General comment

The Norman Conquest of England in 1066 conventionally marks the end of the Old English period and the beginning of Middle English. The literature produced in England during the Middle English period closely mirrors the shifting prominence of the English language. When French was the dominant language among the upper classes, their reading and listening materials were predominantly in French. The separation between the English nobility and France became more evident around 1250, leading to a broader adoption of English among the upper classes. This shift is reflected in the English literature of the following century, where genres that were previously written in French began to appear in English. Among these genres, the romance was the most popular. The widespread adoption of English by all social classes, which occurred by the latter half of the fourteenth century, led to a flourishing of English literature, marking a peak in medieval English literary achievements. The Middle English period conventionally ends at the beginnings of the XV century. Differently from Old English, for which we see scarce diachronic evolution across the centuries, Middle English is “a period of great change” (Baugh & Cable 2013: 152) and this change affected the English language in its phonology, morphosyntax and vocabulary

The coding frames given here include all arguments/adjuncts of the pre-defined role frame, plus a few additional ones that were found regularly in the sources.

Characterization of flagging resources

Middle English is characterised by a gradual decay of inflectional paradigms: except for the genitive, case marking is found only in pronominal forms, where a nominative form is distinguished from a non-nominative form (indicated with -acc in the database), in which forms of the accusative and dative have merged. The masculine/neuter -es genitive has been extended also to the feminine and is the only case found also in nominal inflection.

Due to case loss (syncretism of non-nominative forms in the pronominal inflection), ditransitives adhere to the neutral alignment.

Characterization of indexing resources

The grammatical categories of the Old English verbal system, i.e. person, number, tense and mood, were substantially retained in Middle English, though many inflectional endings were lost. As in Old English, however, there is still agreement between subject and verb in number and person (Smith 2023: 91), even though many forms show syncretism.

Characterization of ordering resources

Probably connected to the loss of inflections, word order patterns became less flexible during the Middle English period, the usual order being SVO. However, this order could change for stylistic reasons (Smith 2022: 95). Middle English still exhibits V2 in many texts, although this phenomenon is frequently disregarded in others (Fulk 2012: 111).

Source of the data and generalizations/background of the contributor(s)

Data were collected in the 2023 for the 80 core meanings in ValPaL, from a subset of the PPCME2 (Kroch & Taylor 2000) and PCMEP (Zimmermann 2014) treebanks. The list of texts selected as sample can be found at the following link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kGDLULwAoNdWDUwQ_8YeN7qZq47_-GT9/view?usp=sharing.

Counterparts to verb meanings were selected searching the electronic Middle English Dictionary. Occasionally, examples were taken from other texts in the treebanks or from the above-mentioned dictionaries when occurrences were missing in corpus samples but the patterns were attested elsewhere.

The contributor, Martina Giarda, is a PhD Student in Linguistic Sciences at the University of Pavia and the University of Bergamo.

Language Middle English