Dynamic Modelling of the Contact Situations

The chapter applies the Dynamic Model to the medieval contact situations between Old French and Middle English. After a brief summary of the model, including its motivations and recent derivatives, parallels between the contact settings originally covered by the model, i.e. British and American colonialism, and the contact situations under investigation are outlined. The model is then first applied to Old French as the settler language, tracing its development towards the nativized variety of Anglo-French. This application reviews the two case studies from Chapter  3 in which features of Anglo-Norman were investigated. The model is then extended to cover Middle English as the indigenous language. After a review of five case studies from Chapter  2 and one case study from Chapter  3 , the general pattern that emerges is one of a general phase of copying in M2 (1250–1350), followed by a selection phase in M3 (1350–1420) in which copied features enter a state of competition with native features in a feature pool, and may become nativized if they are selected over native features, or are otherwise discarded. For a contact-induced feature to persist, it must therefore not only be copied, but subsequently selected over native alternatives by the speech community.