The Middle English Grammar Project

The study of linguistic variation in Middle English has undergone a revolution in recent years, with the publication of the "Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English" (McIntosh, Samuels and Benskin 1986) and other important surveys. However, no thorough-going attempt has as yet been made to harness this new information to a wider programme of linguistic description which is oriented from both structural and variationist perspectives. The Middle English Grammar Project, a British-Academy funded venture now underway at the University of Glasgow and at Stavanger College, Norway, is designed to address this gap, with the production of surveys covering the whole field of ME linguistic studies: spelling, phonology, grammar and lexicology. The Project is currently focused in the UK within the Institute for the Historical Study of Language, a research-centre within Glasgow's Faculty of Arts. The first research area being addressed by the Project is the creation of a new history of ME spelling and phonology. In order to carry out this analysis a corpus of machine-readable texts is currently being assembled. These texts are subsequently classified according to both Present-Day and etymological reflexes and the results of this process are entered in a database. This database includes a variety of extralinguistic information in addition to the classified spelling data, such as genre and script, which allows the corpus to be interrogated according to a number of different factors. This presentation will demonstrate this database and discuss its uses for the study of linguistic variation in Middle English, and historical linguistics more generally.