Jacob Thaisen

• Nykiel, Joanna & Thaisen, Jacob (2024). English comparative modals and their complements. English Language and Linguistics. ISSN 1360-6743. 28(1), s. 73–93. doi: 10.1017/S1360674323000485. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  English comparative modals are combinations of the adverbs rather, sooner and better with an auxiliary. There is recent consensus that the comparative modals rather and sooner have over time developed a different syntax and semantics than better. However, potential differences in the syntax of rather and sooner with respect to patterns of complementation haven’t been explored. This article reports the results of a corpus study of these two modals and finds that rather patterns like object-raising verbs, allowing a range of complements that are unavailable for sooner. Our analysis of these patterns draws on recent work in the Construction Grammar framework, with forays into its formal implementation, Sign-Based Construction Grammar, and we propose that rather differs from sooner in that it constitutes a micro-construction whose features are licensed by both the Modal Construction and the Object-Raising Construction, the latter a subtype of the Transitive Construction.

• Honkapohja, Alpo; Thaisen, Jacob & Nøklestad, Anders (2024). A search tool based on language modelling developed for The Index of Middle English Prose. Open Research Europe. 3. doi: 10.12688/openreseurope.16590.2. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Non-standardised early vernaculars present a problem for search tools due to the high degree of variation. The challenge lies in the variation found in orthography, syntax, and lexicon between titles, incipits, and explicits in manuscript copies of the same work. Traditional search methods relying on exact string matching or regular expressions fail to address these variations comprehensively. This project presents a web-based search tool specifically designed to handle linguistic and textual variation. The software is made available as a part of the Index of Middle English Prose (IMEP). The search tool addresses the issue of variation by utilizing a database of incipits and explicits, character-based n-gram language models (LMs) built with the Stanford Research Institute Language Modelling (SRILM) toolkit, and a fuzzy search script (IMEP: FSS) written in Python. The tool optimizes for recall, retrieving multiple potential matches for a search string, without attempting to identify the ‘correct’ one. The search process involves looking up exact matches in the database while simultaneously using the fuzzy search script to evaluate the incipits and explicits against a model of the search string, followed by a match of the search string against models of the incipits and explicits. This two-step process shortens the processing time, which would otherwise be unreasonably long, because while using SRILM to match the search string against each incipit or explicit in the IMEP for precision could be time-consuming, running a first step where all texts are matched against a single LM built from the search string allows for faster processing. A web application, built using Django and Docker, combines the results of the direct database lookup and the fuzzy search script, presenting them as a list with exact matches followed by fuzzy matches ordered by increasing model perplexity. The tool is made available Open Access and can be adapted to other datasets.

• Calle-Martín, Javier & Thaisen, Jacob (2023). General Patterns of Punctuation in the Paston Letters. Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses (RCEI). ISSN 0211-5913. 87, s. 167–185. doi: 10.25145/j.recaesin.2023.87.06. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Thaisen, Jacob (2020). Standardisation, exemplars, and the Auchinleck manuscript. I Laura, Wright (Red.), The multilingual origins of standard English. De Gruyter Mouton. ISSN 9783110687514. s. 165–190. doi: 10.1515/9783110687545-006. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Thaisen, Jacob (2020). Transparently Hierarchical: Punctuation in the Townshend Family Recipe Book. International Journal of English Studies. ISSN 1578-7044. 20(2), s. 11–30. doi: 10.6018/ijes.393481. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  The three scribes of a mid-seventeenth-century collection of medical recipes resemble each other in how they have punctuated the recipes, although they did not work simultaneously. They draw on similar repertoires of marks and they mark similar functions, but they do not use the same marks for the same functions. The principal function is the global one of indicating where the constitutive elements of the recipes begin and end. This function of indicating a text’s structural hierarchy goes back centuries and can seem old-fashioned for an Early Modern English manuscript produced when grammarians had started to discuss whether punctuation should mark syntactic units. A key observation is that recipes stand out among text-types by having a fixed, transparently hierarchical structure. This feature of them facilitates the researcher’s appreciation of how the punctuation functions and dismisses any impression of the scribes having deployed the marks haphazardly.

