Word Order Variation in the Canterbury Tales

Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales” is a collection of stories told from the perspective of various people on pilgrimage to Canterbury, England, in the late 14th century. The tales vary in both content and style, in a way that reflects personality traits and background of the teller of the tale. This study explores whether syntactic structure, specifically word order, varies systematically for different characters. At the time, both English and French word order had recently shifted from verb-final to subject-verb-object. Verb-final order, though still grammatical, was much less common. Since the use of older vs. newer structures tends to signal class distinctions, there may be a correlation between the amount of verb-final word order in a tale and the social class of the central character. This study focuses on three tales: “The Knight,” “the Miller,” and “the Prioress.” The Knight represents a well-educated and high-class group, as knights were generally younger sons of nobility. The Miller serves as the representation of the middle class and the middle geographic region of England. The Prioress is educated, but is characterized as a woman very concerned with projecting her class and status, rather than actually embodying the traits that her rank should carry. The specific prediction of this study is that “the Prioress” will include a greater percentage of verb-final structures, reflecting the character’s unsuccessful imitation of the upper class. The data consist of embedded clauses from the chosen tales, which are categorized according to word order. Preliminary analysis suggests that there is more verb-final word order in “the Prioress” than in the other tales, as predicted