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Many of the stories found in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer are adapted from other sources, a common practice amongst Medieval authors. But Chaucer often draws attention to his derivations by explicitly naming a source for the stories he uses. This strategy is employed in different ways. In Troilus and Criseyde, a false source is cited, but in the Clerk's Tale, Chaucer names the actual source of the story. In this thesis, identification and close examination of Chaucer's source materials reveal his changes to the derived texts, and an analysis of the role of the narrator in each case demonstrates the different narrative strategies he employs. Although Chaucer is clearly using different strategies in the two works, both raise questions about final authority over a text. These questions are the central issues explored in this thesis.

John R. Searle asks the following fundamental question at the beginning of Speech Acts: "What is the difference between saying something and meaning it and saying it without meaning it?" This dissertation demonstrates that Chaucer is interested in this same question and that his answer to it is essentially "modern." I show in a number of Chaucer's works, but primarily through a reading of the Friar's Tale, that Chaucer understands the intentional structure of all signs, based on the paradigm of language; that is, that signs are always simultaneously mind-related and world-related, that they possess what is called today a "three-level semantics." This semantics is at the heart of the dynamic play in Chaucer's poetry, and through it he is able to portray his characters psychologically. This being so, with Chaucer as an exemplar, this dissertation calls into question the widespread belief in a "medieval mentality" that is essentially "other" than a "modern mentality." / To support this argument in the context of medieval thought, I explain that Chaucer could have such a "modern" understanding of the psychological import of language by describing certain of the common, shared presuppositions and characteristics of medieval Judeo-Christian metaphysics: its thesis of intentionality, its personalism and existentialism, and its semiological nature. / The present study is of importance to Chaucerian studies in general because I argue that heretofore Chaucer's understanding of language has been inadequately, incorrectly, and confusedly described in terms of medieval nominalism and realism. Consequently, Chaucer has been seen as a nominalist thinker, a realist thinker or a combination of both. This dissertation lays these particular "Chaucers" to rest. I argue that Chaucer may be described as an "intentionalist realist," but the "realist" of this description is not identical with the "realism" of the scholastic debates on the nature of the universals. / This dissertation further suggests that the semantics which Chaucer consciously considers and exploits in his works on the level of language, speech and other human-directed signs may serve as a paradigm of a general Chaucerian "semantics" in an extended sense: Chaucer's understanding of a structure of meaning or logos of all reality. On an individual human level this translates into a structure whereby a medieval Christian may judge if a person, including his or her own self, is relating properly, or improperly, to other individuals, to other created things, and to God.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--New York University. / Bibliography: p. 141-148.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Lehigh University, 1997. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 222-233).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1990. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [291]-306).

Thesis--Zurich. / Contains extensive passages from Chaucer. Bibliography: p. 285-288.