Exaptation in the nominal inflection of Early Middle English dialects

1. 项目目标本项目旨在研究中古早期方言中屈折形容词、指示代词、关系代词以及定冠词的修饰。该项目分为两部分。第一部分的主要问题是：各种早期中古英语方言是如何从以前有性别区分的格系中分离出来的？因此，它解决了关于形态学和语法的语言内部问题，例如哪些形式是可期待的，它们编码什么，或者在一个子句中是否有一些位置屈折形式比其他位置保留的时间更长（甚至是可期待的）。第二部分调查区域和社会语言学问题。首先，不同中古英语方言预期系统之间的差异和相似之处可以用社会语言学因素来解释，例如接触和隔离。其次，该项目旨在回答一个问题，即预期的形式是否会传播，或者类似的新系统是否会相互独立地出现。项目的创新性以往关于中古英语的研究主要是研究如何根据一份或很少的手稿来预测一个词性。此外，以前的研究通过分析个别的摘取摘取实例来调查摘取摘取现象，从而以一种更普遍的方式。该项目同时以更广泛、更集中的方式解决了这种现象。一方面，对不同方言和中古早期英语不同时期的不同手稿进行分析和比较。另一方面，这些数据完全基于早期中世纪英语，因此是在特定时期内的一种语言。这就提出了关于摘取的新问题，如前一节所述。因此，本项目是一项全面的比较调查，研究结果可能有助于语言变化理论的研究。研究方法及其实施这是一个跨学科的语言学项目，汇集了形式语言学、历史语言学和地域语言学以及社会语言学。在方法上，这是一个基于定量语料库的项目。数据基于LAEME（早期中古英语语言地图集）标记文本语料库，该语料库直接从手稿中开发出来。

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.