The purpose of this paper is to conduct a discourse-pragmatic analysis of the spatio-temporal systems in Chaucer’s language along the lines of historical pragmatics and discourse analysis. The text used for analysis is “The knight’s tale” adopted from the Riverside edition of The Canterbury tales. Language has built-in spatio-temporal systems by which speakers judge how distant the situations they wish to express are from their domain, i.e. proximal or distal. Spatio-temporal elements can be connected to each other to take either a proximal or a distal perspective in discourse. Based on this approach, the present paper performs a detailed examination of the spatio-temporal elements, and addresses the following questions: 1) How does the perspective change as the discourse progresses? and 2) What factors are relevant to this change in discourse? To provide answers to these questions, this paper will investigate: 1) elements which structure discourse, 2) elements which promote a proximal or a distal perspective, 3) elements which trigger alternations of these perspectives, and 4) factors which facilitate the alternation of elements in either the spatial, the temporal, or the integrated spatio-temporal domain.
The paper analyses figurative applications of phrases containing words connected with human seeing (e.g. the verbs see, look, espy, nouns like sight, look, eye and adjectives such as blynd). It shows the motivation for metaphoric expressions used by Chaucer to express his thoughts and visions in a most vivid and precise way and their further development in the language system. The analysis is based on the data obtained from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (Ellesmere MS), the Oxford English Dictionary online and the Middle English Dictionary. As regards its theoretical basis it refers to Lakoff–Johnson’s theory of cognitive metaphor.
Wat's Dyke is an earthwork running along the border of England and Wales, like its western neighbour Offa's Dyke. But it is the shorter of the two, stretching a mere thirty-eight miles (62 kilometres) from the coast of the Dee Estuary to the environs of Old Oswestry, an Iron Age fortress in Shropshire, England. Although Wat's Dyke is now dated to the early ninth century (some decades later than Offa's Dyke), its name has remained obscure. A solution is yet possible. It can be related to the legendary Germanic hero Wade, who figures in Old and Middle English verse (including that of Chaucer), Old Norse, Middle High German, and even (as 'Wat') medieval Welsh. Wat's Dyke thus has unexpected links with poetry in Wales and beyond. There is another surprise: for Wade will be the mysterious warrior appearing on Maen Achwyfan, a tenth-century cross near Whitford, a Welsh village neighbouring the Dyke. The arguments for all this can be set out in four parts. We start with accounts of Wat's Dyke; move on to Chaucer and others on Wade; discuss the 'Wat' praised by Welsh bards; and end with Wade as the hero of both Maen Achwyfan and a lost monument to the west of it at Meliden (near Prestatyn) recorded by Edward Lhuyd (1660-1709), pioneer Oxford archaeologist. Plenty to say, then, on the past (Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian) of this region, where north-east Wales borders the English counties of Cheshire and Shropshire.
Some influence of Chaucer’s The Clerk’s Tale, also known as the story of the patient Griselda, on Shakespeare, and particularly on The Winter’s Tale, has long been recognized. It seems, however, that the matter deserves further attention because the echoes of The Clerk’s Tale seem scattered among a number of Shakespeare’s plays, especially the later ones. The experimental nature of this phenomenon consists in the fact that Griselda-like characters do not strike the reader, especially perhaps the Renaissance reader, as good protagonists of a tragedy, or even a problem comedy. The Aristotelian conception of the tragic hero does not seem to fit Griselda because there is no “tragic fault” in her: she is completely innocent. It was thus a bold decision on the part of Shakespeare to use this archetype as a corner stone of at least some of his plays.
The present paper focuses on instances of irregular, non-root accentuation placed on words of Germanic origin in Middle English iambic verse. A proposed explanation for the phenomenon is the continued special metrical status of heavy syllables from Old to Middle English and the retained potential of such syllables for attracting poetic accent. The analysis also takes into account additional factors, including possible external influences and morphological considerations. The text samples are selected basing on the date of their provenance and metrical regularity. In order to reduce the possibility of the results being affected by any loose applications of metre, the analysis is confined to the metrically strongest positions within each type of verse.
This article deals with autobiographical remarks and autobiographies written in medieval England, either by English authors or by authors who came to England (mainly from France), as well as by authors that were born in England but moved (or had to move) abroad (mainly to France). The survey is broad in that it takes not only Old and Middle English texts into account, but also relevant Latin texts. A wide range of material exists, from passages where authors simply mention their name to fully-fledged autobiographies, such as the Book of Margery Kempe, which is often regarded as the first genuine English autobiography. In another respect, my scope is narrower than that of some previous critics (especially Brandl and Misch): autobiographies by clearly fictitious characters such as Beowulf or the speakers in many of the Old English elegies are excluded. However, the borderline between the genuine and the fictitious is not always easy to draw. Therefore, I also briefly discuss the Old English elegy “Deor”, where the speaker mentions his name (Deor), but is nevertheless probably a fictitious character. It is also not always easy to decide where the autobiography describes real events and where the speaker uses or at least seems to use topoi, conventionalized images; but even a conventionalized image can express real events. There are several cases where the speaker describes himself as an old man, who repents the luxurious and sinful life which he led in his youth. Due to these and similar problems, scholars have not been able to identify some authors or characters, even if their names are mentioned. This applies to the Old English poet Cynewulf or to Nicholas of Guildford, who is referred to as a wise man at the end of the Early Middle English poem “Owl and Nightingale.” Chaucer is the only author who describes himself with a bit of clear self-irony – this confirms Chaucer’s exceptional status among the medieval English poets.
We investigate Chaucer’s use of interjections in Fragment III of the Canterbury Tales, which comprises “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale”, “The Friar’s Prologue and Tale”, and “The Summoner’s Prologue and Tale”. We discuss the problem of how to distinguish interjections from other word classes, and we distinguish primary interjections such as allas, buf, ey, fy, hayt, lo, weilawei and secondary interjections, such as hayl, look, now, peace, welcome, why. As a third group we also take corroborative phrases such as by God into consideration. We look at the frequency of the various interjections: Now, lo, nay as well as a, by God, and pardee are frequent and occur in all the tales of Fragment III; on the other hand of the frequency scale there are buf, which is a hapax legomenon, and the rarely attested hayt. We describe the interjectional spectrum used in Fragment III based on their functions. Interjections can, for example, serve as indicators of emotions (allas, weilawei), as corroboratives (by God) and expletives (a devel weye), as discourse markers (now thanne), as response forms (nay, ye, yis), as polite speech act formulae (grant mercy, no fors), etc. The paper further offers an analysis of the phonology, morphology, verse meter and stress pattern. As the Middle English vocabulary generally, the etymology of the interjections is mixed: some go back to Old English, especially weilawei, but many were borrowed from French (or ultimately from Latin), e.g., allas, ey, fy, pardee. Chaucer’s characters often use not just one, but two or three interjections in combination, e.g., Allas! and weylawey! or allas nay, nay, mainly probably for additional emphasis. We suggest that that the interjectional spectrum in Fragment III (1) expands on Biber et al’s. (1999) inserts and Culpeper and Kytö’s (2010) pragmatic noise; (2) undergoes change like words; and is indexical (3) of a multi-lingual social context (4) and of oral and literary conventions.
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