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

Syntactic dialectal variation in Middle English 143
system of relativizers, with a marked tendency for relative clauses to be intraposed
rather than extraposed, which is also an innovative trait in the English Language.
2. Description of the Corpus
The data for the present study have been drawn from The Helsinki Corpus of English
Texts: Diachronic and Dialectal. Only prose texts from the M1 period of The Helsinki
Corpus have been included in the analysis, which corresponds to early Middle
English and comprises texts written between 1150 and 1250. The inclusion of additional
subperiods would have added a further dimension to the task of analysis
and interpretation, that is, the dimension of time or chronology and might, therefore,
have biased the results obtained and the conclusions arrived at on dialectal
variation; thus, the changes observed would be attributed to both dialectal and
chronological differences. This subperiod of early English has also been chosen
in order to make comparisons with the situation in late Old English, a period
whose descriptive syntax on relativization and relativizers is based on the standard
variety. Furthermore, the position of the relative clause is not informative
after early Middle English onwards, as the process of clausal incorporation was
highly operative in late Old English and less so in early Middle English, following
the parataxis-to-hypotaxis hypothesis (see O’Neil 1976; Hopper & Traugott 2003:
chapter 7; Suárez-Gómez 2006: 51–75).
Table 1 illustrates the distribution of the data used in this research:
Table 1. Description of the corpus 3
Dialect Text Nr of words Nr of tokens
West-Midlands Ancrene Wisse 9,320 139
Hali Meidhad 8,820 142
Sawles Warde 3,820 64
Lambeth Homilies 9,900 172
East-Midlands Trinity Homilies 5,070 121
Vices and Virtues 10,230 289
South-West Bodley Homilies 5,880 87
The Holy Rood Tree 6,920 117
South-East Vespasian Homilies 5,880 47
Total 65,840 1,178
3. No texts from the northern dialect are available in this sub-period of The Helsinki Corpus.
Therefore, the South will comprise both Southwestern and Southeastern dialects, and the North
both East and West-Midlands dialects.