XXXX X. YYYYYY

Linguistics final

Professor A. Schramm

December 6, 2000

 

 

PURPOSE

Lucky are those high school students who encounter Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in their study of English literature.If they’re really lucky, they read it in Middle English (ME) for some taste of the master poet’s verse and also for some exposure to the linguistic ancestor of our own modern English (MO)PDE IS THE COMMON ABBREVIATION USED – PRESENT DAY ENGLISH.The present-day reader will struggle with Chaucer’s language on every linguistic level.Much of it they’ll find vaguely familiar.Some aspects, particularly on the phonetic and semantic levels, can be tricky since they may resemble modern usages but in fact hold entirely different meanings.More than a few constructions found in ME are sure to prove baffling because they’ve totally been dropped in the years between Chaucer and ourselves.

WHAT IS YOUR PURPOSE? THIS COULD BE A BIT MORE FOCUSSED!
 

 

INTRODUCTION OF TOPIC

One such construction is the addition of the prefix y- or i- to a verb in the past participle.Chaucer (Benson, 1988) uses this construction frequently, if not reliably [my emphasis added]:

“That with the strook he was almoost yblent.”

“For he was late ycome from his viage,”

“Is signe that a man is well yshryve.”

The beginning student of ME might think this construction would come into play anytime the past participle is used.Not so.Sometimes Chaucer omits the prefix; at least once he uses a different prefix altogether.It’s precisely because this construction is unreliable that the modern reader needs to learn what it means, how it’s used, and why.Adding to the confusion is the fact that, not only have y- and i- been dropped as valid prefixes in MO, but no prefix is used in an even remotely similar manner now (more on this later).GOOD

 

 

BACKGROUND

In the broadest linguistic terms, this is a morphological issue, because it involves the smallest units of meaning, called morphemes.Specifically, what I’m talking about here is a word formation process because it involves a change that occurs to a word when it’s used in a certain way; it involves verbs that have been changed to express completed action.Even more specifically, this construction is an example of the word formation proces called affixation.Affixation occurs whenever a bound morpheme is attached to a free morpheme to create a new word.Here, the bound morpheme is y- or i- because they can’t stand alone; additionally, they’re called affixes because they don’t bear the principal meaning of the word.The verb in this case is the free morpheme because it stands alone ACTUALLY NOT HERE – IT’S THE STEM WHEN THERE IS AN AFFIX ATTACHED!, and it’s also called a stem because it does bear the principal meaning (Ohio State, 1998).

 

 

DISCUSSION OF FEATURE

Among the examples I referred to earlier, ycome consists of the affix y- and the verb stem come.The use of y- signifies that come is in the past participal tense.Translating the whole line in which ycome appears above yields the MO sentence “He had come back late from his voyage.”Past participal verbs in both ME and MO require a helping verb – that’s a good clue which the modern reader can recognize.However, MO lacks any affixation for the same; simply put, we don’t precede past participal verbs with y- or i- any longer.

As I suggested earlier, this can prove tricky for the modern reader because we don’t use any prefixes in this way.Specifically, y- and i- are inflectional morphemes because they serve a purely grammatical function; unlike derivational morphemes, which change the meaning of of the word they attach to, inflectional morphemes only change the form of the word, not the overall meaning.(In a real sense, the prefixes y- and i- do change the meaning of the word, because they indicate the verb is in the past participal tense, but this is still a largely grammatical issue).What’s tricky is that inflectional morphemes exist only as suffixes in MO.At least at first, the use of a prefix to make a strictly grammatical change to a word, without changing the essential meaning of the word, might have the modern reader scratching her head. GOOD

 

 

LINK WITH READER

Modern readers who have exposure to other languages besides English might have an easier time understanding how a prefix can be used in this way, while the monolingual English student may be at a disadvantage.A student of German, for example, will recognize that ge- can be affixed to past participle verbs in almost precisely the same way as y- or i- in ME.It might come as no surprise to learn that Old English (OE) likewise used the affix ge-.A series of phonetic changes led from ge- to y- and i-.(Perhaps it should be noted here that “i” and “y” are pronounced the same in ME; Chaucer and the scribes who made copies of his works came about 400 years prior to the first English dictionaries, and so spelling often varies).

The reader should understand why Chaucer uses this affixation in some places and not in others and why he uses different affixations altogether on at least one occasion.This is where morphology meets with historical linguistics, pragmatics and sociolinguistics.Now, the premise of the Canterbury Tales is that some 20-odd pilgrims take turns telling stories during a pilgrimage to Canterbury.Since the author was one of the king’s most trusted retainers (and one of the most widely-traveled men in the medieval world), he knew about language variation, and he wrote indifferent dialects within his works, just as Mark Twain did with Huckleberry Finn.Chaucer comes from London, which means that he normally uses the Eastern dialect common to that area (and since London was the capital by this time, his dialect was the official standard of the land).Among the features of the Eastern dialect is the affixation of y- or i- to past participal verbs.NICE DISCUSSION!