• Thaisen, Jacob (2020). Classifying scripts, with particular reference to Anglicana and Secretary. I Lorido, Rodrigo Pérez; Prado-Alonso, Carlos & Rodríguez-Puente, Paula (Red.), Of ye Olde Englisch Langage and Textes: New Perspectives on Old and Middle English Language and Literature. Peter Lang Publishing Group. ISSN 9783631821336. s. 163–183. doi: 10.3726/b16935. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  This book provides new insights on different aspects of Old and Middle Eng-lish language and literature, presenting state-of-the-art analyses of linguistic phenomena and literary developments in those periods and opening up new directions for future work in the field. The volume tackles aspects of English diachronic linguistics such as the development of binominals and collective nouns in Old and Middle English, the early history of the intensifiers ‘deadly’ and ‘mortally’, the articulatory-acoustic characteristics of approximants in English, Old English metrics, some aspects of the methodology of corpus research with paleography in focus, studies of the interplay language-register, and a chapter discussing the periodology of Older Scots. The last section of the book ad-dresses literary and translatorial issues such as the impact of Latin ‘quis’ on the Middle English interrogative ‘who of’, the problems that may arise when trans-lating Beowulf into Galician, a reinterpretation of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, and a discussion of the structure of medieval manuscripts containing miscellanea.

• Thaisen, Jacob (2019). The Round Allograph of <r> in Late Middle English. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia. ISSN 0081-6272. 53(1), s. 129–144. doi: 10.2478/stap-2018-0006. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  This paper discusses glyphs of the 2-shaped or “round” allograph of the grapheme &lt;r&gt; with a tag protruding from the lower part of the stem, asking whether their distribution in a corpus of some 600 late Middle English texts can be meaningfully related to these texts’ localisation in A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English. It discusses what localisation expresses, and uses regression modelling to show that there is no co-variation between the texts’ paleography and their orthography, although there is a measure of correlation between them. The evidence in favour is that the quantitative analysis identifies localisation in northings as a predictor of the occurrence of the tagged form of the allograph, which occurs at a higher frequency in texts localised below the Midlands line at c. 300 northings. The evidence against is the form’s scattered distribution according to the localisation variable where co-variation would imply a more clear-cut concentration of points, and also the moderate success at explaining the form’s distribution by means of variables known to explain orthographic variation.

• Thaisen, Jacob (2017). Secretary letter-shapes in County Durham. Folia Linguistica Historica. ISSN 0168-647X. 38, s. 263–280. doi: 10.1515/flih-2017-0009. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  This paper applies quantitative methods in palaeography. It develops tree-structured regression models of the palaeographical variation found in a synchronic corpus of texts written in orthographically less standardised late Middle English and establishes their accuracy. There are sixteen models, each one relating to a letter-shape known to distinguish the Gothic cursive scripts Anglicana and Secretary. The models predict the presence of the individual letter-shape from one or more of the following variables, in no particular order: (1) localisation of texts’ orthographic variation; (2) text-type; and (3) in-word position. The discussion asks why several Secretary letter-shapes cluster in documents localisable to County Durham and the area further north, given the script’s association with (a) institutions of national administration in the London-Westminster area and (b) orthographic standardisation. It concludes that the linguistics and the palaeography do not co-vary during this period in the history of the English language and suggests that it may illuminate studies of the gradient between Anglicana and Secretary to pay attention to provincial centres, not least Durham.

• Thaisen, Jacob (2014). Initial Position in the Middle English Verse Line. English Studies: A Journal of English Language. ISSN 0013-838X. 95(5), s. 500–513. doi: 10.1080/0013838X.2014.924275. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  This paper establishes that spelling forms collected from initial position in the Middle English verse line have unique characteristics, and it discusses why this is so. The paper first addresses scribal copying practices, before describing the utility of letter-based N-gram models in objectively comparing scribal copies in terms of their spelling. Testing of models trained on a corpus totalling ten manuscripts demonstrates that initial position regularly prompted scribes to suppress their tendency to introduce their own spelling forms in favour of replicating those encountered in their exemplars. The discussion attributes this behaviour to the operation of two mechanisms. One mechanism is psycholinguistic in origin, while the other is rooted in manuscripts’ production and so implies a codicological dimension to spelling variation.

• Thaisen, Jacob (2013). Gamelyn's Place among the Early Exemplars for Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Neophilologus: An International Journal of Modern and Mediaeval Language and Literature. ISSN 0028-2677. 97(2), s. 395–415. doi: 10.1007/s11061-012-9315-3. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Thaisen, Jacob (2013). Obituary: Norman Francis Blake (1934-2012). English Studies: A Journal of English Language. ISSN 0013-838X. 94(1), s. 120–122. doi: 10.1080/0013838X.2012.732770. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  ‘‘Norman F. Blake, University of Sheffield’’. Students of English around the world will have come across title pages and article headers with this name and affiliation, for Blake’s academic output was extensive and varied. It included some thirty authored or edited volumes, not to mention around 200 articles and an even larger number of reviews; many of the latter in particular appeared in English Studies where Blake also served on the International Advisory Board. He held the Chair in English Language at Sheffield for a generation and several senior administrative posts there, including Head of Department, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and eventually Pro-Vice Chancellor. Prior to his arrival at Sheffield in 1973, he lectured in English at the University of Liverpool for just over a decade. After retiring, he first stayed on at Sheffield as Director of the Humanities Research Institute but later took a Research Professorship at Leicester’s De Montfort University.

