Exaptation in the nominal inflection of Early Middle English dialects

1.项目目标该项目旨在调查古英语早期方言中形容词屈折变化、指示代词和关系代词以及定冠词的发音。这个项目分为两个部分。第一部分的主要问题是：各种早期中世纪英语方言是如何表现出以前性别区分的格系统的碎片的？因此，它解决了语言内部关于词法和句法的问题，例如哪些形式被省略，它们编码了什么，或者在从句中是否有位置的屈折形式比其他位置保留的时间更长(甚至被省略)。第二部分考察了区域和社会语言学问题。首先，不同早期中世纪英语方言的语言系统之间的差异和相似之处可以用社会语言因素来解释，例如接触和孤立。其次，该项目旨在回答这样一个问题，即被摘录的形式是否会传播，或者类似的新系统是否会相互独立地出现。项目的创新性以前关于中世纪英语的著作主要研究一个词性是如何基于一篇或几篇手稿而被摘录出来的。此外，以前的研究通过分析个别的突读实例来考察突读现象，从而以更一般的方式来考察突读现象。一方面，对不同方言、不同早期中古英语时期的手稿进行分析比较。另一方面，这些数据完全是基于中世纪早期的英语，因此是在一个确定的时期内的一种语言。如上一节所示，这允许提出有关Exapation的新问题。因此，本研究是一项全面的对比研究，其研究结果可能有助于语言变化的理论研究。研究方法及其实施这是一个融合了形式语言学、历史语言学和区域语言学以及社会语言学的跨学科语言学项目。从方法上讲，这是一个基于语料库的量化项目。这些数据是基于LAEME(早期中世纪英语语言图谱)标记文本的语料库，该语料库是直接从手稿发展而来的。

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.