32.3987, Review: English, Middle; Historical Linguistics; Sociolinguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics: Stenroos, Thengs (2020)

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Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2021 20:16:45
From: Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre [jcconde at um.es]
Subject: Records of Real People

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/32/32-758.html

EDITOR: Merja  Stenroos
EDITOR: Kjetil V.  Thengs
TITLE: Records of Real People
SUBTITLE: Linguistic variation in Middle English local documents
SERIES TITLE: Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 11
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2020

REVIEWER: Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre, University of Murcia

SUMMARY

Advances in historical linguistics over the last few decades are clearly
connected with the expansion of the sources used as evidence of language
change. In concert with the compilation of the earliest historical corpora,
the traditional use of literary sources was supplemented by a diversity of
text-types, including scientific and medical, legal and administrative,
historical and philosophical, religious and homiletic, etc. (see Kytö 1996;
Görlach 2004). At the same time, new methodological approaches, like
historical sociolinguistics and historical pragmatics, have privileged some
materials hitherto underused, such as ego documents (letters, diaries,
personal itineraries, etc.), dialogues, tracts, or shorter, specialised texts
like recipes, often collected into specialised corpora―for a comprehensive
list see the “Corpus Resource Database” at https://varieng.helsinki.fi/CoRD/. 

The treatment of local documents has been somehow different. These are
administrative, bureaucratic, and legal texts produced outside the central
government offices and clearly “connected to real, historical people and
places” (p. 3); at the same time, they have a pragmatic function concerned
with specific, individual cases or matters such as the transmission of land or
valuables, the communication of information, the record of decisions, etc.
Local documents were considered crucial for historical English dialectology,
as stated by the compilers of “The Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English”
(LALME) (McIntosh, Samuels, and Benskin 1986). The project intended to locate
scribal texts in the linguistic space by comparing their respective Linguistic
Profiles (LPs), built on a comprehensive questionnaire of 280 items.
Methodologically, manuscripts of known origin, clearly grounded in time and
space, were fundamental for this aim. These “anchor texts” helped situate
other manuscripts with no direct association to a given location by means of
the “fit-technique”. The linguistic features of the unlocalised scribal texts,
extracted from their LPs, were compared with those of the “anchor texts” as
plotted in a number of maps―one for each of the forms recorded in the texts
analysed (LALME I: §2.3). Local administrative documents were regarded by the
LALME authors as the ideal anchor texts. Nevertheless, many of them were
discarded on account of their short, often formulaic, and multilingual nature
(LALME I: §2.3.2), which hindered the compilation of the inclusive LPs on
which the whole project relied. Thus, despite recognising their importance for
the reconstruction of local usage and diatopic variation, medieval English
local documents remained an “underresearched source of linguistic evidence”
(p. 3). 

This situation has recently changed thanks to the development of the research
project “The Language and Geography of Middle English Local Documents”
developed at the University of Stavanger in Norway since 2012. One result of
the project is the compilation and publication online in open access of “A
Corpus of Middle English Local Documents” (MELD)
(https://www.uis.no/en/meld-corpus-files). The MELD corpus comprises 2017
individual (i.e., produced by a single scribe) documentary texts from the
period 1399‒1525, selected from a catalogue of over 5000 documents (p. 19).
All texts have been transcribed and diplomatically edited, so that each of
them is available in three different formats: (a) a searchable version in
plain text to be used with corpus software, (b) a readable version of the
diplomatic edition, and (c) an electronic version showing iconically the
abbreviations, flourishes, and symbols of the original manuscript  (p. 19).
The metadata relevant for each text are also appended, including contextual
and descriptive information such as geographical location, date, function,
domain, institutional connections, physical format, script, etc. The MELD
corpus is an outstanding source of evidence for multidimensional work on
Middle English linguistic variation, as shown by each of the chapters in this
volume.

The book consists of ten chapters, organised into three parts. Part I
(“Approaches to Middle English local documents”) opens with Chapter 1, “Local
documents as source material for the study of late medieval English” (pp.
3‒21), where Merja Stenroos and Kjetil Thengs contextualise Middle English
document texts. The authors also put forward two main research questions that
all of the ten chapters attempt to answer: (a) What kind of language was
produced in which area and for which purposes? and (b) How does the linguistic
variation relate to processes in the society and to text production, literacy,
and scribal networks? (p. 11). At the same time as these questions are
answered in the different chapters, information on the distribution of
variation―mainly spelling and morphology―in late Middle English is produced,
the shift from Latin into monolingual English is analysed in connection with
supralocalisation and standardisation, and the extent of vernacular literacy
in the period is traced.

Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 deal with the classification of Middle English local
documents and the ways in which the categories adopted may affect the
interpretation of linguistic variation. Martti Mäkinen in “Grouping and
regrouping Middle English documents” (pp. 23‒35) approaches this issue from a
theoretical perspective. Firstly, he exposes the difficulties inherent in the
direct application of concepts like “genre”, “text-type”, and “register” to
the historical material; then he proposes the more dynamic notion of
“text-category”. This is a fluid concept based on prototype theory, defined as
sets of flexible, external and internal criteria (formal and/or functional)
that can be individually related and freely combined. In this way, a new
tropological textual space is organised where the selection of one or other
category helps “accommodat[e] any new texts to which the reader is exposed and
assign them their place in the system through textual affinity” (p. 29). The
specific parameters that can be applied to organise the textual space in MELD
are comprehensively discussed by Merja Stenroos, Geir Bergstrøm, and Kjetil
Thengs in Chapter 3, “The categorization of Middle English documents.
Interactions of function, form and language” (pp. 37‒67). In doing this, the
authors not only reconstruct the uses and users of Middle English local
documents, but also describe the basic tenets and particularities that guided
the compilation of the corpus. The textual contexts and parameters deployed
fall into five main categories: (a) linguistic, including main language used,
multilingual events, and degree of formulaicness; (b) textual: stage of the
document (draft, copy, etc.); (c) situational: location, date, topic, identity
(of scribe, author, recipient(s) …), institutional context, etc.; (d)
socio-cultural, including domain (academic, ecclesiastical, manorial …),
function, social category, and gender (of scribe, author, recipient(s) …) and
(e) material and/or visual: medium, physical format (codex, roll, indenture
…), seal and seal fastening, script, etc. These textual parameters can be
freely combined “thus changing the constellation of texts ad infinitum and
potentially bringing to light linguistic patterns of interest” (p. 41). The
available material is arranged into sixty-seven functional categories subsumed
under ten superordinate ones: accounts, conveyances, correspondence,
directions, memoranda, ordinances, settlements, statements, sureties, and
surveys. The authors then discuss three main threads of research connected to
each category. In the first place, attention is given to the producers and
recipients of the documents, including the textual community who commissioned
and used them, and considering not only individuals but also institutional
sponsors of literacy: guilds, manors, municipalities, religious houses, etc.
Secondly, code selection―medieval Latin vs. Middle English and, occasionally,
mixed codes involving medieval Latin, Anglo-Norman and Middle English―and
degree of formulaicness are explored in relation to both the intended function
of the document and the community producing it (episcopal vs. municipal
administration). Finally, a section is devoted to the relationship of
function, material context and the format typically used for each
category―indenture, sheet, deed poll, bill, codex, roll.
 
Geography has traditionally been privileged in the study of Middle English
linguistic variation and it deserves a complete section in the book: “Part II:
Text communities and geographical variation”. A theoretical and methodological
introduction is given in the final Chapter (4) of Part I: “The geography of
Middle English documentary texts”, by Merja Stenroos and Kjetil V. Thengs (pp.
64‒92). The authors problematise geographical localisation as methodologically
deployed in LALME. Research on the overlap between the geographical (physical)
space and the social space has challenged the notion of the dialect
continuum―one of the methodological foundations of LALME―by showing, for
instance, the relevance of urban centres in the late medieval landscape and
the possibility that innovations geolinguistically diffused by hopping from
one to another in connection with factors like demography, rates of literacy,
and the pressure of relevant institutions (sponsors of literacy). In the MELD
project, localisation is based on three main types of non-linguistic evidence:
(a) the explicit localising clauses appearing in some documents; (b) the
inherent historical or contextual situatedness of some texts like surveys,
account books, cartularies, or registers necessarily connected to a single
place and time; and (c) the inferences made from internal references
(place-names, parties, witnesses) and characteristics (scribal hands) of
texts, or drawn by comparing them with other closely related documents.
Following these directions, the documents in MELD are situated in 395
locations—on the basis of explicit data or historical-contextual
information—to which 367 further locations are added when the inferential
methodology is applied. The widespread distribution of vernacular pragmatic
literacy all over England attested by these figures has important implications
for the geographical dissemination of written English, mainly explored in Part
II. 
 
