WORKSHOP ON MEDIEVAL NORTHERN ENGLISH
Date: 06-07 Nov. 2017
Location: Faculty of Philology, Seville (Spain)
Northern English, like mainland Scandinavian languages, is characterised by its tendency towards analyticity from its earliest stages, as evidenced already in the written records from the Old Northumbrian period (7th-10th centuries). There is no general agreement about the causes/motives for the early development of northern English (whether the result of language contact or language internal change, or both). It has been argued that contact with both Celtic and Scandinavian languages may have been responsible for the early processes of change (morphological simplification, loss of grammatical gender and grammaticalisation) in these varieties (Thomason and Kaufman 1988, McWhorter 2007, Trudgill 2011, Benskin 2011), but there is no general consensus as to the reasons for the changes and the period in which they started. Quantitative analysis of our medieval witnesses against the socio-cultural background in which they were written (as well as re-examination of the actual manuscripts) may shed light on many of these questions.
Medieval northern English is also characterized by its rich vocabulary, as attested in toponyms as well as various texts penned throughout the period, from the late Old Northumbrian glosses to various fourteenth- and fifteenth-century texts. Much work has been done on the identification of Celtic, Norse, French and Latin loans, and the stylistic effects arising from their use (e.g. Turville-Petre 1977: Chapter 4, Pons-Sanz 2000, and the Gersum Project: https://www.gersum.org/), but, as is the case with morphosyntactic issues, we can only gain a better understanding of contemporary attitudes towards the effects of multilingualism by such studies in a wider context that also considers other issues related to the texts’ linguistic, cultural and sociohistorical milieu.
Following the seminar on the Lindisfarne Gospel Gloss, organised at the University of Westminster (Fernández Cuesta & Pons-Sanz 2016), we now announce a second workshop on Old and Middle Northern English, which will take place at the University of Seville on 6-7 November 2017.
Keynote speakers:
Prof. Carole Hough (University of Glasgow)
Prof. Laura Wright (University of Cambridge)
Dr. Peter Stokes (King’s College, London)