Preface

Introduction

Irma Taavitsainen

Terttu Nevalainen

Paivi Pahta

Matti Rissanen

Chronological and social context

Language periodization and the concept ``middle''

Roger Lass

Language and society in twelfth-century England

Tim William Machan

Syntactic constraints on code-switching in medieval texts

Herbert Schendl

Dialect, normalization and corpus-linguistic methodology

Introduction

Norman F. Blake

Never the twain shall meet Early Middle English - The East-West divide

Margaret Laing

Standard language in Early Middle English?

Jeremy Smith

Changing spaces: Linguistic relationships and the dialect continuum

Keith Williamson

Normalizing the word forms in the Ayenbite of Inwyt

Manfred Markus

Chaucer's spelling and the manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales

Simon Horobin

Which and The Which in Late Middle English: Free variants?

Helena Raumolin-Brunberg

Lexical semantics

Introduction

Hans-Jurgen Diller

Robbares and reuares pat ryche men despoilen: Some competing forms

Jane Roberts

Here comes the judge: A small contribution to the study of French input into the vocabulary of the law in Middle English

Janet Bately

Naming and avoiding naming objects of terror: A case study

Louise Sylvester

An application of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage to diachronic semantics

Malgorzata Fabiszak

Patterns of semantic change in abstract nouns: The case of wit

Paivi Koivisto-Alanko

The spatial and temporal meanings of before in Middle English

Ruta Nagucka

The adjective weary in Middle English structures: A syntactic-semantic study

Saara Nevanlinna

Utterance and discourse meaning

Introduction

Laurel Brinton

Slanders, slurs and insults on the road to Canterbury: Forms of verbal aggression in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

Andreas H. Jucker

Hir not lettyrd: The use of interjections, pragmatic markers and whan-clauses in The Book of Margery Kempe

Liliana Sikorska

Whose thorgh presumpcion ... mysdeme hyt: Chaucer's poetic adaptation of the medieval ``book curse''

Leslie Arnovick

Sounds, prosody and metre

Introduction

Nikolaus Ritt

Middle English prosodic innovations and their testability in verse

Donka Minkova

Old English (non)-palatalised */k/: Competing forces of change at work in the ``seek''-verbs

Marcin Krygier

Some remarks on the nonprimary contexts for Homorganic Lengthening

Jerzy Welna

On the phonetic and phonological interpretation of the reflexes of the Old English diphthongs in the Ayenbite of Inwyt

Albertas Steponavicius

Author index

Subject index