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The Locative Uses of the Preposition at in the Old English Version of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People: A Cognitive Approach

Paper · 2001 · Carmen Guarddon Anelo

Summary

The paper asks how Old English speakers, here the translator of Bede's history, conceptualised location with the preposition æt/at, and how it shared the spatial domain with in and on. The author compiled a corpus from Miller's 1890 edition of the Old English translation of Bede's church history. That edition mostly reproduces the Tanner Manuscript and fills its gaps from the C., O. and Ca. manuscripts. Every occurrence of at with a spatial object was collected together with its full sentence. The analysis is cognitive. It draws on Herskovits' ideal meaning of at (point-like 'coincidence') and her use-types, on Langacker's trajector/landmark, and on the contrast between a remote and a close-up view of a scene. The object noun is treated as the main factor that splits at into senses. A central claim is that at in this text already behaves much like present-day at, while in and on differ more from modern usage. The findings are checked against Lundskær-Nielsen's (1993) and Lindkvist's (1978) studies. This gives a basis for testing whether the categorisation holds for Old English generally.

Key points

  • Source text: Miller's 1890 edition, based on the Tanner Manuscript (Bodleian, five scribes, first half of the 10th century). Gaps are filled in preference order from Cotton Otho B. XI, Corpus Christi College Cambridge, and Cambridge University Library Kk.
  • The text's Mercian dialect makes the traditional attribution to Alfred hard to defend.
  • Comparison points:
    • Lundskær-Nielsen's analysis of two Anglo-Saxon Chronicle extracts: years 892–900 and the Peterborough Second Continuation, 1122–54. This gives a diachronic angle.
    • Lindkvist's comparison of Old and Middle English at with its Gothic cognate.
  • Theoretical stance:
    • The paper follows Herskovits' polysemy model: one ideal meaning plus use-types.
    • It rejects Bennet's single 'locative' meaning, which does without geometric idealisation.
    • It adds that at can mark the goal of a path through sentence composition, as with æt londe gebrohte ('brought to land').
  • Examples cover body or hand proximity (æt honda, æt minum heafde), furniture and activity settings (æt beode, æt fulwihte), objects (æt þam fyre) and holy places (æt þara apostola stowe).

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Using at signals a distant viewpoint in which both trajector and landmark shrink to points, while in implies the speaker is inside or can see the scene, so the choice of preposition encodes the speaker's perspective.
  • I2. Some at phrases evoke a scenario rather than a place: "at the doctor's" means taking part in the activity, not occupying a precise spot.
  • I3. The object noun's category is treated as the main factor that splits a preposition into senses, so sense assignment can be driven by the landmark's semantic class.
  • I4. Goal readings of a static preposition arise compositionally, when at combines with a motion verb, rather than being a separate lexical sense.
  • I5. Comparing one text's prepositional usage against independent corpora from other periods is a way to check whether conclusions reach beyond a single source.

For Mova

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

  • I1 (frames): Pragmatic inference could record "speaker is probably not at the location" for at versus in, giving explainable implicatures about the speaker's vantage point.
  • I2 (world): When building the text world, at + institution or activity nouns could create an "engaged in activity" state with uncertain exact location, instead of a hard containment fact.
  • I3 (frames): Prepositional-phrase roles could be chosen from the WordNet class of the object (body part, furniture, building, event) through an explicit lookup table that stays easy to inspect.
  • I4 (frames): Role assignment could mark at as a Destination only when the governing VerbNet class is motion or caused motion, keeping the lexicon small and the rule explainable.
  • I5 (learn): Rules induced on one treebank or genre could be validated against a held-out corpus from a different register before they are trusted, as a basic generalisation control.

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

📚 Shelves 3The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksClassics · 67 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 1,373 worksHistorical linguistics & language change · 159 works

Cite

Cite as Carmen Guarddon Anelo. 2001. The Locative Uses of the Preposition at in the Old English Version of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People: A Cognitive Approach. SELIM 11.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.17811/selim.11.2001.117-146

@inproceedings{anelo2001locative,
  title = {{The Locative Uses of the Preposition at in the Old English Version of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People: A Cognitive Approach}},
  author = {Carmen Guarddon Anelo},
  booktitle = {SELIM 11},
  year = {2001},
  doi = {10.17811/selim.11.2001.117-146},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.17811/selim.11.2001.117-146}
}

References

25 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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  2. Bennet, D. 1975: Spatial and Temporal Uses of English Prepositions – An Essay in Stratificational Semantics. Longman, London. find
  3. Boggess, L. 1978: Computational Interpretation of English Spatial Prepositions. University of Illinois, Ph.D. Dissertation. find
  4. Brøndal, V. 1950: Theorie des Prepositions. Introduction à une Sémantique Rationnelle. Ejnar Munksgaard, Copenhague. find
  5. Cassidy F. G. & R. Ringler 1981: Bright’s Old English Grammar and Reader. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers, Toronto. find
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  14. Levinson, S. 2002: Space in Language and Cognition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ↗
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  16. Lindkvist, K. 1978: At versus On, In, By: On the Early History of Spatial At and Certain Primary Ideas Distinguishing At from On, In, By. Almquist & Wiksell International, Stockholm. find
  17. Lundskær-Nielsen, T. 1993: Prepositions in Old and Middle English. A Study of Prepositional Syntax and the Semantics of At, In and On in some Old and Middle English Texts. Odense University Press, Odense. ↗
  18. Miller, T. ed. 1990[1890]: The Old English Version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of The English People. Kraus Reprint, New York. find
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  21. Sweet, H. 1883: King’s Alfred’s Orosius. [E.E.T.S.], London. find
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