Chaucers Canterbury Tales - Essay Example

Chaucer in his Canterbury tales employs different linguistic styles in his work. Word usage in the text has been made to have a rhyming scheme to make his work more interesting to the reader. His stories and speeches are poetic through the rhyming scheme. Through rhyming, Chaucer manages to artistically portray his work to the audience of the time. Chaucer uses a style that was more accepted at the time. A good example is found in the friar's tale, The words at the end of each of his sentences are corrupted to create a rhyming scheme for his audience. Contree in the first sentence is a corruption of the country. This word has been corrupted to rhyme with the word degree in the following line.

The arrangement of the rhyming scheme follows the contemporary poetry rhyming scheme of a dipodic meter or a, a, b, b, rhyming is perhaps one of the most common linguistic applications of Chaucer in his work. In nearly all of the Canterbury tales, Chaucer uses rhyme as an artistic tool. He even corrupts the words that were very common at the time. England is corrupt of England, which he does to maintain his rhyming scheme with his hand. The corruption of these words is done carefully to avoid the words from losing their original meaning and confusing his readers.

Chaucer relies on inflectional endings in his attempt to create rhyme and some order in his text. However, when it comes to conveying the meaning of the sentences, Chaucer relies on word order. Grammatical information is conveyed in word order instead of inflections and corruption of words. In the above quote, the grammatical information cannot be inferred from the corruption of words but from their arrangement. Well and Abundance can be inferred to mean well or wellness and abundance. The arrangement of the words gives the whole statement its meaning.

In the last sentence, as well as Olde as Yonge, the grammatical meaning of the statement can be inferred from the meaning of the words and not from the inflections of the sentences. This is an example of Chaucer’s artistic use of words.