• Lingua Humanitatis
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.109-128
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• 2002

The six fabliaux of the Canterbury Tales are a notable artistic achievement. Of all of them, however, the Merchant's Tale is the most notable to show Chaucer's development of the scope of this genre. We will look briefly at the characters of the fabliau narrators who are crucial to Chaucer's drama of relationships in the course of the Canterbury pilgrimage framework. To distinguish the accomplishment of the Merchant's Tale, we will consider the relative merits of each of the other five fabliaux in the Canterbury Tales. The least flawed of the fabliau narrators, the Merchant will tell a powerful tale about an old man's lust turned into a hasty marriage gone wrong that aims its satire at the noble ruling class of the land, not the usual targets of Chaucer's or most other writers' fabliaux. Further, unlike the light-hearted and dismissable endings of the other Chaucerian fabliaux, the Merchant's Tale has what we will call an Act 6 of continued deception at all corners of the love triangle represented by the senex amans January, his young wife May, perhaps now pregnant after her tryst with Damyan in the pear tree, and the still present young lover Damyan. This triangle of mutual deception will continue into the unknown future under the male and female forces at odds as personified in the king and queen of fairies, Pluto and Proserpina.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.91-107
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• 2003

Although the language of Geoffrey Chaucer as part of late Middle English has been discussed by many studies, among which David Burnley (1983) seems to be most remarkable, some aspects of Chaucer's language still need to be better illuminated for a more thorough understanding of not only Chaucer's work and language but also the English language in the late Middle English period. This paper examines the English negation of Chaucer's language, shown especially in his Canterbury Tales, and explains how negation is used in his work, focusing on the three different types of sentence negation and the uses of or and and in the scope of negation.

• Lingua Humanitatis
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.85-107
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• 2002

The word play on h(e)art-hunting has become a virtual commonplace in criticism of Chaucer′s Book of the Duchess. Less widely discussed is the third meaning of ME herte, "hurt." The "hart"/ "heart" pun is, however, only implicit in the poem, while the rhyme of "heart" and "hurt" in lines 883-84 makes clear the close association of the terms for Chaucer. Earlier commentators insisted that this was in fact an instance of rime riche or "identical rhyme," but if it is so it is striking that it is the unique instance of the rhyme in Chaucer, whose works are full of occasions for hurt hearts. The essay argues that this is, instead, an instance of near-rhyme and that the confusion in scribal spellings of ME hurten(with ′u,′ ′0,′ ′i,′ ′y,′ and ′e′ ) suggests uncertainties about its root vowel that modem linguistic study has not clarified completely. If the rhyme of herte ("hurt") with herte ("heart") is, however, established by these lines in BD, then it is probably reasonable to ask about all the occasions where characters in the poem are hurt by emotional or physical distress. In the cases of A1cyone and the Man in Blak, the hurt is revealed plainly as the death of a loved one, and Alcyone′s death and the Man in Blak′s return "homwarde" offer contrasting responses to the realization and acknowledgement of their loss. In the case of the Narrator, however, the exact nature of his "hurt" is nowhere made clear and the questions this Jack of clarity raises for the reader remain unanswered when the poem declares its "hert-huntyng" done. Further examination of the Narrator′s character and his role in the poem may reveal him to be a physician himself in need of healing, and this reading of his character may identify him as an ancestor as much of Chaucer′s Pardoner as of the Pilgrim Narrator of Canterbury Tales.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.53 no.2
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• pp.281-306
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• 2007

M. M. Bakhtin's dialogic concept of multi-voiced discourse allows us to open up the text of The Clerk's Tale and to account for its radical heterogeneity. Once we recognize the multi-voiced character of The Clerk's Tale, then what was heretofore regarded as discontinuous or ignored can be seen as the clash of several different world-views. Such a conceptual framework gives an added depth and scope to such thematic subjects as sovereignty, the status of women, and rhetorical style. There are three different and antagonistic voices involved in the tale's narration. These voices project different viewpoints or world-views, and they consequently engage each other in a polemic debate. Their relationship with each other is discontinuous and dialectical rather than continuous and harmonious. The first voice is the Petrarchan voice of moral allegory, which is the voice of tradition, authority, and high seriousness. This voice of moral allegory regards the story of Griselda as an exemplum of spiritual constancy and virtuous suffering. The second voice is the Clerkly voice of pathos based on human experience and feeling. This voice is defined by the Clerk's asides and apostrophes interspersed in the narrative proper, which function to engage the Petrarchan voice in a polemical debate. The third voice is the voice of parody, nominally identified with Chaucer the poet, which is located in the second ending, including Envoy. Whereas the other two voices are earnest and serious, the voice of parody is irrelevant, playful and antagonistic to both the Petrarchan voice of moral allegory and the Clerkly voice of secular humility.