Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, 2014 vol. 49.3
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Browsing Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, 2014 vol. 49.3 by Subject "Middle English"
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Item Courtesy and politeness in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2014) Jucker, Andreas H.A close reading of three selected passages of the Middle English alliterative romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight provides a detailed picture of fictional and fairy-tale manifestations of courtly and polite behaviour in Middle English, a period that imported many new terms of courtesy and politeness from French. In the three passages Sir Gawain is visited in his bedchamber by the lady of the house, who tries to seduce him and thus puts him in a severe dilemma of having to be courteous to the lady and at the same time loyal to his host and to the code of chivalry. The analysis shows how Sir Gawain and the lady of the house engage in a discursive struggle of the true implications of courteous behaviour. It also shows how the two characters use nominal and pronominal terms of address to negotiate their respective positions of power, dominance and submission towards each other. And, finally, an analysis of requests reveals how the lady carefully selects appropriate strategies to reflect the severity of the imposition of her requests and her momentary standing in their discursive struggle.Item The dialectal provenance of London, Wellcome Library, MS 5262(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2014) Esteban-Segura, LauraThis paper takes into consideration the language found in London, Wellcome Library, MS 5262, a one-volume codex from the early fifteenth century which holds a medical recipe collection. The manuscript, written in Middle English (and with a few fragments in Latin), represents a fine exemplar of a remedybook, a type of writing that has been traditionally considered to be popular. The main aim is to study the dialect of the text contained in folios 3v-61v in order to localise it geographically. The methodology followed for the purpose is grounded on the model supplied by the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (LALME) (McIntosh et al. 1986), which consists of several stages including the completion of a survey questionnaire, the creation of the linguistic profile of the text and the application of the ‘fit’-technique (McIntosh et al. 1986, vol. 1: 10-12; Benskin 1991). Extralinguistic features of the manuscript may also be taken into consideration. This comprehensive analysis will help us to circumscribe the dialectal provenance and/or local origin of the text accurately.Item The rise of standard I (< ME ich): A contribution to the study of functional change in English(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2014) Wełna, JerzyIn its post-Norman Conquest development the Old English first person personal pronoun ic underwent transformations which, following the loss of the consonant, finally yielded the contemporary capitalised form I, contrasting with other Germanic languages, which retain a velar sound in the corresponding pronoun. The rather complex change of ich to I involves a loss of the final velar/palatal consonant, lengthening of the original short vowel, and capitalisation of the pronoun. It is argued here that the use of the capital letter was a consequence of vowel lengthening subsequent to the loss of the consonant. This seems to be confirmed by the observation that forms retaining a consonant are extremely rarely capitalised. The data adduced in the present paper will help verify as precisely as possible the distribution of the forms of that pronoun in Middle English dialects in order to determine to what extent the changes were functionally interdependent. The evidence comes from the Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose.