scholarly journals A corpus-based approach to the lemmatisation of Old English superlative adverbs

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yosra Hamdoun Bghiyel
Keyword(s):  
Pilot Study ◽  
Old English ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Lexical Database ◽  
Old English Poetry ◽  
English Prose ◽  
First Time

This article aims to discuss the lemmatisation process of Old English adverbs inflected for the superlative from a corpus-based perspective. This study has been conducted on the basis of a semi-automatic methodology through which the inflectional forms have been automatically extracted from The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose and The York Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Poetry whereas the task of assigning a lemma has been completed manually. The list of adverbial lemmas amounts to 1,755 and has been provided by the lexical database of Old English Nerthus. Additionally, the resulting lemmatised list has been checked against the lemmatised forms compiled by the Dictionary of Old English and Seelig’s (1930) work on Old English comparative and superlative adjectives and adverbs. Through this comparison, it has been possible to verify doubtful forms and incorporate new ones that are unattested by the YCOE. This pilot study has implemented for the first time a methodology for the lemmatisation of a non-verbal class and can be further applied to those categories that are still unlemmatised, namely nouns and adjectives.

Auxiliary and verbal inBeowulf

1980 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 157-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Bliss
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Poetic Tradition ◽  
Old English Poetry ◽  
English Prose

The principles of Old English prose syntax are on the whole well understood, but there is no general agreement about verse syntax. There are many reasons why verse syntax should differ, at least in some respects, from the syntax of prose. The Old English poetic tradition is known to have been conservative, and it is therefore possible that certain ancient syntactic patterns, obsolete in prose, might have survived in verse. The more ‘rhetorical’ purposes of verse might have made it necessary to call extensively on usages either rare or unknown in prose. Above all, the metre might have exercised such a constraint on the syntax that certain syntactic patterns could not be used at all, or could be used only in favourable circumstances. Such general considerations would no doubt be accepted as plausible by all students of Old English poetry, but there is still no agreement about how they may have operated in detail: the result is that any attempt to judge the style of an Anglo-Saxon poet is frustrated at every turn. It is impossible to tell how far his usage is the result of choice, how far the result of constraint; there is no way of judging how skilful he is in avoiding such constraint, or of assessing the ingenuity he exercises in saying what he wants to say in spite of the difficulties imposed by the metrical form; there is no way to tell how far his variations from prose usage are dictated by ‘rhetorical’ motives. Judgement is necessarily limited in this way until there is an agreed analysis of verse syntax.

Old English prose before and during the reign of Alfred

1988 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 93-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet M. Bately
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Old English ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Old English Poetry ◽  
English Prose

Old English poetry had its origins in the pagan continental past of the Anglo-Saxons. The development of an Old English literary prose is generally supposed to have taken place many centuries later in Christian England. According to a recent work by Michael Alexander, for instance.

Maxims in Old English Poetry (review)

Parergon ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 190-192
Author(s):  
Antonina Harbus
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Old English Poetry

The Concessive Relation in Old English Poetry

1955 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 518
Author(s):  
K. R. Brooks ◽  
Randolph Quirk
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Old English Poetry

Expanded lines in Old English poetry

Neophilologus ◽  
1951 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 226-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. J. Timmer
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Old English Poetry

XVII.—Recent Translations of Old English Poetry.

PMLA ◽  
1903 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 445-458
Author(s):  
James M. Garnett
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
The Other ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
William Morris ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Old English Poetry ◽  
The Past

The desire was expressed some years ago that we might soon have in English a collection of translations of Old English poetry that might fill the place so well filled in German by Grein's Dichtungen der Angelsachsen. This desire is now in a fair way of accomplishment, and much has been done during the past ten years, the period embraced in this paper. As was naturally to be expected from the work previously done in criticism of both text and subject-matter, Beowulf has attracted more than ever the thoughts and efforts of translators, for we had in 1892 the rhythmical translation of Professor J. Lesslie Hall and the prose version of Professor Earle; in 1895 (reprinted in cheaper form in 1898) the poetical translation of William Morris and A. J. Wyatt, the editor of Beowulf; in 1901 the prose version of Dr. J. R. Clark Hall, author of A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary; and only the other day, in 1902, the handy prose version of Professor C. B. Tinker.

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