Adjectival inflection in Late Middle English
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2016-07-01
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en
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This thesis discusses the use of adjectival inflection in Late Middle English to express definiteness. By means of corpus research, using CorpusStudio, five texts from the late 14th century were analysed: “The Parson’s Tale” and “The Tale of Melibee” by Geoffrey Chaucer, as well as “The Cloud of Unknowing”, “Equatorie of the Planetis”, and “Polychronicon”. A total of 831 parsed and annotated phrases were checked manually for adjectival inflection. The conclusion is that the backbone of the old adjectival inflection system had survived into Late Middle English, as late 14th-century writers like Chaucer still made a distinction between strong (indefinite) and weak (definite) forms. However, the results also show that this system would soon come to an end, probably because of influences from northern dialects that had already lost the inflectional –e.
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