ye saidꝭ lettreʒ: the orthographic representation of inflectional morphemes in Older Scots

Abstract

The general tendencies characterising Older Scots (OSc) inflectional morphology and differentiating it from that of Middle English (ME) have been described (Minkova 1991; King 1997; Aitken 1977; Aitken and Macafee 2002; Kopaczyk 2001; Bugaj 2002; Bugaj 2004a) but, as yet, there has not been any attempt to thoroughly and systematically investigate the diversity of inflectional forms in OSc texts and investigate the factors conditioning its orthographic realisation.(1) lists six tokens of the plural noun land from various OSc legal manuscripts, taken from A Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots (LAOS), each with a distinct form of the {S} inflection, including a zero-morpheme, forms with covered inflectional <i>, <y> and <e>, a syncopated form with no covered inflectional vowel (CIV), and an abbreviated form <ꝭ>. (1) <land>, <landꝭ>, <landes>, <landis>, <landys>, <landʒ> In a manuscript note, Aitken (1977) stated that he had “regrettably not yet made the time to discuss […] prefix and sufix syllables”. Macafee, in her 2002 preface to Aitken’s The Older Scots Vowels, elaborates that “without further data, [Aitken] did not feel that he could improve on the fullest account available, that of Kuipers (1964: 67-69)”. Kuipers’ account is a descriptive chapter within a larger work analysing two Eucharistic tracts written by Quintin Kennedy, a sixteenth-century Scottish abbot and religious reformist. Whilst Kuipers’ treatment of the inflectional forms used in Kennedy’s tracts is detailed and informative, its scope extends only as far as the work of the single scribe who is the subject of his study. Since the completion of LAOS, it has been possible to access more than 1000 legal texts in OSc as part of a lexico-grammatically tagged corpus. In this study, I present the LAOS data compiled by Williamson (2008) as precisely the “further data” which Aitken felt was lacking in 1977. Using data extracted from LAOS, I investigate the distribution of the various orthographic realisations of OSc {S} and {D}. The lexico-grammatical tagging of the LAOS data enables the near-instant identiflcation of a large enough dataset of inflected tokens to perform detailed statistical analyses. The results of these analyses cover the distribution of each type of inflectional realisation exemplified in (1), firstly considering the factors correlating with the use of zero {S} forms, then the abbreviation of {S} to <ꝭ>. Both {S} and {D} are investigated with regard to syncopated inflectional forms and the variation between the potential realisations of the CIV