The Present Participle Mark-ing in East Midland Middle English: A Corpus Study

The present paper contains a description of the distribution of the typical forms of the present participle marker in the East Midland dialect, one which also incorporates the relatively autonomous dialectal areas of East Anglia and London. The major contrasting characteristic of the conservative and the advanced types was materialised in the opposition between the old nd-forms and the new ng-forms. The evidence for the present study comes from the prose and poetic texts of the 13th–15th centuries compiled in the electronic versions of the Innsbruck computer archive of machine-readable English texts (ICAMET), Penn-Helsinki parsed corpus of Middle English (PPCME2), Chadwyck-Healey’s English poetry full-text database, The Auchinleck manuscript, and the Michigan Corpus of Middle English prose and verse. The selected texts are those from localized manuscripts, established on the basis of the Catalogue of sources for a linguistic atlas of Early Medieval English (LAEME) and A linguistic atlas of Late Mediaeval English (LALME). The present contribution is another instalment in a series of papers devoted to the rise and spread of the present participle form -ing(e) in Middle English.