Noun Phrase Modification in Middle English Culinary and Medical Recipes

Although noun phrase modification and its evolution in early English writings have been the subject of many scholarly discussions, none of them has compared the use of noun phrases in the same text-type (= recipes) directed at different audiences. Thus, the present paper investigates the use of noun phrase modifiers in Middle English culinary and medical recipes. The study explores possible conditioning factors which may have influenced the use of pre- and post-modifiers in the two types of instructions written in the 14th and 15th centuries. Among others, the following questions will be considered: (i) which modification patterns prevailed in the examined material? (ii) was there any link between the type of the instruction and the choice of modifiers? (iii) did the modification patterns change over time? The corpus for the analysis consists of almost 2,300 recipes, which encompasses culinary and medical samples of approximately equal length.