Verbs in Historical Language Contact

In this chapter we briefly explain the research background of this book, describe the historical language contact situation and sketch Johanson’s (1999, 2002) model of copying, which will serve as a descriptive framework for most of the contact-linguistic phenomena discussed in Chapter 2 . Concerning the Old French/Middle English contact situation, we briefly describe the state of the art and new insights gained in recent research. We point out that what was traditionally seen as a diglossic situation, i.e. as contact between the dominating speakers of French and the native speakers of English “marked by relatively impermeable group boundaries” (Fishman, 1967, 32), should rather be understood as a long period of bilingualism, focusing on “individual linguistic behaviour” (Fishman, 1967, 33), since large parts of at least the urban population also spoke Anglo-FrenchAnglo-French (Ingham, 2012b), the variety of OF spoken in England, also traditionally known as “Anglo-Norman”. Anglo-Norman