Palatalization in Grammatical Words as Reflected in Unclassified Late Middle English Sources

Although palatalization changing [k] into [tS] was most widespread in Southumbria, the previous examination (Kocel 2009, 2010) has already proved that on no account can it be perceived as a homogeneous process. This lack of consistency is reflected in many instances of palatal forms found in the North alongside many nonpalatal ones encountered in the East Midlands and London. Consequently, the substantial number of such “odd” forms seems to defy the existence of clear-cut boundaries between the above mentioned areas, allowing for an unhindered influx and amalgamation of ostensibly dialect-specific variants. The problem appears even more complex, taking into account the vast collection of dialectally unidentified Middle English texts which, containing both palatal and nonpalatal forms, only corroborate the fact that palatalization could not be dialect or even area specific. The multitude of variants present in those texts, a result of the Scandinavian influence and dialectal borrowing, point to the process of the lexical diffusion of these forms across the whole English territory, affecting in particular such high-frequency items as the grammatical words each, much, such and which. The aim of the study, thus, will be to determine the extent of palatalization affecting these grammatical words, through the analysis of the spelling/phonological discrepancies and the distribution of each, much, such and which in unclassified Late Middle English sources. The data come from the Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose, The Middle English Dictionary and A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English.