The adjectival group in the English Chancery documents

Abstract

Historical Linguistics has been mainly concerned with the study of the word, both from the point of view of its phonological and morphological structure and from the perspective of its etymology, all this to the detriment of the study of syntax. Even though some works about mediaeval syntax have dealt with the different parts of speech as linguistic categories, little attention has been paid to the syntagmatic structure of the different clause constituents. The syntactic study of the English Chancery documents has been similarly overlooked, despite their importance for the development of standard Modern English. This article is devoted to the study of the Adjectival Group in the Chancery documentary texts, in order to, on the one hand, arrive at a better knowledge of the syntactic structure of this linguistic category and, on the other, to see to what extent these texts have contributed to the development of standard Modern English.