Linguistics and English Language

Margaret Laing Dugald Stewart Building 3 Charles Street Edinburgh EH8 9AD Tel: +44 131 650 4020 Fax: +44 131 650 6883 m.laing@ed.ac.uk.

Meg graduated from the University of Oxford in 1974 and received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 1978. As a member of the Middle English Dialect Project, under the direction of Angus McIntosh, she contributed to the production of A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (LALME) (AUP/Mercat Press, 1986). Since then, at the department's Institute for Historical Dialectology, she has been engaged in a major research project in collaboration with Keith Williamson, and more recently with Roger Lass, to create A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English ( LAEME). The LAEME electronic text corpus, with accompanying software and theoretical introduction, is now available as an interactive website. She has written on late Middle English, most notably with Michael Benskin — ‘Translations and Mischsprachen in Middle English Manuscripts', in So meny people longages and tonges, philological essays in Scots and mediaeval English presented to Angus McIntosh , ed. Michael Benskin and M.L. Samuels, pp. 55–106 (1981). She has published extensively on early Middle English, including A Catalogue of Sources for a Linguistic Atlas of Early Medieval English (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1993) and many articles arising out of the investigation of early Middle English texts for LAEME.

The methodology employed for LAEME involves transcribing texts from original manuscripts and ‘tagging' them for analysis and localisation. The close scrutiny involved in this work has led not only to assessment of the diatopic and diachronic variation in early Middle English phonology, morphology, lexis and syntax, but also to a number of studies on textual and linguistic relationships of different versions of texts, early Middle English orthographical systems and new manuscript readings (see publications below).

Since September 2007 Meg has been working, in collaboration with Keith Williamson and Michael Benskin (University of Oslo), towards the creation of an electronic, web-based version of LALME (e-LALME). The project is funded by AHRC and the Mellon Foundation.

Meg contributes to the teaching of Middle English Honours and gives the Middle English lectures of the History of English component in English Language 1. She offers (with Keith Williamson) the ‘Principles and Applicatons of Medieval Dialectology’ option in the department's MSc in English Language and at Honours, and teaches the Middle English palaeography component of the interdepartmental MSc in Medieval Studies. She co-supervised Ela Majocha’s PhD An Onomastic Study of Early Middle English (2005) and is jointly supervising Lauren Stewart’s PhD on Representation of Dialect in 17th-century English drama and Claire McShane's PhD on the use of register in Margery Kempe.

Publications since 1997

1997 ‘A Fourteenth-Century Sermon on the Number Seven in Merton College, Oxford, MS 248, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 98: 99–134.

1998a ‘Linguistic and textual relationships between the Corpus, Nero and Vernon Manuscripts of Ancrene Riwle — a response', Medieval English Studies Newsletter 38: 4–16.

1998b ‘Raising a Stink in The Owl and the Nightingale : a New Reading at line 115', Notes and Queries 243:276–84.

1998c ‘Notes on Oxford , Bodleian Library, MS Digby 86, the Names of a Hare in English ', Medium Ævum 67:201–11.

1998d ‘Three notes on Dame Sirith , Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 86, fols. 165r–168r', Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 99: 401–409.

1999 ‘Confusion wrs confounded: litteral substitution sets in early Middle English writing systems', Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 100: 251–270.

2000a ‘The Linguistic Stratification of the Middle English Texts in Oxford , Bodleian Library, MS Digby 86', Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 101: 523–569

2000b ‘“Never the twain shall meet” early Middle English the east west divide', in Irma Taavitsainen et. al. eds. Placing Middle English in Context , pp. 97–124. Topics in English Linguistics series. Mouton de Gruyter.

2001 ‘Words reread. Middle English Writing Systems and the Dictionary', Linguistica e Filologia 13: 87–129

2002 ‘Corpus-provoked Questions about Negation in early Middle English', Language Sciences 24: 297–321

2003 (with Roger Lass - Laing/Lass) ‘Tales of the 1001 Nists. The Phonological Implications of Litteral Substitution Sets in 13th-century South-West-Midland texts', English Language and Linguistics 7.2:1-22.

2004 ‘Multidimensionality: Time, Space and Stratigraphy in Historical Dialectology' in M. Dossena and R. Lass (eds.), Methods and Data in English Historical Dialectology. Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 49–96.

2004 (with Keith Williamson - Laing/Williamson) ‘The Archaeology of Middle English Texts' in Christian J. Kay and Jeremy J. Smith (eds.), Categorization in the History of English, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 261. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 85–145.

2005 (with Roger Lass - Lass/Laing) ‘Are front rounded vowels retained in West Midland Middle English?' in Nikolaus Ritt and Herbert Schendl (eds.), Rethinking Middle English: linguistic and literary approaches . Frankfurt / Main, etc.: Peter Lang. pp. 280–90.

2005 (with Roger Lass - Laing/Lass) ‘Early Middle English knight: (Pseudo)metathesis and lexical specificity’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 106: 405–423.

2006 (with Roger Lass - Laing/Lass) ‘Early Middle English Dialectology: Problems and Prospects’, in Ans van Kemenade and Bettelou Los (eds.), Handbook of the History of English, pp. 417–51. Oxford: Blackwell.

2006 (with Roger Lass - Lass/Laing) ‘$ho:fian{*}/vK2: A LAEME-based Lexical Study’. In: G. Caie, C. Hough and I. Wotherspoon (eds), The Power of Words: Essays in Lexicography, Lexicology and Semantics in honour of Christian Kay. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 79–91.

2007 ‘The Owl and the Nightingale: five new readings and further notes’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 108: 445–477. An article published to commemorate the 120th anniversary of the Modern Language Society, Helsinki.

2008– (with Roger Lass - Laing/Lass) A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English 1150–1325 - electronic text corpus with accompanying software (Keith Williamson) index of sources and theoretical introduction. http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laeme1/laeme1.html. Compiled by Margaret Laing and Roger Lass. Edinburgh: ©The University of Edinburgh 2008–

2008 ‘The Middle English scribe:  sprach er wie er schrieb? ’ in Dossena, M., Dury, R. and Gotti, M. (eds), English Historical Liguistics 2006. Volume III: Geo-historical Variation. CILT 297. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 1-44.

2009 ‘Weak segments in early Middle English’ in D. Minkova (ed.), Phonological Weakness in English: from Old to Present-Day English. Palgrave Studies in Language History and Language Change. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 237-315.

2009 (with Roger Lass - Laing/Lass) ‘Shape-shifting, sound change and the genesis of prodigal writing systems’, English Language and Linguistics 13.1. 1–31.

2009 (with Roger Lass - Lass/Laing) ‘Databases, Dictionaries and Dialectology. Dental Instability in Early Middle English: A Case Study’ in Dossena, M. and Lass R. (eds.). Perspectives on English and European Historical Dialectology. Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 91-131.

Forthc. 2010 (with Roger Lass - Laing/Lass) ‘Raiders of the lost archetype: ‘eo’ in the strong verbs of classes IV and V’, Transactions of the Philological Society.

Forthc. 2010 ‘The reflexes of OE beon as a marker of futurity in Early Middle English’. Proceedings of the 15th ICEHL. CILT. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Forthc. 2010 (with Roger Lass - Lass/Laing) ‘In celebration of early Middle English ‘h’ ’. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen.