Abstract | In considering a text such as the Lindisfarne Gospels, one is very much aware of the
vast philological attention the manuscript has received since the first contribution made
to its study by George Hickes in 1705. Since ...
In considering a text such as the Lindisfarne Gospels, one is very much aware of the
vast philological attention the manuscript has received since the first contribution made
to its study by George Hickes in 1705. Since then, scholars of the stature of Bouterwek
(1857), Skeat (1871-87), Lindelöf (1901), Holmqvist (1922), Berndt (1956) and Ross,
Stanley & Brown (1960) have advanced the subject (see Ross 1937:17-25 for a detailed
summary of early studies on Lindisfarne). This Latin Gospelbook written in the North
of England in the early eight century constitutes a major landmark of human cultural,
intellectual, spiritual and artistic achievement. While the Latin text of the Lindisfarne
Gospels is a valuable early witness to St Jerome’s ‘Vulgate’, it is the carefully inserted
interlinear gloss to the Latin, written in Old Northumbrian and added around the 950s960s,
and the linguistic importance this gloss holds as one of the most substantial
earliest surviving renderings of early northern dialect that will concern us in this study,
and more concretely the distribution of verbal morphology found therein.
Old and Middle English verbal morphology in the northern dialects diverged
most remarkably from that of the southern dialects in two main areas. Crucially, the
tenth-century Northumbrian texts bear witness to the replacement of the inherited
present-indicative -ð suffixes with -s forms, and by the Middle English period, presentindicative
plural verbal morphology in northern dialects was governed by a
grammatical constraint commonly referred to as the Northern Subject Rule (NSR) that
conditioned verbal morphology according to the type and position of the subject. The
plural marker was -s unless the verb had an immediately adjacent personal pronoun
subject in which case the marker was the reduced -e or the zero morpheme, giving a
system whereby They play occurred in juxtaposition to The children plays, They who
plays, They eat and plays.
It has tacitly been assumed in the literature that the reduced forms at the crux of
the NSR, and the constraint that triggers them, must have emerged in the northern
dialects during the early Middle English period, as there is little indication of the
pattern existing in extant Northumbrian texts from the tenth century, and by the time
northern textual evidence is once again available from c.1300, the NSR is clearly
prevalent (Pietsch 2005; de Haas 2008; de Haas & van Kemenade 2009). Nevertheless, the assumption that the NSR was entirely lacking in Old Northumbrian stands on shaky
grounds without further detailed analysis of the tenth-century northern writings, as has
been pointed out in the literature (Benskin 2011:170). As might well be imagined, such
an endeavour is hindered by the fact that extant textual evidence from the period is far
from abundant, and that which remains is limited in nature: the only substantial
Northumbrian texts passed down to us are the interlinear glosses to the Latin
manuscripts of the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Durham Ritual supposedly written by
the same scribe, Aldred, in the second half of the tenth-century, as well as the
Northumbrian part of the Rushworth Gospels gloss (Rushworth
2
), written by a scribe
called Owun in the late tenth-century and heavily reliant on the Lindisfarne gloss. Yet
despite their limitations, the glosses constitute a substantial record of late ONrth verbal
morphology that provides important insights into the mechanisms of linguistic change.
Although the study of the Northern Subject Rule in the early northern writings
has barely been touched upon in the literature (as far as I am aware the matter has only
been cursorily considered by de Haas 2008), morphological variation between -s as
opposed to -ð in the late Northumbrian texts has been the object of numerous
quantitative analyses (most famously Holmqvist 1922; Ross 1934; Blakeley 1949/50
and Berndt 1956). It is striking, however, that the vast majority of these studies were
written well over fifty years ago and the matter has not been thoroughly considered
since. A reconsideration of present-tense marking patterns in Old Northumbrian that
draws from the insights of recent research into variation and benefits from the
application of modern statistical methodology is clearly long overdue. Furthermore,
certain potentially relevant factors remain unexplored. For instance, while grammatical
person and number have been identified as important factors in conditioning variation
between the interdental and alveolar variants, the effect of subject type and adjacency
on morphological variation in Old Northumbrian has hitherto been disregarded. This is
despite the fact that research indicates that subject effects are a crucial factor in
determining the selection of verbal morphology, not just in non-standard varieties of
present-day English (cf. Chambers 2004; Tagliamonte 2009) and in varieties of
EModE, as discussed above, but also most notably in Middle English northern dialect
itself (McIntosh 1989; Montgomery 1994; de Haas & van Kemenade 2009; de Haas
2011).
