ICOME6 Abstract

Joanna Janecka
University of Warsaw
Email: j dot m dot janecka at uw dot edu dot pl

Gratter cost, more grat zenne, þe more gratter torment: inept adaptor or brilliant innovator? On Dan Michel’s manner of comparison in Ayenbite of Inwyt [Arun 57]

Ayenbite of Inwyt is probably the most rewarding text to observe the development of the intensified, emphasized and graded adjectival forms in Middle English. Here, the pleonastic forms occur for the first time in full bloom, both present and past participles are graded or intensified and, finally, the periphrastic grading in Kentish appears for the first time to immediately reach the level of over 48% of all graded forms, a percentage found nowhere else in the 14 th century and hardly observable even in Modern English.

The present paper aims at analysing the phenomenon of Dan Michel’s peculiar manner of comparison, trying to state whether he accidentally calqued periphrastic structures straightforwardly from the French original Somme le Roi, correcting himself many times (cf. Francis 1937: 894, Gradon in Morris 1965: 8-9), or perhaps he was the genius of his times, who first employed the periphrastic mode of grading on such an unusual scale. The analysis will include the distribution of intensified and graded adjectival forms, their suffixal and periphrastic exponents, taking into consideration the origin and syllable structure of graded adjectives, as well as the markedness and the position of the graded structures within the clause.

The results of such an analysis are also expected to shed some light on the presence of some suffixal grading in structures parallel to those taking periphrasis, which might be attributed either to Dan Michel’s later corrections of “continentalisms” into a typically insular phraseology or which might contribute to the assumption that periphrasis was evolving along suffixation as an internal phenomenon, resulting from the more and more descriptive, or analytic, nature of English in the 14 th century.

References

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Francis, W. Nelson. 1937 “The original of the Ayenbite of Inwyt”. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 52: 893-895.
Morris, R. (ed.) 1866 [1965] Don Michel's Ayenbite of Inwyt (rev. P. Gradon). (Early English Text Society 23). Oxford: Oxford University Press [Arundel 57, British Library, London]
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