ARTICLE
TITLE

The morphological and semantic types of Old English lost adjectives

SUMMARY

The aim of this article is to provide a morphological and semantic analysis of the ca. 4,800 Old English adjectives that, having got lost throughout linguistic evolution, are not included in the Oxford English Dictionary. On the morphological side, the category and inflectional class of the base of derivation as well as the affixes and the type of derivational process are taken into account, while the semantic analysis yields a classification of these Old English adjectives based on categories proposed by the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. The conclusion reached in the morphological analysis is that affixation patterns surviving into Present-day English and more type-frequent affixation patterns show lower percentages of lexical loss than, respectively, less type-frequent and lost affixation patterns. The main conclusion of semantic analysis is that lexical losses of the adjectival class often comprise adjectives denoting abstract qualities.

 Articles related

Sonja E. Bosch,Laurette Pretorius    

The central research question that is addressed in this article is: How can ZulMorph, a finite state morphological analyser for Zulu, be employed to add value to Zulu lexical semantics with specific reference to Zulu verbs? The verb is the most complex w... see more

Revista: Lexikos

José Antonio Sánchez Fajardo    

The impact of English on Cuban Spanish has represented the embodiment of a profound process of acculturation on the island. This empirical study is intended to examine the anglicization of Cuban Spanish by determining anglicizing patterns or strategies i... see more


Francesco-Alessio Ursini    

The goal of this paper is to offer a novel account on the Syntax and Semantics of Spanish Spatial Prepositions. This account is novel in at least three aspects. First, the account offers a unified syntactic analysis that covers understudied types of Span... see more


M. Rita Manzini,Anna Roussou    

In English, finiteness has an extremely limited realization in morphology and is almost exclusively defined in syntax. In particular, there are two main morphological forms, the stem and the stem followed by the -ed ending, which function as finite or as... see more


Steve Bode Ekundayo,Patrick Balogun    

Educated Nigerians express and store socio-cultural concepts and experiences in various linguistic ways, three of which are examined in this paper: lexicalization, compounding and reduplication. They are conceptualized as intraference in the main because... see more