Bøker av LAURA WRIGHT

Textbooks inform readers that the precursor of Standard English was supposedly an East or Central Midlands variety which became adopted in London; that monolingual fifteenth century English manuscripts fall into internally-cohesive Types; and that the fourth Type, dating after 1435 and labelled ¿Chancery Standard¿, provided the mechanism by which this supposedly Midlands variety spread out from London. This set of explanations is challenged by taking a multilingual perspective, examining Anglo-Norman French, Medieval Latin and mixed-language contexts as well as monolingual English ones. By analysing local and legal documents, mercantile accounts, personal letters and journals, medical and religious prose, multiply-copied works, and the output of individual scribes, standardisation is shown to have been preceded by supralocalisation rather than imposed top-down as a single entity by governmental authority. Linguistic features examined include syntax, morphology, vocabulary, spelling, letter-graphs, abbreviations and suspensions, social context and discourse norms, pragmatics, registers, text-types, communities of practice social networks, and the multilingual backdrop, which was influenced by shifting socioeconomic trends.

The rulers of London in the late middle ages sought to safeguard the future of their important river crossing by placing its administration in the hands of a specially created institution. By the mid-fourteenth century the "BridgeHouse", as it became known, had been endowed with a large portfolio of properties which provided the bulk of the revenue needed for the frequent, and often urgent, repairs to London Bridge's structure: as many as 130 shops stoodon the bridge itself. As well as providing information on the technicalities of bridge-building or wider issues concerning urban crafts and productive processes, the accounts and rentals from the institution's archive provide useful snapshots of the bridge at various points in its often turbulent history.