diss freidok

Volum omagial – In memoriam Elena Petre, 2020

It is widely acknowledged that a considerable part of our everyday vocabulary derives from Old English, most of these words having different origins. Although many of them completely changed their spelling and some others developed or even modified their meaning, it is still obvious that they are the precursors of present-day English. Linguists were also able to establish, apart from the etymological stratification, a stylistic stratification of the Old English vocabulary. The purpose of this research is to illustrate these linguistic processes as inherent parts of today English. In order to achieve this goal, we will refer to the etymological layers of native Old English and the categories of Old English words from a stylistic point of view. Afterwards, the study of the multiple influences (Celtic, Latin, Scandinavian) on the Old English vocabulary will reveal the type of words that were borrowed, the reasons behind these semantic loans, the forms of alteration, and their impact as linguistic features of English nowadays.

2021

The Middle English period is well known as one of widespread lexical borrowing from French and Latin, and scholarly accounts traditionally assume that this influx of loanwords caused many native terms to shift in sense or to drop out of use entirely. The study analyses an extensive dataset, tracking patterns in lexical retention, replacement and semantic change, and comparing long-term outcomes for both native and non-native words. Our results challenge the conventional view of competition between existing terms and foreign incomers. They show that there were far fewer instances of relexification, and far more of synonymy, during the Middle English period than might have been expected. When retention rates for words first attested between 1100-1500 are compared, it is loanwords, not native terms, which are more likely to become obsolete at any point up to the nineteenth century. Furthermore, proportions of outcomes involving narrowing and broadening (often considered common outcomes...

2011

2006

This is a study of the vocabulary of poverty in early medieval English. It is a diachronic study in that the focus is the change in the vocabulary from Old English into early Middle English. However texts from different times within this span, different genres and geographical areas are presented as a series of slices so that the vocabularies of the particular texts can be compared. The starting point for the Acknowledgments 7

This book provides the reader with a description of the semantic change that took place over two periods of the history of English language: Middle English and Early Modern English. In view of the fact that semantic change is the type of change by which the relationship between language and society can be traced best, notes on the socio-historical background of the period have been included. They are followed by the analysis of language change in general in which some of the literature on the topic is reviewed and the author’s interpretation of change as being caused by external factors is made clear. For this reason, terminology and concepts relating to the field of socio-historical linguistics have been incorporated in the analysis. The core of the work is semantic change and the linguistic study of vocabulary items which belong to the field of person-rank nouns. The results of the analysis indicate a tendency towards specialisation in the meaning of lexical categories which runs parallel to specialisation in society.

Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics

Historical sociolinguistic enquiry into Old English is not a straightforward task, and compared with later periods of English, rather less research has been undertaken on the English of that period. There are several reasons for this difficulty, from the vagaries of textual survival to the restriction of literacy to a small ecclesiastical elite. Moreover, we have no ego documents; the vast majority of texts are anonymous, and in very many cases what survives consists of copies of manuscripts, rather than autographs by an author. To an extent, this situation results in the surviving data from the period being less amenable to historical sociolinguistic enquiry than documents from other periods. That is not to say that such "bad data" cannot be interrogated using historical sociolinguistic methods. It is a challenge which requires a good knowledge of the material and its circumstances of production in order to see how it can best be interrogated (Labov 1994: 11). Previous studies have demonstrated the successful implementation of sociolinguistic approaches, investigating the role of networks in the Benedictine Reform (Lenker 2000), the development of 'Winchester vocabulary' among this group and its adherents (Hofstetter 1987), or intra-writer variation among manuscript copyists (Wallis 2023). In spite of the challenges of working with what is in many ways a limited dataset, Old English is "a rich collection of genres, text types, registers and styles that still awaits its full sociolinguistic appreciation" (p. 3). Timofeeva tackles the difficulties of conducting a sociolinguistic analysis on Old English texts head on. Her solution is to focus on the data at the level of genre and register, and the communities of practice who engaged with the textsin this case, the people who produced and used legal administrative records such as writs, wills and diplomas. Thus, the present volume is not about the speakers of Old English, but specifically about the practices of a specific section of literate (in a broad sense) language users and their written registers in mono-, bi-and trilingual settings: "[t]he fact that the history of Old English is essentially a history of texts, registers, and genres in Old English cannot be overstated" (p. 19). The book's chapters fall into two sections. The first part, covering Chapters 1-3, lays the groundwork for the study. The first chapter discusses previous (socio)linguistic approaches to Old English, from linguistic, philological, archaeological and

2021

This is an Accepted Manuscript that has been published in [Current issues in medieval England] edited by [L. Vezzosi] in the series [Studies in English Medieval Language and Literature]. The original work can be found at: [https://www.peterlang.com/document/1069016]. © [copyright holder (in most cases this Peter Lang AG), 2021]. All rights reserved.This paper reports on a new project, Technical Language and Semantic Shift in Middle English which aims to address questions about why semantic shift, lexical and/or semantic obsolescence and replacement happen and to try to uncover patterns of narrowing, broadening, obsolescence and synonym co-existence at different levels of the lexical hierarchy. The data is based on the Middle English vocabulary for seven occupational domains collected for the Bilingual Thesaurus of Everyday Life in Medieval England, with the addition of two further domains representing the interests of the elite and professional classes. This paper offers three case ...

Early Modern Digital Review, 2019

Early Modern Digital Review materials are published under a CreativeCommons 4.0 license (CC BY 4.0) that permits the right to share (copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially) the material, provided that the author and source are credited. The full description of CC BY 4.0 can be found on creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

This journal article identifies two kinds of mismatch form-function in the formation of Old English adjectives. Convergent derivation is found when the meanings of derivatives converge in spite of the motivated morphological alternation that holds between their respective bases of derivation. Redundant derivation applies when an affix is attached that contributes the same meaning as another affix which has already been added to the base of derivation. The instances of convergent and redundant derivation analyzed in this work represent evidence in favour of the existence of two lexical layers in the Old English lexicon, namely the layer of affixless derivation and the layer of affixal derivation. The layer of affixless derivation, in turn, can be subdivided into the component of zero derivation proper and the component of derivation by inflectional means. Other conclusions of this research have to do with the patterns of recursive derivation in adjective formation, the insertion, combination and suppression of strong verb prefixes and the grammaticalization of -bǣre, -cund, -feald, -lēas, -lic,sum, -weard, -welle, -wende and -wīs.

York Papers in Linguistics, 2022

The study compares multiple Old English gospels in the 10th century (the northern Lindisfarne Gospels, the midlands Rushworth Gospels and the southern West Saxon Gospels) with a focus on the prepositional triplet mid-wið-against. Under the same Latin original, different scribes resorted to different dialectal realisations of these prepositions. Additional prepositional variance can also be observed in the Ælfrician text as opposed to the West Saxon Gospels. The result clearly indicates the existence of a marked dialectal variation, both inter-regionally and intra-regionally, in the late Old English period.