“The Verb pray in Chaucer and Caxton”

This study explores the verb pray in Boece and The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer and Reynard the Fox, Paris and Vienne, Blanchardyn, and Eneydos by Caxton. The aim is to clarify the initial stage of the development of the parenthetical use of pray.

The verb pray is often followed by that-clauses, whose decline will be a step forward in the development of its parenthetical use. Among the texts investigated in this study, the prose text of The Canterbury Tales and Caxton’s Reynard the Fox are relatively advanced in the decline of that-clauses. At the same time, the extent to which that-clauses have receded does not differ much between the examples with the first-person subjects and those with second- and third-person subjects.

Although this may suggest that the parenthetical use, which is typical of the first person, has not yet become a noticeable feature in later Middle English, further analysis shows that there is already a marked difference between the first-person and the other persons. With the former, pray followed by imperatives is on the increase, while with the latter the same verb followed by to-infinitives is on the increase, both together with the decline of that-clauses. In other words, the first person and the other persons are already taking separate paths, and the path the first person takes is the one to lead to the parenthetical use.

The Canterbury Tales is particularly advanced in the development, giving examples such as: Telle on thy tale, Manciple, I thee preye (“The Manciple’s Tale”). Here, the chunk I thee preye has been dislocated from its original position.

Related publication(s)

• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2009. ”The Verb pray in Different Letters of the Paston Family with Special Reference to its Pragmatic Use”, in English Philology and Corpus Studies: A Festschrift in Honour of Mitsunori Imai to Celebrate his Seventieth Birthday, ed. Shinichiro Watanabe & Yukiteru Hosoya, pp. 169-83. Tokyo: Shohakusha.