scholarly journals Echoes of Eriugena in the Old English Boethius

Neophilologus ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleni Ponirakis
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Mystical Traditions ◽  
Early English

AbstractThis article identifies a passage from Eriugena’s Periphyseon as a source for an interpolation in the Old English Boethius. The interpolation introduces an unambiguous reference to the Neoplatonic idea of reditus, the return of all created creatures to God. This is not the first such evidence of Neoplatonic ideas in Old English texts and the article explores the significance of this new identification as further evidence for the presence of eastern mystical traditions in early English monastic and courtly circles, challenging the idea that English mysticism began in the Middle English period.

Homorganic Cluster Lengthening, Pre-Cluster Shortening and Preference-based change in Early English

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-110
Author(s):  
William W. Kruger
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Consonant Clusters ◽  
Vowel Lengthening ◽  
High Vowels ◽  
Early English

Abstract This paper discusses the processes of Homorganic Cluster Lengthening (HCL) and Pre-Cluster Shortening (PCS) occurring in the late Old English and Early Middle English periods. These processes are responsible, respectively, for vowel-lengthening before voiced homorganic consonant clusters (OE bindan, feld, hund > LOE/EME bīnd, fēld, hūnd) and vowel shortening before other clusters (OE cēpte, fīfta, brōhte > ME kepte, fifte, brohte). This paper builds on reassessments of data by Minkova (2014) to contribute an account of HCL within the system of “preference laws” articulated by Vennemann (1988). This account attributes the motivation for HCL to preferences for syllable-internal transitions between nucleus and coda in order to explain the fine details of HCL; namely, the fact that HCL applies with higher frequency to high vowels followed nasals than to low/mid vowels and in a sporadic manner to front vowels followed by /l/ compared to back vowels. These differences are attributed to the application of the Coda and Nucleus Laws (Vennemann 1988: 25, 42), with additional proposals about the effect of velarization of /l/ in Old English, with comparison to PCS providing important context throughout.

Dative External Possessors in Early English

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia L. Allen
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Empirical Base ◽  
Case Marking ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Dative Case ◽  
English Syntax ◽  
Early English ◽  
Genitive Case

This book presents the results of a corpus-based case study of diachronic English syntax. Present Day English is in a minority of European languages in not having a productive dative external possessor construction. This construction, in which the possessor is in the dative case and behaves like an element of the sentence rather than part of the possessive phrase, was in variation with internal possessors in the genitive case in Old English, especially in expressions of inalienable possession. In Middle English, internal possessors became the only productive possibility. Previous studies of this development are not systematic enough to provide an empirical base for the hypotheses that have been put forward to explain the loss of external possessors in English, and these earlier studies do not make a crucial distinction among possessa in different grammatical relations. This book traces the use of dative external possessors in the texts of the Old and Early Middle English periods and explores how well the facts fit the major proposed explanations. A key finding is that the decline of the dative construction is visible within the Old English period and seems to have begun even before we have written records. Explanations that rely completely on developments in the Early Middle English period, such as the loss of case-marking distinctions, cannot account for this early decline. It does not appear that Celtic learners of Old English failed to learn the external possessor construction, but they may have precipitated the decrease in frequency in its use.

Pronominally headed relative clauses in early English

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
CYNTHIA L. ALLEN
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Simple Explanation ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Demonstrative Pronouns ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Early English

Present-day English is unlike Old English in not using singular demonstrative pronouns with anaphoric reference to human beings. This article adds to the contributions of Cole (2017) and Los & van Kemenade (2018) in our understanding of the factors determining the choice between personal and demonstrative pronouns in Old English by documenting the hitherto unexamined use of these pronouns as heads of relative clauses. It also traces how the singular demonstrative pronouns referring to humans retreated as heads of relative clauses in Early Middle English. A corpus-based study shows that third-person personal pronouns were unusual as heads of relative clauses in Old English and normally referred to specific individuals, while demonstratives were the pronouns of choice for generic reference but could also refer to specific individuals. The increased use of personal pronouns for generic reference is well underway in Early Middle English. While the retreat of the singular demonstrative pronouns to refer to humans in Early Middle English seems to have some connection with the reduced marking of feature distinctions in that period, a simple explanation in terms of loss of gender is untenable.

