Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang

Syntactic dialectal variation in Middle
English 1
Cristina Suárez-Gómez
Universitat de les Illes Balears
ME is widely known as “par excellence, the dialectal phase of English” (Strang
1970: 224). It is therefore not at all surprising that the linguistic differences
among dialects in ME have long attracted the attention of scholars. It is generally
assumed that northern dialects innovate mainly due to Scandinavian influence
as opposed to southern dialects, which maintain the tradition. The aim of my
study is to test whether this tendency is also reflected in relativization, both in
the system of relativizers used and in the position adopted by the relative clause.
My study shows that the system of relativizers inherited from OE, with deictic
relativizers, and the tendency towards extraposition typical of ME are associated
with southern dialects, while the North shows a simplified system of relativizers
as well as a marked tendency for relative clauses to be intraposed. The data for
the present study have been drawn from The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts:
Diachronic and Dialectal.
1. Introduction
The fact that research into English historical dialectology has focused almost
exclusively on Middle English comes as no surprise given that Strang hailed
this period as “par excellence, the dialectal phase of English” (1970: 224), and
for Milroy it “exhibited the greatest diversity in written language of any period
before or since” (1992: 156). Indeed, for Milroy “the label ‘Middle English’
does not refer to a coherent entity, but to a complex series of divergent, rapidly
changing and intertwining varieties restrospectively seen as transitional
1. I am grateful to the Autonomous Government of Galicia (grant no. PGIDIT05PXIC20401PN),
and the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science and the European Regional Development
Fund (grant no. HUM2004–00940/FILO) for generous financial support. Thanks are also due to
Prof Teresa Fanego, Dr Elena Seoane and Dr Belén Méndez for valuable comments on an earlier
version of this chapter.