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Anna Wojtyś
Institute of English Studies, Academy of Management in Warsaw
Email: annawojtys at wp dot pl
The consensus among historical linguists is that in Late Middle English the prefix y- (OE ge-) no longer fulfilled the function of the past participle marker, although it continued to be attached to the form in southern dialects. In the writings of London, the prefix is present especially in Chaucer’s poetry, where past participles with and without the prefix are found in similar contexts. Thus, the occurrence of the prefix is attributed to the demands of the rhythm as a convenient means of creating an iambic foot (see, e.g., Draat 1902: 365, Mustanoja 1960: 447, Lass 1992: 147) . The hypothesis of the prefix y- being only a meaningless syllable filler is further supported by the fact that the same text in various manuscripts sometimes features differently marked past participles in identical contexts, which seems to suggest that scribes were free to interfere with prefixal past participle marking.
The present paper compares the past participle marking in several versions of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (MS Ellesmere, MS Hengwrt, MS University Library Gg 4.27, MS Corpus, MS Harley 7334, and others) in order to reveal the degree of regularity in the employment of the prefix in various manuscripts of the Tales. Thus, the study discusses syntactic functions of the past participles possessing or lacking prefixal marking and the contexts in which the two types are found. Additionally, the examination of the rhythmical pattern is expected to show if preserving the rhythm is the only function of the prefix or whether it still fulfils grammatical tasks. Thus, the analysis aims at establishing potential grammatical restrictions on the scribal practice which affected prefixal past participle marking.