Some of Chaucer’s characters assume a different dialect, as in the case of the clerks in the Reeve’s Tale who are said to have come from the North; their Northern dialect likewise uses affixation to past participal verbs, but the letters are different.When one of the clerks says, “That gif a man/in a point be agreued,” he’s using a Northern version of the affixation, in which case a- serves as the prefix instead of y- or i-.In the Eastern form, which Chaucer usually employs, the line would have gone “That gif a man/in a point be ygreued.”This is a significant point because the Ellesmere scribe, who wrote the manuscript most favored by modern Chaucerians, mistakenly used the “ygreued” form for the Northern clerk while he was copying the Canterbury Tales, whereas the Hengwrt scribe left it, presumably as Chaucer had intended, as “agreued” (Smith, 1997).When characters use an East Midlands accent, for example, the prefix gets dropped altogether. YOU ARE REALLY INTO THIS – THAT’S GOOD! I AM ENJOYING MYSELF!

Finally, in rare cases, verbs that aren’t past participles do use the prefix, such as with the infinitive “yknowe” or as in the line “Of sondr folk, by aventure yfalle” (Brink, 1901).Like most inflectional verbs, the form is a common one; however, beyond the past participal usage, it is used only in specific instances.Sometimes Chaucer used the form pragmatically, in order to make the meter of his lines work; likewise, he dropped the construction according to the demands of meter and rhyme.

 

 

LITERATURE REVIEW

While the study of Middle English linguistics is a narrow field, it’s not lacking in reference works.Unfortunately, most grammars breeze over affixation in the past participal verb, preferring instead to focus on issues like the -e ending on adjectives and nouns or the challenging phonetics of the language.(I found the number of books on ME linguistics written by presumably nonnative speakers of English surprising; the Japanese, Dutch, and Germans are all getting in on the act).INTERESTING!

The Language and Meter of Chaucer, written in 1901 by a Dutchman, belongs to that class of old grammar books which exacts the finest detail but which requires a pedant’s understanding of linguistic meta-language.In it, the author says, “The P.P., both strong and weak, is often compounded with the article y- (OE ge-).Verbs which have already adopted another prefix do not admit composition with y-, unless the prefix has ceased to be felt as such” (Smith, 139).

A later grammar (Burnley, 1983) echoed this defnition, with the additional note that “In Chaucer, the form ycleped is found alongside the east Midland cleped, and ycome(n) alongside come(n)” (p. 28).More intriguing material on dialects was found in a modern casebook on linguistic issues in ME (Smith, 1997). GOOD

 

 

CONCLUSION

The affixation of y- or i- onto past participal verbs is, of course, a small piece in the larger puzzle that is Middle English.The student of Chaucer must leap past the Great Vowel Shift into a language with nearly as many differences from our own as their similarities.Differences in phonetics, phonology, syntax, morphology, semantics, and pragmatics all fly in the face of the would-be reader of Chaucer.However, by gaining some brief familiarity with ME features -- such as the affixation I’ve discussed here -- one may avoid confusion, even when MO lacks similar forms.The reader who understands the basics of the language gain entry to subtle meaning in the language and poetry of a great English writer.

REFERENCES

Benson, L. (1988). The riverside Chaucer. Oxford: Oxford UP.

Burnley, D. (1983). A guide to Chaucer’s language. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Cipollone, N., Hartman, S.K., & Vasishth, V. (Eds.). (1998).Language Files: Materials for an introduction to language and lingustics (7^th ed.). Columbus: Ohio State UP.

Samuels, M.L (1988). “Chaucer’s spelling”. In J. Smith (Ed.), The English of Chaucer and his contemporaries. Aberdeen: Aberdeen UP.

Smith, J.L. (1997). “Handmade tales: The implicatoins of linguistic variatoin in two early manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.” In Fisiak, J. (Ed.), Studies in Middle English linguistics. Berlin: Montende Gruyter.

Van Brink, B. (1969). The language and metre of Chaucer. (M. Bentinck Smith, trans). New York: Greenwood Press. (Original work 1901).

I THINK CAPITALIZATION IN TITLES IS PRETTY UNIVERSAL AT THIS POINT!!?

NICE JOB! I HAVE NOTHING TO ADD! GRADE: A