"English local documents - leases, wills, accounts, letters and the like - provide a unique resource for historical sociolinguistics. Abundant from the early fifteenth century, they represent the language and concerns of people from a wide range of social, institutional and geographical backgrounds. However, as relatively few documents have been available digitally or in print, they have been an underresearched resource. This volume shows the tremendous potential of late- and post-medieval English local documents: highly variable in language, often colourful, including developing formulae as well as glimpses of actual recorded speech. The volume contains eleven chapters relating to a new resource, A Corpus of Middle English Local Documents (MELD). The first four chapters outline a theoretical and methodological approach to the study of local documents. The remaining seven present studies of different aspects of the material, including supralocalization, local patterns of spelling and morphology, land terminology, punctuation, formulaicness and multilingualism"--.

• Records of Real People
• Editorial page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Table of contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the cited texts and conventions
• Part I. Approaches to Middle English local documents
  • 1. Local documents as source material for the study of late medieval English
    • 1.1 Introduction
    • 1.2 The present approach
      • 1.2.1 Basic principles
      • 1.2.2 Written and spoken language
      • 1.2.3 The formulaicness of documentary texts
      • 1.2.4 Formulating research questions
    • 1.3 The material: Middle English local documents
    • 1.4 A Corpus of Middle English Local Documents (MELD)
    • 1.5 The structure of this book
  • 2. Grouping and regrouping Middle English documents
    • 2.1 Introduction
    • 2.2 Basic concepts: Text, scribal text and document
    • 2.3 Categorizing texts: Genre, text type and textual dimensions in earlier literature
      • 2.3.1 Genre, text type, and register
      • 2.3.2 From genres and text types to text categories
    • 2.4 Text categories and topological space
    • 2.5 Contexts of text production and use
    • 2.6 Changing topologies through chains of context
    • 2.7 Conclusions
  • 3. The categorization of Middle English documents: Interactions of function, form and language
    • 3.1 Introduction: Categorizing documents
    • 3.2 The framework: Textual parameters and contexts of text production
    • 3.3 Categorizing the functions of Middle English local documents
      • 3.3.1 The functions of documentary texts
      • 3.3.2 Function vs genre
      • 3.3.3 Functional categories in MELD
    • 3.4 Who produced the documents? Communities, institutions and domains
    • 3.5 Function and code selection
    • 3.6 Function and the material context
    • 3.7 Conclusions
  • 4. The geography of Middle English documentary texts
    • 4.1 Geography as a textual parameter in Middle English
    • 4.2 Changing models of geographical variation
      • 4.2.1 A “soil somewhere in England”: The idea of the local dialect
      • 4.2.2 From geographical to social space
    • 4.3 Connecting texts to localities
      • 4.3.1 How does a text relate to a place?
      • 4.3.2 Localizing texts on the basis of localizing clauses
      • 4.3.3 Historically situated texts
      • 4.3.4 Inferred localizations: People and places
    • 4.4 Mapping the localizations
    • 4.5 Discussion
    • 4.6 Conclusions
• Part II. Text communities and geographical variation
  • 5. Regional variation and supralocalization in late medieval English: Comparing administrative and literary texts
    • 5.1 Introduction
    • 5.2 The idea of a fifteenth-century standard
    • 5.3 Variability and text production: Documentary and literary texts
    • 5.4 The material and methodology
    • 5.5 Comparison of the corpora: Findings
      • 5.5.1 Purely orthographic features (W-features)
        • The variable (th) in THEY, THEM and OTHER
        • The variable (sh) in SHALL
        • The variable (gh) in RIGHT
        • Final and in ANY, HOLY AND THEY
        • Double and single in SHALL
        • Summary
      • 5.5.2 Features relating to the spoken mode
        • Phonology: LAND, ANY, SHALL, HOLY, MAN and OTHER
        • Morphology: THEY, THEM, ARE and the past participle prefix ‘y-’
        • ‘Vocabulary’: Clepe ‘and’ call ‘ CALL ’
    • 5.6 Discussion: Literary vs documentary texts
    • 5.7 Conclusions
  • 6. Cambridge: A University town
    • 6.1 Introduction
    • 6.2 Material and methods
    • 6.3 Cambridge as a community: The historical context
    • 6.4 The findings
      • 6.4.1 Preliminaries
      • 6.4.2 The first vocalic element in ANY
      • 6.4.3 The vocalic element in SAID
      • 6.4.4 The consonantal element (gh)
      • 6.4.5 The consonantal element (wh)
      • 6.5 Discussion and conclusions
  • 7. Knutsford and Nantwich: Scribal variation in late medieval Cheshire
    • 7.1 Introduction
    • 7.2 The geographical and historical context
      • 7.2.1 The Knutsford area
      • 7.2.2 The Nantwich area
    • 7.3 The data collection
    • 7.4 Presentation of the findings
    • 7.5 Conclusions
    • Appendix.
  • 8. Land documents as a source of word geography
    • 8.1 Introduction
    • 8.2 Land documents and descriptions of land
    • 8.3 The study
      • 8.3.1 The data collection
      • 8.3.2 The land units
        • Measures and divisions
        • Types of landholding and property
      • 8.3.3 Verbs describing geographical relations
      • 8.3.4 Landmarks
    • 8.4 The local character of land documents
    • 8.5 Conclusions
• Part III. Social and pragmatic variation
  • 9. The pragmatics of punctuation in Middle English documentary texts
    • 9.1 On punctuation and pragmatics
    • 9.2 Some fifteenth-century Welsh documents
    • 9.3 The punctuation of letters
    • 9.4 Conclusions
  • 10. Ventriloquism or individual voice: Formulaic language in heresy abjurations
    • 10.1 Introduction
    • 10.2 Historical context
      • 10.2.1 The Lollards
      • 10.2.2 The heresy trial
    • 10.3 Approaches and definitions
      • 10.3.1 The present corpus
      • 10.3.2 The characteristics of abjuration texts
      • 10.3.3 Identifying confessional utterances
      • 10.3.4 Formulaic and non-formulaic language
    • 10.4 Presentation of findings
    • 10.5 Discussion
      • 10.5.1 The question of individual contribution
      • 10.5.2 The abjuration as an opportunity to speak?
    • 10.6 Conclusions
    • Appendix.
  • 11. Multilingual practices in Middle English documents
    • 11.1 Introduction
    • 11.2 A framework for describing multilingual patterns in manuscript texts
      • 11.2.1 Spoken and written multilingualism
      • 11.2.2 Conceptualising multilingual patterns: From switches to events
      • 11.2.3 Classifying multilingual events in written texts
        • Linguistic mixing types
        • Units of analysis: Syntactic, textual and visual structure
        • Visual marking
        • Language – content relationships
        • Level of predictability
    • 11.4 The material for the present study
    • 11.5 Presentation of findings
      • 11.5.1 The distribution of multilingual events in the English texts
      • 11.5.2 The mixed-code texts
      • 11.5.3 Multilingual events in the English texts: Structure and visual marking
      • 11.5.4 The functions and information content of multilingual events
      • 11.5.5 The predictability of Latin elements
    • 11.6 Conclusions
• References
• List of cited documents
• Index