ATLANTIS 25.1 (June 2003): 29-38 ISSN 0210-6124

Lexical and Non-Lexical Linguistic Variation in the Vocabulary of Old English

Javier E. Díaz Vera Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha [email protected]

This paper deals with different theoretical aspects of lexical variation and change. More exactly, I will focus here on the analysis of some of the different ways lexical and non-lexical linguistic variation can interact over long periods of time. My analysis is based on the Functional-Lexematic Model, which conceives the lexicon of a language as a grammar. Its central unit of description is the word, which appears with all its syntactic, morphological, semantic and pragmatic properties. Macrostructurally, predicates are interconnected by cohesive, associative and encyclopaedic functions, forming what has been called the “semantic architecture of the lexicon.” I will deal here with three basic concepts of lexical analysis and their applications to the historical vocabulary of English: (1) word-frequency, (2) syntactic variation, and (3) lexical productivity. I will argue that the relative position of an Anglo-Saxon lexeme within the semantic architecture of OE can be calculated in terms of—at least—the following three diffferent types of variation: onomasiological, syntactic and morphological-derivational. Since defining a verb means locating it in semantic space, the resulting hierarchical ordering into lexical domains and subdomains implies a reliable reconstruction of the mental lexicon of the Anglo-Saxons. In doing so, I will try to show how these easily observable variational phenomena can be used in order to compensate for the shortcomings of historical lexicology and semantics.

1. Introduction

In this paper, I am going to analyze some of the different ways lexical and non-lexical types of linguistic variation interact over long periods of time, with special attention to the early history of English.1 My approach is mainly lexicographic, in that this research is based on day-to-day observation and analysis of the information contained in different types of dictionaries of the English language, both historical and non-historical, semasiological and onomasiological, bilingual and monolingual, general and specialized. In fact, the primary source of inspiration for this paper is to be found in my earlier work on the compilation of a formalized grammatical lexicon of Old English (henceforth OE) and Old Norse verbs, organized onomasiologically in semantic hierarchies (Díaz Vera 2002). Within this ongoing project, we are trying to apply some of the methodological principles of the so-called Functional-Lexematic Model (hence FLM) (Faber and Mairal

1. This paper is part of the research project “GermaLex: Diccionario onomasiológico contrastivo del léxico verbal de las lenguas germánicas antiguas” (MCyT BFF2001-0921). 30 Javier E. Díaz Vera

Usón 1999) to the analysis of the historical lexicon of English. In order to do so, we have adapted some of the basic principles of lexical description formulated by the FLM to the analysis of the lexicon of past states of language. Through the careful observation of the overall functioning of the verbal lexicon of Present-Day English (henceforth PDE), we have been able to formulate a set of theoretical statements whose application to our lexicographic approach to the vocabulary found in Anglo-Saxon texts has proved extremely useful. To put it in Labovian terms, my main interest is in how to use the present to explain the past, so that I will focus on the application of the theoretical findings of the synchronic version of the FLM to the lexical analysis of past states of language.

