"When that wounds are evil healed”: Revisiting pleonastic that in early English medical writing
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Date
2017
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Adam Mickiewicz University
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Abstract
The origin of pleonastic that can be traced back to Old English, where it could appear in syntactic
constructions consisting of a preposition + a demonstrative pronoun (i.e., for þy þat, for þæm þe)
or a subordinator (i.e., oþ þat). The diffusion of this pleonastic form is an Early Middle English
development as a result of the standardization of that as the general subordinator in the period,
which motivated its use as a pleonastic word in combination with many kinds of conjunctions
(i.e., now that, if that, when that, etc.) and prepositions (i.e., before that, save that, in that)
(Fischer 1992: 295). The phenomenon increased considerably in Late Middle English, declining
rapidly in the 17th century to such an extent that it became virtually obliterated towards the end of
that same century (Rissanen 1999: 303–304). The list of subordinating elements includes
relativizers (i.e., this that), adverbial relatives (i.e., there that), and a number of subordinators
(i.e., after, as, because, before, beside, for, if, since, sith, though, until, when, while, etc.).
The present paper examines the status of pleonastic that in the history of English pursuing the
following objectives: (a) to analyse its use and distribution in a corpus of early English medical
writing (in the period 1375–1700); (b) to classify the construction in terms of genre, i.e., treatises
and recipes; and (c) to assess its decline with the different conjunctive words. The data used as
source of evidence come from The Corpus of Early English Medical Writing, i.e., Middle English
Medical Texts (MEMT for the period 1375–1500) and Early Modern English Medical Texts
(EMEMT for the period 1500–1700). The use of pleonastic that in medical writing allows us to
reconsider the history of the construction in English, becoming in itself a Late Middle English
phenomenon with its progressive decline throughout the 16th and 17th centuries.
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Sponsor
The present research has been funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness
(grant number FFI2014-57963-P), and by the Autonomous Government of Andalusia (grant
number P11-HUM7597).
Keywords
Early Modern English, historical syntax, medical writing, Middle English, pleonastic that
Citation
Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, vol. 52.1(2017), pp. 5-20