Using data drawn from the standard edition of the Lindisfarne gloss (Skeat 1871-87) collated with the facsimile copy of the manuscript (Kendrick, T. D. et al.,
1960), this dissertation carries out a detailed study of the replacement of the interdental
fricative by the alveolar fricative which differs both methodologically and in
perspective from previous studies in several crucial ways. It constitutes the first study
to simultaneously examine the effects of all relevant phonetic, lexical and syntactic
variables on the process of change using statistical quantitative methodology. The
study approaches the issue from an innovative hitherto disregarded perspective and
considers factors such as lexical conditioning and morphosyntactic priming and pays
particular reference to the subject and adjacency effects of the so-called Northern
Subject Rule. By analysing the full breadth of possible language-internal explanatory
variables on the development of the alveolar fricative ending in late Old Northumbrian
and by applying statistical methodology, the study aims to elaborate and refine the
overall view presented in early studies and set the Northumbrian developments within a
broader framework of diachronic variation that will aid the verification of crosslinguistic
generalisations and further our understanding of regularisation processes. It
will be shown that the distribution of ONrth verbal morphology constitutes the first
attested manifestation of a tendency in English for subject type to compete with person
and number features for the function of grammatical material.
In addition to a variationist study of -ð and -s forms, this dissertation also carries
out a contextual and quantitative analysis of reduced morphology in the Old
Northumbrian interlinear gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels. It looks in detail at reduced
forms in the Lindisfarne gloss and considers to what extent the nature and distribution
of these forms are indicative of the incipient development of the ME -s versus -e/Ø
NSR pattern in late Old Northumbrian. I also assess to what extent inflectional
morphology already present in the northern dialects constitutes the historical source for
the occurrence of -e/Ø/n in the present indicative. To this end, I posit that, not only
present-subjunctive morphology, but also preterite-present and preterite-indicative
verbal morphology played an important role in perpetuating the levelling of reduced
forms and -n into the present indicative. I show that the subject and adjacency effects at
the heart of the NSR appear not only to govern the occurrence of reduced morphology
in the present indicative as a low frequency variant but also conditions the distribution
of reduced verbal morphology in the preterite.
A further question that will be examined in this dissertation involves the contentious issue of the authorship of the glosses to Lindisfarne and whether or not the
interlinear gloss of the Lindisfarne Gospels was the work of a single hand, Aldred
(Ross, Stanley & Brown 1960; Brunner 1947/48; van Bergen 2008). To this end, I will
consider the utility of language variation as a diagnostic for determining the authorship
and more specifically, what light is shed upon this unresolved problem of Old English
philology by the distribution of variants verbal forms in Li.
Another aspect under consideration relates to methodology and the unreliability
of the text editions of medieval sources for linguistic research. In general, editions are
unsuitable as sources unless they are collated with the raw data of the original
manuscript because, as van der Hoek (2010) points out, they tend to involve “a
reconstruction of a non-extant version of the text in question by selecting and altering
from among the different surviving versions, in the attempt to arrive at a text that is
purer from either a literary or philological point of view.” The edition in question, in the
case of the Lindisfarne Gospels, is that of Skeat (1871-87) which relies on the sole
version of Li. but whose language and grammar have nevertheless been subjected to
editorial interpretation and alteration.
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