Lexis

Of all linguistic concepts, that of ‘word’ is the most fundamental, possessing a quality of homely familiarity which is lacking in more technical terms like ‘phoneme’, ‘morpheme’ or even ‘syntax’. Words seem to have a reality either as pronunciations or as written characters, they have grammatical rules for combination, and they have meanings: and for everyday purposes we require little more than this in order to discuss them adequately. Yet, as soon as words become the object of serious study requiring more precise definition, it is apparent that our complacency is ill-founded. Difficulties are encountered in describing with precision what constitutes that composite of form and meaning we call a word. Our ready acceptance that words can be misspelt, mispronounced or inappropriately combined confirms that their use is governed by linguistic rules, but we assume too easily that such rules are founded on an ability to recognise words as the fundamental unit of analysis. In any period this is a troublesome business, but especially so in Middle English.

That written Middle English presents a problem in the definition of any individual word by its orthographic form is a fact vividly apparent to anyone who has ever used a computer to search a text. The machine's capacity to recognise forms is relatively inflexible, but inflexibility is not characteristic of scribal spelling. The scribe who, in the late fourteenth century, wrote MS Cotton Nero A.x, Art. 3, refers within a few lines of each other to þyn aunt and þy naunt, reflecting an uncertainty about word boundaries which is sometimes exploited in the patterns of alliterative verse: ‘And worisch him as namely as he myne awyn warre’ (Wars of Alexander 582).

Introduction

Dialectology is the study of varieties of speech and variation in language. Dialectologists work to make correlations between linguistic features (phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexical) and such extralinguistic facts as place of origin, race, sex, social status. In doing so, we identify individual varieties – idiolects – and relate them to dialects, the more general patterns of speech communities. When undertaking the study of a contemporary speech community, the dialectologist has living informants and modern devices for collecting data. Studies of historical varieties depend on less direct methods. The main sources of information are written records and conjectures about older varieties based on comparisons of surviving dialects. Linguists interested in earlier varieties of English are fortunate that the English language has been written for over a thousand years. Those records attest several clearly distinct historical varieties, compare the Old English of Beowulf with Chaucer's Middle English or Shakespeare's Early Modern English. More subtle distinctions within periods, as between Chaucer and the Pearl/Gawain, are also evident. This chapter will be an investigation of the modern methods used to extract as much information as possible from ancient written records.

Given its name and rather narrow focus, Old English dialectology might at first seem a subject very remote from day-to-day human affairs. Speakers of a language are, however, by their very nature unselfconscious ‘students’ of speech varieties. Early in life we begin that ‘training’ by identifying and learning to imitate the wide range of speech habits and styles we encounter in our nurturing environments.

Introduction

The term literary language can be used in various senses, reflecting the different meanings of the word literature, and the area of discourse usefully designated by it will vary from one period to another. For the period up to 1100 there is little value in applying the broad and etymological sense of the word ‘literary’ or ‘literature’, meaning ‘all that is written down’ in contradistinction to oral discourse: to do so risks, on the one hand, excluding poetry, since the special language of verse was largely developed without benefit of writing and a number of the surviving poems probably originated in oral conditions; and on the other hand, including too much to be useful, since virtually all our evidence for the language of the time, at all levels, comes from written documents. At the other extreme, a more restricted definition of literature as imaginative composition would be in danger of excluding much that is worth attention and including some texts of little linguistic or literary interest because they happen to deal with imaginary fictions. I use the term ‘literary language’ here to cover the language of all verse and of the more sustained and ambitious writing in prose, especially those texts which reveal a concern with the selection and use of language.

Political history and language history

Bede begins his story of the Anglo-Saxon invasions and settlements of Britain as follows(it seems more appropriate here to quote from the Old English translation than from the original Latin text):

Introduction

5.1.1 One linguistic concept, although fundamental and constantly referred to, is often taken for granted: the concept of ‘word’. The word is the domain of many phonological statements; it is the implicit ordering principle in morphology; and the word is a central, though again implicit concept of syntax in so far as the latter describes the patterns or rules according to which words are combined into larger linguistic structures. It is therefore necessary to be somewhat more explicit about this linguistic category, not only because words – more precisely, the aggregate of words making up the vocabulary (= dictionary = lexicon) of a language – are the topic of this chapter, but also because the term is familiar from non-technical, everyday language, where it is often employed in a variety of senses, while as a technical term it ought to be unambiguous. Thus, when talking about inflectional paradigms, the term ‘word’ might be used to refer both to each individual member of the paradigm, and to the global entity each member of the paradigm is a form of, as well as to the entity that is bounded by spaces to its left and right in a text. This, then, might lead to a seemingly contradictory statement such as

(1) The word heah steap is written as two words.

In actual fact, there is a sequence heah steap reced ‘very high house’ (lit. ‘high lofty house’) in Gen. 2840 (Sauer 1985:270), where heah steap is normally interpreted as an adjectival compound, which, however, is written in the manuscript as two separate words.

