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 is planned to eventually include more than a thousand texts or text samples covering a wide range of genres and text types. A starting point has been to transcribe the texts that were mapped in A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (McIntosh, Samuels and Benskin, 1986), and the 410 texts included in version 2011.1 all belong to this group. The corpus will, however, also include other texts, including a large number of legal documents that were not included in the Atlas.
The corpus is being annotated by means of a database. Each form is related 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 work.
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.
MEG was funded by the Norwegian Research Council as a freestanding Humanities project during the period from July 2006 to June 2010.
