“Intra-text Variation as a Case of Intra-writer Variation: Middle English Scribal Behaviours, with a Focus on the Spelling Variation of WOMAN in MS Pepys 2125”
Intra-Writer Variation in Historical Sociolinguistics is an open access book and downloadable from here.
Bibliographical details
Iyeiri, Yoko. 2023. “Intra-text Variation as a Case of Intra-writer Variation: Middle English Scribal Behaviours, with a Focus on the Spelling Variation of WOMAN in MS Pepys 2125”, in Intra-Writer Variation in Historical Sociolinguistics, ed. Markus Schiegg and Judith Huber, pp. 473-490. Peter Lang.
This is based upon my presentation at HiSoN2021, which took place in Erlangen in the hybrid form and which I attended online. My thanks go to the audience, who gave me various suggestions to improve my arguments on that occasion. I would also like to express my thanks to the editors of the volume.
This paper studies the spelling variation of the word woman in the first two items in MS Pepys 2125, which are both ascribable to a single scribe in the 15th century. The spelling forms of woman fluctuate within the texts, and I would argue that the fluctuation illustrates how he reacted to the exemplar texts, showing at the same time this intra-text variation is a case of intra-writer variation.
Related publications
- Iyeiri, Yoko. 2018. “Interpreting Different Types of Linguistic Variation: hit and it in Middle English”, in The Pleasure of English Language and Literature: A Festschrift for Akiyuki Jimura, ed. Hideshi Ohno, Kazuho Mizuno, and Osamu Imahayashi, pp. 95-107. Hiroshima: Keisuisha.
- Iyeiri, Yoko. 2013. “The Pronoun it and the Dating of Middle English Texts”, in Phases of the History of English: Selection of Papers Read at SHELL 2012, ed. Michio Hosaka, Michiko Ogura, Hironori Suzuki & Akinobu Tani, pp. 339-50. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
