The Monastic Rules of Visigothic Iberia - eTheses Repository ...

different idiolects, meaning that it is „heteroglossic‟. With each speech act, then, a speaker
identifies his audience and couches his language in the appropriate format, which is called his
„speech genre‟. Artistic expression, meanwhile, came from the „parodic‟, or rather
subversion or displacement of the normal constraints speech (Schmitz 2007).
This model is useful for various reasons. In the first instance, it recognises the
contextual and varying nature of language use: “What we call by the abstract name of
„language‟ really is a variety of different levels: literary and everyday usage, different forms
of language used in different professions and social strata, forms of language used in
historical periods” (Schmitz 2007: 67). In the second instance, it recognises that the speech
genre, in this case Isidore‟s sermo plebeius uel rusticus, is a conscious choice selected over
other options available: “Language is realized in the form of individual concrete utterances
(oral and written) by participants in the various areas of human activity. These utterances
reflect the specific conditions and goals of each such area not only through their content
(thematic) and linguistic style, that is, the selection of the lexical, phraseological, and
grammatical resources of the language, but above all through their compositional structure
[...] These we may call speech genres” (quoted in Verkholantsev (2008: 133)).
It seems clear, then, that there was some recognition of register on the part of Isidore
and an investigation begs the question of exactly what would have been „standard‟ language
for a writer such as him and Fructuosus; like Martin of Braga, who had to change his register
of speech, they clearly wrote their monastic rules in a different type of language when
compared to Classical Latin; the examples given in Chapter Four show that both were
capable of writing in a high register of language, but chose not to. However, the fact that
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