old northumbrian verbal morphology in the glosses to the lindisfarne gospels

322 Pages·2011·1.46 MB·English

by  Marcelle Cole

UNIVERSIDAD DE SEVILLA
Facultad de Filología
Departamento de Lengua Inglesa
OLD NORTHUMBRIAN VERBAL MORPHOLOGY IN THE GLOSSES TO
THE LINDISFARNE GOSPELS
Marcelle Cole
Sevilla, December 2011
1
1
UNIVERSIDAD DE SEVILLA
FACULTAD DE FILOLOGÍA
DEPARTAMENTO DE LENGUA INGLESA
OLD NORTHUMBRIAN VERBAL MORPHOLOGY IN THE GLOSSES TO
THE LINDISFARNE GOSPELS
Tesis presentada para la colación del título de Doctora en
Filología por la Lda.
Dña. MARCELLE COLE
Directora:
Prof. Dra. Dña. JULIA FERNÁNDEZ CUESTA
Sevilla, diciembre de 2011
2
2
To my parents
3
3
Acknowledgements
4
4
Table of Contents
1 Introduction and preliminaries
1.1 Introduction
1.2 Thesis and outline of the investigation
2 The manuscript of the Lindisfarne Gospels
2.1 The biography of the text
2.2 The authorship of the Lindisfarne glosses
2.2.1 Palaeographical evidence as a diagnostic for determining authorship
2.2.2 Linguistic variation as a diagnostic for determining authorship
2.3 The language of the Lindisfarne glosses
2.4 The sociolinguistic situation
2.5 The loss of present-tense suffixal -ð in English
2.5.1 Present tense markings in Old English
2.5.2 The proliferation of suffixal -s in English
2.6 Previous accounts of the origin of the -s ending
2.6.1 Sound change
2.6.2 Analogical influences
2.7 Summary
3 The Northern Subject Rule
3.1 The Northern Subject Rule in the North of England and Scotland
3.1.1 Northern Middle English and Middle Scots
3.1.1.1 Summary
3.1.2 Northern varieties during EModE and Modern English periods
3.1.2.1 Summary
3.2 The Northern Subject Rule outside the North
3.2.1 Early Modern London English
3.2.2 Southwest varieties of English
3.2.3 Summary
3.3 Extraterritorial Englishes
3.3.1 Irish English
3.3.2 The Northern Subject Rule beyond the British Isles
3.3.3 AAVE and the NSR
3.4 The Northern Subject Rule and finite forms of the verb be
3.5 Levelling processes in Germanic languages
5
5
3.5.1 Processes of was-levelling in present-day varieties of English
3.6 Summary
4 A variationist study of -s/-ð present-tense markings in Late Old Northumbrian
4.1 Data and Methodology
4.1.1 Methodological preliminaries
4.1.2 Data collection and coding
4.1.3 Explanatory variables
4.1.4 Methods
4.1.5 Summary
4.2 Grammatical person, subject type, number, person and adjacency effects
4.2.1 Overview of Old English subject types
4.2.1.1 Pronoun subjects
4.2.1.1.1 Personal pronoun subjects
4.2.1.1.2 Demonstrative pronoun subjects
4.2.1.1.3 Indefinite pronoun subjects
4.2.1.2 Relative clauses
4.2.1.3 Zero subjects
4.2.2 Results for the effect of grammatical person
4.2.3 Subject type, person and number effects
4.2.3.1 Results for subject type, person and number effects
4.2.4 Implications of the distribution of the subject-type constraint in Lindisfarne
4.2.5 Adjacency and word order effects
4.2.5.1 Results for adjacency and word order effects
4.2.6 Summary
4.3 Phonological conditioning factors
4.3.1 Following phonological environment
4.3.2 Inflectional vowel weakening and syncope
4.3.3 Preceding phonological environment
4.3.3.1 Palatalisation and assibilation of velars in OE
4.3.3.2 Effect of stem ending
4.3.4 Results for phonological environment
4.3.5 Summary
4.4 Priming effects
4.4.1 Morphosyntactic priming
4.4.1.1 Results and analysis
4.4.2 Priming effect of the Latin verbal inflection
6
6
4.4.2.1 Results and analysis
4.4.3 Summary
4.5 Lexical conditioning and lexical frequency effects
4.5.1 Measuring token frequency
4.5.2 Results
4.5.2.1 Word specific effects
4.5.2.2 Frequency effects
4.5.3 Summary
4.6 Discussion
5 Reduced verbal morphology in late Old Northumbrian
5.1 Reduced inflection in Old English dialects
5.2 Reduced present tense inflection in the Lindisfarne gloss
5.2.1 Present-indicative interrogative forms
5.2.2 Imperative forms
5.2.3 Present indicative forms
5.2.4 Summary
5.3 The historical source of present-indicative -e/Ø
5.3.1 Subjunctive verbal morphology
5.3.1.1 Conditional clauses
5.3.1.2 Purpose clauses
5.3.1.3 Temporal clauses
5.3.1.4 Summary
5.3.2 Preterite-present verbal morphology
5.3.3 Preterite verbal morphology
5.3.3.1 Preterite subjunctive verbal morphology
5.3.3.2 Preterite indicative verbal morphology
5.4 Summary
5.5 Discussion
6 Conclusions
Appendices
Appendix A. Statistical models
Appendix B. Lexical items
Appendix C. Low frequency lexical clusters
Appendix D. s/ð tokens
Appendix E. non-adjacent pronoun tokens
7
7
Appendix F. preterite-present tokens
Appendix G. preterite tokens
Abbreviations
References
8
8
1. Introduction and preliminaries
1.1 Introduction
In considering a text such as the Lindisfarne Gospels, one is very much aware of the
vast philological attention the manuscript has received since the first contribution made
to its study by George Hickes in 1705. Since then, scholars of the stature of Bouterwek
