Cover not available
Part of
English Historical Linguistics: Historical English in contact
Edited by Bettelou Los, Chris Cummins, Lisa Gotthard, Alpo Honkapohja and Benjamin Molineaux
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 359] 2022
► pp. 5–34

Chapter 2
Adapting the Dynamic Model to historical linguistics

Case studies on the Middle English and Anglo-Norman contact situation

ORCID logo | University of Mannheim
This chapter describes a new application of the Dynamic Model of contact by Edgar W. Schneider to the medieval contact situation between Anglo-Norman and Middle English, which lasted from 1066 until ca. 1500. Specifically, the emergence of an insular variety of Old French called Anglo-French, as well as the transfer of linguistic features from French into Middle English, are discussed within this framework. By way of three pilot studies, the productivity of copied features as well as instances of ‘failed change’ are explained by the model’s dynamic and granular nature. The chapter demonstrates how the model can be applied to further contexts than its original scope, and may provide a framework to explain contact-induced developments in both settler and indigenous languages.
Keywords: language contact, dynamic model, Middle English, Anglo-Norman
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The Dynamic Model
    • 2.1Origins and motivations of the model
    • 2.2A brief description of the model
    • 2.3Adaptations of the model
  • 3.The Anglo-Norman contact situation
  • 4.Adapting the Dynamic Model
    • 4.1Anglo-Norman in the Dynamic Model
    • 4.2Middle English in the Dynamic Model
  • 5.Case studies
    • 5.1Anglo-Norman verbal prefixes in Middle English
    • 5.2Prepositional secondary predicate constructions
    • 5.3Of-Objects
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 2 February 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.359.02per
References (70)
References
Ahmad, Dohra (ed.). 2007. Rotten English: A literary anthology. New York: W.W. Norton.Google Scholar
Ambridge, Ben, Julian Pine, Caroline F. Rowland, Daniel Freudenthal & Franklin Chang. 2014. Avoiding dative overgeneralisation errors: Semantics, statistics or both? Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 29(2). 218–243. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Asmah, H. Omar. 1979. Language planning for unity and efficiency. Kuala Lumpur: Penerbit Universiti Malaya.Google Scholar
Baayen, R. Harald. 1992. Quantitative aspects of morphological productivity. In Geert Booij & Jaap van Marle (eds.), Yearbook of Morphology 1991, 109–149. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1993. On Frequency, transparency, and productivity. In Geert Booij & Jaap van Marle (eds.), Yearbook of Morphology 1992, 181–208. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2009. Corpus linguistics in morphology: Morphological productivity. In Anke Lüdeling & Merja Kytö (eds.), Corpus Linguistics, Volume 2, 899–919. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bates, David. 2001. William the Conqueror. Stroud: Tempus.Google Scholar
. 2013. The Normans and Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bekker, Ian. 2009. The vowels of South African English. North-West University: Potchefstroom dissertation.
Buridant, Claude. 1995. Les Préverbes en Ancien Français. In Andre Rousseau (ed.), Les préverbes dans les langues d’Europe: Introduction à l’étude de la préverbation, 287–323. Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion.Google Scholar
Buschfeld, Sarah & Alexander Kautzsch. 2017. Towards an integrated approach to postcolonial and non-postcolonial Englishes. World Englishes 36(1). 104–126. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Buschfeld, Sarah, Alexander Kautzsch & Edgar W. Schneider. 2018. From colonial dynamism to current transnationalism: A unified view on postcolonial and non-postcolonial Englishes. In Sandra C. Deshors (ed.), Modeling World Englishes: Assessing the interplay of emancipation and globalization of ESL varieties, 15–44. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Davey, William G. 1990. The legislation of Bahasa Malaysia as the official language of Malaysia. In Karen L. Adams & Daniel T. Brink (eds.), Perspectives on official English: The campaign for English as the official language of the USA, 95–103. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
De Klerk, Vivian. 2000. Language shift in Grahamstown: A case study of selected Xhosa-speakers. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 146. 87–110. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Smet, Henrik. 2013. Spreading patterns: Diffusional change in the English system of complementation. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Deterding, David. 2007. Singapore English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dinu, Georgiana, Nghia T. Pham & Marco Baroni. 2013. DISSECT – DIStributional SEmantics Composition Toolkit. In Proceedings of the system demonstrations of ACL 2013 (51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics). Stroudsburg, PA: ACL.Google Scholar