2. Lexical and non-lexical variation in the FLM, synchronic and diachronic

To start with, I will briefly introduce some of the basic principles of the synchronic version of the FLM, with special attention to its concept of linguistic variation. In the FLM, the lexicon of a language is conceived of as a grammar. Its central unit of description is the word, which appears with all its syntactic, morphological, semantic and pragmatic properties (Faber and Mairal Usón 1999: 57). Macrostructurally, predicates are interconnected by cohesive, associative and encyclopaedic functions, forming what has been called the “semantic architecture of the lexicon” (Faber 1994; Díaz Vera 2002). The term lexical domain is used to refer to the highest level of onomasiological organization within the FLM. A lexical domain is constituted by the set of lexemes which together lexicalize all or part of a conceptual domain. Lexical domains are further organ- ized in a network of subdomains, i.e. meaningful sets of lexemes within a lexical domain, which form the basis of its internal structure and focus on a particular area of meaning. For example, the set of English verbal predicates included under the lexical domain of possession “to have something” (e.g. have) can be grouped together in smaller subdomains or subareas of meaning, such as “to come to have something” (e.g. get, obtain), “to continue to have something” (e.g. keep, save), “to stop having something” (e.g. lose) or “to cause somebody or something to have something” (e.g. give). In turn, these subdomains may be further divided into smaller semantic areas. Each domain or subdomain has a superordinate term, the genus, by means of which its troponyms are directly or indirectly defined. Following the previous example, we can affirm that the ultimate genus of the English domain of possession is the verb to have, which will appear in a more or less direct way in the individual definitions of each lexical item within this domain. Similarly, to get is the genus of the subdomain “to come to have something,” so that every lexical member of this lexical group will we defined by means of it (e.g. take, gain, receive, collect, recover). Furthermore, these predicates instantiate new lexical subdomains, whose members are defined in terms of a common genus. Meaning definitions include a second type of semantic information, referred to as differentiae, which distinguishes a lexeme from others in the same lexical domain.

2.1. Onomasiological variation: the role of word-frequency in historical lexicography

I will now concentrate on the set of relationships that can be established between a genus and its troponyms in terms of lexico-semantic and morphosyntactic variation. To start Lexical and Non-Lexical Linguistic Variation in the Vocabulary of Old English 31 with, as has been noted above, the semantic area covered by a genus must include all its troponyms, so that semantic predicates with archilexematic status are the most general ones within their corresponding categories. For examples, PDE to get includes in its definition such predicates as to gain, to buy or to obtain, whereas to obtain includes the more specific terms to procure and to acquire. Broadly speaking, we can argue that, whereas the use of the most specific terms within each category depends frequently on stylistic and sociolinguistic factors, archilexematic predicates are found much more frequently in general language. In order to illustrate this tendency, I will analyze the distribution of two couples of near-synonyms in the Brown Corpus (which includes samples of 15 categories of American English texts from the early 1960s). The lexical couples under scrutiny are composed of PDE to obtain “to get something as a result of work/planning” plus one of its troponyms, either to acquire or to procure. As can be seen here, PDE to obtain is used much more frequently than to acquire in all the genres represented in this corpus.2 The relative frequency of PDE to acquire is relevant (that is, over 40%) only in two of the textual categories analyzed here, skills and hobbies and belles lettres. In order to interpret this distribution, I will argue here that all the texts included under these two categories have in common their reader-oriented character. Broadly speaking, these texts consist of instructional treatises, so that the writer’s message must be efficiently decoded by the reader. This implies that different lexemes will be used in order to express apparently insignificant semantic nuances, avoiding polysemy and ambiguity.

Press Learned Govern- Religion Popular Skills and Belles ment Lore hobbies lettres to 0.82 0.81 0.79 0.67 0.65 0.59 0.50 obtain [23] [70] [31] [2] [15] [13] [12] to 0.18 0.19 0.21 0.33 0.35 0.41 0.50 acquire [5] [16] [8] [1] [8] [9] [12]

The analysis of the couple to obtain/to procure is still more revealing, in that it shows clearly that the use of the more specific predicate is restricted to the most reader-oriented category within this set.

Press Learned Govern- Religion Popular Skills and Belles ment Lore hobbies lettres to 1.00 1.00 0.97 1.00 1.00 1.00 0.70 obtain [23] [70] [31] [2] [15] [13] [12] to 0.00 0.00 0.03 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.30 procure [1] [5]

These two calculations indicate that, given a corpus of general language use, archi- lexematic predicates are used more frequently than their troponyms. More importantly,

