On variation in medieval mixed-language business writing

Wright, Laura; Schendl, Herbert

doi:10.1515/9783110253368.191

Cited by 39 publications

(11 citation statements)

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“…The consistent generation of new mixed forms is not typical of literary texts involving Latinalthough it is a highly inflected language, it rarely combines a foreign lexical morpheme with its own inflection, except when forming a new loan. The data imply that in literary texts such forms are rather an exception than a preferred strategy, and that they come chiefly in dialogical texts, not only in the period of Classical Antiquity, but also in the Middle Ages (see Adams, 2004;Forster, 1970;Mullen, 2015;Schendl, 2015), while they are normal in post-ancient technical usage (see Wright, 2011), which, as we saw, is one of the phenomena that set the stage for the emergence of MacL.…”

Section: Status Of Non-latin Elements In Maclmentioning

confidence: 59%

Artificial fusion: The curious case of Macaronic Latin

Demo

2020

International Journal of Bilingualism

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Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions: The present paper aims to situate Macaronic Latin, a peculiar type of linguistic mixture that was used in literary works in early modern Europe, within the context of phenomena such as code-switching and borrowing, as well as mixed and constructed languages. The main objective is to see whether and how it can be compared to various instances of linguistic structures originating from more than one source language. Design/Methodology/Approach: After a description of its historical background and sociolinguistic features, main linguistic traits of Macaronic Latin are sketched and, finally, compared to other language contact phenomena, with particular reference to the fusion hypothesis. Data and Analysis: The main data for the analysis are sixty samples from macaronic works belonging to eleven language pairs. The analysis shows that mixed words in Macaronic Latin have properties of both borrowings and loans, being very similar to nonce formations. When compared to mixed and constructed languages, Macaronic Latin shows peculiarities that set it apart from either group. Findings/Conclusions: Although individual structural aspects of Macaronic Latin align its individual aspects with various outcomes of linguistic contact, the sociolinguistic pattern of its creation and later development make it a rather untypical case of linguistic mixing. Originality: Latin served as the main language of learned communication in medieval and early modern Europe; yet, this paper is the first study devoted to putting it in the context of mixed language debate. Significance/Implications: The study suggests that the preservation of the widespread use of a language with no native speakers requires sociolinguistic forces so strong so as to override many trends of what has been established as regular linguistic development. This implies that in investigating such cases we might need a modified research methodology and an extended terminology.

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Section: Status Of Non-latin Elements In Maclmentioning

confidence: 59%

Artificial fusion: The curious case of Macaronic Latin

Demo

2020

International Journal of Bilingualism

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“…It is precisely the gap between spontaneous oral production and written forms of the language that can tell us how each culture or community envisions what a language is. In the case of historical evidence, which is confined to written genres, deductions can, similarly, be made from the differences between different types of document (see Schendl’s comments in this issue on CS in business texts as described by Wright 2011), even if some questions will not be answerable on the basis of written evidence alone.…”

Section: From Oral To Written Code-switchingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Code-switching and multilingualism in literature

Gardner‐Chloros

Weston

2015

Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics

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Code-switching in spoken modes has now been studied fairly extensively and is better understood at the conversational as well as the grammatical level. However, interest in written code-switching has developed more slowly and is still represented mainly in relation to specific periods, such as the Classical period and the medieval period, where a large number of works have now appeared. Linguists have questioned to what extent the models developed for spoken code-switching can be applied to writing, and a fortiori to literary writing. This introductory article reviews the main types of literary multilingualism and the main functions of code-switching within it. We conclude that there is at least a partial – and not inconsiderable – overlap between the functions of code-switching in spoken and written modalities.

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“…From a linguistic point of view, forms like spadibus, hedibus, bredibus , can be analysed either as instances of intra-word switches between an English base and a Latin inflectional suffix, or as (ad-hoc) innovations formed with a productive Latin morphological rule from an English base. Such hybrid lexical innovations are quite frequent in non-literary medieval texts like business accounts (Wright, 2011), where they are in no way negatively marked, but rather belong to the normal lexical inventory of this text type. The Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources (Latham and Howlett, 1975) has numerous Latin headwords derived from an English or French base, some of them hapax legomena (e.g.…”

Section: Medieval Multilingualism and Code-switchingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Code-switching in early English literature

Schendl

2015

Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics

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Code-switching has been a frequent feature of literary texts from the beginning of English literary tradition to the present time. The medieval period, in particular, with its complex multilingual situation, has provided a fruitful background for multilingual texts, and will be the focus of the present article. After looking at the linguistic background of the period and some specifics of medieval literature and of historical code-switching, the article discusses the main functions of code-switching in medieval poetry and drama, especially in regard to the different but changing status of the three main languages of literacy: Latin, French and English. This functional-pragmatic approach is complemented by a section on syntactic aspects of medieval literary code-switching, which also contains a brief comparison with modern spoken code-switching and shows some important similarities and differences between the two sets of data.

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On variation in medieval mixed-language business writing

Cited by 39 publications

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Artificial fusion: The curious case of Macaronic Latin

Artificial fusion: The curious case of Macaronic Latin

Code-switching and multilingualism in literature

Code-switching in early English literature

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