What Chaucer’s Language Is

What Chaucer’s Language Is Christopher Cannon Pembroke College, Cambridge In describing any language—perhaps any system—there is a necessary tension between the simple and the complex. A rule or principle may be fashioned that resolves copiousness into pattern, chaos into norm, but to the extent that the rule is successful in the process of reduction it may proliferate exceptions, qualifications, and options, ultimately approaching in complexity the very system it was designed to simplify. Conversely, description may seek to preserve the complexity of the system in its own form, collecting examples endlessly so that the very unboundedness of the activity of illustration reconstitutes the unboundedness of the language, but the cost of such richness will be that each descriptive instance is itself simpler than the whole, a partial view of an aggregate it posits but never fully captures. Chaucer studies has always yearned for simplicity of the first sort, a description of Chaucer’s language parsimonious enough that it can itself account for (more or less) every sentence we now identify as written by Chaucer (which will say ‘‘Chaucer’s language is X’’). But, at the same time, we have only been happy with complexity of the second sort (‘‘happy’’ in the sense that we absorb such analysis into our scholarship): Chaucer’s language is only held to have been described successfully where it remains elusive, where the description itself holds that, whatever Chaucer’s’ language is, an unspecified surplus exceeds that description ’s analytic scope (‘‘Chaucer’s language is X + Y,’’ where ‘‘Y’’ is unknown). Such a split desire is made to seem reasonable by an act of projection whereby the extremes of simplification we yearn for are held to be the proper study of another field—in this case linguistics, where scientism is the procedure by which simplicity is achieved, but where the results consequently have no purchase on critical interest. Another way to put this is that literary criticism begins with the sense that reducing Chaucer’s language to some sort of rule (or ‘‘generalization’’) would 301 ................. 9680$$ CH10 11-01-10 12:36:04 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER very much advance its own tasks of understanding, but, faced with a rule or any procedure for writing one, criticism turns tail and accuses those who have written the rule of failing to appreciate Chaucer’s ‘‘art’’ (defined in such instances as that which escapes rules). Two examples may, I hope, demonstrate the accuracy and the importance of these typologies. The first stems directly from Noam Chomsky ’s Syntactic Structures (1957), the volume in which ‘‘simplicity’’ of description was first urged on modern linguistics.1 Chomsky defined language as ‘‘a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of a finite set of elements,’’ and understood the ‘‘linguist’s task’’ to be the production of ‘‘a device of some sort’’— generally a set of rules—‘‘for generating all and only the sentences of a language.’’2 This definition and this method made itself felt in Chaucer studies only nine years later, when Morris Halle and Samuel Jay Keyser claimed that a single rule (with one optional, and one obligatory transformation ) would generate every pattern in Chaucer’s prosody:3 Branching Rule 1. VV #P1P2P3. . . . Pn#(s (s)) where V ⳱ verse, P ⳱ position, s ⳱ syllable, # ⳱ verse boundary, ( ) ⳱ elements enclosed thus are optional ; that is, may or may not be present, n ⳱ the total number of positions in the line; in the pentameter line n ⳱ 10; in the tetrameter line n ⳱ 8, etc. Substitution transformations 1. SD: # P1X SC: 1 2 3V 1 Ø 3 (optional transformation) 2. SD: X PnY # Z {S} SC: 1 2 3 4 5V 1 {Sa} + (s) 3 4 5 {Sb} where n ⳱ 2, 4, 6 and/or 8, S ⳱ stress maximum, Sa ⳱ neutralized syllable, Sb ⳱ weakly stressed syllable equal to adjacent syllables in stress, (s) ⳱ extra syllable assigned to Pn 1 Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (’S-Gravenhage: Mouton, 1957). On the importance of ‘‘simplicity’’ to the theory elaborated here, see pp. 53–56. 2 Syntactic Structures, pp. 13, 85. 3 Morris Halle and Samuel Jay Keyser, ‘‘Chaucer and the Study of Prosody,’’ College English 28...