2. Only in the set of texts labelled as “Belles lettres” these two verbs are used with the same frequency. 32 Javier E. Díaz Vera the selection of the more specific predicates by the speaker or writer seems to correlate with textual factors, allowing a variationist approach to this type of onomasiological variation. The word-frequency criterion has influenced OE lexicography in different ways. On the one hand, a preliminary application of this basic principle can be found in Roberts and Kay’s Thesaurus of Old English (TOE, 1995). Using the information given by dictionaries of OE, the compilers of the TOE have included simple references to word-frequency (very infrequent words are flagged with o) and textual category (flag p for words that appear only in poetry, and flag g for words used generally as glosses of Latin texts). On the other hand, word-frequency has become one of the overriding principles in the editing of the Dictionary of Old English (Amos and Healy 1986). In our lexicographic approach to OE, word-frequency is used as a preliminary indicator of archilexematic status, so that it is applied exclusively to couples or sets of lexemes belonging to the same lexical subdomain, and traditionally treated by modern lexicographers of OE as synonyms or near-synonyms. What we argue is that, given a set of OE lexemes that form a lexical subdomain, the most general predicate will tend to appear more frequently than its troponyms and its usage will be more or less regular through different textual types. By way of illustration, we can have a look at the following set of OE verbs of light, which the compilers of the TOE (141) have arranged alpha- betically as a compact set of synonyms:

To shine: ascinan, beorhtian, (ge)bierhtan, blic(i)ang, gladian, (ge)lihtan, lymano, onlihtan, (ge)scinan

Using the Dictionary of Old English Corpus, I have calculated the relative frequencies of these nine lexical items. According to my calculation, OE (ge)scinan is by far the most frequently used verb of light in OE texts (143 occurrences, corresponding to 38.23%), whereas, as one might expect, the flagged items OE blic(i)ang and OE lymano occupy the lowest positions (with one single instance each, amounting to 0.26%). According to our observations of the overall functioning of PDE predicates, we could argue that OEscinan is the most general verb within this group, acting as the genus in the definitions of the remaining predicates of light. However, the application of this onomasiological principle to historical lexicography is not free from complications, insofar as our corpus of OE is small and probably not representative enough of the lexicon of the Anglo-Saxons. In spite of this, rather than denying the validity of word-frequency as a lexical research tool for the calculation of degrees of semantic coverage, I will try to show here that, by analyzing and combining different types of linguistic variation in our limited corpus of Anglo-Saxon texts, we can get a highly reliable picture of the hierarchical onomasiological structure of OE.

2.2. Syntactic variation and lexical membership

As has been seen before, all the predicates included in the same lexical subdomain can be defined in terms of the same genus. This tendency is formulated in the so-called Principle of Lexical Domain Membership (Faber and Mairal Usón 1999: 87): Lexical and Non-Lexical Linguistic Variation in the Vocabulary of Old English 33

Principle of Lexical Domain Membership: Lexical domain membership is deter- mined by the genus, which constitutes the nucleus of the meaning of a lexeme

