• Anchorites and abbreviations: a corpus study of abbreviations of Germanic and Romance lexicon in Ancrene Wisse

    Author(s):
    Alpo Seppo Santeri Honkapohja (see profile)
    Date:
    2019
    Subject(s):
    Manuscripts, Historical linguistics, Paleography, English language--Middle English, Corpora (Linguistics)
    Item Type:
    Book chapter
    Tag(s):
    manuscript abbrevitions, Ancrene Wisse, lexicology, early middle english, Manuscript studies, Palaeography, Middle English, Corpus linguistics
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/x1s6-k360
    Abstract:
    Manuscript abbreviations are a well-known feature of manuscript culture, which have mainly been studied qualitatively by palaeographers. The present study uses a quantitative corpus-based approach to examine how abbreviations are distributed in the etymologically Romance and Germanic lexicons during the early Middle English period (1150–1350), which saw many developments in the writing systems of English. It applies linear regression with effects coding on a dataset consisting of all the versions of Ancrene Wisse included in the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME). The results reveal a statistically significant distribution in which some abbreviations are used exclusively for Germanic words, some for Romance and some for both, proving that ‘Romance’ and ‘Germanic’ work as diagnostic categories. Further corpus searches reveal a group of abbreviations that are used almost exclusively in the West Midlands.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Book section     Show details
    Publisher:
    Peter Lang
    Pub. Date:
    2019
    Book Title:
    Current Explorations in Middle English
    Editor(s):
    Merja Stenroos, Martti Mäkinen, Kjetil V. Thengs, Oliver M. Traxel
    Version:
    prepring
    Page Range:
    35 - 64
    ISBN:
    978-3-631-78205-7
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    3 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved

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