Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang
Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang
Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang
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144 Cristina Suárez-Gómez<br />
The corpus contains ca. 65,000 words and has rendered 1,178 examples of relative<br />
clauses. The texts submitted to analysis belong to <strong>the</strong> following dialects: West-<br />
Midlands, East-Midlands, Southwestern and Sou<strong>the</strong>astern. The overall number of<br />
tokens is dialectally classified as follows: 517 tokens belong to <strong>the</strong> West-Midlands<br />
dialect; 410 to <strong>the</strong> East-Midlands; 204 to <strong>the</strong> Southwestern dialect and only 47 to <strong>the</strong><br />
Sou<strong>the</strong>astern one. Since sample sizes vary with respect to dialect, not only in terms of<br />
<strong>the</strong> number of relative clauses, but also in terms of <strong>the</strong> number of words, normalized<br />
frequencies were used in <strong>the</strong> analysis in order to correct <strong>the</strong> unbalanced distribution<br />
of words per dialect. Frequencies have been normalized per 10,000 words.<br />
3. Syntactic dialectology in Middle English<br />
Five major dialectal areas exist in <strong>the</strong> Middle English period, which are <strong>the</strong> direct<br />
inheritors of those corresponding to Old English (see Milroy 1992: 172):<br />
– Nor<strong>the</strong>rn (descendant of Old English Northumbrian);<br />
– East-Midland (descendant of Old English Mercian);<br />
– West-Midland (descendant of Old English Mercian);<br />
– Southwestern, also referred to as Sou<strong>the</strong>rn (descendant of Old English<br />
West-Saxon);<br />
– Sou<strong>the</strong>astern, or Kentish (descendant of Old English Kentish).<br />
Middle English dialectology has been a favourite topic of research, and a whole<br />
bundle of distinctive features characterizing <strong>the</strong> different dialects has been recognized.<br />
Such distinctive features are mainly concerned with spelling and phonology,<br />
lexicon and morphology. In fact, most available regional indicators pertain<br />
to any of <strong>the</strong>se three levels of <strong>the</strong> language. Although five main dialects are distinguished<br />
in Middle English, <strong>the</strong> most revealing regional indicators group <strong>the</strong>m into<br />
two macro-dialects: (i) Nor<strong>the</strong>rn, which comprises <strong>the</strong> inheritors of Old English<br />
Northumbrian and Mercian, namely, Middle English Nor<strong>the</strong>rn, East-Midland, and<br />
West-Midland; and (ii) Sou<strong>the</strong>rn, which comprises <strong>the</strong> descendants of Old English<br />
West-Saxon and Kentish, namely Middle English Southwestern and Sou<strong>the</strong>astern<br />
(or Kentish), a classification which will be adopted in this chapter.<br />
Studies on Middle English dialectology provide comprehensive lists of regional<br />
indicators (Milroy 1992: 174–180; Fernández Cuesta & Rodríguez Ledesma<br />
2004), which lend support to <strong>the</strong> above mentioned North-South divide. As already<br />
mentioned, most of <strong>the</strong>se indicators affect phonology and orthography, lexis and,<br />
less frequently, but still very revealing, morphology. A common tendency is to divide<br />
<strong>the</strong> dialectal areas into two: <strong>the</strong> North, displaying earlier innovations, and <strong>the</strong>