Research in Focus: Richard Ingham

In a series of blogs we will be learning about the research of our members. This month we hear from Professor Richard Ingham of the University of Westminster…

Later mediaeval England, between the 12th-early 15th centuries, was similar to many societies today, such as India, Mexico, and Haiti, where different languages are used for different functional purposes. It was not a multilingual society in the sense of being divided among ethnic communities, each mainly using their own language, as with modern-day Belgium. Latin was generally the language of documentary record, while French enjoyed a significant presence in public life. Most people in that period had English as their first language, but if they belonged to higher-status social classes, either by birth or by education, would have been able to acquire French as a second language. If members of the clergy, they would also have known Latin. With three languages in play, in some cases in the repertoire of the same individuals, considerable contact influence was to be expected. My research is intended to provide a more accurate picture of the effects of language contact, and of the nature of the bilingual situation that produced them.

While conducting research into syntactic change in Middle English, I became interested in how the contact influence of Scandinavian and French might have contributed to accelerating or retarding certain changes. My linguistic background made it easier for me to focus on the role of French, so I devoted my research output to gaining a more accurate understanding of French in medieval England. I’ve carried out numerous studies of insular French, focusing on its linguistic properties and then on how it was maintained in use after it lost its mother-tongue speakers. This is important if we are to understand how English was so heavily affected by French from the 13th c. onwards.

Traditional textbook treatments have offered an account of contact with French in which English borrowed words belonging to higher-status content domains such as government, warfare, law, religion, fashion, etc. Yet Francophone influence on the English lexicon extended to semantic areas which can’t be pigeon-holed in terms of content domains, but often belong to the general vocabulary of the language. My research into Middle English lexis indicates that by the late 13th c. much French-origin general vocabulary must have featured in at least the recognition vocabulary of monolingual English speakers.

 Giuard des Moulin’s Grande Bible Historial), f. 19 © National Library of the Netherlands

How French loans entered English is often attributed to the members of the upper classes, who adopted English, taking French words with them. I have proposed other channels of diffusion, notably the clergy in their role as the ‘media’ of that era, as well as professional and occupational networks. There is extensive evidence for working knowledge of French in late 13th and early 14th century England in various professional domains, and also for a process of diffusion from specialist to non-specialist sectors of the community in occupational domains such as shipping and metalworking.

The effect on Middle English of contact with French was not limited to individual loanwords themselves: when verbs were borrowed, their syntactic selectional properties were borrowed with them. I found a huge increase in later Middle English after 1300 in the ability of change-of-state and change-of-position verbs, as well as others, to adopt the syntactic behaviour of the source verb in French. Sentence construction in English could in this way be affected by the language contact setting.

I am currently interested in patterns of maintenance or replacement among native (Old English) words under pressure from French loans, looking at semantic areas such as abstract versus concrete vocabulary. My overall aim is to establish a broader picture of what factors favoured or disfavoured the penetration of French into the lexicon and grammar of English at this time.

Professor Richard Ingham

May 2018