Linguistic Markers of Countability in Early and Late Middle English

• Thesis title in Czech: Lingvistické ukazatele počitatelnosti v rané a pozdní střední angličtině
• Thesis title in English: Linguistic Markers of Countability in Early and Late Middle English
• Key words: počitatelnost|střední angličtina|určenost|kvantifikátory|členy
• English key words: countability|Middle English|definiteness|quantifiers|articles
• Academic year of topic announcement: 2023/2024
• Thesis type: diploma thesis
• Thesis language: angličtina
• Department: Department of the English Language and ELT Methodology (21-UAJD)
• Supervisor: Mgr. Ondřej Tichý, Ph.D.
• Author: hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept.
• Date of registration: 01.02.2024
• Date of assignment: 01.02.2024
• Administrator's approval: approved
• Confirmed by Study dept. on: 01.02.2024
• Submitted/finalized: no

Guidelines

The main aim of this thesis is to investigate the linguistic markers of countability in Early and Late Middle English and explore their syntactic, morphological, and semantic features. To achieve that, the system of number, definiteness, and articles in Middle English will be examined. Firstly, the text will provide an overview of various means that different world languages employ to express whether a noun belongs to the countable or uncountable class. Additionally, this thesis will review the development of expressing countability and the consistency of distribution of such expressions in Middle English, when the English language underwent a significant structural shift from a highly synthetic inflectional language to a more analytical one, in comparison to the Old English period. The data analysis will focus especially on the distribution of articles and quantifiers as signals of the noun countability class. Concerning the methodology, this work is going to employ a combination of qualitative literature review and quantitative corpus data analysis, validated by relevant statistical methods. The corpora employed for this work will be The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpora of Middle English, second edition. Supplementary datasets, such as The Corpus of Early English Correspondence, A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, and A Linguistic Atlas of Late Middle English will be incorporated in the analysis as well. They should expand the research of linguistic features of countability across more genres and spelling variations in Middle English, working both with prose, poetry, non-fiction documents and correspondence. Overall, this work should shed light on the historical evolution of countability expressions within the English language.
Práce bude vypracována v anglickém jazyce.

References

Allan, K. (1980). Nouns and Countability. Language, 56(3), 541–567.
Barber, C. (1993). The English Language: A Historical Introduction. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Biber, D., K. M. Broussard, S. Johansson, G. Leech, S. Conrad, and E. Finegan (2000). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Longman.
Blake, N. (Ed.) (1992). The Cambridge History of the English Language. The Cambridge History of the English Language (Vol. 2). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bloomfield, L. (1933). Language. New York: H. Holt and Company.
Dryer, M. S. (2013). Indefinite Articles. In: Dryer, M. S. & Haspelmath, M. (eds.) WALS Online
Filip, H. Countability in Natural Language. Cambridge University Press, 2021. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992
Gil, D. (2013). Numeral Classifiers. In: Dryer, M. S. & Haspelmath, M. (eds.) WALS Online
Grimm, S. and Wahlang, A. (2021). Determining Countability Classes. In: Kiss, T., F. J. Pelletier and Husic (eds) Things and Stuff: The Semantics of the Count-Mass Distinction, 357-376. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
J. Brinton, L. & Bergs, A. (2017). Volume 3 Middle English. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
Ledgeway, A., & Roberts, I. (2017). Introduction. In A. Ledgeway & I. Roberts (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Historical Syntax, Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics (pp. 1–4). chapter, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Quirk, R., S. Greenbaum, G. Leech and J. A. Svartvik (1985). Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.
Srinivasan, M., & Barner, D. (2020). Lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic sources of countability: An experimental exploration of the mass-count distinction. In F. Moltmann & L. Tovena (Eds.), Mass and Count in Linguistics, Philosophy and Cognitive Science.