ICOME6 Abstract

María José Carrillo-Linares
Department of English Philology, University of Huelva
Email: mlinares at uhu dot es

Semantic and Dialectal Variation in Late Middle English: The Case Of Trowen

Abstract: The Middle English verb TROWEN has, according to the MED, several meanings ranging from that of ‘to have trust or faith’ or ‘to believe’ to ‘to be of a certain opinion’ or ‘to think’. The semantic boundaries are, nevertheless, quite blurred and in many instances several meanings may coalescence. The origin of TROWEN has to be sought in two Old English verbs: TRŪWIAN and TRĒOWIAN, which have survived in present day English in the related words TRUTH and TRUE, and whose semantic values were in Old English closer to the idea of ‘to have faith’ or ‘to trust’. OED gives also a quotation dating from c. 1000 where the meaning seems to be ‘to think’ rather than ‘to believe’. Nevertheless, this sense appears to be more limited. In Early Middle English the occurrences of the lexical item with the sense of ‘to believe’ seem to be also far more numerous and, according to the sources and quotations given in the MED, that seems to be also the case for the later period of Middle English. The meanings associated with the equivalent lexical item in Older Scots as recorded in DOST, are mainly related to an act of faith as well, although there are a few instances with a more general sense closer to that of ‘to think’.

In the course of my research on lexical distributions of several items in Middle English, I have come across quite consistently the avoidance or substitution of the item TROWEN in certain dialect areas. As the semantic boundaries are not always clear, it must have been difficult for the scribes to decide about the meaning in certain contexts. Not all occurrences of TROWEN are avoided by some scribes, and leaving aside matters of metrics (rhyme, rhythm and alliteration), their choice seems to be semantically-motivated. In this paper I will study the occurrences, semantic values and distributions of instances of TROWEN in the Late Middle English period. For this purpose I will analyse the data collected mainly (though not exclusively) from the copies of a Middle English text: the widely geographically-spread Prick of Conscience. In most of the northern copies of this work there are around 31 potential occurrences of this word, which in non-northern copies could be substituted by other lexical items or could be left as they supposedly appeared in the northern original.

References:

Carrillo-Linares, María José. 2005-2006. Lexical Dialectal Items in Cursor Mundi: Contexts of Occurrence and Geographical Distribution. Selim Journal 13. 151-178.
Carrillo-Linares, María José / Edurne Garrido-Anes. 2007a. Middle English Lexical Distributions: Two Instances from the Lay Folks’ Catechism. Ed. by Gabriella Mazzon. Studies in Middle English Forms and Meanings, 85-100. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Carrillo-Linares, María José / Edurne Garrido-Anes. 2007b. The Contribution of External Sources and Technological Innovations to the Research of Middle English Word Geography. Paper presented at the International Conference on English Historical Dialectology 2. Bergamo, 2007.
Carrillo-Linares, María José / Edurne Garrido-Anes. Forthcoming, 2008. Middle English Word Geography: Methodology and Applications Illustrated. Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics. Volume III: Geo-Historical Variation. Ed. by Marina Dossena, Richard Dury, & Maurizio Gotti. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
DOST=Craigie, William A. / Aitken, Adam Jack et al. 1931-2002. Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press; Oxford: Oxford University Press.
MED=Kurath, Hans et al. 1952 – 2001. Middle English Dictionary. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Laing, Margaret / Lass, Roger 2007. A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, 1150-1325 . At <www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/ laeme1/laeme1.html>. Edinburgh: The University of Edinburgh.
OED=Murray, James A. H. et al. 1884-1933. The Oxford English Dictionary. Supplement, 1972-1986, 4 vols.; ed. Robert W. Burchfield. 2 nd ed., 1989; ed. John A. Simpson, Edmund S. C. Weiner / Michael Proffitt. Oxford: Clarendon Press. OED online, March 2000-, ed. John A. Simpson, <http://www.oed.com>.
The Thesaurus of Old English at < http://libra.englang.arts.gla.ac.uk/oethesaurus>
Williamson, Keith 2007. A Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots. Phase 1: 1380-1500. At <http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laos1/laos1.html>. Edinburgh: The University of Edinburgh.