Iyeiri, Yoko.
Yoko Iyeiri and Margaret Connolly, eds. And Gladly Wolde He Lerne and Gladly Teche: Essays on Medieval English Presented to Professor Matsuji Tajima on His Sixtieth Birthday (Tokyo: Kaibunsha, 2002, pp. 127-43.
Examines occurrences of "any" in four Middle English texts, including CT. The word occurs more frequently in negative contexts in formal tales (KnT, ClT, Mel, and ParsT) than elsewhere.
The Flemish proverbs in CkP and ManT "trigger a whole series of contradictions and reversals of meaning that mirror the complexity of Chaucer's comedy." They also contribute to a pattern in CT in which Flemings are associated with misused language.
Challenging suggestions that individuals like Chaucer are agents of linguistic change, Machan argues that they cannot foresee history and therefore cannot work to a future end. The article surveys political factors in late-medieval English linguistic…
Mazzon, Gabriella.
Jacek Fisiak, ed. Studies in English Historical Linguistics and Philology: A Festschrift for Akio Oizumi Studies in English Language and Literature, no. 2 (Frankfurt am Main : Peter Lang, 2002), pp. 255-66.
Classifies Chaucer's verbs of "verbal activity" (gestural, onomatopoetic, and performative), treating verbs of saying as a subset of performative verbs.
Minkova, Donka, and Robert Stockwell, eds.
Berlin : Mouton de Gruyter, 2002.
Nineteen essays by various authors, divided into three sections--Millennial Perspectives; Phonology and Metrics; and Morphosyntax/Semantics-and an envoy. Includes author and subject indexes. For three essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for…
Nakao, Yoshiyuki.
Yoko Iyeiri and Margaret Connolly, eds. And Gladly Wolde He Lerne and Gladly Teche: Essays on Medieval English Presented to Professor Matsuji Tajima on His Sixtieth Birthday (Tokyo: Kaibunsha, 2002), pp. 73-94.
Nakao tabulates the frequency of epistemic "trewely" in Chaucer's major works and compares its semantic frequency in Chaucer with that in several contemporary poetic texts. Investigates the significance of the modal adverb "trewely" in TC,…
Nakao, Yoshiyuki.
Toshio Saito, Junsaku Nakamura, and Shunji Yamazaki, eds. English Corpus Linguistics in Japan. Language and Computers: Studies in Practical Linguistics, no. 38 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2002), pp. 235-47.
Explores the "quantifiability" of the elements that condition the semantics of moot/moste and shal/sholde modals. Although conditions deriving from proposition and clause structure are quantifiable and machine-readable, pragmatic conditions require…
Pakkala-Weckström, Mari.
Journal of Historical Linguistics 3: 151-73, 2002.
Examines "politeness strategies" (ye/thou) and emotional language in light of genre expectations and characterization. In MilT, MerT, and ShT, wives use various linguistic strategies to manipulate their husbands and others, but the linguistic…
Linguistic and philosophical notions underlying the idea of "cosyn to the dede" fascinate Chaucer and Jean de Meun, who follow Plato and Augustine in accepting that signs reveal ultimate meaning and that myths relate to eternal ideals.
Shimonomoto, Keiko.
Tokyo : Waseda University Enterprise, 2001.
Examines the indicators of politeness and social categories (class, degree of intimacy, etc.) in the speech of romance characters in CT and TC, with attention to forms of address and second-person pronouns (ye/thou). Also considers politeness…
Sociohistorical commentary on the rise of prestige markers in English writing and speech, focusing on accent as a marker in Chaucer's time and soon after, in particular the pronunciation of final -e, the Great Vowel Shift, and northern dialect…
Twose, Gareth, and C. B. McCully.
Language and Literature 10 (2001): 291-306.
The article assesses the range of function and the frequency of "thus" in representative samples of English poetry from Old English through the twentieth century. Data derived from electronic searches (1000-line samples) confirm relations between…
Youmans, Gilbert, and Xingzhong Li.
Donka Minkova and Robert Stockwell, eds. Studies in the History of the English Language: A Millennial Perspective (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002), pp. 153-75.
Argues that Chaucer's decasyllabic lines are based on metrically significant, statistically normative feet, with clear and significant caesuras. Chaucer's and Shakespeare's iambic lines deviate from prototypical lines in similar ways. See Thomas…
Archibald, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Barnes, ed. Incest and the Literary Imagination (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002), pp. 17-38.
Although the Catholic Church in the twelfth century had developed "extraordinarily rigorous" prohibitions against intermarriage by persons related by blood, by the thirteenth century these standards had to be relaxed. Archibald discusses various…
Explores the link between fear of God and literary expression, usually manifested as "overwhelming prolixity." Considers several of the tales in CT as part of this exploration.
Bloom, Harold.
Harold Bloom. Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds. New York: Warner, 2002, pp. 102-9.
Impressionistic praise of Chaucer's ability to combine human sensitivity with comedy, his refusal to be cowed by Dante, his characterizations, and his irony.
Burrow, J. A. .
Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Explores the functions and significances of "non-verbal signs" (glancing, pointing, winking, hand-clasping, kissing, bowing, etc.) in medieval literature, concentrating on Dante's Commedia, the romances of Chrtien de Troyes, Froissart's Chronicles,…
Examines the English educational system in Chaucer's time, tracing the paths from parish schools to the universities indicated in the GP portraits of the Clerk and the Parson.
Chaudhuri, Supriya, and Sukanta Chaudhuri, eds.
Calcutta : Allied, in collaboration with the Department of English, Jadavpur University, 1996.
Eleven essays by various authors, on topics relating to Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Petrarchan tradition, Renaissance ballads and drama, and George Herbert. For two essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Writing Over under Alternative Title.
Constructs a model for the reception of Gower's "Confessio Amantis" that accommodates its combination of English, marginal Latin glosses, and very difficult Latin prefatory verses. Clerk-prelectors probably studied the work before performing…
Cooper, Helen.
Penguin Classics Essays. <http://us.penguinclassics.com/static/cs/us/10/essays/chaucer.html>. 10 July 2002.
Month-by-month (April to March) commentary on the significance of dates and months in Chaucer's life and works, with occasional quotations. Initial version posted April 2001. An addendum includes the transcript of a "Question and Answer Session" with…
Chaucer's "doubleness" in critical tradition results from combinations of self-deprecation and extravagant claims to poetic authority in his works. In 1592, Robert Greene depicted Chaucer as short, whereas the frontispiece of Speght's 1598 edition…
Crane, Susan.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.
Crane investigates a wide range of cultural rituals, demonstrating how identity was performed in late medieval England and how such performances make meaning and establish identity. She explores the Chaucer coat of arms as self-representation rooted…
