The an(d) conjunction, whose primary function in present-day English is
coordination, could introduce conditional clauses in earlier stages of English,
most notably during the Middle English and the Early Modern English periods
(Rissanen 1999: 281). This particular use of the conjunction, which Adamson
has termed iffy-an(d) (2001: 212), is strongly associated with literary English, as
in this example from Shakespeare:
An I may hide my face, let me play Thisby too, I’ll
speak in a monstrous little voice. ‘Thisne,
Thisne;’ ‘Ah, Pyramus, lover dear! thy Thisby dear,
and lady dear!’ (Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream I, ii, Bottom)
In Early Modern English, iffy-an(d) is commonly found in drama with uneducated
or lower-class speakers as well as in representations of dialect speech (cf.
Adamson 2001: 213; Culpepter and Kytö 2010: 167). While findings on the use of
iffy-an(d) in Early Modern English already exist, empirical studies on the use
of the conjunction in Middle English literary texts are still lacking. This paper
thus seeks to investigate the distribution and the development of iffy-an(d) as
well as its competition with the conditional conjunction if in Middle English
literary texts. The study will be based on the TEAMS Middle English Texts Series
Online, a collection of prose and verse texts (e.g. religious texts, romances,
Chaucer’s works). The analysis will take into consideration both internal factors,
e.g. clause position, topic, verb choice, as well as external (social) factors. The
emphasis on the latter factors will reveal whether iffy-an(d) was already associated
with spoken language and a particular social group in the Middle English
period. Attention will also be paid to the emergence and the decline of the linguistic variant under investigation.
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