The Names of Watercourses and Natural Water Reservoirs in Middle English
Journal Title: Anglica. An International Journal of English Studies - Year 2016, Vol 25, Issue 2
Abstract
Geographical words referring to water, such as river, stream sea or lake, have been used in language since the earliest. As water is considered essential for life in general, the names of water reservoirs and watercourses became popular and frequently used items in all languages. The present study is focused on the English names of natural water reservoirs(sea, lake) and watercourses (river, stream) and their regional spread in the 12th–15th centuries. The Old English names of watercourses and natural water reservoirs, sӕ, flodand ea, either survived in Middle English in a modified form or were (rarely) replaced by loanwords as the effect of the Norman Conquest of England in the 11th century. The research is concentrated on texts selected from the Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose (Marcus 2008), with some material coming from the OED and MED. The analysis will show the extent of the loss of the original Anglo-Saxon words or their spread, frequently with a modified meaning. The analysis will also include the statistics of the terms in question in prose texts representing the chief dialects of the period. As regards the method, the present author makes use of the traditional semantic theories (e.g. Lyons 1977) and the prototype theory (e.g. Geeraerts 1997).
Authors and Affiliations
Anna Wrzesińska
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP175787
- DOI -
- Views 9
- Downloads 0
The Structural Simplification Hypothesis and the Premodifiers in Nigerian English
This paper conducts a corpus-based study of the occurrence/non-occurrence, structural pattern, and forms of the premodifi er in the Nigerian English noun phrase, comparing the scenarios that emerge with those of the Brit...
The Return of the Silenced: Aboriginal Art as a Flagship of New Australian Identity
The paper examines the presence of Aboriginal art, its contact with colonial and federation Australian art to prove that silencing of this art from the official identity narrative and art histories also served eliminatio...
“I’ll risk you, if you’ll risk me”: The Ambiguity of Human Existence and Relationships in Marilyn Duckworth’s Married Alive
The aim of this paper is to analyse Marilyn Duckworth’s Married Alive within the framework of Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy of ambiguity, risk and reciprocal recognition. It is argued that the New Zealand writer repres...
World Travellers: Colonial Loyalties, Border Crossing and Cosmopolitanism in Recent Postcolonial First World War Novels
This article offers a comparative analysis of the representation of travelling men and women in The Sojourn (2003) by Canadian writer Alan Cumyn, The Daughters of Mars (2012) by Australian novelist Thomas Kenneally and B...
Popular Fiction Tropes in George Eliot’s Felix Holt: the Radical
In line with recent critical approaches to George Eliot that increasingly question her reputation as a realist writer, the article seeks to analyse the plot and characterisation in George Eliot’s Felix Holt: The Radical...