/08/wårvik. Wülfing, Johann Ernst. 1894–1901. Die Syntax in den Werken Alfreds des Großen. 3 volumes. Bonn: Haunstein. Yule, George. 1996. Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ursula Lenker, Eichstätt (Germany) 22 Old English: Dialects 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 The main Old English dialects Some important people Research on the Old English dialects Some problems for research on Old English dialects Dialects and standard The origin of the Old English dialects The transmission of the Old English dialects Phonology Inflectional morphology Word-formation Vocabulary and word geography The Winchester Vocabulary Wulfstan’s vocabulary The question of a poetic dialect Further development References Abstract The chapter provides a description of the usual dialectal division of Old English into WestSaxon in the South, Kentish in the South-East, and Anglian in the Midlands and the North, with a further subdivision of Anglian into Mercian and Northumbrian. Some of the AngloSaxon personalities that are connected with the various dialects are first introduced. A sketch of research on the OE dialects along with some problems for research follows. The chapter then deals briefly with the question of dialects and standard language and with the origin and transmission of the OE dialects. The main dialectal differences in phonology, inflexional morphology, word-formation, vocabulary, and word-geography are outlined, with special attention paid to the (early) runic inscriptions, the Winchester Vocabulary, and Wulfstan’s Vocabulary. As far as the transmission allows us to judge, there were no differences in syntax. The chapter ends with an exploration of the question of a poetic dialect and of the role of the OE dialects in the further development of the English language. Alex Bergs and Laurel 2012, Historical Linguistics ofMünchen English Universitätsbibliothek (HSK 34.1), de Gruyter, 340–361 Brought to youBrinton by | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) Authenticated Download Date | 8/9/18 10:21 PM