753 Middle English Whilom
3.1 Introduction
A reader of Middle English narrative, especially of Chaucer and Gower, will
certainly have noticed the formulaic use of the word whilom at the onset of
tales and stories. It is frequently translated with the phrase ‘once upon a time’
characteristic of folk tales in contemporary English. The function of whilom
is relatively unproblematic; like expressions such as it bifel that ‘it happened
that’(see Brinton 1996 ), it serves to initiate episodes within the narrative
structure. Furthermore, as Jucker and Taavitsainen ( 2013 ) note, whilom sets
“very clear genre- specifi c functions” (61): it functions as a “trigger of genre
expectations” (156), namely, that what is to follow is a narrative, particularly
a romance, but also a saint’s life, a chronicle, or a fabliau. Visser ( 1972 : 709)
observes that the use of whilom at the beginning of a story or tale is a way of
establishing the time- sphere of the tale (and thus, for example, allowing for
the use of the “historical present” tense). Burrows ( 2008 : 81) calls whilom
the “storyteller’s word.”^1 It functions, therefore, as a textual pragmatic marker
introducing and setting the scene for a narrative tale or episode.
This chapter investigates the development of whilom from its origin in Old
English as an adverb meaning ‘sometimes’ to its use as a pragmatic marker,
and beyond. The development of whilom can be compared to the better-
documented development of while. The early evolution of whilom , like that
of while , is consistent with the process grammaticalization, but then whilom
moves in an apparently contradictory direction, toward adjectival usage. The
question addressed here is whether, in the end, the development of whilom
represents a counterexample to the hypothesis of unidirectionality (from less to
more grammatical, or from major to minor word class) postulated in grammati-
calization studies or whether its development must be seen as lying outside the
bounds of grammaticalization altogether.
1 According to Burrows ( 2008 ), whilom means ‘once upon a time’ but “without the nursery
fl avour.”