Sound change, analogy, and urban koineization in the regularization of verbs in late fourteenth-century
English
This paper presents a detailed comparison of certain verb forms in Sir Firumbras, a text
produced in a relatively remote part of southwestern England around 1380, with those found in texts produced in the
London area around the same time. The forms in question reflect a collapse in some dialects of earlier present-tense
distinctions between strong verbs and the largest class of weak verbs. This collapse is commonly assumed to have
affected southern English in general but the evidence presented here suggests that it may initially have been
characteristic only of urban regions with an influx of migrants from other parts of the country.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Terminological preliminaries
- 3.The Great-English-Verb-Regularization hypothesis
- 4.Early Middle English verbal inflection
- 5.Middle English verbal inflection after 1350
- 6.Quantitative findings from the LAEME corpus, Sir Firumbras, and the MED citations
- 7.Regularization of strong and Type-1 weak verbs in Sir Firumbras
- 8.The role of London koineization in the collapse of the
Type-1–Type-2 present-tense distinction
- 9.Summary and conclusions
-
Notes
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References