The possessive adjective as involvement marker in Colonial Virginia cookeries

John J. Staczek

Sat. 2:00-3:40 D

That a linguistic form would have a social function is not at all a revolutionary concept in terms of contemporary linguistic and sociolinguistic analysis. Further, that a modern spoken form in a particular setting would have a written, reported oral, antecedent also comes as no surprise. Possessive adjective forms such as my, your, and our in contemporary conversational varieties of American English are used with high frequency in socio-instructional settings as a device that creates intimacy and involvement between speaker and audience. Earlier antecedents in written texts are attested in the work of Chaucer and Middle English cookeries. The use of pin 'thy' in the cookeries shows an alternation with the and further suggests that the forms were interchangeable, perhaps having even the same demonstrative meaning, as we would expect from the Old English se[[currency]] demonstrative.

In this paper, I examine data from Colonial Virginia cookbook recipes of mid-eighteenth century vintage whose origins may be found in the English cookeries of the time, and iteratively, whose origins reflect the same kind of recorded oral tradition found in earlier cookeries and in the instructional genre of Chaucer's A Treatise on the Astrolabe. The point of these remarks is the durability of the social function of the form. The forms are powerful social ones that carry meaning beyond their traditional lexical meaning, not unusual, of course, in language. The durability of a form is important to an understanding of language use over time and reinforces the social nature of language use. Chaucer's instructional intent was clear; whatever the intent of the cookery chronicler must have been in selecting the forms in the fifteenth century is a continuing intent of speakers of the language.