In order to apply this principle to the lexical analysis of OE, it should be remembered here that our interpretations of the meaning of each individual lexical item must rely almost exclusively on the definitions developed by previous lexicographers of that language. Contrary to PDE dictionaries, OE dictionaries (e.g. Bosworth and Toller 1898, Hall 1960) do not normally offer full definitions of each lexical item, from which one could extract different types of semantic and grammatical information. Rather, historical dictionaries of English can be described as bilingual dictionaries, insofar as the lexicographic defini- tions they include are simple approximate translations of each OE lexical item into Modern English. In the TOE, Roberts and Kay have used the translations offered by Old English alphabetical dictionaries in order to propose an onomasiological arrangement of the bulk of Anglo-Saxon lexemes. By turning Hall’s A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (1960) and its supplements inside out (Roberts and Kay 1995: xvi), the compilers of the TOE have assigned OE lexemes to semantic groups and subgroups, following a mechanism of semantic clustering that vaguely resembles the principle of lexical domain membership described above. However, whereas in the TOE words are ascribed to semantic areas on the basis of their sharing any meaning component, the FLM postulates that lexemes can be grouped on the basis of a common core meaning. Given the limits that result from a paradigmatic analysis alone in historical lexicology, linguistic variation can be used as a source of information on the configuration of lexical domains and subdomains. More exactly, I will analyze now some of the different ways syntax can be used in order to throw light on some problematic issues related to the classification of OE verbal predicates into lexical subdomains. Within the FLM, it has been observed that the members of each lexical subdomain are interrelated not only by means of their common genus, but also by a similar syntactic behaviour, i.e. they share one or more syntactic complementation patterns. The syntax of each individual predicate is conceived of as being motivated by the lexical subdomain to which the predicate in question belongs. For example, the onomasiological arrangement proposed in the TOE for OE verbs of sensation, perception, feeling (02.05, 64–79) includes the subdivisions shown in Table 1 below. Although the existence of semantic connections between these ten semantic categories is quite evident, our syntactic analysis of a representative number of predicates from each category indicates that these semantic links are not strong enough to be conceived a compact lexical domain. To start with, OE verbs of perception share at least one of the two basic syntactic complementation patterns inherited from ProtoGermanic, namely NPACC and NPGEN (with a Human participant in the role of subject/experiencer). This implies that all the intransitive predicates in 02.05.01 to 02.05.05 can be automatically excluded from this category, so that our lexical domain perception will be composed of five basic subdomains, corresponding to the five human senses: touching, tasting, smelling, seeing and hearing. Furthermore, TOE 02.05.10 faculty of hearing includes the subcategories in Table 2. Rather than focusing on the faculty of hearing, this is a classifica- tion of different types of sounds, from uproar to whistle. Once again, the semantic link 34 Javier E. Díaz Vera between noise and the faculty of hearing is more than obvious. However, it should be noticed that most of the verbs included under these headings do not admit any of the two syntactic patterns described above for OE verbs of perception, so that, in our opinion, they should be included in another lexical domain, i.e. sound.

02.05. Sensation, perception, feeling 02.05.01. Without feeling, insensible 02.05.02. Consciousness 02.05.03. Exhaustion, faintness, weariness 02.05.04. Sleepiness, drowsiness, sleep 02.05.05. Desire, appetite 02.05.06. Sense of touch 02.05.07. Faculty of taste 02.05.08. Faculty of smell 02.05.09. Faculty of sight 02.05.10. Faculty of hearing

Table 1

02.05.10 Faculty of hearing 02.05.10.01. Thing heard 02.05.10.02. Noise, din 02.05.10.03. Noise, tumult, uproar 02.05.10.04. To resound 02.05.10.05. Roaring, raging 02.05.10.06. Harsh sound 02.05.10.07. A crashing, noise 02.05.10.08. A crackling, rustling 02.05.10.09. A hissing, whistling 02.05.10.10. Clattering, noise

Table 2

2.3. Syntactic variation and semantic coverage

In the FLM, defining a predicate means locating it in semantic space. Once lexical items have been grouped into lexical domains and subdomains, we must be able to reconstruct their relative position within the corresponding category, elaborating lexical hierarchies where semantically related lexemes are ordered according to their semantic space and relative location within a subdomain. The analysis of the verbal lexicon in PDE leads to an interesting conclusion, that the hierarchical semantic ordering of lexemes correlates with a systematic distribution of their syntactic configuration. This basic principle of the synchronic version of the FLM (Faber and Mairal Usón 1994: 210–11) has been formulated in terms of the so-called Lexical Iconicity Principle: Lexical and Non-Lexical Linguistic Variation in the Vocabulary of Old English 35

Lexical Iconicity Principle: The greater the semantic coverage of a lexeme is, the greater its syntactic variation.

Syntactic variation is to be understood here as the number of complementation patterns admitted by a verbal predicate. The superordinate term within each subdomain tends to take a greater number of complementation patterns than its more specific troponyms. Cortés Rodríguez and Mairal Usón (2002) have adapted this principle to the analysis of the lexicon of past states of the language, proposing the following reinterpretation of the lexical iconicity principle (provisionally called “Beta-Reading” 20–21):

Lexical Iconicity Principle (“Beta-Reading”): The greater the syntactic coverage of a lexical unit, the higher its position in the semantic hierarchy within a given subdomain

This new interpretation introduces “a reorganization of both the semantic and the syntactic component in the sense that it is now syntax that determines the semantic space and location in a subdomain” (21). According to this new principle, we can expect that:

1. Syntactic variation compensates for the shortcomings of a semantic analysis.

2. Syntactic patterning allows us to articulate not only configurational structure within domains, but also to assign verbal predicates to lexical classes.

