BILINGUALISM IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND: THE OLD FRENCH AND MIDDLE ENGLISH VERSIONS OF THE 'ANCRENE WISSE' (DISCOURSE, ANALYSIS, SOCIOLINGUISTICS)

Because of a Middle English and Anglo-Norman bilingualism present in the West Midlands region of thirteenth-century England, this dissertation argues that the Ancrene Wisse is profitably studied as the work of one bilingual author. An investigation of the author's lexical choice reflects language contact between Anglo-Norman French and the West Midlands AB dialect. French lexical items tend to reinforce the institutional authority of the author; the corresponding English forms reinforce the author's solidarity with his audience. Linguistic analysis (sociolinguistic and formal-functional) also suggests that syntactic structures and surface case assignment are being handled in a way that strongly indicates that the West Midlands speech community was a code-switching society. Formal and functional linguistic analysis show the process of "hybridization" between Middle English and Anglo-Norman linguistic and discourse structures. The fourth chapter applies the conclusions drawn from the study of a medieval bilingual to the literary situation of a Spanish-English author writing the same narrative in Spanish for a Mexican-American audience and then later for an Anglo readership. The chapter points to the subtle influence one language has over the other, especially when the author considers the prestige of the language used or the availability of numbers of readers who read either language. It argues that Rolando Hinojosa-Smith re-creates Estampas Del Valle y Otras Obras in The Valley because English has a wider readership and has more prestige as a literary language. The effect of this language choice begins to set the norms for the establishment of a Chicano literary dialect. An epilogue points out that the methods of synchronic linguistics and hermeneutic theory can be applied to the study of the texts having their provenance in the West Midlands speech community.