Abstract This paper investigates performative manifestations of sincerity across Anglo-Norman and Middle English. In particular, it locates adverbial sincerity markers used to qualify performative speech act verbs in late medieval letters (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), at a point when Middle English was rapidly replacing Anglo-Norman as the vernacular of epistolarity in England. Employing historical dictionaries and corpora, the study 1) locates the range of words for ‘sincerity’ from a time when the modern lexeme had yet to be borrowed in either vernacular, and 2) demonstrates that while it is clear that Middle English epistolarity was greatly influenced by Anglo-Norman, quantitative and qualitative analyses suggest that sincerity markers were much less commonplace in Middle English performatives, which further suggests ways in which the communicative ideal and practice of sincerity were reanalyzed from one language to the next.

中文翻译：

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盎格鲁-诺曼和中古英语字母中的表演性言语动词和诚意

摘要本文研究了英语和英语之间真诚表现的表现形式。尤其是，它定位了用来修饰中世纪晚期字母（十四和十五世纪）中的表演性言语动词的副词诚意标记，当时中古英语正在迅速取代盎格鲁-诺曼语成为英格兰的俗语。研究使用历史词典和语料库，1）定位了从现代话语到任何地方都没有借用的“诚意”一词的范围，以及2）证明虽然很明显，中古英语的俗称是很大的在盎格鲁-诺曼（Anglo-Norman）的影响下，定量和定性分析表明，诚意标记在中古英语表演者中不那么普遍，