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Morphemic classification of Old English adverb subsets

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2016

R. A. Peters
R. A. Peters*
Affiliation:
Western Washington State College
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Extract

The description of Old English adverbs found in OE handbooks and grammars is the traditional Greco-Roman one based on function, namely a listing of words that function as modifiers of verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. The result is a morphological classification based on syntactic function.

In contrast, the classification of other OE parts of speech (verbs adjectives, pronouns, nouns) is based on paradigmatic sets marked by characteristic inflectional suffixes. One finds, therefore, inconsistency of classification and description. Whereas verbs, adjectives, pronouns, and nouns are identified as sets marked by morphemes of case, number, tense, etc., adverbs are identified as a set marked by function. However, it is possible to reclassify OE adverbs on a morphemic basis. This paper attempts to provide such an analysis, as well as a morphemic identification of characteristic subsets of OE adverbs.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , Fall 1967 , pp. 20 - 23
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1967

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References

1 OE constructions cited in this paper are taken from A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary by John R. Clark Hall with a supplement by Herbert D. Meritt, 4th ed. (Cambridge, 1960). The Late Southwestern (West Saxon) vowel phonemes used to describe those forms are from Kuhn, Sherman M., “On the Syllabic Phonemes of Old English,” Lang. 37 (1961), pp. 536-37 Google Scholar. The consonant phoneme /r/ is a trill. For the other consonant phonemes, see Moulton, W. G., “The Stops and Spirants of Early Germanic,” Lang. 30 (1954), pp. 1-42 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 One example is OE swēt-um, wherein the stem swēt-, a single base, is an allomorph of the lexical morpheme {‘sweet’}, and the inflectional suffix -um is an allomorph of the portmanteau case-number morpheme {dative plural}. Some OE portmanteau adjective suffixes also include gender, as in swēt-ne, wherein the inflectional suffix -ne is an allomorph of the morpheme {masculine accusative singular}.

3 As in the case of OE gōd ‘good,’ listed in traditional paradigms as genderless nominative singular, for which the alternatives are gōd (blank) or gōd + /ø/.

4 Hall-Meritt, p. 74.

5 For economy of presentation I have limited subsets largely to those in which stems = base + PoB of comparison, although prebases and other postbases occur, as in OE un-clœn-lic ‘unclean’ = PB + B + PoB.

6 OE /n/ = [ŋ] before /g/ or /k/.

7 The comparative construction lāss- in subset 4 does not contain a phonemically long stem-final consonant. For evidence of that view, see Peters, R. A., “Phonic and Phonemic Long Consonants in Old English,” Studies in Linguistics, Vol. 19 Google Scholar (forthcoming).