Bed & Board: The role of alliteration in twin formulas of Middle English prose
-
Manfred Markus
Abstract
“The sound must seem an echo to the sense.”
(Pope, Essay on Criticsm, l. 365)
1. Introduction
The role of alliteration in Middle English prose has occasionally been seen, for example, by Oakden (1935: 15-20) and, in his wake, by Blake (1970: 120), who referred to the works of the so-called Katherine-group and certain other sermons (Sawles Warde and Hali Meidenhad) as “rhythmical alliteration” to indicate the syntactic shortness and stylised line-orientation of this prose. Oakden provides long lists of alliterative phrases in Old and early Middle English and also in later alliterative and non-alliterative poetry (235-361 and 365-378), but only two pages (361-63) refer to (Northern alliterative) prose. His analysis is generally work-specific and the listed examples are not quantified. In these and other, more recent publications on the topic of alliteration, the alliterative pattern has only been discussed from the literary and metrical point of view. The remarkable linguistic effects of alliteration on the idiomaticity of Middle English, i.e. on its lexicology and phraseology, have only vaguely been seen.
© 2006 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Abraham Ibn-Ezra's viewpoint regarding the Hebrew language and the biblical text in the context of medieval environment
- Exploring exaptation in language change
- Liturgical Hebrew in 13th-15th century Catalonia
- Nonspecific free relatives and (anti)grammaticalization in English and German
- Bed & Board: The role of alliteration in twin formulas of Middle English prose
- Aspects of punctuation in the Old English Apollonius of Tyre
- Persistence and renewal in the relative pronoun paradigm: The case of Italian
- Specificational pseudo-clefts in Old Japanese
- Thoughts on the question of Gurage: Now you see it, now you don't
- Lines on an African-Semitic language: The case of Tigrinya
- Michiko Ogura, Verbs of motion in Medieval English
