Morphology of Chaucerian English: With reference to the portrait of the prioress

The transition period in the history of English between Old and Modern English is known as Middle English, spoken between 1150 and 1450, which lacks a generally accepted standard. Chaucer is the first author to use many common English words in his writings, having a great influence on the development of Standard English. The famous Canterbury Tales written by Chaucer were written in the English spoken by Londoners. We will use the portrait of the prioress - a short passage from line 118 to line162 in The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (edited by James 1965) as data for our investigations of the morphology of Chaucerian English. This passage will be subjected to systematic analysis, to show the main distinguishing characteristics of morphology in Chaucerian English. A brief introduction to morphology, and the analysis of the main causes of inflectional simplification will also be included, aims to give a deep insight into the structure of the morphology of Chaucerian English.