Browse Items (16469 total)

Tallies uses of "that" clauses and "to" clauses after the verb "command" in Chaucer's works, documenting their frequencies in various syntactic contexts.

Taylor surveys the development of attention to language and linguistics in Chaucer studies, commenting on the usefulness of developments that enable increased attention to sociolinguistic uses rather than philological forms. She reads RvT as a work…

Tabulates and analyzes various combinations of Middle English infinitive markers--the -e(n) ending, the particle "to," and the particle phrase "for to"--finding that they occur in no identifiable grammatical or semantic patterns of distribution in…

Comments on translations/modernizations of TC from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries. Considers modern problems with reproducing the nuances of Chaucer's courtly idiolect, particularly "courtly value words" such as "goodly," "fresshe,"…

Nolan exemplifies the continuity of English versification through close metrical analyses of samples from Chaucer (Truth), Lydgate, and Wyatt. Each text "displays inherited forms at the very limits of their capacities."

Tani examines the word pairs or doublets in Fragment A of CT and those in Chaucer's prose texts. The pairs are used for rhyme and for generic and stylistic differentiation among verse texts.

Describes the historical evolution of figurative language, especially metaphors, identifying patterns of development. Metaphors depend on images in the past; new metaphors are created through linkage to core concepts or "underlying conceptual…

Zarins assesses Gower's and Chaucer's uses of rime riche ("in which rhyme patterns appear identical but diverge in meaning"), focusing on instances in which the device lends seriousness (or mock seriousness) in characters' dialogue. Appends a partial…

In late medieval England, "code-switching" among English, French, and Latin was linked to literacy and social prestige, not to aberrant or nonconformist behavior; code-switching was a means to articulate social identity. Chaucer distanced his…

Examines the characteristics of Chaucer's usage of the expletive "there." In Japanese.

The semantic field of "heat" includes emotional connotations in Old English, but Chaucer evokes new oxymoronic nuances when he uses it in Troilus's song, TC 1.400-420.

Comments on various aspects of dialect, diction, prestige, etc. in Middle English poetry, with many examples drawn from Chaucer's works.

Horobin exemplifies how Chaucer used traditional methods of word formation to expand English vocabulary, creating new words and meaning by adding prefixes and suffixes, shifting grammatical function, and compounding words.

Jimura cites instances of impersonal constructions in TC and KnT in which verbs of "occurrence or happening" (e.g., "befal," "hap") are used to present important events and to suggest inevitability.

Bokenham repeatedly refers to himself as an "auctor" as a way to extricate himself from the classicizing, conventional, and paternal shadow of Chaucer.

Sponsler comments on the "appropriation theory" underlying Candace Barrington's analysis of a Chaucer-themed Mardi Gras pageant of 1914, raising broader questions about the ideology, methodology, and disciplinary implications of "American…

Sweet examines works by William Dunbar and Robert Henryson as well as lesser-known texts to argue that, like Chaucer, Lydgate had significant influence on the development of literature in Scotland.

Argues that Lydgate's allusions to HF are part of a larger effort to deny the accessibility of truth through language, which the author describes as a "Chaucerian poetics of ambiguity and skepticism."

Includes comments on Chaucer's combination of jest and earnest as it was admired by Thomas Heywood and Thomas More.

Examines the readers' marks in an annotated copy of the 1550 Thynne edition of Chaucer's Workes (Folger STC 5074 Copy 2), identifying its century-long provenance (1578-1677) of female ownership and commenting on how notes, bracketed passages, and…

It is "anachronistic to assume" that Chaucer distinguished between the "reading and hearing of his literary works." His "style is best understood as a versatile adaptation of language to suit both silent and vocalized readings."

Johnston scrutinizes Chaucer's comments on alliterative poetry in ParsP, interpreting them as evidence of a power struggle in England's evolving literary field. By presenting aesthetic difference as linguistic difference, Chaucer consciously presents…

Draws from TC examples of how voice contributes to ambiguity, considering how "suprasegmentals" and various phonetic and prosodic features contribute to voice.

Nicholson asserts that critics' "willingness to detect irony at every turn" is appropriate in Chaucer studies, but not in Gower studies, arguing that paradox is a recurrent and sustained mode of thought and expression in Gower's "Confessio." Surveys…

Assesses the location and implications of one stanza from TC (1.400-406) as quoted in the "Disce mori," a fifteenth-century manual of religious instruction addressed to "Dame Alice." The quotation indicates that some may have read TC as a warning…