Studies in the Language of A Revelation of Love : with special reference to vacillation in nouns, pronouns and verbs

This paper examines the lexical and grammatical features of the language of A Revelation of Love by a medieval female mystic, Julian of Norwich. Linguistic characteristics of her prose in the longer version written in Middle English, irrespective of their importance, have been overlooked so far. The present analysis builds on descriptive sketching with the aim mainly to elucidate the vacillation and style in her work with some diagrams. The parts of speech to be surveyed are nouns, personal pronouns, relative pronouns, verbs and others. Middle English is a period that permits a number of spelling and syntactic variants. The inclination is reflected in her prose as a miniature of the language of this period, as is seen in such as plurals accompanied by a singular and plural verb, dual use of some verbs in personal and impersonal constructions, and the like. At the same time some of the fluctuations are peculiar to the author such as the use of the second person pronouns. Through the study of her idiosyncratic prose, we see a vivid process of transition from Old to Modern English