261 research outputs found
Timofeeva, Olga. 2022. Sociolinguistic Variation in Old English. Records of Communities of People. Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pp. xv + 204. ISBN 9789027211347.
No full textBook review of Timofeeva, Olga. 2022. Sociolinguistic Variation in Old English. Records of Communities of People. Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pp. xv + 204. ISBN 9789027211347
Sociolinguistic variation in Old English: records of communities and people Advances in historical sociolinguistics ;, v. 13./ Olga Timofeeva, University of Zurich.
No full textIncludes bibliographical references and indexes."This is the first extensive study of Old English to utilise the insights and methodologies of sociolinguistics. Building on previous philological and historical work, it takes into account the sociology and social dialectology of Old English and offers a description of its speech communities informed by the theory of social networks and communities of practice. Specifically, this book uses data from historical narratives and legal documents and examines the interplay of linguistic innovation, variation, and change with such sociolinguistic parameters as region, scribal office, gender, and social status. Special attention is given to the processes of supralocalisation and their correlation with periods of political centralisation in the history of Anglo-Saxon England"--1 online resource (xiv, 204 pages)
Introduction
No full textIntroduction to the article-collection Interfaces between Language and Culture in Medieval England: A Festschrift for Matti Kilpiö, ed. by Alaric Hall, Olga Timofeeva, Ágnes Kiricsi and Bethany Fox, The Northern World, 48 (Leiden: Brill, 2010). The article comments on the intellectual context of the collection and surveys its twelve articles, which promote the growing contacts between historical linguistics and medieval cultural studies. They fall into two groups. One examines the interrelation in Anglo-Saxon England between Latin and vernacular language and culture, investigating language-contact between Old English and Latin, the extent of Latinity in early medieval Britain, Anglo-Saxons' attitudes to Classical culture, and relationships between Anglo-Saxon and Continental Christian thought. Another group uses historical linguistics as a method in the wider cultural study of medieval England, examining syntactic change, dialect, translation and semantics to give us access to politeness, demography, and cultural constructions of colour, thought and time
Accommodation, dialect contact and grammatical variation: Verbs of obligation in the Anglophone community in Japan
No full textThe present study investigates dialect contact and linguistic accommodation in the use of verbs expressing obligation (such as MUST, HAVE GOT TO, HAVE TO and GOT TO) among native speakers of English resident in Japan, using a social network approach. Approximately 500 tokens were extracted from conversations between 39 native speakers of English from England, the US and New Zealand, recorded in single-nationality dyads, both immediately upon arrival in Japan and after a period of one year. Statistical analysis revealed that the informants from England actually diverged from the forms typically used by the Americans. The results, however, demonstrate the importance of social network strength in accounting for the consequences of dialect contact and short to medium-term linguistic accommodation
Non-finite constructions in Old English : with special reference to syntactic borrowing from Latin
No full textMy dissertation is a corpus-based study of non-finite constructions in Old English (OE). It revisits the question of Latin influence on the OE syntax, offering a new evaluation of syntactic interference between Latin and OE, and, more generally, of the contact situation in the OE period, drawing on methods used in studying grammaticalization and language contact.
I address three non-finite constructions: absolute participial construction, accusative-and-infinitive construction, and nominative-and-infinitive construction, exemplified respectively in present-day English as
- She looked like a pixie sometimes, her eyes darting here and there, forever watchful (BNC CCM 98); - My first acquaintance with her was when I heard her sing (BNC CFY 2215); - Charles the Bald was said to resemble his grandfather physically (BNC HPT 175).
This study compares data from translated texts against the background of original OE writings, establishing dependencies and differences between the two. Although the contrastive analysis of source and target texts is one of the major methods employed in the study, translation and translation strategies as such are only my secondary foci. The emphasis is rather on what source/target comparison can tell us about the OE non-finite syntax and the typological differences between Latin and OE in this domain, and on whether contact-induced change can originate in translation.
In terms of theoretical framework, I have adopted functional-typological approach, which rests on the principles of iconicity and event integration, and to the best of my knowledge, has not been applied systematically to OE non-finite constructions. Therefore one more aim of the dissertation is to test this framework and to see how OE fits into the cross-linguistic picture of non-finites.
My research corpus consists of two samples: 1) written OE closely dependent on the Latin originals, based on editions of two gloss texts, five translations, and Latin originals of these texts, representing four text types: hymns, religious regulations, homily/life narrative, and biblical narrative (180,622 words); and 2) written OE as far independent from Latin as possible, based on a selection from the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (YCOE) and representing five text types: laws, charters, correspondence, chronicle narrative, and homily/life narrative (274,757 words).Tämä tutkimus käsittelee englannin kielen historiaa, sen syntaksia sekä latinan kielen vaikutusta kielissä ja kulttuurissa
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