Dr Richard Ingham - Research Profile
Research Interests
In my research, I carry out a reassessment of multilingualism in later mediaeval England. Modern English, especially in less colloquial registers, is the outcome of extensive language contact influences in that period. I explore the pivotal role of Anglo-French as the medium through which this process was enabled.
My work to date has established that, in the century or so up to Chaucer, Anglo-French, far from being the degenerate ‘poorly understood jargon' of textbook notoriety, remained a functioning linguistic system, keeping step in key syntactic respects with the grammar of continental French, even though its pronunciation was heavily influenced by English. It thus remained a valid medium for linguistic contact in the usage of bilingual speakers in England until a much later date than has generally been supposed.
Current work I have been doing on bilingual code switching in manorial accounts and dialogic language in law reports has provided empirical support for a picture of spoken language competence in French in day-to-day professional contexts, on the part of mother-tongue English speakers at this time.
I have also investigated how Anglo-French could have been transmitted for so long after the Norman Conquest, focusing on the school context, in which French was not taught, but used as a medium language for learning Latin. It seems to have been acquired quasi-naturalistically at school in the early-to-middle childhood years, within a ‘critical period' for accurate syntax acquisition, but rather too late for native-like pronunciation. Anglo-French texts were produced by clerks belonging to the literate class, who would typically have received their education at school, not with private tutors, unlike the aristocracy. The combination of quite accurate syntax but divergent phonology in later Anglo-French thus makes good acquisitional sense.
My PhD and post-doctoral research on first language syntax acquisition, coupled with degree-level training in philology, has provided me with the conceptual and analytic framework needed to carry out this investigation.
I have been invited to present aspects of this work in Switzerland, Spain, and Japan, and also as a videoconference seminar for the World Universities Network. The research originated as a British Academy network grant 2005-2007, which funded two workshops held at UCE/BCU. In addition to eight research articles published or accepted for publication, I have edited 'The Anglo-Norman language and its contexts' to be published by Boydell in 2010.
Publications
(2008a) 'On the postfinite misagreement phenomenon in Late Middle English. In M. Gotti, M. Dossena, and R. Dury (eds.) English historical linguistics 2006. Amsterdam: Benjamins. pp. 125-14.0 (with Kleanthes Grohman)
(2008b) 'L'ordre syntaxique V3 aux débuts du moyen français' In B. Fagard, S. Prévost, B. Combettes & O.Bertrand (eds.) Evolutions en français. Etudes de linguistique diachronique. Berne: Peter Lang.
(2008c.) ‘Contact with Scandinavian and late Middle English negative concord'. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 44, 125-36.
(In press a.) ‘The Persistence of Anglo-Norman 1230-1362: A Linguistic Perspective'. In J.
Wogan-Browne (ed.) Proceedings of the French of England conference, University of York, July 2007.
(In press b.) ‘L'anglo-normand et la variation syntaxique en français médiéval' In M. Iliescu, H.
Siller-Runggaldier & P. Danler (eds.) Proceedings of Colloque International de Linguistique et de Philologie Romane, University of Innsbruck 2007.
(in press c.) ‘Expletive pro and Misagreement in Late Middle English.' Proceedings of
Diachronic Issues in Generative Syntax 2006. (With K. Grohman)
(to appear a) ‘Shakespeare's use of syntax and metre in dramatic verse: subject-verb
inversion and ictic stress placement.' In M. Ravassat & J. Culpeper (eds.) Essays on Shakespeare's language (with Michael Ingham).
(to appear b) ‘Mixing languages on the Manor'. To appear in Medium Aevum, 2009.
(to appear c) ‘The grammar of later medieval French: an initial exploration of the Anglo Norman Dictionary textbase'. To appear in C. Guillot (ed.) Corpus 7.
(to appear d) ‘Aussi en anglo-normand'. In M. Abecassis (ed.) Proceedings of 2008 Association of French language Studies Conference, Oxford University, 2008.
(submitted, under review) ‘Grammar change in Anglo-Norman and continental French: the replacement of non-affirmative indefinite nul by aucun'. Submitted to Diachronica.
(2007a). ‘A structural constraint on multiple negation in Late Middle and Early Modern English’, Medieval English Mirror 3, 55-67
(2007b). ‘Negation and adverbs in Middle English.’ Lingua 117, 1-25 (co-authored with Eric Haeberli).
(2007c). ‘NegP and negated constituent movement in the history of English.’ Transactions of the Philological Society 105, 3, 1-33.
(2007d). ‘Le changement linguistique et l’oralité du texte: la syntaxe du connecteur et au débuts du moyen français.’ In A. Vanderheyden, J. Mortelmans, W. de Mulder, & T. Venckeleer (eds.) Texte et discours en moyen français: actes du XIème colloque international sur le moyen français
(2006)a. ‘Syntactic change in Anglo-Norman and Continental French Chronicles: was there a ‘Middle’ Anglo-Norman?’ Journal of French Language Studies 16,1. 26-49.
(2006)b. ‘The status of French in medieval England: evidence from the use of object pronoun syntax’. Vox Romanica 65, 1-22.
(2005). ‘Bilingualism and syntactic change in medieval England’. Reading University Working Papers in Linguistics, 8, 1-25.
(2005)a. The loss of Neg V->C in Middle English. Linguistische Berichte 202 171- 206.
(2005)b. ‘NegV1 and Secondary Negation in Old and Middle English Religious Prose’. In J. Close, A. Galani, B. Sinar & P. Wallage (eds.) York Papers in Linguistics 2, 3. University of York: Department of Language and Linguistic Science, pp. 29-49.
(2003)a. The development of the expletive negative construction in Middle English Transactions of the Philological Society, 101,3 411-452.
(2003)b. The changing status of Middle English OV order: evidence from two genres. SKY Journal of Linguistics (Finland) 16, 75-92.
(2002). Negated subjects and object positions in 15th century English. Language Variation and Change 14, 291-322.
(2000). Negation and OV order in Late Middle English. Journal of Linguistics 36, 1 13-38.
(2000) Argument structure preferences in pre-school and school-age children. In M, Perkins & S. Howard (eds.) New directions in language development and disorders. Kluwer/Plenum: New York. 129-138.
(1999). Resultative VPs and Specific Language Impairment. Language Acquisition 7,2-4 87-111. First-authored, with P. Fletcher.
(1998). Tense without agreement in early clause structure. Language Acquisition 7,1 51-81.
(1996). English-speaking children's use of locative/contact and causative alternations. In M. Garman et al. (eds): Issues in Normal and disordered child language. New Bulmershe Papers pp. 106-117. (Co-authored, with P. Fletcher, C. Schelleter, & I. Sinka.)
(1995). Grammatical impairment. In P. Fletcher & B. MacWhinney (eds.) Handbook of child language. Oxford: Blackwell. 603-622. (Second-authored, with P. Fletcher).
(1994). Input and learnability: direct-object omissibility in English. Language Acquisition 3,2. 95 - 120.
(1993). Critical influences on the acquisition of verb transitivity. In D. Messer & G. Turner (eds.) Critical influences on child language acquisition and development. 121-137.
(1992). The optional subject phenomenon in young children’s English: a case study. Journal of Child Language 19,1 133-152.