Adjectival inflection in medieval Irish English texts
Piotr Jakubowski (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań)
The aim of the present paper is to provide a detailed analysis of the adjectival inflection in Irish English texts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Unlike numerous accounts of the disintegration of adjectival inflection in the dialects of Middle English there is hardly any study devoted to the problem in medieval Irish English. The investigation will also focus on the comparison between the use of adjectival final -e in medieval Irish English texts and in the texts of south-west Midlands. The dialect of south-west Midlands was the area from which English arrived in Ireland in the twelfth century (Hickey 2002: 39). Thus, it is of interest whether the morphological developments in both dialects display similar tendencies or whether Irish English morphology of that period followed a different route. A preliminary analysis of the texts reveals a rather archaic character of the adjectival system found in the texts of medieval Irish English.
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