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

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.

Functional and semantic development of the Middle English lexeme milde (Based on the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse)

This article focuses on the features of the functional and semantic development of the Middle English adjective milde, which in the studied period was a means of moral and ethical evaluation. Middle English written monuments of the XII–XV centuries both religious and secular serve as the material of the study.

Verb-final conjunct clauses in Old English prose

The aim of this study is to analyse intertextual differences in the use of V-final order in Old English conjunct clauses and to determine to what extent the source of these differences may be Latin influence. The analysis reveals that the frequency of V-final order in OE conjuncts is rather limited in most texts, and Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica surfaces as the text in which the frequency of V-final conjunct clauses is exceptionally high. The study shows that the regular use of V-final order in Bede may be interpreted as a translation effect, with Latin inflating the frequency of the pattern in conjunct clauses, which means that the frequency of V-final conjunct clauses in early OE translations may not reflect native tendencies.

DIASPORA AND IDENTITY IN NAIPAUL’S WORKS : A SELECT STUDY

“Write what you know” - this is the age-old advice said by someone to all the novelists. Surajprasad Naipaul, generally known as V. S. Naipaul, took it more seriously than others. Naipaul’s grandparents migrated from Uttar Pradesh India to Trinidad. His grandfather started working as an indentured laborer in the sugarcane estates there. They faced many problems regarding settlement and adjustment in this new cultural environment. That’s why Naipaul’s works are replete with the themes of diaspora. He applied his uniquely careful prose style to the point where the observer has called him the greatest living writer of English prose. Often known as the world’s writer, Naipaul is both one of the most highly regarded and one of the most controversial of contemporary writers. Much of his work deals with individuals who feel estranged from the societies. The present paper is an effort to analyze his select works based on diaspora and identity. Different characters in his fiction and non-fiction works seem to be in search of their identity in this world. Cultural-clash and hybridity, these twin themes, are also dominant in his works and I have tried to highlight all these diaspora-related issues in this paper.