On derivational suffixes in three Late Middle English romances: Guy of Warwick, Bevis of Hampton, and Sultan of Babylon.(LINGUISTICS)

Publication: Studia Anglica Posnaniensia: international review of English Studies

Publication Date: 01-JAN-06

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COPYRIGHT 2006 Adam Mickiewicz University

ABSTRACT

The aim of this paper is to provide an analysis of derivational suffixes in three Late Middle English romances. Since a number of new, foreign suffixes appeared in Middle English, more specifically of French origin, it is of interest to the author of the study to what extent these were adopted in medieval romances. One might expect that the number of French suffixes might be significantly higher than that of other texts given that romances were as a genre based on a French model. The paper investigates whether this was the case in the texts of Guy of Warwick, Bevis of Hampton, and Sowdon of Babylon, which represent the East Midland dialect in Late Middle English.

1. Aims

The present study has been inspired by the publication on derivational suffixes by Dalton-Puffer (1992). The aforementioned paper, among other aspects, focused on the productivity of Romance derivational suffixes found in the Helsinki corpus of English texts. The author questioned the productivity of Romance suffixes on the basis of the results from the conducted analysis. Apparently, the only suffix of French origin that was found to be productive to a limited extent was the suffix -ment (Dalton-Puffer 1992: 478). However, due to the nature of the Helsinki Corpus, which draws from text samples, it appears of interest whether an analysis of entire texts may provide different results. As was pointed out by Dalton-Puffer (1992: 479) "more conclusive statements, however, must be reserved until more suffixes have been considered in the method presented in this paper. This, as usual, points to the need for additional work" (Dalton-Puffer 1992: 479). The texts selected for the present study are Late Middle English romances. The choice of the sources for the present investigation was not coincidental. First of all, little research has been conducted on the problem of derivational suffixes in these texts. Moreover, the texts represent the genre of French origin, which may have also had some influence upon the derivations found in these texts. One might expect that the number of French suffixes might be significantly higher than that of other texts given that romances were as a genre based on a French model.

A question inherent in the discussion of Middle English derivational morphology is that of productivity. Following Dalton-Puffer (1992), the criterion which will be employed in the assessment of the productivity of particular suffixes is their capacity to form hybrids. Hybrids, as defined by Dalton-Puffer are "lexical items, where the base and the suffix come from different subparts of the vocabulary" (Dalton-Puffer 1992: 478). The subparts referred to by Dalton-Puffer are native and French words.

Having employed the criterion of hybrid formation for the evaluation of productivity Dalton-Puffer arrived at a conclusion that native suffixes were highly productive in Middle English as opposed to the low productivity of their Romance counterparts (Dalton-Puffer 1992: 478). The number of hybrids formed with the French suffix -ment was very low, which put the problem of the productivity of French suffixes in question. The use of the native suffix -ung in hybrid formations was overwhelming and greatly outnumbered the occurrences of -ment....

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