A LINGUISTIC
ATLAS OF EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH
Margaret Laing
A LINGUISTIC ATLAS OF OLDER SCOTS
Keith Williamson
Institute for Historical
Dialectology
University of Edinburgh
A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME) and A Linguistic
Atlas of Older Scots (LAOS) are being undertaken at the Institute for
Historical Dialectology, English Language, School of Philosophy, Psychology and
Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh.
They continue an extensive research programme into variation in medieval
written vernaculars that was started in the early 1950s by Professor Angus
McIntosh of Edinburgh University and Professor Michael Samuels of Glasgow
University (later joined by Professor Michael Benskin, now of Oslo University).
This resulted in the publication in 1986 of A Linguistic Atlas of Late
Mediaeval English. Laing and Williamson are investigating (1) written
English (ca. 1150–1300) over the two or three generations preceding the
material in LALME; (2) Older Scots (ca. 1350–1700), which was given only token
coverage in LALME.
Close links are maintained with Glasgow University and with
Professor Michael Benskin in Oslo University. The LAEME project enjoys support
from Professor Jeremy Smith and Dr Kathryn Lowe (Glasgow). The Scots project
has close collaborative links with Dr Anneli Meurman-Solin from the Department
of English of the University of Helsinki, the creator of the Helsinki Corpus of
Older Scots. Further collaborative links have recently been established
with Professor Roger Lass, University of Cape Town. Related investigations
based in the Department of English Language, University of Glasgow are: the
Middle English Grammar Project (Smith with Dr Simon Horobin (Glasgow) and
Professor Merja Stenroos (Stavanger)) and the Historical Thesaurus Projects
with Professor Christian Kay (Glasgow) and Professor Jane Roberts (London).
The LALME project was largely
carried out before the computer age. It was made using filing slips and
paper, pen or pencil. It collected data using the tool traditionally employed
by dialectologists, the questionnaire. By 1987 computer technology had
progressed to the point where we were able to use computers from the inception
of the daughter projects and in a way that is integral to the
methodology. Instead of completing questionnaires comprising a set of
predetermined ‘items’, we are developing a method whereby entire texts are
transcribed and keyed onto computer disk and are analysed linguistically using
programs written in-house. Each word or morpheme in a text is tagged according
to its lexical meaning and grammatical function and each newly tagged text is
added to the corpus of such texts. Programs then allow information on
particular ‘items’ (defined by one or more tags) to be abstracted from the
corpus to identify spatial or temporal distributions of the forms associated
with the item. Output may be produced in different formats including
concordances, text profile comparisons, time charts and maps.
This corpus method of analysis has
considerable advantages over the traditional questionnaire. Selection of items
for a questionnaire must be made before analysis begins, or very early in the
investigation, on a trial and error basis. Results are restricted and provide
only a fraction of the information achievable by the corpus method. Tagged
texts in the corpus are immediately and constantly available to be processed
and compared. Not all the material will be of use for dialectal work but this
method allows items to be selected from a complete inventory of linguistic
forms rather than from some predetermined sample. The method shortcircuits
Gilliéron’s paradox that for results to be optimal a questionnaire ought to be
devised after the investigation. The tagged corpora provide a detailed
lexical-grammatical taxonomy that is useful not just for dialect mapping but
for the historical study of phonology, morphology, syntax or semantics. The
implementation of the corpus approach to linguistic analysis makes feasible a
dynamic, interactive concept of dialect atlas. The corpus can be on CD or on a
web-site for scholars to search the data themselves and make their own
linguistic maps and time-charts.
The Institute for Historical
Dialectology has received support for the LAEME and LAOS projects from the
Leverhulme Trust, the British Academy and the Carnegie Trust. We here also
acknowledge with gratitude a recently awarded three-year grant from the Arts
and Humanities Research Board.
Recent and forthcoming
publications
Margaret Laing
2002 ‘Corpus-provoked
Questions about Negation in early Middle English’, Language Sciences 24,
297-321.
2001 ‘Words reread. Middle
English Writing Systems and the Dictionary’ [for DSNA conference celebrating
the completion of the MED, 6-9 May 2001, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor], Linguistica
e Filologia 13, 87-129.
2000a ‘“Never the twain
shall meet” early Middle English the east west divide’, I. Taavitsainen, T.
Nevalainen, P. Pahta and M. Rissanen (eds.) Placing Middle English in
Context, 97–124. Topics in English Linguistics series. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
2000b ‘The Linguistic
Stratification of the Middle English Texts in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS
Digby 86’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 101, 523-569.
1999 ‘Confusion wrs
Confounded: Litteral Substitution Sets in Early Middle English Writing Systems’,
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 100, 251–70.
Keith Williamson
2002 ‘The Dialectology of
“English” North of the Humber, c. 1380-1500’ in Teresa Fanego, Belen
Méndez-Naya and Elena Seoane Posse (eds.) Sounds, Words, Texts and Change.
Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 253-286.
2001 ‘Spatio-Temporal
Aspects of Older Scots Texts’, Scottish Language, 20, 1-19.
2000a ‘Lexico-Grammatical
Tags and the Phonetic and Syntactic Analysis of Medieval Texts’ in Christian
Mair and Marianne Hundt (eds.) Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory,
Language and Computers: Studies in Practical Linguistics, no. 33.
Amsterdam, Atlanta GA: Rodopi, 385-395.
2000b ‘Changing Spaces.
Linguistic Relationships and the Dialect Continuum’ in I. Taavitsainen, T.
Nevalainen, P. Pahta and M. Rissanen (eds.) Placing Middle English in
Context, Topics in English Linguistics series. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 141-179.
Keith Williamson and
Margaret Laing
(forthc) ‘The Archaeology
of Middle English Texts’, delivered to the Symposium on Linguistic Categories
and Classification, University of Glasgow, Scotland, 15–17 September 1999.