As there was no standardised model for written English, texts from this period show an extensive range of linguistic variation, as well as diachronic change. This makes describing the Middle English language something of a challenge. The last attempt at a large-scale description was Richard Jordan's unfinished Handbuch der mittelenglischen Grammatik, of which the first part, Lautlehre, was published in 1925.
The eventual aim of MEG is to produce an up-to-date reference grammar of Middle English. For this purpose, we are compiling an electronic text corpus, that will eventually include approximately a thousand texts or text samples covering a wide range of genres and text types. In the first instance, the texts will represent localizable dialects, as localised in the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English. Eventually, however, texts representing non-regional usages will also be included. The first version of the corpus is now available as an open access resource on this website.
The next step will be to annotate the corpus by means of a database, relating each form to etymological and present-day headwords as well as to a range of extralinguistic variables. The analysis of this material will, in the first hand, produce a series of three regional surveys of Middle English dialects, dealing with Western, Northern and Eastern materials respectively. These surveys will be based both on the database and on more comprehensive studies of individual counties, text groups or features carried out in parallel to the database.
We will be able to combine two assets that were unavailable to Jordan. Firstly, our work builds on the great theoretical and methodological advances that have taken place in the last decades both within Middle English dialectology and within empirical linguistics in general. Secondly, we are able to make use of current computer technology and the insights and experiences derived from present-day corpus linguistics.
Our aim is to relate the observable linguistic variation not only to geography and diachronic change, but also, as far as possible, to variables such as genre, text type, social networks and changes, text communities, script types, written traditions and scribal strategies. Our research questions and methods are drawn from the fields of historical dialectology, sociolinguistics and Literacy Studies. In addition, we draw heavily on insights from areas such as manuscript studies, pragmatics and Reading Research.
At Stavanger, the project forms part of a larger research programme, North Sea Language History, which was established in 2008 as a prioritized research area at the University of Stavanger. We are also connected to the Masters and PhD programmes in Literacy Studies at the Department of Cultural Studies and Languages.
We gratefully acknowledge that MEG is funded by the Norwegian Research Council as a freestanding Humanities project during the period from July 2006 to June 2010.
