The restructuring of the Old English second weak verbal class: Evidence from late Northumbrian

Ramirez-Perez, Elisa 2023. The restructuring of the Old English second weak verbal class: Evidence from late Northumbrian. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

The Lindisfarne Gospels is one of the most renowned surviving Anglo-Saxon treasures. Not only is it a stunning codex, it is of great importance to the history of the English language because its interlinear glosses to the main Latin text constitute the first ever translation of the Holy Gospels into the English language. These glosses are written in the tenth-century late Northumbrian dialect of Old English. This dialect is also attested in the majority of the interlinear glosses to another early medieval codex, namely the Rushworth Gospels. These two sets of interlinear glosses inform this thesis. Earlier studies on the language of the Northumbrian glosses described them in a considerably negative fashion, highlighting that they did not conform to the expected (West-Saxon) grammar and, therefore, represented a problem to the study of Old English (Lindelöf 1927; Campbell 1959). More recent scholarship has taken a more sympathetic approach and has identified the peculiarities of the Northern dialect simply as specific grammatical features of this variant. What is remarkable about this dialect is that it attests to many linguistic innovations that are generally associated with the Middle English period. Thus, it can be claimed that the late Northumbrian dialect is closer to the grammatical system of Middle English than to that of any other contemporary Old English dialect. The present thesis thoroughly investigates one such innovation, namely the loss of the characteristic -i- stem formative in weak class 2 verbs. To this end, I first introduce the research questions tackled by this thesis in the Introduction. Chapter 2 provides the necessary historical and linguistic background to the late Northumbrian glosses, in an attempt to position my study in its socio-historical context. Given the focus on late Northumbrian verbal morphology in this thesis, chapter 3 includes the main theoretical framework, and chapter 4 covers the methodological approach followed. The results of the several statistical (regression) analyses are presented in chapter 5, where the main factors conditioning the loss of the -i- formative are identified: frequency, etymological class, and structure of the following segment. The results obtained and the factors identified in chapter 5 are discussed in great detail in chapter 6, where I argue that the loss of the -i- formative in weak class 2 verbs is a conceptually and analogically motivated change conditioned by several factors and lexically spreading in late Northumbrian via the low frequency verbs.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics
Funders:	South, West and Wales DTP (AHRC)
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	2 January 2024
Last Modified:	21 Dec 2024 02:30
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/165028

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