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

26 Peter Petré & Hubert Cuyckens
in which becuman copied the copularizing functions of weorðan. A final section,
then, provides an account of the differences in distribution between weorðan and
becuman. In addition, this section will also try to shed light on what caused the
replacement of weorðan in the first place. It will be suggested that a major explanatory
factor in this respect is a change in the lexeme-independent network of copulaconstructions
in which the lexeme weorðan was used.
. Methodological considerations: how (un)representative are the data?
In general, two approaches exist in research on Old and Middle English, each taking
a different position on problems that may arise in comparing these two dialects.
The first approach is mainly philological and descriptive in nature. Its position with
respect to any problems involved in comparing Old and Middle English is basically
one of resignation. The second approach is that of theoretical linguistics, which
is concerned with mechanisms of language change such as grammaticalization
(i.e., the development of (more) grammatical functions, see Hopper & Traugott
2003) or lexicalization (i.e., idiomatization). In this approach, problems of comparison
are more often than not ignored. Either one of these positions is, in essence,
undesirable. In this section, we will first discuss what underlies these positions; we
will then explain the principles on which the data sample (or corpus) used in this
paper was based to avoid either of these undesirable positions.
First, in philological research on English, it is commonly accepted that a wide
gap exists between Old and Middle English (see, for instance, Milroy 996: 67 &
Toon 996: 434–435). Old English manuscripts are predominantly preserved in
the southern West Saxon (WS) dialect. The earliest Middle English texts (from
the period 5 – 250), however, are almost exclusively written in the Midland
dialect, which, if anything, is rather a continuation of the Anglian dialect of Old
English. The usual conclusion drawn from this observation is one of resignation:
OE and ME data should not be compared, because they derive from two widely
differing dialects.
It cannot be denied that these dialectical differences constitute a fundamental
problem. And yet, in more theoretically oriented linguistic studies, this problem is
often largely ignored, and comparisons between Old and Middle English are readily
made – a point also discussed at length in Lass ( 994: –5). The main argument
given in defence of this strategy is that the data are so scarce that the best one can
do is to make use of all of them. In particular, if the language items one is doing
research on are fairly low or even average in frequency, ignoring is probably the
only option. However, for the purpose of this paper, i.e., explaining the loss of