(1857), Skeat (1871-87), Lindelöf (1901), Holmqvist (1922), Berndt (1956) and Ross,
Stanley & Brown (1960) have advanced the subject (see Ross 1937:17-25 for a detailed
summary of early studies on Lindisfarne). This Latin Gospelbook written in the North
of England in the early eight century constitutes a major landmark of human cultural,
intellectual, spiritual and artistic achievement. While the Latin text of the Lindisfarne
Gospels is a valuable early witness to St Jerome’s ‘Vulgate’, it is the carefully inserted
interlinear gloss to the Latin, written in Old Northumbrian and added around the 950s-
960s, and the linguistic importance this gloss holds as one of the most substantial
earliest surviving renderings of early northern dialect that will concern us in this study,
and more concretely the distribution of verbal morphology found therein.
Old and Middle English verbal morphology in the northern dialects diverged
most remarkably from that of the southern dialects in two main areas. Crucially, the
tenth-century Northumbrian texts bear witness to the replacement of the inherited
present-indicative -ð suffixes with -s forms, and by the Middle English period, present-
indicative plural verbal morphology in northern dialects was governed by a
grammatical constraint commonly referred to as the Northern Subject Rule (NSR) that
conditioned verbal morphology according to the type and position of the subject. The
plural marker was -s unless the verb had an immediately adjacent personal pronoun
subject in which case the marker was the reduced -e or the zero morpheme, giving a
system whereby They play occurred in juxtaposition to The children plays, They who
plays, They eat and plays.
It has tacitly been assumed in the literature that the reduced forms at the crux of
the NSR, and the constraint that triggers them, must have emerged in the northern
dialects during the early Middle English period, as there is little indication of the
pattern existing in extant Northumbrian texts from the tenth century, and by the time
northern textual evidence is once again available from c.1300, the NSR is clearly
prevalent (Pietsch 2005; de Haas 2008; de Haas & van Kemenade 2009). Nevertheless,
9
9
the assumption that the NSR was entirely lacking in Old Northumbrian stands on shaky
grounds without further detailed analysis of the tenth-century northern writings, as has
been pointed out in the literature (Benskin 2011:170). As might well be imagined, such
an endeavour is hindered by the fact that extant textual evidence from the period is far
from abundant, and that which remains is limited in nature: the only substantial
Northumbrian texts passed down to us are the interlinear glosses to the Latin
manuscripts of the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Durham Ritual supposedly written by
the same scribe, Aldred, in the second half of the tenth-century, as well as the
Northumbrian part of the Rushworth Gospels gloss (Rushworth2), written by a scribe
called Owun in the late tenth-century and heavily reliant on the Lindisfarne gloss. Yet
despite their limitations, the glosses constitute a substantial record of late ONrth verbal
morphology that provides important insights into the mechanisms of linguistic change.
Although the study of the Northern Subject Rule in the early northern writings
has barely been touched upon in the literature (as far as I am aware the matter has only
been cursorily considered by de Haas 2008), morphological variation between -s as
opposed to -ð in the late Northumbrian texts has been the object of numerous
quantitative analyses (most famously Holmqvist 1922; Ross 1934; Blakeley 1949/50
and Berndt 1956). It is striking, however, that the vast majority of these studies were
written well over fifty years ago and the matter has not been thoroughly considered
since. A reconsideration of present-tense marking patterns in Old Northumbrian that
draws from the insights of recent research into variation and benefits from the
application of modern statistical methodology is clearly long overdue. Furthermore,
certain potentially relevant factors remain unexplored. For instance, while grammatical
person and number have been identified as important factors in conditioning variation
between the interdental and alveolar variants, the effect of subject type and adjacency
on morphological variation in Old Northumbrian has hitherto been disregarded. This is
despite the fact that research indicates that subject effects are a crucial factor in
determining the selection of verbal morphology, not just in non-standard varieties of
present-day English (cf. Chambers 2004; Tagliamonte 2009) and in varieties of
EModE, as discussed above, but also most notably in Middle English northern dialect
itself (McIntosh 1989; Montgomery 1994; de Haas & van Kemenade 2009; de Haas
2011).
Using data drawn from the standard edition of the Lindisfarne gloss (Skeat
10
1