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Abstract: Because Chaucer, through the mouthpiece of Harry Bailey, described himself as elvish in line 703 of the prologue to The Tale of Sir Thopas , the precise meanings of the Middle English word elvish have attracted a fair amount of commentary. Besides a reassessment of previous work by J. A. Burrow in 1995, the word has recently enjoyed a thorough consideration by Richard Firth Green. Green emphasised that to understand the reference in the prologue to Sir Thopas , we must also consider the semantics of elvish elsewhere in Chaucer's work, in lines 751 and 842 of The Canon's Yeoman's Tale . He argued further that Chaucer's usage of elvish is liable to have drawn connotations from the meanings of its root elf – and ably elucidated these. However, some useful evidence for the meanings of elvish has been passed over. One revealing Middle English attestation remains to be adduced. Moreover, Old English attests once to elvish 's etymon ælfisc , as well as to another adjectival derivative of the elf -word, ylfig . The evidence of these Old English words is more complex, but also more revealing, than has been realised. Taken together, this new evidence affords new perspectives on the history of elvish , on what it may have meant to Chaucer, and on the significance of elves in medieval English-speaking cultures. In particular, while Chaucer doubtless kept elves in mind as he used elvish , in ways which Green's research illuminates, the word seems certainly in Old and Middle English to have had developed senses not strictly related to its literal meaning, along the lines of ‘delusory’, while the apparent sense of elvish in the prologue to Sir Thopas , ‘abstracted’, finds parallels in the Old English ylfig .

Abstract: In humanist discourse, language was very much perceived as a double-edged tool. On the one hand, it was emphatically praised as the basis of all disciplines and the foundation of civilised society, on the other, the humanists' emphasis on the social function of language also drew their attention to the inherent dangers of its use. This article explores some of the main assumptions underlying this essential ambiguity within humanist theories on language. Starting from Rudolph Agricola's reconception of dialectics as an art of discourse, whose aim is to convey knowledge through communication instead of providing a true but abstract description of the world, special attention is then paid to Juan Luis Vives, who (in the wake of Thomas More and Erasmus) introduced the concept of common usage as a central norm into his philosophy of language. It guarantees the creative flexibility and historical adaptability of language on the one hand, and prevents it from exceeding the limits of communicability on the other. However, the increased emphasis on communicability instead of abstract truth also led to a greater awareness of possible misuse. Thus a considerable body of literature was concerned with cautioning its readers about language as essentially janus-faced, elusive and ungovernable. Writings such as Erasmus' tract Lingua may shed new light on a work like Thomas More's History of Richard III , in which the dark pessimism and elusiveness can neither be explained by reading the text as political mythmaking nor as moralistic black-and-white painting. The article thus concludes with a reading of More's text as a kind of anti- Utopia , whose central point it was to hightlight the strictures of a society whose well-being depends entirely on the use (and misuse) of language.

Abstract: The corpus-based description of varieties of English is a discipline that only recently gained ground in variety research because there has been only a limited amount of data collected in corpora so far. Many descriptions of specific varieties of English, such as Indian English, in the past have therefore been mainly based on intuition or introspection. The present paper is an attempt at a pilot study that merges the benefits of such past work with the advantages corpus-based methodology has to offer. The two parts deal with the classification of Indian English within the dynamic model for the description of New Englishes proposed by Schneider (2003) and comparison of a sample-set of observances made in Nihalani et al . 2004 with information that can be obtained by employing two corpora of Indian English (ICE-India and the Kolhapur-Corpus) and two British English reference corpora (ICE-GB and LOB).

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