Performative speech act verbs and sincerity in Anglo-Norman and Middle English letters
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Graham Trevor Williams
Abstract
This paper investigates performative manifestations of sincerity across Anglo-Norman and Middle English. In particular, it locates adverbial sincerity markers used to qualify performative speech act verbs in late medieval letters (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), at a point when Middle English was rapidly replacing Anglo-Norman as the vernacular of epistolarity in England. Employing historical dictionaries and corpora, the study 1) locates the range of words for ‘sincerity’ from a time when the modern lexeme had yet to be borrowed in either vernacular, and 2) demonstrates that while it is clear that Middle English epistolarity was greatly influenced by Anglo-Norman, quantitative and qualitative analyses suggest that sincerity markers were much less commonplace in Middle English performatives, which further suggests ways in which the communicative ideal and practice of sincerity were reanalyzed from one language to the next.
Dictionaries and Corpora
Anglo-Norman Dictionary (AND). <http://www.anglo-norman.net/gate/>Search in Google Scholar
Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse (CMEPV). <https://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/>Search in Google Scholar
Historical Thesaurus of English (HTE). <http://historicalthesaurus.arts.gla.ac.uk/>Search in Google Scholar
Middle English Dictionary (MED). <https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/>Search in Google Scholar
Oxford English Dictionary (OED). <http://www.oed.com/>Search in Google Scholar
Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence (PCEEC). Available through the Oxford Text Archive http://ota.ahds.ac.ukSearch in Google Scholar
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© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Sincerity and epistolarity: Multilingual historical pragmatic perspectives
- Articles
- Performative speech act verbs and sincerity in Anglo-Norman and Middle English letters
- Expressing friendship in letters: Conventionality and sincerity in the multilingual correspondence of nineteenth-century Catholic churchmen
- Sincere or heart-felt?: Sincerity, convention, and bilingualism in French and Spanish letters
- ‘With the greatest sincerity’: expressing genuineness of feeling in nineteenth-century business correspondence in English
- Sincerity in Lithuanian epistolarity: Between truth and emotion
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Sincerity and epistolarity: Multilingual historical pragmatic perspectives
- Articles
- Performative speech act verbs and sincerity in Anglo-Norman and Middle English letters
- Expressing friendship in letters: Conventionality and sincerity in the multilingual correspondence of nineteenth-century Catholic churchmen
- Sincere or heart-felt?: Sincerity, convention, and bilingualism in French and Spanish letters
- ‘With the greatest sincerity’: expressing genuineness of feeling in nineteenth-century business correspondence in English
- Sincerity in Lithuanian epistolarity: Between truth and emotion
