The complex linguistic situation of earlier multilingual Britain has led to numerous contact-induced changes in the history of English. However, bi- and multilingual texts, which are attested in a large variety of text types, are still an underresearched aspect of earlier linguistic contact. Such texts, which switch between Latin, English and French, have increasingly been recognized as instances of written code-switching and as highly relevant evidence for the linguistic strategies which medieval and early modern multilingual speakers used for different purposes.

The contributions in this volume approach this phenomenon of mixed-language texts from the point of view of code-switching, an important mechanism of linguistic change. Based on a variety of text types and genres from the medieval and Early Modern English periods, the individual papers present detailed linguistic analyses of a large number of texts, addressing a variety of issues, including methodological questions as well as functional, pragmatic, syntactic and lexical aspects of language mixing. The very specific nature of language mixing in some text types also raises important theoretical questions such as the distinction between borrowing and switching, the existence of discrete linguistic codes in earlier multilingual Britain and, more generally, the possible limits of the code-switching paradigm for the analysis of these mixed texts from the early history of English.

Thus the volume is of particular interest not only for historical linguists, medievalists and students of the history of English, but also for sociolinguists, psycholinguists, language theorists and typologists.

Herbert Schendl, University of Vienna, Austria; Laura Wright, Cambridge, UK.


     
Contents 


Introduction 
Herbert Schendl and Laura Wright 
 
Code-switching in early English: Historical background and methodological and theoretical issues 
Herbert Schendl and Laura Wright 
   P. 15

Beyond boundaries: Code-switching in the leases of Oswald of Worcester 
Herbert Schendl 
 P.    47

Code-switching in the later medieval English lay subsidy rolls 
Richard Ingham 
 P.   95

Syntactic aspects of code-switching in Oxford, MS Bodley 649 
Helena Halmari and Timothy Regetz 
 P.115

Death, taxes and property: Some code-switching evidence from Dover, Southampton, and York 
David Trotter 
      p.155

On variation in medieval mixed-language business writing 
Laura Wright 
      P. 191

Multilingual discourse in the domain of religion in medieval and early modern England: A corpus approach to research on historical code-switching 
Päivi Pahta and Arja Nurmi 
     P. 219

“Gadryng Togedre of Medecyne in the Partye of Cyrugie”: Strategies of code-switching in the Middle English translations of Chauliac’s Chirurgia Magna 
Simon Meecham-Jones 
     P. 253

Code-switching in Langland, Chaucer and the Gawain poet: Diglossia and footing 
Ad Putter 
      P. 281

The visual pragmatics of code-switching in late Middle English literature 
Tim William Machan 
 P.   303

Index of Manuscripts 


Details
Language: English
Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
Copyright year: 2012
Audience: Researchers working on the History of English, Language Contact, Language Death, Minority Languages, Synchronic Code-Switching, Bilingualism

Pages:

Front matter: 8
Main content: 340

Illustrations:

Tables: 12
Keywords: Englisch/Language; Language Contact and Change; Romance Languages; Historical Linguistics; Pragmatics