Anglo-Saxon Willsの文体と口語性

概要

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Our agenda is to investigate transitional prose texts from medieval England, in order to illuminate how written ones emerged from oral ones in the Middle Ages. The crucial reason for choosing wills is that these texts suggested that we would find in them strong evidence of their transitional nature from Old to Middle English, and of a struggle to realize the dispositive or performative potential of writing. We see that the linguistic features of Anglo-Saxon wills differ sharply from those which characterize modern ones. In some ways these wills retain links to pre-literate times; in others they anticipate the eventual institutionalization of writing. Section 1 introduces by pointing out style peculiar to Anglo-Saxon wills, and refers to the relevant issues. In section 2 we deal with negative patterns. Section 3 studies passive constructions. Section 4 is devoted to word order, and then in section 5, we consider parataxis and the `multiple sentence'. These foregoing sections lead on to an issue in section 6 concerning colloquialism found in Anglo-Saxon wills, and concludes in section 7. Despite the significance from linguistic point of view, there still remains much room to be investigated in the issue concerned. This paper will, it is hoped, contribute to a better characterization of the language of the Anglo-Saxon wills.