The question of standardisation in connection with the geographical diffusion
of late Middle English variants—mainly orthographical, morphological, and
lexical features—is addressed by Merja Stenroos in Chapter 5, “Regional
variation and supralocalistion in late medieval English: comparing
administrative and literary texts” (pp. 95‒128). The author adheres to
post-2000 approaches to standardisation that reject the single-ancestor
dialect hypothesis (Wright 2000; 2020; Benskin 2004, among others)―the idea
that standard written English is based on the spread nationwide of the
governmental variety used at the Chancery offices in London from 1430. She
also claims that no such standard variety would have ever been enforced at a
local level, since Latin was still the dominant language of administration
throughout the century (see also Dodd 2011; 2012). In this way, Stenroos
emphasises the relevance of processes like focusing, levelling, and variant
reduction taking place in different areas, with different rates and in
connection to particular socio-historical situations, like trade,
urbanisation, the presence of sponsors of  literacy, etc. (see Nevalainen
2012; Beal 2016). In particular, Stenroos is concerned with the
“supralocalisation”―“the spread of linguistic factors from its region of
origin to neighbouring ones over time” (Nevalainen 2000: 338)―of the language
of local administrative documents in contrast to non-documentary writing. This
is achieved by comparing a selection of texts from MELD with the documents
used as witnesses for LALME: literary, medical, cook books, chronicles,
sermons, treatises, etc., i.e., texts not directly related to specific places
and situations, with a general non-pragmatic function. Results show a tendency
for both types of sources to show similar diachronic and diatopic patterns,
i.e., supralocalisation is not specific to any of them, although innovations,
especially as regards purely orthographic features, are more likely to appear
in local documents than in the non-practical ones. Stenroos explores the
possibility that some of these differences reflect the specific context of
production of each text category: for instance, the Latin context of document
production may have favoured the disappearance of recessive spelling features
like “thorn” <þ> and “yogh” <Ʒ> and their replacement with the Latin-based
<th> and <gh> innovations for fricatives.
 
The supralocalisation of innovations in specific text communities is the
subject of Chapter 6—“Cambridge: A University town” (pp. 129-154)—and Chapter
7—“Knutsford and Nantwich: scribal variation in late medieval Cheshire” (pp.
155‒173). In the first study, Geir Bergstrøm traces a number of spelling
variables in local documents from Cambridge and the surrounding Eastern
Counties, and notices that written language in the former is at the same time
highly homogeneous and receptive to innovations, mainly from the North (but
also from the South and West). Bergstrøm directly connects these peculiarities
both to the educational and commercial functions of the town as well as to a
“tight-knit but regionally mixed community connected to north and south by
weak tie networks that fostered innovation” (p. 154). The second study, by
Kjetil Thengs, focuses on the scribal communities of Nantwich and Knutsford,
two towns in Cheshire with different economic profiles and settlement
patterns. The former had benefited from the proto-industrial production of
salt and the tanning trade; it was also a natural stop on the way from London
and the Central Midlands to Chester and the Irish Sea. The latter was a mere
market town with no monastic or administrative centres. Moreover, the families
in Knutsford formed a tight-knit community, while those at Nantwich were not
as closely linked. Thengs analyses a number of spelling and morphological
variables and his results agree with the socio-economic profile of each
locality. The documents from Nantwich―an important urban trade centre well
connected to the outside world―show a clear degree of uniformity and
supralocalisation; on the contrary, the Knutsford area—a rural, self-contained
community—exhibits more variation, with local usages alternating with a clear
northern influence on some items like (th) and (a+n). The last chapter in this
section, Chapter 8, Merja Stenroos’s “Land documents as a source of word
geography” (pp. 175‒202), explores the likely contribution of local documents
to the diatopic analysis of lexical variation. Stenroos deals with documents
specifying landmarks, land holdings, and land boundaries, normally produced
for local use; she confirms the expected tendency of many of these items to
reveal regional variation, both as regards the designations themselves and the
meaning and function of each word. 
 
Three chapters on “Social and pragmatic variation” (Part III) close the
volume. In this section new dimensions of variation are touched upon, hitherto
unexplored in local documents (possibly due to their formulaicness and often
multilingual character). Interestingly, these two issues are the actual focus
of the three remaining chapters. Chapter 9, “The pragmatics of punctuation in
Middle English documentary texts” (pp. 205‒218) by Jeremy J. Smith, explores
the deployment of punctuation practices in a number of fifteenth century
documents, including a note, an indenture, a petition, a lease, and three
letters. Smith confirms the rhetorical function of punctuation in all
documents, relating the written text to spoken performance rather than
visually representing grammar, and connects the types of devices used―“virgula
suspensiva”, “punctus”, “punctus elevatus” and “litterae nobiliores”―to the
pragmatic function and the textual design of each text-type. At the same time,
the analysis of letters shows that variation in punctuation does not
necessarily correlate with sophistication of expression.
 
