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A Linguistic History of English

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The purpose of this volume is to outline the linguistic development of Old English (OE) phonology and morphology down to about AD  or so, and the development of OE syntax to the end of the OE period. This difference in periodization is dictated by the nature of the material at our disposal. OE phonology and morphology underwent significant changes—some of which are poorly recorded in the surviving documents but can be reconstructed with confidence from later sources—between about  and . There is little difference in the syntax between early and late OE texts, however, apart from some fairly small changes in the frequency of different constructions, and it therefore makes sense to treat OE syntax as a whole in a single chapter.
Throughout the volume the focus will be on the West Saxon (WS) dialect, again because of the nature of the material. Most OE documents, including virtually all examples of connected prose except for some short charters, are written in WS. In the phonology and morphology chapters the emphasis will be on early West Saxon (EWS), as dictated by the intended temporal coverage of that part of the volume; however, details of the development of other attested dialects up to about the same time will also be discussed. In the chapter on syntax no effort is made to distinguish between the dialects because there are few (if any) significant syntactic differences between them. It will be seen that the late West Saxon (LWS) works of Ælfric have provided most of the syntactic examples, simply because copious amounts of his writing survive and his syntax is generally clear and straightforward. Especially in the phonology and morphology chapters, ‘OE’ in this volume means WS except when stated otherwise or when WS forms are explicitly adduced.

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Detail Information

Series Title

A Linguistic History of English

Call Number

-

Publisher

United Kingdom : ., 2014

Collation

1-629

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

978-0-19-920784-8

Classification

NONE

Content Type

-

Media Type

-

Carrier Type

-

Edition

1st Edtion

Subject(s)

English Language

Specific Detail Info

-

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