| Preface | v |
| Introduction | 1 |
| Chronological and social context | |
| Language periodization and the concept "middle" | 7 |
| Language and society in twelfth-century England | 43 |
| Syntactic constraints on code-switching in medieval texts | 67 |
| Dialect, normalization and corpus-linguistic methodology | |
| Introduction | 89 |
| Never the twain shall meet Early Middle English--The East-West divide | 97 |
| Standard language in Early Middle English? | 125 |
| Changing spaces: Linguistic relationships and the dialect continuum | 141 |
| Normalizing the word forms in the Ayenbite of Inwyt | 181 |
| Chaucer's spelling and the manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales | 199 |
| Which and the which in Late Middle English: Free variants? | 209 |
| Lexical semantics | |
| Introduction | 229 |
| Robbares and reuares pat ryche men despoilen: Some competing forms | 235 |
| Here comes the judge: A small contribution to the study of French input into the vocabulary of the law in Middle English | 255 |
| Naming and avoiding naming objects of terror: A case study | 277 |
| An application of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage to diachronic semantics | 293 |
| Patterns of semantic change in abstract nouns: The case of wit | 313 |
| The spatial and temporal meanings of before in Middle English | 329 |
| The adjective weary in Middle English structures: A syntactic-semantic study | 339 |
| Utterance and discourse meaning | |
| Introduction | 361 |
| Slanders, slurs and insults on the road to Canterbury: Forms of verbal aggression in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales | 369 |
| Hir not lettyrd: The use of interjections, pragmatic markers and whan-clauses in The Book of Margery Kempe | 391 |
| Whoso thorgh presumpcion ... mysdeme hyt: Chaucer's poetic adaptation of the medieval "book curse" | 411 |
| Sounds, prosody and metre | |
| Introduction | 427 |
| Middle English prosodic innovations and their testability in verse | 431 |
| Old English (non)-palatalised /k/: Competing forces of change at work in the "seek"-verbs | 461 |
| Some remarks on the nonprimary contexts for Homorganic Lengthening | 475 |
| On the phonetic and phonological interpretation of the reflexes of the Old English diphthongs in the Ayenbite of Inwyt | 489 |
| Author index | 505 |
| Subject index | 509 |
