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

144 Cristina Suárez-Gómez
The corpus contains ca. 65,000 words and has rendered 1,178 examples of relative
clauses. The texts submitted to analysis belong to the following dialects: West-
Midlands, East-Midlands, Southwestern and Southeastern. The overall number of
tokens is dialectally classified as follows: 517 tokens belong to the West-Midlands
dialect; 410 to the East-Midlands; 204 to the Southwestern dialect and only 47 to the
Southeastern one. Since sample sizes vary with respect to dialect, not only in terms of
the number of relative clauses, but also in terms of the number of words, normalized
frequencies were used in the analysis in order to correct the unbalanced distribution
of words per dialect. Frequencies have been normalized per 10,000 words.
3. Syntactic dialectology in Middle English
Five major dialectal areas exist in the Middle English period, which are the direct
inheritors of those corresponding to Old English (see Milroy 1992: 172):
– Northern (descendant of Old English Northumbrian);
– East-Midland (descendant of Old English Mercian);
– West-Midland (descendant of Old English Mercian);
– Southwestern, also referred to as Southern (descendant of Old English
West-Saxon);
– Southeastern, or Kentish (descendant of Old English Kentish).
Middle English dialectology has been a favourite topic of research, and a whole
bundle of distinctive features characterizing the different dialects has been recognized.
Such distinctive features are mainly concerned with spelling and phonology,
lexicon and morphology. In fact, most available regional indicators pertain
to any of these three levels of the language. Although five main dialects are distinguished
in Middle English, the most revealing regional indicators group them into
two macro-dialects: (i) Northern, which comprises the inheritors of Old English
Northumbrian and Mercian, namely, Middle English Northern, East-Midland, and
West-Midland; and (ii) Southern, which comprises the descendants of Old English
West-Saxon and Kentish, namely Middle English Southwestern and Southeastern
(or Kentish), a classification which will be adopted in this chapter.
Studies on Middle English dialectology provide comprehensive lists of regional
indicators (Milroy 1992: 174–180; Fernández Cuesta & Rodríguez Ledesma
2004), which lend support to the above mentioned North-South divide. As already
mentioned, most of these indicators affect phonology and orthography, lexis and,
less frequently, but still very revealing, morphology. A common tendency is to divide
the dialectal areas into two: the North, displaying earlier innovations, and the