Daisy Smith is the new AHRC-funded doctoral candidate within the AMC’s FITS project
The AMC is very happy to welcome Daisy Smith as a doctoral student within its From Inglis to Scots project. Daisy was awarded a three-year AHRC-funded studentship to research the spellings and sounds of Older Scots inflectional morphology, thus complementing the core of the project’s work on the language’s Germanic root-morphemes.
An MA in English Language and Literature from our own University of Edinburgh, Daisy is excited by the opportunity to rejoin the Linguistics and English Language department and continue her studies within the FITS team. Her MA dissertation was on synchronic aspects of derivational morphology, so she is very keen to tackle inflection this time, as well as delving into Historical Linguistics, an area of studies she has always been interested in.
A brief summary of her doctoral project is given below.
‘ye saidis lettres’: A study of the Older Scots covered inflectional vowel
The focus of my PhD research is the inflectional morphology of Older Scots. Using the Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots (developed by Keith Williamson, also part of the AMC), I will examine a variety of legal texts dating from 1380 to 1500 with the objective of identifying factors conditioning scribal choice of orthographical variant in covered inflectional vowels, that is to say, those unstressed vowels which appear in an inflectional morpheme before a final consonant, such as represented by <i> in the Modern Scots askit, and <e> in the Modern English equivalent asked. This topic of research is not one which has been previously considered in great detail. The general tendencies characterising OSc inflectional morphology and differentiating it from that of Middle English have been described (see Minkova 1991, King 1997, Aitken 1977, Aitken and Macafee 2002, Bugaj 2002; 2004, Kopaczyk 2001), but as yet there has not been any attempt to investigate thoroughly the diversity of the covered inflectional vowel in OSc texts and account for its distribution. In a manuscript note made in 1977, Aitken stated that he had “regrettably not yet made the time to discuss […] prefix and suffix syllables”. In her 2002 editor’s preface to Aitken’s The Older Scots Vowels, Macafee elaborates that “without further data, [Aitken] did not feel that he could improve on the fullest account available, that of Kuipers (1964:76-9)”. 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. 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. I propose to utilise this “further data” which Aitken felt was lacking in 1977 and investigate the development of the covered inflectional vowel.
References
Aitken, Adam Jack & Caroline Macafee (2002). The Older Scots vowels : a history of the stressed vowels of Older Scots from the beginnings to the eighteenth century. Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society.
Aitken, Adam Jack (1977). How to Pronounce Older Scots. In Adam Jack. Aitken, Matthew Purdie McDiarmid & Derick Thomson (eds.), Bards and makars : Scottish language and literature : medieval and Renaissance. Glasgow: University of Glasgow Press. 1-21.
Bugaj, Joanna (2004). Middle Scots inflectional system in the south-west of Scotland. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. 189
Kennedy, Quintin and Cornelis Henricus Kuipers (1964). Quintin Kennedy, 1520-1564: Two Eucharistic Tracts. Nijmegen: Drukkerij Gebr. Janssen. 76-79
King, Anne (1997). The Inflectional Morphology of Older Scots. In Charles Jones (ed.), The Edinburgh history of the Scots language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 157-181.
Kopaczyk, Joanna (2001). The Scots-Northern English continuum of marking noun plurality. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 36. 131-140.
Minkova, Donka (1991). The history of final vowels in English: the sound of muting. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 88-91.
