Exaptation in the nominal inflection of Early Middle English dialects

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1. Goals of the projectThe project aims to investigate exaptation of inflected adjectives, demonstrative and relative pronouns, as well as definite articles in Early Middle English dialects. The project is split into two parts.The main question of Part I is: How do the various Early Middle English dialects exapt the debris of a formerly gendered case system? Thus, it tackles language-internal questions on morphology and syntax, such as which forms are exapted and what they encode or whether there are positions in a clause where inflected forms are preserved longer (or even exapted) than in other positions.Part II surveys areal and sociolinguistic questions. Firstly, the differences and similarities between exapted systems of different Early Middle English dialects may be explained by sociolinguistic factors, e.g. contact and isolation. Secondly, the project aims to answer the question of whether exapted forms spread or whether similar new systems emerge independently from one another.2. Innovativeness of the projectPrevious works on Middle English mainly investigated how one part of speech was exapted based on one or very few manuscripts. Furthermore, previous research surveyed the phenomenon of exaptation by analysing individual selected instances of exaptation, and thus in a more general way.This project tackles the phenomenon of exaptation in a broader and more focused way at the same time. On the one hand, different manuscripts of different dialects and different Early Middle English periods will be analysed and compared. On the other hand, the data is exclusively based on Early Middle English, thus on one language in a defined period. This allows for new questions on exaptation, as presented in the previous section. Thus, this project is a comprehensive and comparative survey on exaptation and the findings may contribute to theories on language change.3. Research approach and its implementationThis is an interdisciplinary linguistic project bringing together formal linguistics, historical and areal linguistics as well as sociolinguistics. Methodologically, this is a quantitative corpus based project. The data is based on the LAEME (A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English) Corpus of Tagged Texts which is developed straight from the manuscripts.