Abstract
This chapter gives an overview of changes in morphology and syntax during the medieval English period that are plausibly induced or catalysed by language contact. Our emphasis is on accurately characterising the contact situations involved, and evaluating the evidence, rather than exhaustively listing every possible contact-induced change, and so the discussion is structured around a few case studies involving each of the three languages that medieval English was in most intense contact with: British Celtic, Old Norse and Old French. We compare and contrast the contact situations in terms of van Coetsem’s (1988) distinction between borrowing and imposition and Trudgill’s (2011) framework of sociolinguistic typology.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Schrijver (2002, 2014) has recently made the case that British Latin survived in lowland Britain for much longer than normally assumed, and that this contact left behind traces in early English phonology. The consequences of this theory have yet to be explored in the morphosyntactic domain, however.
- 3.
- 4.
Whether dominance always correlates with order of acquisition is a matter of some debate. Van Coetsem (2000) and Winford (2003, 2005) propose that dominance can shift over time, for instance when a person moves abroad and spends the rest of their life immersed in a different language. For Lucas (2012, 2014), on the other hand, dominance is an immutable consequence of first-language status.
- 5.
These two authors reach drastically different conclusions on the respective roles of Old Norse and Celtic, as is discussed in Sect. 3.1.
- 6.
For a recent assessment of the historical accounts of Anglo-Saxon settlement, see also Carver (2019).
- 7.
Cf. also Warner (2017: 364–369), who considers it likely that bilingualism, including childhood bilingualism, was widespread among first-language speakers of British Celtic.
- 8.
Van Coetsem (1988: 3 and 26) notes that phonology and grammar are areas where transfer typically takes place in source language imposition. Phonology, however, is not discussed in this chapter.
- 9.
‘Old English forms and functions of the root *bheu, which are alien to the other Germanic dialects, arose in the mouths and minds of English-speaking Britons’.
- 10.
It is worth emphasising that some other Germanic languages also have forms beginning with b- in some parts of their paradigms of the verb ‘to be’, as Keller (1925) already noted. Thus, Schumacher (2007) argues for possible earlier continental contact between Celtic and West Germanic. While Ahlqvist considers this kind of contact quite possible (Ahlqvist 2010: 54), Lutz (2009: 237) prefers Keller’s original account, which rests on the idea of early substratal influence between Celtic and Old English.
- 11.
Laker (2008b) also considers the possibility that the Old French (OFr.) ne explétif construction could have played a role in the development of the English comparative nor / negative comparative particle (NCP). He concludes, however, that ‘several formal linguistic divergences existing between the OFr. ne explétif construction and the NCP of Middle and Modern English dialects argue against French influence’ (Laker 2008b: 25).
- 12.
Comparative nor is also attested in Irish English. Laker (2008b: 21–22) suggests that the Irish English NCP is a borrowing from colloquial British English or a loan translation of the corresponding Irish construction.
- 13.
In this chapter we use the term ‘Old Norse’ broadly, to refer to any and all North Germanic varieties spoken and written during the medieval period, rather than narrowly in the sense of Old West Nordic (as opposed to Old East Nordic). This latter distinction is not trivial, especially since the bulk of Scandinavian settlement in England was by speakers of Old East Nordic; however, the differences between the two varieties are unlikely to be relevant to any of the changes discussed in this section.
- 14.
For a very similar quadripartition of phases of Old Norse contact in a different context, see Timofeeva (2016: 87).
- 15.
- 16.
- 17.
- 18.
Samuels claims that the Old Norse ending, later -r, would still have been pronounced -z at the time of Scandinavian settlement in the British Isles, but this is not the consensus view: see Cole (2014: 32–33) for discussion.
- 19.
Kroch and Taylor’s causal story is more nuanced than this, involving a mediating role for the loss of verbal agreement, as discussed in the previous subsection. See Walkden (Forthcoming) for detailed discussion.
- 20.
Some scholars (e.g. Ingham 2012) prefer the term ‘Anglo-Norman’, since the variety of French spoken in England was closely related to the Norman dialect. Others (e.g. Blake 1992 in the Oxford History of the English Language) associate ‘Anglo-Norman’ with the earliest phase of French in England, and ‘Anglo-French’ with the language in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, ‘which was essentially an administrative language which had to be acquired as a foreign language by the English’ (1992: 5). We do not share Blake’s view that the situation in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was fundamentally different to the earlier phase, as we discuss below, and for clarity adopt the term ‘Anglo-French’ to refer to the variety of French spoken in England throughout its history.
- 21.
Labile verbs are defined as those whose direct object argument in a transitive construction may be realised as the subject in an intransitive construction without any change in the verb form, for example PDE you broke it / it broke (Ingham 2020: 447).
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Walkden, G., Klemola, J., Rainsford, T. (2023). An Overview of Contact-Induced Morphosyntactic Changes in Early English. In: Pons-Sanz, S.M., Sylvester, L. (eds) Medieval English in a Multilingual Context. New Approaches to English Historical Linguistics . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30947-2_9
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