scholarly journals The Adversary or the Devil?: Semantic Analysis of Wiþer-Nouns in Old English

2020 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-137
Author(s):  
Marta Sylwanowicz ◽  
Anna Wojtyś
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Semantic Analysis ◽  
Evil Spirit ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
Diachronic Analysis ◽  
Early English ◽  
Lexical Field ◽  
The Devil

Abstract The examination of Old and Middle English religious lexis has attracted attention of many scholars. However, there are hardly any studies that would offer a comprehensive diachronic analysis of the terms denoting ‘Satan/(the)Devil’. The authors of the present study aim to fill this gap by conducting a systematic analysis of early English lexical field of ‘(the) evil spirit’, beginning with the analysis of Old English items that could potentially refer to ‘Satan/(the)Devil’ This paper discusses wiþer-nouns in Old English with the aim to verify which of them were applied with reference to ‘(the) evil spirit’. Thus, the texts compiled in the Dictionary of Old English Corpus have been searched for all the above-listed items. The identification of their uses has allowed us not only to determine the frequency of the words in question but also to specify whether the sense of ‘(the) evil spirit’ was core or peripheral for each lexeme.

scholarly journals “When That Wounds Are Evil Healed”: Revisiting Pleonastic That in Early English Medical Writing

2017 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-20
Author(s):  
Javier Calle Martín
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Medical Writing ◽  
Medical Texts ◽  
Progressive Decline ◽  
Demonstrative Pronoun ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early English

Abstract The origin of pleonastic that can be traced back to Old English, where it could appear in syntactic constructions consisting of a preposition + a demonstrative pronoun (i.e., for py pat, for pæm pe) or a subordinator (i.e., op pat). The diffusion of this pleonastic form is an Early Middle English development as a result of the standardization of that as the general subordinator in the period, which motivated its use as a pleonastic word in combination with many kinds of conjunctions (i.e., now that, if that, when that, etc.) and prepositions (i.e., before that, save that, in that) (Fischer 1992: 295). The phenomenon increased considerably in Late Middle English, declining rapidly in the 17th century to such an extent that it became virtually obliterated towards the end of that same century (Rissanen 1999: 303-304). The list of subordinating elements includes relativizers (i.e., this that), adverbial relatives (i.e., there that), and a number of subordinators (i.e., after, as, because, before, beside, for, if, since, sith, though, until, when, while, etc.). The present paper examines the status of pleonastic that in the history of English pursuing the following objectives: (a) to analyse its use and distribution in a corpus of early English medical writing (in the period 1375-1700); (b) to classify the construction in terms of genre, i.e., treatises and recipes; and (c) to assess its decline with the different conjunctive words. The data used as source of evidence come from The Corpus of Early English Medical Writing, i.e., Middle English Medical Texts (MEMT for the period 1375-1500) and Early Modern English Medical Texts (EMEMT for the period 1500-1700). The use of pleonastic that in medical writing allows us to reconsider the history of the construction in English, becoming in itself a Late Middle English phenomenon with its progressive decline throughout the 16th and 17th centuries.

Verbo-nominal constructions of necessity with þearf n. and need n.: competition and grammaticalization from OE to eModE

2010 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 373-397 ◽  
Author(s):  
LUCÍA LOUREIRO-PORTO
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
High Frequency ◽  
English Prose ◽  
Semantic Competition ◽  
History Of ◽  
Current Article ◽  
Early English ◽  
Nominal Sets

