Diffusion and Change in Early Middle English: Methodological and Theoretical Implications from the LAEME Corpus of Tagged Texts

The present study examines the diffusion of three linguistic variables in Early Middle English with special focus on the East versus West Midlands divide, namely the reduction from four to three stems in the gradation of strong verbs, variation between Middle English and and the decline of the dual forms of the personal pronoun. The data is retrieved from version 2.1 of the corpus of tagged texts of the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME) (Laing and Lass 2008–), in which two thirds of the 167 semi-diplomatically transcribed corpus files are localized, permitting innovative approaches to Early Middle English dialectology, such as investigations into spatial diffusion phenomena. The present study offers suggestions as to how modern diffusion models can be adjusted and applied to historical data. It also discusses the usability of LAEME for this specific purpose and develops a set of plausible hypotheses on spatial diffusion patterns in Early Middle English. At the same time, the study addresses the main issues of studying medieval manuscripts and of working with historical corpora, and it illustrates how maps prove to be a useful tool in the visual representation of linguistic change across time and space

The transmission of alliterative poetry: scribal practice in the A text of William Langland's Piers Plowman

The extant manuscripts of William Langland’s Piers Plowman are rich in scribal variation, with the scribes even going as far as to change words in alliterating position. This paper analyzes the variants collected in the critical apparatus of Kane’s (1988) edition of the A text in order to find out how frequently the scribes reduced alliteration in a line. It seems that some variants were introduced at such an early stage that they were passed down in the text tradition. Moreover, while it is certainly not possible to tell why exactly a scribe introduced a certain variant, there are certain patterns among the non-alliterating variants. I will, therefore, also address possible reasons for the introduction of variants that reduce alliteration, such as mechanical errors, substitutions for difficult words or semantically related words