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The Morphological and Semantic Types of Old English Lost Adjectives

Paper · 2014 · Luisa Fidalgo Allo

Summary

The paper asks how many Old English adjectives vanished from the language, and what kinds of words they were. Lost words are usually counted only in aggregate, and the author argues they also matter for understanding how the English lexicon became "dissociated": many native derivational families were replaced by unrelated pairs such as father/paternal. A lost adjective is operationally defined as one listed in the Nerthus lexical database of Old English but absent from The Oxford English Dictionary. Of 5,788 Nerthus adjectives, 4,825 (about 83%) fail this test. For the survivors, the author sorts the sense relationship between the Old and Present-day forms into five types. The lost adjectives are then analysed in two ways. Morphologically, the analysis covers base category, inflectional class, affixes and word-formation process, with losses compared against totals for each process. Semantically, they are sorted using the classification scheme of the OED's Historical Thesaurus, supplemented by a few additional categories. The work links derivational morphology and semantic taxonomy to lexical loss, extending Wang (2009), who did not study absolute losses.

Key points

  • Data come from Nerthus, an online database of 29,992 Old English words (16,694 nouns, 5,788 adjectives, 5,618 verbs, 1,892 grammatical words). Nerthus draws mainly on Clark Hall's Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, and to a lesser degree on Bosworth–Toller and Sweet.
  • Cross-checking Nerthus against the OED (2nd ed., CD-ROM) gives 963 surviving adjectives (16.63%) and 4,825 lost ones (83.36%). Earlier overall estimates of Old English word loss were 85% (Kastovsky) and 60% (Trask).
  • Survivors fall into five sense relations: unchanged, senses added, senses lost, senses both added and lost, and full meaning change.
    • The mixed add-and-lose type is the most common, followed by pure addition.
    • Unchanged items number 75 and pure sense loss only 58.
    • The author reads this as evidence that gaining senses helps a word survive.
  • The morphological analysis covers prefixation, suffixation, compounding and zero derivation. The semantic analysis uses Historical Thesaurus categories.
  • Twelve lost adjectives stay unclassified because their only gloss is Latin or they have no gloss at all.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. A lexical loss is defined operationally as presence in one dictionary but absence from another, which turns a vague historical notion into a reproducible set difference.
  • I2. A fixed five-way scheme (unchanged, gained, lost, both, shifted) describes how a word's sense inventory differs between two states.
  • I3. The author treats the modern lexicon as dissociated, with a native noun paired with an unrelated Latinate adjective (hand/manual, father/paternal), so the link is lexical rather than derivational.
  • I4. Some radical meaning shifts are explained by a change in the derivational base, as with cnihtlic 'boyish' becoming knightly once knight changed meaning.
  • I5. Items whose only gloss is Latin or missing are kept in an explicit unclassified bucket rather than being forced into a category.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (world): The same diff can be run between our compiled knowledge sources, for example WordNet lemmas versus the en lexicon or FrameNet coverage, to list concepts one layer knows and another lacks.
  • I2 (learn): The same scheme can compare sense or frame assignments between two model versions or two witness parsers, so regressions get typed labels instead of a single disagreement count.
  • I3 (world): We should store explicit relational-adjective links such as paternal→father in the ontology, because morphology alone will never connect them when building entities and relations.
  • I4 (tokens): Derived-word analysis in the morphology crate can compute meaning from the current base lemma's sense, with a lookup override for frozen historical derivatives.
  • I5 (learn): Silver-data pipelines should likewise keep an honest "unresolved" class with a count, which also serves as a negative control on classifier coverage.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Universidad de La RiojaLogroño · Spain24 works · 125 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 works

🧭 Topics 3Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 worksMorphology · 405 worksHistorical linguistics & language change · 249 works

Cite

Cite as Luisa Fidalgo Allo. 2014. The Morphological and Semantic Types of Old English Lost Adjectives. Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies 47.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.20139227

@article{allo2014morphological,
  title = {{The Morphological and Semantic Types of Old English Lost Adjectives}},
  author = {Luisa Fidalgo Allo},
  journal = {Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies 47},
  year = {2014},
  doi = {10.26754/ojs\_misc/mj.20139227},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.20139227}
}

References

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