Magdalena Bator - Böcker

So far, no comprehensive study of the obsolescence of Scandinavian loanwords in English has ever been published. This book remedies that situation, and presents an analysis of the causes of obsolescence of Scandinavian loanwords in English since the 15th century. The study has mainly been based on the Oxford English Dictionary and the Middle English Dictionary. Over 300 loanwords have been selected, grouped into semantic fields and analysed. To account for their disappearance, reasons such as the rivalry of synonyms, the exclusive use in local dialects, the disappearance of the referent as well as rare occurrence or phonological changes were investigated.

This study examines the range of culinary verbs found in the English culinary recipes of the 14th and 15th centuries. Altogether over 1500 recipes have been collected and over 100 verbs were selected for the research. They have been divided into three major semantic groups, i.e. verbs of cooking, cutting, and preparing. The analysis comprises such aspects as the origin of the verbs, rivalry of synonyms, context of usage and other criteria.

This volume is a selection of papers presented at the 9th International Conference on Middle English held at Wyższa Szkoła Filologiczna (Philological School of Higher Education) in Wrocław, Poland, from April 30 to May 3, 2015. The contributors cover a wide range of topics in the area of language and literature. The linguistic papers constitute the majority of contributions and focus on problems from phonology to grammar, semantics and pragmatics. The literary contributions discuss various aspects of Middle English texts.

This monograph offers an analysis of the lexical domain of beauty and other additional lexical domains that are figuratively used to refer to beauty, highlighting their central role in the Anglo-Saxon formulaic style. Using different methods from computational and cognitive linguistics, this study is aimed at determining the exact semantic value of these terms, detecting possible patterns of metaphorization and metonymization and identifying strategies behind their usage, ultimately determining how beauty was conceptualised and experienced in early Medieval England and in its literature. This research evidences the importance of this aesthetic idea in the Old English poetry and its aesthetic paradigm and revealing the core associations between beauty and other religious and social ideas.

The book provides the first comprehensive study of love and ethics in Middle English and Middle Scots poems written at the close of the Middle Ages by Geoffrey Chaucer, James I, Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, and Gavin Douglas. It shows that medieval poems often reveal a pattern in which an individual moves from selfish to selfless concerns, and how this movement is incited by love, while fulfilled through virtue. By taking into account the English and Scottish cultural contexts, as well as other traditions of writing, the book shows how the ideas on human well-being were disseminated and adjusted to meet cultural changes. In this, the book contributes to a discussion on what constitutes “mindful” or “virtuous” living, a discussion that is as relevant today as it was in the Middle Ages.

This monograph examines three aesthetic emotions in Ælfric’s Lives of Saints. Drawing on recent research on emotional communities, this research combines methods from Cognitive Sciences and other studies on early Medieval English language and literature in order to explore Ælfric’s usage of the terms in the lexical domain of amazement. The main aim of this study is to identify preferred modes of expression that would reveal a series of emotional rules in the context of Ælfric’s emotional community. Looking into Ælfric’s usage of this lexical domain and how he depicts emotion dynamics in these texts, this monograph shows how the emotion family of amazement is central to the hagiographical genre, and it highlights important emotion-regulation scripts that operate in these texts.

This monograph presents Old English renderings of Christian words found in interlinear glosses, especially the Gospels and the Psalter glosses. Nouns, adjectives, adverbs and verbs in biblical contexts are included through dialectal (Northumbrian, Mercian, and West Saxon) diachronic (early and late West Saxon) and idiolectal (i.e. scribal) comparison. By using interlinear glosses, the correspondence between the original Latin word and the Old English rendering can be recognised more clearly than in ordinary prose, and at the same time, a flexible choice of renderings can be seen in some contexts. The author shows which Old English words were chosen as renderings, while some Latin words were accepted without translation.

Preterite-present verbs and the Germanic weak preterite have already attracted considerable scholarly interest. Usually, however, they are treated separately. One of the aims of the present monograph is to illustrate the history of Germanic preterite-present verbs against a broader background, with special reference to six preterite-presents that developed into Present-Day English modal auxiliaries. Another aim is to draw a parallel between the weak preterite markers in the Germanic preterite-present and weak verbs, and show the evolution of English preterite -ed in a new light.Chapter 1 introduces the basic linguistic concepts and terms associated with ‘verb’. Verbs are discussed and exemplified in a diachronic and geographical perspective. The approach is aimed at drawing attention to the fact that ‘verb’ is an umbrella term for various linguistic phenomena. The remaining chapters deal with Germanic verbs. Chapter 2 shows the interplay between strong and weak verbs in the history of English, and presents paradigms and characteristics of Germanic preterite-present verbs in a broader perspective. Chapter 3 focuses on main semantic and morphosyntactic properties, as well as synchronic and diachronic tendencies in the evolution of six English preterite-present verbs. They developed into either core modal auxiliaries (can, could, may, might, must, shall, should), or marginal modal auxiliaries (ought and dare).