Abstract
The starting point for this thesis was an interest in Middle English word order. I was interested in seeing whether there would be any differences in word order patterns between different genres of Middle English texts.
When comparing genres, it is ideal to be able to compare texts by the same author. Chaucer’s writings give us this opportunity. I decided to work with prose texts because they are not dependent on rhyme and metre which may influence and alter the word order of texts written in verse. I decided to work with The Tale of Melibee and The Parson’s Tale from The Canterbury Tales and A Treatise on the Astrolabe using an edition of Chaucer’s texts, The Riverside Chaucer, because this provides the opportunity to compare texts by the same editor. My hypothesis was that there would be more imperatives in A Treatise on the Astrolabe than in the two other texts because of its didactic prose style. I was not sure whether the word order patterns of The Parson’s Tale would be more similar to those of the The Tale of Melibee or those of A Treatise on the Astrolabe. The Parson’s Tale is a literary prose text just as The Tale of Melibee, but it is a sermon and is didactic in style and may therefore have much of the same word order patterns as A Treatise on the Astrolabe.
In each of the texts I extracted 20 sentences from the beginning, the middle and the ending of each text. As several different clause types were contained within a sentence, I decided to group the data into three cateogries, i.e. main clauses, subordinate clauses and conjunct clauses. When I had completed the analysis I divided the different clauses into categories according to the position of the sentence constituents. I decided to focus on the positions of the subject and the verb in each clause. All other elements are grouped in a category which I have chosen to call X.
What I found was that the SOV pattern has a much lower number of occurrences in all these texts than the SVO pattern. The Parson’s Tale shared similarities with both the other two texts. I also found that The Parson’s Tale is more similar to A Treatise on the Astrolabe than to The Tale of Melibee. The fact that it is didactic prose (as A Treatise on the Astrolabe) seems to weigh heavier than that it is literary prose (as The Tale of Melibee). When it comes to verb-final clauses (imperatives) A Treatise on the Astrolabe has a higher frequency in main clauses than the two other texts. In the subordinate clauses The Tale of Melibee has a higher number of occurrences of verb-initial subordinate clauses than The Parson’s Tale and A Treatise on the Astrolabe which reflects a higher number of verb-initial reporting clauses.