Linguistic Analysis of a Passage from Both the “Miller’s Tale” and the “Man of the Law’s Tale” of Chaucer’s the Canterbury Tales
In a linguistic analysis of a passage from both the “Miller’s Tale” and the “Man of the Law’s Tale” of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, focus on the lexicon and the word-formation processes utilised, and consider how far it is representative of its period.
Introduction:
Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales were written in Middle English during the 14th Century, the period after the loss of Old English inflexions and before the standardisation of spelling due to the introduction of the Caxton printing press. Chaucer wrote during the years in which foreign loan words were fully integrated into the English vernacular as a result of invasions such as the Norman Conquest of 1066, the developing trade routes, and the expansion of learning associated with the Renaissance. It can be argued that his influence allowed for foreign words to be embedded and accepted into the language. It was relatively easy for loans to be adopted by Middle English because it had lost the inflections system, thus new words could ‘cohere with the syntactic structures of the borrowing language’. Middle English morphology consisted mostly of a manipulation of the existing vocabulary; therefore affixation and compounding were common.
Methodology:
The Canterbury Tales passages:
The first 60 lines of ‘The Miller’s Tale’ and ‘The Man of the Law’s Tale’ supply two contrasting characters. I accessed the passages from the Electronic Literature Foundation (ELF) website. I was able to compare the use of lexis and word formation, and able to comment on whether any differences were deliberate to suit a purpose.
Categorising the words:
Each word was systematically looked up in a combination of three locations: The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), Henry Stratmann’s Middle English Dictionary (MED) and Norman Davis’ A Chaucer Glossary. The OED was useful in providing the etymology of words and indicating the morphology. The MED filled gaps when the OED in some cases did not provide a comprehensive
Introduction:
Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales were written in Middle English during the 14th Century, the period after the loss of Old English inflexions and before the standardisation of spelling due to the introduction of the Caxton printing press. Chaucer wrote during the years in which foreign loan words were fully integrated into the English vernacular as a result of invasions such as the Norman Conquest of 1066, the developing trade routes, and the expansion of learning associated with the Renaissance. It can be argued that his influence allowed for foreign words to be embedded and accepted into the language. It was relatively easy for loans to be adopted by Middle English because it had lost the inflections system, thus new words could ‘cohere with the syntactic structures of the borrowing language’. Middle English morphology consisted mostly of a manipulation of the existing vocabulary; therefore affixation and compounding were common.
Methodology:
The Canterbury Tales passages:
The first 60 lines of ‘The Miller’s Tale’ and ‘The Man of the Law’s Tale’ supply two contrasting characters. I accessed the passages from the Electronic Literature Foundation (ELF) website. I was able to compare the use of lexis and word formation, and able to comment on whether any differences were deliberate to suit a purpose.
Categorising the words:
Each word was systematically looked up in a combination of three locations: The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), Henry Stratmann’s Middle English Dictionary (MED) and Norman Davis’ A Chaucer Glossary. The OED was useful in providing the etymology of words and indicating the morphology. The MED filled gaps when the OED in some cases did not provide a comprehensive
Bibliography: Stratmann, Francis, A Middle English Dictionary, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1891 (1963 reprint) OED online, http://www.oed.com/ Davis, Norman, A Chaucer Glossary, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979) Secondary Sources: Burnley, David, The Language of Chaucer, (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1989) Burrow, J.A, and Turville-Petre, Thorlac, A Book of Middle English, Second Edition, (Oxford, Blackwell Publishers, 1996) Cannon, Christopher, The Making of Chaucer 's English: A Study of Words, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) Harley, Heidi, English Words: A Linguistic Introduction, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006) Horobin, Simon, An Introduction to Middle English, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002) Mersand, Joseph [ 3 ]. Stratmann, Francis, A Middle English Dictionary, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1891 (1963 reprint), p. v. [ 4 ]. Burnley, David, The Language of Chaucer, (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1989), p. 137.