The evolution of verbs expressing necessity in the history of English, such as *þurfan and need, has been studied in detail, especially their semantic competition and their grammaticalization (see Molencki 2002, 2005; Taeymans 2006; Loureiro-Porto 2009). However, analogous verbo-nominal expressions involving the morphologically related nouns þearf and need and the verbs be and have have received little attention, despite their relevance as semantic competitors of the verbs and their subsequent fossilization in high-frequency expressions such as if need be and had need. The current article fills this gap by studying the development of verbo-nominal expressions with þearf and need from Old to early Modern English, and asks: (i) whether the verbs and the verbo-nominal expressions undergo similar processes of grammaticalization, and (ii) whether there is any connection between the evolution of the verbal and the verbo-nominal sets. Analysis of these verbo-nominal constructions in a 4.1 million-word corpus (including the Helsinki Corpus and fragments of the Dictionary of Old English Corpus, the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse, the Lampeter Corpus and the Corpus of Early English Correspondence Sampler) shows that, firstly, both idiomaticization and grammaticalization are relevant in the development of verbo-nominal constructions; secondly, their evolution is key to the understanding of the development of the necessity verbs *þurfan and need; and finally, the competition between constructions with þearf and need calls into question the well-known hypothesis that phonological confusion with durran caused the disappearance of *þurfan in the ME period (see Visser 1963–73: 1423, §1343).

Talking about MOTION in Middle English

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Huber
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The Other ◽  
Motion Verbs ◽  
Text Type ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
Contact Situation ◽  
Analysis Of Motion

Chapter 6 begins with an overview of the language contact situation with (Anglo-) French and Latin, resulting in large-scale borrowing in the Middle English period. The analysis of 465 Middle English verbs used to express intransitive motion shows that there are far more French/Latin loans in the path verbs than in the other motion verbs. The range of (new) manner of motion verbs testifies to the manner salience of Middle English: caused motion verbs are also found in intransitive motion meanings, as are French loans which do not have motion uses in continental French. Their motion uses in Anglo-Norman are discussed in terms of contact influence of Middle English. The analysis of motion expression in different texts yields a picture similar to the situation in Old English, with path typically expressed in satellites, and neutral as well as manner of motion verbs being most frequent, depending on text type.

scholarly journals Norse against Old English: 20-0

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anders Holmberg
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
West Germanic

The conclusion seems inescapable, if the facts in Emonds & Faarlund are more or less right: Middle English would be the outcome of a shift from West Germanic grammar to an eccentric form of North Germanic grammar.

Positive and negative face as descriptive categories in the history of English

2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 178-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas H. Jucker
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
General Trend ◽  
Clear Distinction ◽  
History Of ◽  
Negative Face

Studies in the history of politeness in English have generally relied on the notions of positive and negative face. While earlier work argued that a general trend from positive politeness to negative politeness can be observed, more recent work has shown that in Old English and in Middle English face concerns were not as important as in Modern English and that, in certain contexts, there are also opposing tendencies from negative to positive politeness. In this paper, I focus in more detail on the notions of positive and negative face and follow up earlier suggestions that for negative face a clear distinction must be made between deference politeness and non-imposition politeness. On this basis, I assess the usefulness of the notions of positive and negative face for the development of politeness in the history of English.

scholarly journals Middle English Medical Recipes: A Metadiscursive Approach

2009 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 21-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Quintana-Toledo
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Social Engagement ◽  
Medical Texts ◽  
Early English ◽  
Selection Of

Middle English Medical Recipes: A Metadiscursive Approach This paper seeks to explore Middle English medical recipes from a metadiscursive perspective. This study will draw on Hyland's (2005) metadiscourse model where code glosses, endophoric markers, evidentials, frame markers and transition markers are included in the interactive dimension, and attitude markers, boosters, engagement markers, hedges and self mention are to be found within interactional metadiscourse. I shall apply this framework for the identification and analysis of data in a corpus which comprises a selection of recipes taken from both Middle English Medical Texts (Taavitsainen - Pahta - Mäkinen 2005) and The corpus of early English recipes. The metadiscursive approach to the study of medical recipes will allow us to establish links between authors, texts and audience of the recipe genre and, consequently, to affirm their status as products of social engagement.

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