Disturbling News from the Thirteenth Century: Variation in a Borrowed Lexeme in Middle English

It is sometimes assumed that the process of reanalysis of a borrowed prefix as productive is a simple process of detachment from the borrowed base and subsequent re-attachment to a native one. If this is reanalysis, however, it is so in a limited sense. It is not, for example, an instance of ambiguity resolution (see Lewis 1998: 2489), since the result of the process is to add to the stock of morphemes, not to alter the form or function of existing ones, thus modifying the system internally. Reanalysis itself is variously and confusingly defined. Indeed it is often simply taken as a given. Langacker’s account is ‘change in the structure of an expression or class of expressions that does not involve any immediate or intrinsic modification of its surface manifestation’ (see Hopper and Traugott 1993: §3.4; cited in Nevanlinna 2000: 346), but this will not suffice in the present case, since extreme surface variation, of which the present lexeme is an excellent example, characterizes Middle English. This paper sets out to examine the early history of distourben, a single lexeme, or rather lexeme complex in early Middle English. The expression ‘lexeme complex’ is being used here to cover lexemes and their variants, given that in this case the range of forms covered is large, extending across what would appear to be lexeme boundaries both in PresE and ME, and in the Middle English Dictionary (MED). To illustrate this, the variants of the verb range from distourben to distourblen, distrublen, and stourblen, and include nouns, deverbals and adjectives. Forms like troublen also need to be taken into account. Since the assumption made at the outset in this research that this prefix could be dealt with as a homogenous, unitary morpheme proved illusory once the database had been constructed, a paper on discomforten was read at the ICOME 5 conference in Naples in August 2005 (McConchie 2005), and another paper covering lexemes such as disseisin, distincioun, and disafforeten is to appear (McConchie forthcoming). This research forms part of a larger project on the early history of the prefix disin English, work which to this stage has suggested that it is essential to consider each of the early lexemes containing this prefix as separate phenomena before attempting to draw conclusions about precisely how this prefix was introduced and vernacularised. In the case of distourben, the prefix has its non-privative sense, described by the MED in these terms: