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The Cely Letters is a well-known collection of correspondence exchanged by members of this London family of wool merchants and their associates between 1472 and 1488. A substantial part of the corpus was written and received by factors based in Calais, which had been an English outpost in France since 1346 and was strategically connected to the wool marts of the Low Countries. The great majority of the letters are monolingual English texts, thus attesting to the widespread use of the vernacular in personal correspondence by the late fifteenth century. Nevertheless, behind the monolingual English surface, traces of multilingualism are revealed. In this paper, I intend to analyse this issue with a twofold purpose. In the first place, attention will be paid to the multilingual background of the letters, considering both the persistent use of French in late medieval England and the specificity of the business transactions carried out at Calais and the marts, where language contact must have been the norm. In the second place, different textual reflections of such contact in the letters are examined and classified, both as regards the generic conventions of letter writing and as part of the multilingual business context where they were produced and received.

A partir del análisis del corpus de correspondencia medieval conocido como Cely letters (1472-1488) profundizo aquí en la relación entre cambio de código y préstamo léxico. Los investigadores está de acuerdo en situar ambos conceptos en los extremos de un continuo diacrónico, de modo que los cambios de código, en el curso del tiempo y en las circunstancias adecuadas, pueden integrarse en la lengua receptora como préstamos; sin embargo, hay discrepancias al abordar categorías intermedias, como los llamados préstamos no integrados o nonce borrowings. Yuron Matras ha propuesto una serir de criterios que permiten cate- gorizar estos elementos intermedios en el continuo. La aplicación de estos criterios a una selección de voces extraídas de las Cely letters permite verificar su validez histórica a la vez que determina la prioridad de mantener las distinciones terminológicas. In this paper I examine the relationship between code-switching and lexical borrowing in the Cely letters (1472-1488). Most researchers agree in situating these concepts at the opposite ends of a diachronic continuum, so that code-switches, in the course of time and given the adequate circumstances, may become integrated borrowings in the recipient language. There is, however, some controversy as regards the classification of intermediate phenomena such as non-assimilated or nonce borrowings. Yuron Matras has recently proposed a set of criteria which, in my opinion, are useful to categorise the intermediate elements in the continuum. These criteria are applied to a selection of words from the Cely letters. As such, the analysis of these terms helps test the historical validity of Matras’s benchmark, at the same time as it determines the necessity of keeping a distinctive terminology. Keywords: code-switching, lexical borrowing, non-assimilated

The analytical construct known as community of practice – a group of people linked by the pursuit of a joint enterprise and sharing a repertoire of resources to this end – is used extensively in so...

The aim of this paper is to explore the impact of social and context factors on the diffusion of a linguistic change from above, namely the deployment of the spelling innovation in fifteenth-century English, and especially in some letters from the well-known Paston collection of correspondence. We particularly focus on the socio-stylistic route of this change from above, observing the sociolinguistic behaviour of some letter writers (members of the Paston family) in connection with the social-professional status of their recipients, the interpersonal relationship with them, as well as the contexts and styles of the letters. In this way, different dimensions of this change from above in progress in fifteenth-century English can be reconstructed. Financial support for this research has been crucially provided by the DGICT of the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (FFI2014-56084-P) and by Fundación Séneca, the Murcian Agency for Science and Technology (19331-PHCS-14 and 20585-EE-18).

The present paper traces the history of zero and that as competing links for object clauses in the history of English from chronological and sociolinguistic perspectives. Even though the zero link is sporadically attested in Old English, the rise of the zero complementizer takes place in late Middle English and is well-established in the second half of the sixteenth century, becoming more frequent in speech-based text types (trials, sermons) or in texts representing the oral mode of expression (fiction, comedies). The use of this construction is then observed to diminish drastically in the eighteenth century, plausibly as a result of the prescriptive bias of grammarians (Warner 1982; Fanego 1990; Rissanen 1991, Rissanen 1999; Finegan and Biber 1995). Our analysis is based on five high frequency verbs, to know, to think, to say, to tell and to hope, and their syntactic behaviour in the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence, especially in the periods 1424–1499, 1500–1569, 1570–1639 and 1640–1681. Our approach aims at showing progress of the zero link along the S curve in these four periods, before it became thwarted in the eighteenth century. We also aim at plotting the diffusion of zero that-clauses against the social hierarchy of the period in order to detect (i) the existence of social stratification for this variant, and, if such be the case, (ii) the social group or groups that were leading the diffusion of the change in the different chronological stages, thus (iii) tracing the social origin and direction of the change as diffusing from below or from above in sociolinguistic terms.