The pragmatics of formulaic  (vs. non-formulaic) language in document texts is
further explored by Kenneth Solberg-Harestad in Chapter 10, “Ventriloquism or
individual voice. Formulaic language in heresy abjurations” (pp. 219‒248). He
concentrates on the confessional content of a number of abjurations by
individuals found guilty of association with the Lollard movement in different
parts of the country (five dioceses) between 1457 and 1509. The structure of
abjurations normally consisted of stereotyped opening and closing (recant)
formulae with a confessional part in between, where the details of the
abjurer’s actions were referenced. Despite recounting personal experience, the
contents of these sections were often highly formulaic lists of charges,
prompted and organised according to the inquisitors’ point-by-point guidelines
for interrogation. Solberg-Harestad establishes a continuum from fully
formulaic content to major non-formulaic additions in the confessional parts,
analyses the main linguistic means to introduce the non-formulaic contents as
well as the topics involved. Interestingly, he interprets some of these
additions—especially the major, more colourful ones—as assertions of the
defendants in front of their examiners; once the repentance final formulae
were challenged, they “achieve[d] a hidden, but real victory in the face of
heresy trial prosecution” (p. 243).
 
Finally, Chapter 11, “Multilingual practices in Middle English documents” (pp.
249‒277), addresses the uses of Latin, English, and mixed code—combining
medieval Latin, Anglo-Norman, and Middle English—in a selection of documents
from MELD and from three archive collections at the Hampshire Record Office.
In order to avoid the problematic application of “code-switching” to
historical material (see Schendl 2012; Schendl and Wright 2011), Merja
Stenroos and Delia Schipor focus on written multilingual events: “the
individual occurrences of two or more languages […] within a text” (p. 255),
not necessarily manifested as linear strings but relating to each other
visually in different ways. A total of 175 multilingual events consisting of
two or more words are studied by the authors, mainly in English (166) and
mixed code (9) texts. The text types exhibiting these multilingual events are
mainly financial accounts, testamentary documents and notes, as well as
inventories in the case of mixed-language. The analysis of these events is
comprehensive and touches on diverse aspects like syntactic structure, textual
structure, visual structure and organisation, information content, and
predictability in relation to the presence or absence of formulaicness. These
patterns of code selection are finally contextualised in the late medieval
shift from Latin to monolingual English so relevant for the expansion of
English as a written language. The evidence from MELD extends this process
chronologically to the first quarter of the sixteenth century, when Latin even
increased its presence in administrative texts, thus contradicting the overall
expectation that monolingual written English had already reached its full
expansion by this time (see Wright 2013; 2017). 

EVALUATION

The above summary of the book contents would be unfair without mentioning the
philological rigour of all chapters and the outstanding analysis of a great
number of orthographical and morphological late Middle English features. As
regards spelling forms, the discussion of variants like <th> (vs. <y>, <þ> or
<d>), <gh> (vs. <Ʒ>, <Ʒh> or <h>), <sh> (vs. <sch> or <ss>), <wh> (vs. <qw> or
<w>), “any” (vs. “eny” or “ony”), <ai>~<ay> (vs. <ei>~<ey>) in “said” and
“they/them”, <a> (vs. <o>) in “land”, “man” and “stand”, <ll> (vs. <l>) in
“shall”, among others, cross-cut many of the chapters. In the same vein,
morphological discussions refer to <h-> vs. <th-> forms of the third person
plural pronouns, and the different variants of are (“are”, “er” or “ben”), as
well as the persistence of the plural suffix <-x> in nouns of Anglo-Norman
origin—a feature rarely dealt with in handbooks on the history of English.
Lexical items are also studied by Merja Stenroos in Chapter 5—the distribution
of “clepe” vs. “call”—and particularly in Chapter 8, which is focused on
regional vocabulary describing land units, boundaries, and landmarks.
 
The main objective of the book is the promotion of historical linguistic
research based on a hitherto discarded text-type: local administrative
records, whose formal and functional characteristics determine the type of
research accomplished. At the same time, important innovations (both
methodological and heuristic) are achieved. Methodologically, the rootedness
of local documents in specific geographical and chronological contexts
facilitates the localisation of variants in space and time. Incidentally, this
accuracy helps the authors transcend the idea of the “real dialect” of given
locations—a tenet disseminated by the LALME project; the sociolinguistic
interpretation of demographic, socio-economic and urban patterning, the
geolinguistic evidence of diffusion by dialect hopping and the evidence of
forms with different origins coexisting in some locations (due to immigration
or supralocalisation) support this observation. Another important
methodological innovation has to do with the classification of texts: the
diversity of documents analysed has led the authors to avoid the categories
afforded by text-linguistics (“genre”, “text-type”, and “register”) as too
narrow, and instead adopt the concept of “text category”, inspired in
prototypical theory. Methodologically, the concept of “multilingual event”
proposed by Mark Sebba (2012: 104‒106) is applied and tested in chapter 11; it
helps Merja Stenroos and Delia Schipor  elude the syntactic constrictions
posed by “code-switching” and the problems behind its application to
historical materials. 
 
