Old English Semantic Field Studies

This book describes and analyzes all published, unpublished and in-progress studies of Old English semantic fields. Thirty-seven fields - such as gloom, nobility, sea and weapon terms - are examined for anyone interested in Anglo-Saxon England from virtually any perspective. The work also describes historical patterns in this area of scholarship and correlates related activity in modern literary criticism and semantics. It helps established scholars and beginners alike to know what has been written about a particular semantic field or segment of the Old English vocabulary and where to find the studies. It shows attempts by scholars over the decades to discover both basic definitions and lost nuances of the Old English, especially poetic, vocabulary and to refine our understanding of how the Anglo-Saxons perceived the world around them. We get a glimpse of a very rich vocabulary and increasingly skillful attempts by scholars to appreciate the intricacy and depth of Anglo-Saxon expression.

Studies in the Lexical Field of Expectation presents a classification by conceptual field of the vocabulary expressing the ideas in the semantic field of Expectation. The field divides into eleven categories including Surprise, Disappointment, Hope, Fear, Caution, Courage, and Rashness. The categories, subcategories of the field and the lexical items are ordered hierarchically and each sense is followed by its dates of usage. The book discusses the method and methodology of constructing the classification examining the delimitation of the field, the choice of headwords, the process of classifying the materials, and the use and presentation of grammatical information within a semantic classification. The proportions of loan words and native terms within each conceptual group are investigated and it examines the patterns of accessions and obsolescences across the centuries from Old English to the present day.

Blue in Old English represents the first thorough investigation of an area of the colour semantics of Old English, and the methodology developed for this study is believed to be appropriate for researching the colour semantics of any language which survives only in recorded texts. By means of a collection of in-depth word-studies, which suggest new interpretations of many well-known passages, an understanding of how blueness was described in Old English is developed. The approach is interdisciplinary, using evidence from subjects such as botany, manuscript illustration, etymology, early technologies, and others. The conclusion contradicts certain previously held views on Old English colour, and presents a hitherto obscured sociolinguistic picture of differing language use among various groups of Old English speakers.

From the contents: Maurizio GOTTI: The origin of 17th century canting terms. - Anne MCDERMOTT: Early dictionaries of English and historical corpora: in search of hard words. - Paivi KOIVISTO-ALANKO: Prototypes in semantic change: a diachronic perspective on abstract nouns. - Manuela ROMANO POZO: A morphodynamic interpretation of synonymy and polysemy in Old English."

This corpus-based study examines the lexical field of theft in the Anglo-Saxon law-codes and documents containing reports of lawsuits (charters, writs, and some chapters of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle). The individual Old English lexemes are analysed not only in terms of their meaning, collocation patterns, and Latin translations, but also, more unusually in a field-approach, with reference to their distribution over the various textual genres and the discourse strategies dominant in these. Although primarily linguistic in focus, a detailed description of the theft-offences and the wider context in which they occur should also be of interest to the historian.

The ancient Romans believed that the Gods sent signs of future events to them through the flight of birds, meteorological disturbances and other natural phenomena. These signs influenced every sphere of ancient life, both public and private, from a state's decision to go to war or make peace, hold an election or meet a public crisis to an individual's business, marriage or travel plans. The articles in this book illustrate how the various Roman divinatory techniques were inter-woven into the structures of ancient society as well as how they were used in literary contexts. The intriguing question of the alleged doublethink among Roman intellectuals in their attitude to Divination is an important theme taken up in this book.

This study comprises a colour semantic investigation into the greyness of Old English, forming a companion volume to the author's Blue in Old English (1997). The research is conducted by means of word-studies of graeg, har, hsau, and wylfen, and their context. The investigation makes use of etymology, literary studies, sociolinguistics, zoology, botany and ornithology, giving Anglo-Saxon' subtle use of grey to inspire a sense of the richly varied Anglo-Saxon world of frost, iron, ancient trees, stalking wolves, and hoary-headed saints and warriors.

The book examines the diachronic change of time perception throughout Anglo-Saxon England, with the conversion as a turning point. It draws evidence from a variety of sources, in particular from a close reading of Bede’s historical writings and his treatises on time, from Old English poetry, especially The Dream of the Rood, The Phoenix, The Wanderer, Beowulf, The Ruin, Deor, from the literature of the Alfredian period, and from the lexical and statistical analysis of Old English time words. It offers insights into the complexity of time in the Anglo-Saxon context, and shows how the change of time can help to understand the conceptual system of the Anglo-Saxons.