Introduction

Whatever their other achievements, the Anglo-Saxons could not lay claim to being outstanding grammarians. Indeed, to judge by the paucity of grammatical writing during the Old English period, where Ælfric's Latin Grammar (ca 1000) stands out because it is the exception that proves the rule, the Anglo-Saxons would not have wished to make such a claim, their intellectual interests lying in entirely different areas.

This, of course, makes the task of reconstructing the nature of the Old English language that much more difficult. Thus, in the areas which are the concern of this chapter, we have no equivalent of the Icelandic First Grammarian, who, writing in the thirteenth century, gives a wealth of detail about the sound system of Old Icelandic (see Benediktsson 1972, Haugen 1950). At much the same time as the First Grammarian was writing, an East Midlands monk of Scandinavian origin, Orm, composed a lengthy verse work entitled Orrmulum, in which he employed a writing system of his own devising from which we can glean a considerable amount of information about his pronunciation (see Burchfield 1956, Sisam 1953b: 188–95 and vol. II, ch. 2 of this History). However, Orm's spelling system, valuable as it is, is not only ambiguous in its aims and effects, but also relates to a period when the English language had considerably altered in structure and system. For Old English itself we have no direct testamentary evidence from any contemporary or near-contemporary source.

General principles

The special status of names

Naming, although semantically a specialised function, in other respects forms part of the everyday language. Phonemic material has to be the same, and to follow dialectal and chronological paths that are related, albeit not invariably identical. The morpho-syntactic features of names must fit with general ones. Lexical material and modes of word-formation too must reflect those of the language at large. Indeed, place-names normally start as plain descriptions of the sites concerned: e.g. Kingston < cyninges tūn ‘the king's estate’, Pyrford < (æt) pyrigan forda ‘(the settlement at) the ford by the pear-tree’ (PN Surrey: 59, 132; illustrative examples will usually be given in normalised rather than documentary form). Personal names, although less transparently motivated, likewise ultimately derive from elements of common language.

Before becoming truly a ‘name’, a descriptive formation must, however, be divorced from its etymological meaning in such a way that the sound-sequence, no matter how complex its structure or plain its surface-meaning, becomes a simple pointer; ‘one might claim that unintelligible names fulfil their role more directly’ (Gardiner 1940; Nicolaisen, in Gelling et al. 1970:14). Bath, as a place-name, coincides in form with the common noun, and awareness survives of the Roman baths that it commemorates; but, for all that, the name's everyday ‘meaning’ is independent of etymology. Such independence is clearer still with names which, like London, have, since records began, apparently been opaque to their users (Rivet and Smith 1979:396–8).

Language change and historical linguistics

Greek philosophers were aware of the fact that human language is subject to change in the course of time. But only from the nineteenth century onwards did scholars develop a truly scientific approach to language change and its description. During the Middle Ages various suggestions had been put forward with regard to language development, but religious prejudices frequently stood in the way of a correct understanding of historical processes; thus one widespread view was that all languages somehow descended from Hebrew. Then in his justly famous Anniversary Discourse of 2 February 1786 (published in Asiatick Researches 1.415–431 (1788)) Sir William Jones brought basic features of Sanskrit to the attention of western scholars. He contended that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin stem from a ‘common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists’ and surmised that Germanic and Celtic derive from the same source ‘though blended with a very different idiom’. The first quarter of the nineteenth century then saw the development of a reliable methodology in genetic linquistics. The main point concerning language relationship can be phrased as follows: two or more languages are genetically related if they stem from a common ancestor; the fact and the degree of the relationship are established on the basis of deep-cutting structural agreements which cannot be due to chance. Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Germanic, Celtic and a few other languages stem from a common proto-language, which is usually termed ‘Indo-European’ (in German indogermanisch).

General background

The study of syntax is the study of the patterns by which morphemes and grammatical categories such as Noun, Adjective, Verb, Preposition and conjunctions are organised into sentences.

To understand the syntax of a language fully, one needs to have access to grammaticality judgements. For example, to understand how the perfect works in English one needs to know not only that She has arrived is possible, that is, that it is part of the system of English, but also that ** She has arrived yesterday is not (** signals that the pattern is not part of the structure of the language, or at least of the variety in question; as is traditional in historical grammars, * is reserved for reconstructed, hypothetical forms). To understand the interaction of indefinite Noun Phrases and subject, one must know that ** A man is over there is not part of the system, whereas There is a man over there is. We obviously have only partial access to the syntax of an earlier stage of a language. This is in part because we have only indirect access to any grammaticality judgements, usually through the negative evidence of absence of a pattern, sometimes through inferences that can be drawn from crosslinguistic generalisations about constraints on possible syntactic patterns given certain word orders, etc. In part, it is because we have access only to written, not to spoken language. Furthermore, in the case of Old English (OE), much of the prose is dependent on Latin (this is particularly true of the interlinear glosses).