Let us have a look, for example, at the following list of OE verbs of touching (Díaz Vera 2002). As we can see from their dictionary translations into Modern English, these predicates are treated as a compact group of synonyms with the general meaning “to touch” (see also TOE 68, for the resulting onomasiological arrangement):

Bosworth and Toller (1898) Hall (1960) grapian To grope, touch, feel with the hands To touch, grope hrepian To touch To touch hrinan To touch To touch tacan on To touch (Toller 1921) To touch (ge)tillan To touch To touch Table 3: Dictionary translations of OE verbs of touching

In order to rearrange these five verbs according to their degree of salience, trying to establish which word was preferred by OE speakers to refer to this particular action, I have calculated the degree of syntactic variation of each predicate with the results shown in Table 4 below. My analysis clearly indicates two different things. Firstly, it has been seen that OE verbs of touching share at least one of the two basic complementation patterns, NPACC or PP, 36 Javier E. Díaz Vera which act as indicators of lexical membership for this set of words. Secondly, given its higher degree of lexical variation, we have been able to identify OE hrinan as the most general predicate within this lexical group, so that it can be considered the subdomain genus.

No. of Inventory Verb cp’s of cp’s Examples

NPACC [PPs: 085900 (104.13)] Ne sceolon ge mine þa halgan hrinan lit. You should not touch my holy god

NPGEN [GenA,B: 022100 (614)] Nu þu his hrinan meaht. lit. Now you may touch it. hrinan 4

NPDAT [MtGl (Ru): 067300 (20.34)] Se hælend & hran egum heora lit. The Saviour touched their eyes

PPæt [Beo: 062500 (2267)] Oþ ðæt deaþes folm hran æt heortan lit. Until the hand of death touched at the heart o/ [Beo: 057700 (2081)] He mægnes rof min costode, grapode gearofolm lit. he made proof of me, groped out ready-handed grapian 2 NPACC [ÆCHom II, 10: 001400 (82.39)] Se cuma his cneow grapode. mid his halwendum handum lit. The stranger touched his knee with his healing hands

hrepian 1NPACC [ÆCHom I, 8: 002100 (242.30)] Moyses æ forbead to hreppene ænigne hreoflan lit. The law of Moses forbade to touch any leper

(ge)tillan 1NPACC [BenR: 019800 (7.23.1)] Gif we þone hrof ðære healican eaðmodnesse getillan willaþ lit. If we want to touch the roof of holy humility

tacan 1PPon [LS 29 (Nicholas): 011200 (273)] Sona swa þæt ele toc on þæt wæter, þa aras þær upp swiðe mycel fyr lit. As soon as the oil touched on the water, there arose a great fire Table 4: OE verbs of touching: degrees of syntactic variation.

2.4. Lexical productivity

Our reconstruction of different lexical domains and subdomains in OE has led to other interesting findings about lexical organization and onomasiological salience. To start with, I will make reference to what I have called the Lexical Derivational Principle, which implies that, broadly speaking, the higher positions within a given semantic hierarchy are normally occupied by underived verbs that frequently serve as a basis for the creation of new derived words. This tendency has been captured in the following principle: Lexical and Non-Lexical Linguistic Variation in the Vocabulary of Old English 37

Lexical Derivational Principle: The greater the semantic coverage of a lexeme is, the greater its number of derivational formations (Díaz Vera 2002: 55–56).