Edwards, Alison. 2016. English in the Netherlands: Functions, forms and attitudes. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haeberli, Eric. 2018. Syntactic effects of contact in translations: Evidence from object pronoun placement in Middle English. English Language and Linguistics 22(2). 301–321. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Harrell Jr, Frank E. & Charles Dupont. 2018. Hmisc: Harrell Miscellaneous. [URL] (19 July, 2021)
Hunt, Tony. 2003. Anglo-Norman: Past and future. In Michèle Goyens & Werner Verbeke (eds.), The dawn of the written vernacular in Western Europe, 379–389. Leuven: Leuven University Press.Google Scholar
. 2008. Anglo-Norman and the loss of Normandy. In Florence Bourgne, Leo Carruthers & Arlette Sancery (eds.), Un espace colonial et ses avatars: Naissance d’identités nationales: Angleterre, France, Irlande (Ve–XVe siècles), 141–152. Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne.Google Scholar
Ingham, Richard. 2010. Anglo-Norman: New themes, new contexts. In Richard Ingham (ed.), The Anglo-Norman language and its contexts: Proceedings of two workshops on Anglo-Norman and medieval language hosted by the School of English, Birmingham City University, in February 2007 and January 2008, 1–7. Woodbridge: York Medieval Press.Google Scholar
. 2012a. Middle English and Anglo-Norman in contact. Bulletin de L’Association des Médiévistes Anglicistes de L’Enseignement Supérieur 81. 1–23. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2012b. The transmission of Anglo-Norman: Language history and language acquisition. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Johanson, Lars. 2002. Contact-induced change in a code-copying framework. In Mari C. Jones & Edith Esch (eds.), Language change, 285–313. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kachru, Braj B. 1985. Standards, codification and sociolinguistic realism: The English Language in the Outer Circle. In Randolph Quirk & Henry G. Widdowson (eds.), English in the world: Teaching and learning the language and literatures, 11–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; The British Council.Google Scholar
Kroch, Anthony & Ann Taylor. 2000. The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English, Second Edition (PPCME2), release 3. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. [URL] (19 July, 2021)
Lange, Claudia. 2012. The Syntax of spoken Indian English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mair, Christian. 2007. British English/American English grammar: Convergence in Writing – divergence in speech? Anglia 125(1). 84–100. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Martin, Robert. 2004. Le couple préfixal en- (in-) / es- (e- / ex-) en Moyen Français. Romania 122(485). 1–45. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mazziotta, Nicolas & Fabienne Martin. 2016. Affixes transitivisants en Français: Approche statistique exploratoire à partir de la base de Données Les Verbes Français. In Franz Rainer, Michela Russo & Fernando Sánchez Miret (eds.), Actes du XXVIIe Congrès International de Linguistique et de Philologie Romanes (Nancy, 15–20 juillet 2013). Section 3: Phonétique, phonologie, morphophonologie et morphologie, 101–113. Nancy: ATILF. [URL] (19 July, 2021)
Mesthrie, Rajend. 2006. South Africa: Language situation. In Keith Brown (ed.), Encyclopedia of language & linguistics, 539–542. Amsterdam: Elsevier. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mitchell, Bruce. 1985. Old English syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mufwene, Salikoko S. 2001. The ecology of language evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mustanoja, Tauno F. 1960. A Middle English syntax, Part I: Parts of speech. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.Google Scholar
Percillier, Michael. 2016a. Verb Lemmatization and Semantic verb classes in a Middle English corpus. In Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS 2016), 209–214. [URL] (19 July, 2021)
. 2018. A toolkit for lemmatising, analysing, and visualising Middle English data. In Andrew U. Frank, Christine Ivanovic, Francesco Mambrini, Marco Passarotti & Caroline Sporleder (eds.), Proceedings of the second workshop on corpus-based research in the humanities CRH-2, Volume 1, 153–160. Vienna: Gerastree Proceedings. [URL] (19 July, 2021)
Perek, Florent & Martin Hilpert. 2017. A distributional semantic approach to the periodization of change in the productivity of constructions. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 22(4). 490–520. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Platt, John, Heidi Weber & Mian L. Ho. 1983. Singapore and Malaysia. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Proffitt, Michael (ed.). 2019. Oxford English Dictionary (3rd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. [URL]
Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech & Jan Svartvik. 1972. A grammar of contemporary English. London: Longman.Google Scholar
R Core Team. 2018. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. [URL]
Rothwell, William. 2001. English and French in England after 1362. English Studies 82(6). 539–559. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Saro-Wiwa, Ken. 1985. Sozaboy. Port Harcourt: Saros International Publishers.Google Scholar
Schaffner, Paul, John Latta, Mona Logarbo, Robert E. Lewis, Evan David, Sarah Huttenlocher, Alyssa Pierce, Chris Powell, Bill Dueber, Gordon Leacock, Tom Burton-West, Ben Howell, Bridget Burke & Nabeela Jaffer (eds.). 2018. Middle English Dictionary. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. [URL] (19 July, 2021)
Schauwecker, Yela & Carola Trips. 2018. Who came riding first? Le chevalier or the knight? A multiple corpus analysis investigating historical language contact. In Andrew U. Frank, Christine Ivanovic, Francesco Mambrini, Marco Passarotti & Caroline Sporleder (eds.), Proceedings of the second workshop on corpus-based research in the humanities CRH-2, Volume 1, 181–190. Vienna: Gerastree proceedings. [URL] (19 July, 2021)
Schneider, Edgar W. 2003. The dynamics of New Englishes: From identity construction to dialect birth. Language 79(2). 233–281. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2007. Postcolonial English: Varieties around the world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2014. New reflections on the evolutionary dynamics of World Englishes. World Englishes 33. 9–32. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sedlatschek, Andreas. 2009. Contemporary Indian English: Variation and change. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Short, Ian. 1980. Bilingualism in Anglo-Norman England. Romance Philology 33(4). 467–479.Google Scholar
. 1996. Tam Angli qua Franci: Self-definition in Anglo-Norman England. Anglo-Norman Studies 18. 153–175.Google Scholar
Spencer, Brenda. 2011a. International sporting events in South Africa, identity re-alignment, and Schneider’s EVENT X. African Identities 9(3). 267–278. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2011b. Linguistic penetration at Schneider’s phase 4: Acceptability ratings of entrenched features of Black South African English by South Africans outside the originating culture of the variety. Journal for Language Teaching 45(2). 133–149. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Strang, Barbara. 1970. A history of English. London: Methuen.Google Scholar
Tan, Rachel S. K. & Ee-Ling Low. 2010. How different are the monophthongs of Malay speakers of Malaysian and Singapore English? English World-Wide 31(2). 162–189. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tongue, Ray K. 1979. The English of Singapore and Malaysia. Singapore: Eastern Universities Press.Google Scholar
Trips, Carola & Achim Stein. 2018. A comparison of multi-genre and single-genre corpora in the context of contact-induced change. In Richard J. Whitt (ed.), Diachronic corpora, genre, and language change, 241–260. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2019. Contact-induced changes in the argument structure of Middle English verbs on the model of Old French. Journal of Language Contact 12(1). 232–267. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Trotter, David. 2003. Not as eccentric as it looks: Anglo-French and French French. Forum for Modern Language Studies 39(4). 427–438. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2006. Anglo-Norman Dictionary 2 Online edition. London: Modern Humanities Research Association. [URL]
Van Rooy, Bertus. 2011. A principled distinction between error and conventionalized innovation in African Englishes. In Joybrato Mukherjee & Marianne Hundt (eds.), Exploring second-language varieties of English and learner Englishes: Bridging a paradigm gap, 189–208. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Verkerk, Annemarie. 2009. A semantic map of secondary predication. Linguistics in the Netherlands 26. 115–126. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Visser, Fredericus T. 2002. An historical syntax of the English language (4th edn.). Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn. 2009. General Introduction: What’s in a name: The ‘French’ of ‘England’. In Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Carolyn Collette, Maryanne Kowaleski, Linne Mooney, Ad Putter & David Trotter (eds.), Language and culture in medieval Britain, 1–13. Woodbridge: York Medieval Press.Google Scholar
Wright, Laura. 2011. On variation in medieval mixed-language business writing. In Herbert Schendl & Laura Wright (eds.), Code-switching in Early English. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zink, Gaston. 1990. L’Ancien Français (2nd edn.). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.Google Scholar