Vitenskapelig sammendrag
The aim of the project is to carry out a sociolinguistic and philological study of late medieval English documentary texts (legal/administrative documents
and personal letters). This material is of central interest for the regionalvariation and the beginning standardisation of written English during this
period. Documentary texts in English appear in large numbers from the early 15th century. Their appearance reflects a process of vernacularisation (shift
from Latin and French to English) as well as a growth in administration and pragmatic literacy. Most of the material is unprinted and much has never been studied before.
The project will produce an electronic corpus of transcriptions of some 3,000 texts. It will carry out a detailed study of this material, the results of which will
be published in book volumes, articles and a PhD thesis. A major research question is to what extent the language and physical form of the texts reflect centralizing processes, and how such effects vary regionally and over time.
The orientation of the project is sociolinguistic, but its focus on historical context makes it interdisciplinary. It combines quantitative methods (corpus linguistics; variationist studies) with qualitative ones (analysis of individual texts; philological approaches). The enquiry will cover several aspects of the documents, including orthographic and morphological variation,
phonological reconstruction, word geography, text type analysis, scripts and scribal practices and the reconstruction of networks of text production.
Such a broad approach is deemed crucial for a balanced view of the material and is made possible by the collaboration of scholars with a range of
specializations. The main book publication will bring together studies of the different aspects of the corpus and provide a synthesizing chapter that outlines the findings.
The project forms part of a long-term research programme, the Middle English Scribal Texts programme (MEST).
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