The period from 1953 to 1980 saw Russian literature develop in many different directions both inside and outside the Soviet Union. With Stalin’s death the intense cultural pressures which the guardians of literature had exerted after the Second World War diminished, and with some hesitation literature sought to strike out in unfamiliar channels during the period of the so-called thaw, a name adopted from Erenburg’s timely novel of the day. The thaw continued through the eventual accession of Nikita Khrushchev to power, but there were clearly strict limits to it, as the controversy over Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and the award of the Nobel Prize to him in 1958 showed: Pasternak finally rejected the award, and his novel was not published in the Soviet Union for nearly thirty years.

And yet the process of cultural liberalization after Stalin has never been totally reversed. The early 1960s saw the rise to prominence of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, following the publication of his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962. Solzhenitsyn remained a central figure of the 1960s thanks to the existence of samizdat, since many of his further writings could not be published within the country. It is indicative that he is supremely a writer of prose, and that two mentor-poets of the older generation – Pasternak and Akhmatova – had ceased to exert very direct influence on the younger generation of writers by the early 1960s. The attitude of the authorities toward the energies of the new literature passed through certain phases.

After the powerful impetus given Russian literature by the flowering of realism from 1855 to 1880, the period from 1880 – the year when Dostocvsky completed publication of his last novel, and Tolstoy underwent his spiritual conversion – to 1895 was perhaps inevitably a time of lesser cultural energies, although any epoch which contained writers of the stature of a Chekhov is still a remarkable one. In 1894 Alexander III had died after reigning for almost this entire period and taking very little interest in literary matters, unlike most of his predecessors. In literary terms 1895 is the year which saw the creation of Chekhov’s The Seagull – the first of his four outstanding plays which followed upon a period dedicated for the most part to the short story – a major work which incorporated modernist and even symbolist elements, foreshadowing the cultural revival to come.

This transitional period was dominated ideologically by the late Tolstoy, who after his spiritual crisis of 1879–80 turned to moral didacticism in literature, developed a viewpoint which came to be known as Tolstoyanism (advocating primarily non-violent resistance to evil), and gathered disciples about him. In his short story “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” he argued that the most ordinary life is the most terrible life; and in “The Kreutzer Sonata” he suggested that since sexual passion was the root of all evil, human beings might abstain from sexual relations even if this meant the end of the human race.

From 1790 to 1820 the Russian Empire underwent tumultuous years beginning with the immediate aftermath of the French revolution, continuing through the rise of Napoleon and the Napoleonic wars which saw the French invasion of Russia in 1812 and the allied occupation of Paris, and ending with the intellectual ferment of the movement which would culminate in the abortive Decembrist uprising of 1825. No great fraction of the nation’s energies at this time could be directed toward literature.

In literary terms this period begins with a work which faithfully reflects the political tensions of the time of the French revolution – Radishchev’s Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow – and ends with a narrative poem, Pushkin’s Ruslan and Lyudmila, which expresses well the romantic sensibility then on the verge of a short-lived cultural triumph. In the intervening thirty years, a culturally chaotic period, a major alteration occurred in literature’s approach to the world. As Arthur Lovejoy has so aptly put it, during the years of neoclassicism and the Enlightenment intellectuals looked to a single standard, “conceived as universal, uncomplicated, immutable, uniform for every rational being.” But then a “momentous” shift in outlook occurred, and was completed by the time of the romantic period, “when it came to be believed not only that in many, or in all, phases of human life there are diverse excellences, but that diversity itself is of the essence of excellence.” In short, the change in emphasis was from a unitary human standard to a belief in diversity for its own sake.

The decades between 1820 and 1840 witnessed simultaneously the zenith of Russian romanticism and the first stages of Russian literature’s greatest period, which extended from approximately 1820 to the time of the First World War. In terms of genres, Russian romanticism began with a strong emphasis on poetry (it is appropriate that Ruslan and Lyudmila of 1820 should be a narrative poem), but in the course of its development shifted toward prose. Thus Pushkin, though he never abandoned poetry by any means, turned definitely toward prose in 1830 with the composition of his Tales of Belkin, a cycle of works which laid the foundations of the Russian short story yet to come; Gogol began his literary career with a poetic failure but soon found his place as a writer of elaborate prose; and Lermontov, in numerous ways the most characteristic figure of the romantic period, remained not only a fine poet – many think him second only to Pushkin among nineteenth-century poets – but became an excellent prose-writer as well, and it is proper that his novel, or cycle of short stories, A Hero of Our Time (1840), should mark the end of Russian romanticism, and rather decisively at that. The transition from Ruslan and Lyudmila to A Hero of Our Time marks not only a shift from an early romanticism based upon national folklore to a romanticism oriented toward the extraordinary individual, the “superfluous man,” in a social context, but also a shift from poetry to prose. And yet both works are plainly romantic in their thrust.