ABSTRACT
Chaucer's English was that of late fourteenth-century London, where the dominant dialect was that of the East Midlands. Middle English (ME) had more impersonal verbs than modern English does. Oaths and emphatic phrases is a feature of ME style that writers often add almost meaningless phrases which are equivalent to 'certainly', 'doubtless', or 'indeed'. Some words, especially foreign words and names, have variable stress: Eneas usually has the main stress on the first syllable, but it can be on the second. During the ME period, some inflections died out and others became optional, like the -n inflections described above. Chaucer's metre is, however, a flexible and expressive iambic one: there is not necessarily a single 'right' way to interpret the pattern of stress in a line. As with later iambic pentameter verse in English, there is often a creative tension between strict metrical expectations and the natural speech rhythms and emphasis of the statement.
