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COPYRIGHT 2005 Adam Mickiewicz University Press
ABSTRACT
The focus of the current paper is on the phenomenon of noun phrase internal gender agreement, as observed in the 12th century manuscript E of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, namely the Peterborough Chronicle (Bodleian MS. Laud Misc. 636). The language used by the scribes of the Chronicle is often held to be a "microcosm" (Jones 1988) of extremely powerful innovations characterising the transition from Old English to Middle English.
The mechanisms of intra-noun-phrase gender agreement operating in "classical" West Saxon Schriftsprache are usually described as strictly formal in nature. The earliest occurrences departing from the formally determined congruence have been attested in the northern texts from the late 10th century, notably the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Durham Ritual. In the course of time, a gradual increase in the number of gender conflicts affected the dialects of the Midlands, whence it spread further southwards (Millar 2002). Notwithstanding numerous attempts to explicate the above developments, the exact reasons which led to the eventual collapse of the Old English gender system have not been fully unearthed to date.
Rather than taking an explanatory stance, the analysis made for the purposes of this paper aims to present the quantitative distribution of nominal phrases with "wrong" gender agreement occurring in the Peterborough Chronicle, a representative piece of transitional prose. In this way, it will be seen whether the language of the Chronicle can be viewed as bearing witness to a proliferation of gender miscongruences in the period in question.
0. Introduction
The transition from Old English to Middle English has long been recognised as a period in which the English language underwent serious changes in its structure. One such change was the "failure to show on many occasions the expected gender triggered congruence between attributive words and the nouns with which they [were] in construction" (Jones 1988: 10). A heated debate over the reasons for this apparent confusion followed.
Numerous attempts have been made to offer more or less viable explanations for the cases of "wrong" gender agreement. Thus, for instance, according to the Genuswechsel theory the innovative use of attributive forms testified to lexical gender reclassification (i.e. gender change). However, neither masculinisation (Clark 1957; see also Baron 1971: 125; Mustanoja 1960: 51) nor neutralisation (Ross 1936; see also Baron 1971: 125; Millar 2000: 256-257; Mitchell 1985: [subsection] 63, 68) nor the triumph of sex over gender (e.g. Mitchell 1985: [section] 69) nor foreign influence (e.g. Mustanoja 1960: 45-48; Pervaz 1958: 157) proved to be successful in accounting for the instances of gender mismatch. (1) At present, the views expressed by Jones (1988), who relies on the temporal refunctionalisation of determiner morphology, are considered the most valid though still, as the author himself admits, speculative.
Although the current paper focuses on intra-noun-phrase gender miscongruence, its aim is far from explanatory, i.e. it does not seek to offer further reasons for the occurrences of gender mismatch. Instead, it sets out to establish, in descriptive and quantitative terms, the actual scale on which the phenomenon of NP internal unhistorical gender agreement can be observed in the selected piece of transitional prose, namely the Peterborough Chronicle (Bodleian MS. Laud Misc. 636).
With this view in mind, the paper has been divided into three parts. Part 1 delineates the most crucial assumptions behind NP internal gender agreement, as it operated in "classical" OE. Part 2 presents the statistical results yielded by an analysis of gender agreement between head nouns and their premodifying demonstratives. Part 3 in turn offers a few remarks summarising the results of the study.
Two important methodological provisos with regard to the analysis ought to be spelled out. Firstly,...
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