Identifying, Categorising and Exploring ‘Ælfrician’ Vocabulary Using the Dictionary of Old English, A Thesaurus of Old English and Evoke

Ælfric of Eynsham (c.955×957–c.1010) is one of the most prominent authors of the Anglo-Saxon period. Despite this fact, there has not yet been an exhaustive study into his typical vocabulary. This article employs the Dictionary of Old English and prior scholarship in order to collect and categorise the lexis that is characteristic for his works. This vocabulary is then analysed using the web application Evoke together with A Thesaurus of Old English, which provides insights into the semantic domains that predominate in Ælfric’s vocabulary, as well as the degrees of ambiguity, synonymy and specificity of his typical lexis.

“Shall I (compare) compare thee?”

This paper presents the results of a corpus-based analysis of a special type of modification of the English (as) Adj as NP similes. The modification involves filling the property slot with a cognate noun-adjective compound, i.e., a compound adjective consisting of the original adjective and the noun representing the original source of comparison, and inserting a new source of comparison into the construction (red as blood vs blood-red as a raw steak). Our data come from three sources: the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), the iWeb Corpus, and material published on the Google website. Using quantitative methods we first explored whether there is a relationship between various distributional and formal features of the “original” as-similes and their likelihood of exhibiting this type of modification behavior. We then performed a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the semantic and, to a lesser extent, discourse-related features of authentic examples of this type of modification. Our results indicate that while these modifications are not abundant, the as-similes that have been found to modify in this way are significantly different from the as-similes that have been found not to modify in this way, on a number of formal and distributional features. The analysis of the semantic and discourse-related features of the modifications themselves revealed (i) the typical semantic domains of the three nominal entities featured in the modified simile: the original source, the new source, and the target, including the semantic fit among the domains of those entities; (ii) the typical semantic domains of the properties for which the three nominal entities are compared, including the semantic fit among the domains of those properties; and (iii) the typical text varieties accommodating these modifications. The latter results confirm, and to some extent elaborate on, some earlier findings about the semantic and discourse-related profiles of similes at large.

A Psycholinguistic Investigation into Diminutive Strategies in the East Franconian NP: Little Schnitzels Stay Big, but Little Crooks Become Nicer

Upper German dialects make heavy use of diminutive strategies, but little is known about the actual conceptual effects of those devices. This paper is the first to present two large-scale psycholinguistic experiments that investigate this issue in East Franconian, a dialect spoken in Bavaria. Franconian uses both the diminutive suffix -la and the quantifying construction a weng a lit. ‘a little bit a’ to modify noun phrases. Our first experiment shows that diminutization has no effect on conceptualization of magnitude: People do not think of a smaller/weaker/shorter etc. referent when the NP is modified by the morphological diminutive, the quantifying construction, or their combination. The second experiment involves gradable NPs and shows that, again, the morphological diminutive has no effect on how people conceptualize the degree to which a gradable nominal predicate holds; in contrast, a weng a reduces it significantly. These experiments suggest that diminutization does not have uniform effects across semantic domains, and our results act as a successful example of extending the avenue of cognitive psychology into dialectology with the active participation of a speaker community.*

Systèmes De Classification Nominale En Asie Du Sud-Est : Les Différentes Fonctions Des Morphèmes Classificatoires

This article focuses on classifiers, one system of the nominal classification domain which is found in Southeast Asian languages. One of the functions associated with classifiers is the categorization of the nominal lexicon according to the semantic characteristics of the referent. Unsurprisingly, classifiers in Southeast Asia are organized around the basic semantic domains of the different systems of nominal classification. Although the system of so-called ‘numeral’ classifiers, whose primary function is to quantify referents, is the best known and most widespread in Southeast Asia, classifiers can encode various functions according to the syntactic constructions in which they appear. In some languages, these morphemes compete with class terms, a second nominal classification system. Sometimes the same form may belong to several paradigms, thus recalling a well-known characteristic of South-East Asian languages: the polyfunctionalty of forms.