The rationale behind this definition is as follows. A predicate is onomasiologically stronger than its hyponyms if it is a likely choice for the derivation of new lexemes within its lexical subdomain. I will now apply this principle to our previous list of OE verbs of touching. In order to calculate the relative degree of lexical productivity of a lexeme, I have made the following list, which includes all the lexemes derived from these five predicates:

Lexical productivity (lp) OE verb Verb Noun Adjective Total grapian agrapian grapung grapigendlic 5 hrepian ahrepian hrepung ungehrepod 4 ahrinan hrine ungehrinen 14 hrinan andhrinan hrining æthrinan æthrine gehrinan handhrine onhrinan hrinenes oþhrinan gehrinenes onhrine tacan —— — 0 tillan atillan ——2 getillan Total 13 9 3 25 Table 5: OE verbs of touching: degrees of lexical productivity

The degree of lexical productivity of a lexeme is the number of lexemes derived from it divided by the cumulative number of derived lexemes calculated for all the members of its same lexical subdomain. Thus, given our corpus of OE texts, the lexical productivity degree of an item like OE hrinan can be calculated by counting how many times it has been used to create new words (i.e. 14) and then comparing our result to the total number of lexemes derived from the whole set of predicates that form the Old English subdomain of touching (i.e. 25, so that 14/25 = 56.00%). In fact, one could claim that as long as we move down the semantic scale, from the most general to the most specific term, the number of semantic specifications that can be expressed through lexical derivation from a single lexical root decreases (Díaz Vera 1999: 80).3

3. The correlation between onomasiological variation, frequency of usage and number of derived word-forms has been ascertained in other languages. For example, Inoue (2001: 44-72 and personal communication) demonstrates that, according to the evidence provided by the Linguistic Atlas of Japan, words with a higher frequency of usage are preferred by speakers of Japanese in order to derive new words. 38 Javier E. Díaz Vera

3. Conclusions

According to the principles defined above, the relative position of an Anglo-Saxon lexeme within the semantic architecture of OE can be calculated in terms of, at least, the following three different types of variation: onomasiological, syntactic and morphological- derivational. Since defining a verb means locating it in semantic space, the resulting hierarchical ordering into lexical domains and subdomains implies a reliable reconstruc- tion of the mental lexicon of the Anglo-Saxons. Much more importantly, I have tried to show how these easily observable variational phenomena can be used in order to compensate for the shortcomings of historical lexicology and semantics.

Works Cited

Amos, A. C., and A. P. Healey 1986: Dictionary of Old English. Toronto: U of Toronto P. (Continuing microfiche publication.) Bosworth, Joseph, and T. Northcote Toller 1972 (1898): An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. London: Oxford UP. Cortés Rodríguez, Francisco J., and Ricardo Mairal Usón 2002: “A Preliminary Design for a Syntactic Dictionary of Old English on Semantic Principles.” A Changing World of Words: Studies in English Historical Lexicography, Lexicology, and Semantics. Ed. Javier E. Díaz Vera. New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi. 3–46. Díaz Vera, Javier E. 1999: “Remembering in Old English: The Diachronic Reconstruction of a Verbal Dimension.” Atlantis 23: 5–25. ——— 2002: “The Semantic Architecture of the Old English Verbal Lexicon: A Historical- Lexicographical Proposal.” A Changing World of Words: Studies in English Historical Lexicography, Lexicology and Semantics. Ed. Javier E. Díaz Vera. New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi. 47–77. Faber, Pamela. 1994: “The Semantic Architecture of the Lexicon.” Symposium on Lexicography IV. Proceedings on the 3rd. International Symposium on Lexicography. Ed. K. Hyldgaard-Jensen and V. Hjørnager Pedersen. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer. 37–50. ——— and Ricardo Mairal Usón 1994: “Methodological Underpinnings for the Construction of a Functional Lexicological Model.” Miscelánea 15: 193–217. ——— and Ricardo Mairal Usón 1999: Constructing a Lexicon of English Verbs. Berlin and New York: Mouton. Hall, J. R. Clark 1960: A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. Toronto: U of Toronto P. Inoue, Fumio 2001: Keiryoteki Hogen Kukau [Quantitative Dialect Classification]. Tokyo: Meiji Shoin. Roberts, Jane, and Christian Kay 1995: A Thesaurus of Old English. London: Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies. Toller, T. Northcote 1921: An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary: Supplement . Oxford: Oxford UP.