Placing Middle English in Context Book

	Preface
	Introduction	1
	Chronological and social context
	Language periodization and the concept "middle"	7
	Language and society in twelfth-century England	43
	Syntactic constraints on code-switching in medieval texts	67
	Dialect, normalization and corpus-linguistic methodology
	Introduction	89
	Never the twain shall meet: Early Middle English - The East-West divide	97
	Standard language in Early Middle English?	125
	Changing spaces: Linguistic relationships and the dialect continuum	141
	Normalizing the word forms in the Ayenbite of Inwyt	181
	Chaucer' spelling and the manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales	199
	Which and THE WHICH in Late Middle English: Free variants?	209
	Lexical semantics
	Introduction	229
	Robbares and reuares pat ryche men despoilen: Some competing forms	235
	Here comes the judge: A small contribution to the study of French input into the vocabulary of the law in Middle English	255
	Naming and avoiding naming objects of terror: A case study	277
	An application of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage to diachronic semantics	293
	Patterns of semantic change in abstract nouns: The case of wit	313
	The spatial and temporal meanings of before in Middle English	329
	The adjective weary in Middle English structures: A Syntactic- semantic study	339
	Utterance and discourse meaning
	Introduction	361
	Slanders, slurs and insults on the road to Canterbury: Forms of verbal aggression in Chaucer's Canterbury Tables	369
	Hir not lettyrd: The use of interjections, pragmatic markers and whan-clauses in The Book of Margery Kempe	391
	Whoso thorgh presumpcion ... mysdeme hyt: Chaucer's poetic adaptation of the medieval "book curse"	411
	Sounds, prosody and metre
	Introduction	427
	Middle English prosodic innovations and their testability in verse	431
	Old English (non)-palatalised [superscript *]/k/: Competing forces of change at work in the "seek"-verbs	461
	Some remarks on the nonprimary contexts for Homorganic Lengthening	475
	On the phonetic and phonological interpretation of the reflexes of the Old English diphthongs in the Ayenbite of Inwyt	489
	Author index	505
	Subject index	509