Heuristically, a number of findings are crucial for the interpretation of late
Middle English and may even affect some received perceptions of the history of
English. On the one hand, the concept of “sponsor(s) of literacy” is
introduced in parallel with that of the individual scribe (Stenroos 2016:
111‒112). This enriches the view of vernacular literacy and text production in
the period, connecting it to a range of institutions and to the domains with
which they were concerned. A second key issue here touches on the textual
relationship between medieval Latin and English within the historical
unfolding of standardisation—i.e., the supralocalisation of monolingual,
highly focused varieties of written English. The analysis of multilingual
events accomplished in Chapter 11 reveals that Latin was still extensively
used in local records as late as the sixteenth century and that mixed-code
usage was still used in inventories and business records in the period
1417‒1433. These observations extend chronologically the proposal by Laura
Wright (2005; 2017), who situates the shift to monolingual English earlier,
between c. 1380 and c. 1480. Nevertheless, a most significant proposal is that
code-selection was, on the one hand, determined by the communities producing
the texts—Latin would be used at the episcopal administration and English
progressively at the local or municipal level—and, on the other, the relation
between degree of formulaicness, the pragmatic needs of the audience, and code
selection. Local documents throughout England show clear tendencies for
English to be used in the unpredictable and less formulaic portions of texts
meant for use by lay people, while “texts for professional in-house use and
very highly formulaic are usually in Latin” (p. 62). Finally, an important
heuristic consequence has to do with the observation of direct connections
between the choice of variants and both the material context and the
circumstances of text production. Meaningful findings in this respect are, for
instance, the relationship between variable (th) and the communities of
scribes that copied the administrative documents: scriveners trained in Latin
or familiar with it tend to use higher rates of <th>, since the digraph is of
Latin origin, while stationers copying literary texts, with no legal or
administrative training and unfamiliar with Latin, show greater rates of the
relic variants <þ> and <ð>. The incidence of the material context—medium and
physical format—on variant selection is also explored, as well as the possible
influence of the visual and/or spatial arrangement of texts, which favoured
the selection of punctuation marks (Chapter 9) or facilitated language
alternation to highlight different sections of a document: heading, body text,
attachments, etc. (Chapter 11). In this way, the chapters in this volume align
themselves with the “new, new philology” advocated by Jeremy J. Smith (2016):
a revival of the late twentieth century return to the rigorous philological
analysis of texts in their manuscript context proposed by Stephen G. Nichols
and others in the well known 1990 issue of “Speculum” (volume 61.1), as a
means to access the socio-cultural context through their complete
analysis―grammar, vocabulary, spelling, punctuation, orthography, and lay-out.
 
There are some minor snags. One of them is that the conclusions are sometimes
obvious and not unexpected, clearly derived from the characteristics of the
material under scrutiny, which occasionally may be a source of circularity;
for instance, Chapter 8 concludes that “local documents being quintessentially
of local interest, tend to show a relatively strongly local or regional
language not only as regards vocabulary, but also with regard to other levels
of language” (p. 201). One could also mention the endogamic character of a
publication whose contributors are all members of the research project leading
to the compilation of MELD. Again, this is not unexpected since they all have
first-hand knowledge of the material and this does not impinge on the high
quality of the research attained. Actually, the generosity of the team in
publishing the corpus online and in open access must be acknowledged. In this
way, the exploitation of the material in the future is guaranteed and the
chances that it will illuminate new areas of research on Middle English
linguistic variation are widened.

REFERENCES

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ABOUT THE REVIEWER

J. Camilo Conde-Silvestre is a Full Professor at the University of Murcia
(Spain) where he has mainly lectured on the History of the English Language
(Old English, Middle English, Early and Late Modern English) and Medieval
English Literature, as well as a number of postgraduate courses on Beowulf,
the Old English Elegies and Research Methods in (Socio)Historical Linguistics.
He has also been Research Fellow at the University of Manchester and visiting
scholar at Toronto University. His main research interests are Old English
literature and the History of the English Language, mainly Middle English
dialectology and historical sociolinguistics.





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LINGUIST List: Vol-32-3987	
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