Discoursal aspects of the Legends of Holy Women by Osbern Bokenham

“Speaking base approbious words”

“…However, only relatively recently has speech representation begun to receive sustained attention in English historical linguistics. As with studies of Present-Day English, these historical investigations have demonstrated the wide range of genres in which the representation of speech plays a significant role, including newspapers and news reports (Jucker 2006;McIntyre and Walker 2011;Jucker and Berger 2014), medieval treatises (Camiciotti 2000(Camiciotti , 2007, and fiction (McIntyre and Walker 2011; Busse forthcoming). Most notably, Moore (2011) has shown the substantial ways in which the formal, textual and functional parameters of speech representation (especially indirect and direct speech) have changed over the course of the history of English.…”

30 Middle English: Pragmatics and discourse

“…Among text-types discussed in some detail in recent work with respect to their distinctive discourse characteristics are instructional "how to" documents (Carroll 2003), medical recipes (Almeida and Carroll 2004;Mäkinen 2004), wills (Del Lungo Camiciotti 2002, and catalogs of tracts, doctrinal disputations, and statutes (Peikola 2003). Vernacularization of scientific texts, modeling on Latin and Arabic, and the professionalization of English are among topics discussed in Taavitsainen and Pahta (2004), and metalinguistic conventions for letters in Nevalainen (2001). Del Lungo Camiciotti (2007 addresses the refashioning of saints' lives from hagiographic text to narrative in the late 14th and 15th centuries, using the example of Bokenham's Legendys of Hooly Wummen (1447).…”

“…sermons), or were dictated (e.g. Oral habits left a mark on the composition of texts, and the texts "are full of idiosyncrasies and incoherences, with gaps, anomalies of grammar, and incoherent discourse patterns" (Taavitsainen and Fitzmaurice 2007: 19) that do not appear in texts on either end of the oral-literate continuum, but rather suggest emergent practices (Arnovick 2006;Del Lungo Camiciotti 2007). sermons, homilies) vs. "non-speech-based" (scientific texts, philosophical works, travelogues letters) are ultimately not very useful in Middle English (or earlier), even though texts in the HC (Rissanen et al 1991) are coded for these factors.…”