Universal and macro-areal patterns in the lexicon

This paper investigates universal and areal structures in the lexicon as manifested by colexification patterns in the semantic domains of perception and cognition, based on data from both small and large datasets. Using several methods, including weighted semantic maps, formal concept lattices, correlation analysis, and dimensionality reduction, we identify colexification patterns in the domains in question and evaluate the extent to which these patterns are specific to particular areas. This paper contributes to the methodology of investigating areal patterns in the lexicon, and identifies a number of cross-linguistic regularities and of area-specific properties in the structuring of lexicons.

Areal patterns and colexifications of colour terms in the languages of Africa

Of all the semantic domains, colour terms have attracted the largest amount of attention, notably from a typological point of view. However, there is much more to be discovered. A search of the cross-linguistic lexical database of African languages (RefLex) reveals several previously undetected areal colexification patterns and shared lexico-constructional patterns in a genetically balanced sample of 401 languages. In this paper, we illustrate several areal characteristics of colour terms: (i) the spread of an areal feature due to a common extra-linguistic setting (locust bean – Parkia biglobosa – as the lexical source of yellow); (ii) two convergence phenomena, one based on a shared lexico-constructional pattern including a term for water, and one based on shared colexifications (red and ripe vs. green and unripe); and (iii) an areal pattern of lexical diffusion of colour ideophones, a category which has thus far been considered difficult to borrow.

Term or Phrase Usage and Contextual Meaning: A Reexamination of Semantic Issues in Translation

It has been observed that “words do not have meanings but rather meanings have words.” But even more, words and phrases, usually thought of as the basic units of meaning, actually should be seen as having only usages within contexts. These contexts themselves are the elements of communication that activate mental and bodily states and processes, and can be properly thought of as the construal of meaning. Sometimes these contexts of usage are shaped by phonological or grammatical patterns (see B. Bergen), sometimes by sociological factors such as reciprocity (see E. Goffman), and of course most commonly by lexical (usually radial) patterns and categories (traditionally presented as “semantic domains”). Cognitive linguists (e.g., Lakoff, Turner) have been hinting at something like this for a long time, but a clear restatement of what constitutes semantics is overdue.

Linking Linguistic and Geographic Distance in Four Semantic Domains: Computational Geo-Analyses of Internal and External Factors in a Dialect Continuum

Dialectometry studies patterns of linguistic variation through correlations between geographic and aggregate measures of linguistic distance. However, aggregating smooths out the role of semantic characteristics, which have been shown to affect the distribution of lexical variants across dialects. Furthermore, although dialectologists have always been well-aware of other variables like population size, isolation and socio-demographic features, these characteristics are generally only included in dialectometric analyses afterwards for further interpretation of the results rather than as explanatory variables. This study showcases linear mixed-effects modelling as a method that is able to incorporate both language-external and language-internal factors as explanatory variables of linguistic variation in the Limburgish dialect continuum in Belgium and the Netherlands. Covering four semantic domains that vary in their degree of basic vs. cultural vocabulary and their degree of standardization, the study models linguistic distances using a combination of external (e.g., geographic distance, separation by water, population size) and internal (semantic density, salience) sources of variation. The results show that both external and internal factors contribute to variation, but that the exact role of each individual factor differs across semantic domains. These findings highlight the need to incorporate language-internal factors in studies on variation, as well as a need for more comprehensive analysis tools to help better understand its patterns.

On the Latin-Romance continuum in the Durham Account Rolls

This article provides an overview of the Romance-Latin continuum, inherent to the Durham Account Rolls (DAR), and contextualises the learning and teaching of French and Latin in medieval England: an understanding of the socio-historical context and the underlying pedagogical framework enables us to better assess the data presented in this article. In line with a detriment to the learning of French in the late 14th century and a progressive loss of linguistic competence, the definite article in these multilingual texts started to develop an independent course from its French model which is herein discussed. The parameters for identifying lexis as coming only from French, Latin, or both are also revisited. The occurrences in the DAR usually encompass a whole spectrum of possible morphological manifestations ranging from Latin to French. This article concludes with some notes on the main semantic domains to which Anglo-French contributed in the DAR.