The loss of MID in English

The thesis investigates the loss of MID in English through quantitative methods using historical corpus data. The research covers the period from the 10th century (the late Old English period) to the 14th century when MID became extinct in most Middle English literature. With the help of logistic regression analysis, the origin of the loss was identified in the 12th-century East Midlands due to the intense Anglo-Scandinavian contact. Language shift and dialect mixing may have occurred in the historical Anglo-Scandinavian community, leading to the semantic gain of WIÐ (originally an oppositional preposition) and a linguistic bias against MID. Detailed textual discussions of MID and WIÐ were made on the late Old English period and on each Middle English dialectal region. Multiple sociolinguistic factors such as immigrant society, the class of free peasantry, style and register concern are also involved in the historical change