“Slipping” in Old English Narrative and Legislative Prose

摘要

The sudden changes from dependent to non-dependent discourse, or vice versa, in a single speech-act are often referred to in the literature as “slipping”. The Old English texts most often discussed in connection with slipping are the Cynewulf and Cyneheard interpolation in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 755 (Wrenn 1940-1: 212), the Ohthere and Wulfstan interpolation in the Old English Orosius (Kerling 1982), and lfric's Lives of Saints (Moloney 1979). Richman 1986 gives a valuable, up-to-date discussion of slipping in these and other Old English texts and usefully distinguishes between “artful” and “inadvertent” slipping. There is no literature on the phenomenon in the law-codes. Focusing on word order, I will suggest that particularly the legislation from the tenth and eleventh centuries should be added to the list of Old English works that contain instances of slipping but also that their pragmatic origin may be too different to postulate direct functional parallels of slipping in the law-codes with slipping in the other prose texts under discussion.