• Thaisen, Jacob (2012). Gamelyn’s Place among the Early Exemplars for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Neophilologus: An International Journal of Modern and Mediaeval Language and Literature. ISSN 0028-2677. 97(2). doi: 10.1007/s11061-012-9315-3. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Application of standard techniques from natural language processing on N-gram models of spelling enables quantification of the similarity between Middle English texts despite their lexical differences. Three studies employing similarity metrics confirm that a scribe’s spelling always is biased in the direction of his exemplars. This bias opens up a window on the number of scribes behind the exemplars for a text executed in a single hand, when other variables such as authorship and poetic form are held constant. A fourth study addresses nine manuscripts of Geoffrey Chaucer’s poem the Canterbury Tales with early textual contents. A one-way ANOVA/Tukey’s Range Test shows that none of these manuscripts is based on exemplars written in more than three hands, when allowance is made for variation due to poetic form. The results point to unified exemplars for the full text as the normal format for the poem’s transmission. The discussion suggests that the final tale ordering found in the first manuscripts is a product of collaboration between the poem’s first two scribes, probably working after Chaucer’s death and spuriously adding the Tale of Gamelyn.

• Thaisen, Jacob (2012). A Probabilistic Analysis of a Middle English Text. I Nelson, Brent & Terras, Melissa (Red.), Digitizing Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture. Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. ISSN 9780866984744. s. 171–200. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Thaisen, Jacob Stig Rønnow & Rutkowska, Hanna (2011). Introduction. I Thaisen, Jacob Stig Rønnow & Rutkowska, Hanna (Red.), Scribes, printers, and the accidentals of their texts. Peter Lang Publishing Group. ISSN 9783631607121. s. 9–13. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Thaisen, Jacob Stig Rønnow (2011). Adam Pinkhurst's short and long forms. I Thaisen, Jacob Stig Rønnow & Rutkowska, Hanna (Red.), Scribes, printers, and the accidentals of their texts. Peter Lang Publishing Group. ISSN 9783631607121. s. 73–90. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv

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• Thaisen, Jacob Stig Rønnow & Rutkowska, Hanna (2011). Scribes, printers, and the accidentals of their texts. Peter Lang Publishing Group. ISBN 9783631607121. 209 s. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv

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• Thaisen, Jacob (2023). Merja Stenroos and Kjetil V. Thengs (eds.), Records of real people: Linguistic variation in Middle English local documents (Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 11). Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2020. Pp. viii + 310. ISBN 9789027207951. English Language and Linguistics. ISSN 1360-6743. 27(1), s. 214–221. doi: 10.1017/S1360674322000260. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Thaisen, Jacob (2017). Quantitative Analysis of Middle English Palaeographical Data. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Thaisen, Jacob (2017). Secretary letter-shapes in County Durham. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Thaisen, Jacob (2017). Medieval Texts in Their Material Context. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Thaisen, Jacob (2017). Mediaeval Texts in their Material Context. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Thaisen, Jacob (2017). Some remarks on the diffusion of letter shapes in late medieval England. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Thaisen, Jacob (2016). Palaeographical Innovation and the Late Middle English Dialect Map. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Thaisen, Jacob (2016). Quantitative Modelling of Middle English Palaeography. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Thaisen, Jacob (2016). Northern Middle English Palaeography. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Thaisen, Jacob (2012). Are letter shapes universal, regional, local, or idiosyncratic? Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Thaisen, Jacob (2012). How Middle English Scribes Avoided Eyeskip When They Copied Texts. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Thaisen, Jacob (2012). N-gram modelling of Middle English spelling. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Thaisen, Jacob (2012). Initial Position in the Middle English Verse Line. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Thaisen, Jacob (2012). Standardising Usages and the Auchinleck Manuscript. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Thaisen, Jacob Stig Rønnow (2012). The Tale of Gamelyn of the Canterbury Tales. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia. ISSN 0081-6272. 47(1), s. 73–80. doi: 10.2478/v10121-010-0021-6. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Thaisen, Jacob Stig Rønnow (2011). Scripts, Maps, and Manuscripts. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Thaisen, Jacob Stig Rønnow (2011). Probabilistic Modelling of Middle English: The Auchinleck manuscript. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Thaisen, Jacob Stig Rønnow (2011). Modelling Middle English. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Thaisen, Jacob Stig Rønnow (2011). Modelling Middle English. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv

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