Elamur Research⌕
☰
home / papers / 2008 / Old English Ge- and the Descriptive Power of Nerthus

Old English Ge- and the Descriptive Power of Nerthus

Paper · 2008 · Francisco Javier Martín Arista

Summary

This article sets out to describe the Old English prefix ge- across all lexical categories. Earlier work, notably Lindemann, looked mostly at verbs, and the old debate kept asking whether ge- is inflectional or derivational. Martín Arista instead examines the ge-alternation, meaning pairs of related words where adding ge- also changes meaning and/or category, such as hlid 'lid' versus gehlid 'roof'. He studies the alternation on its own (pure) and combined with Ablaut, zero derivation and other affixation (mixed).

All evidence comes from Nerthus, a lexical database of Old English derivational morphology. The main findings are:

  • ge- is the most frequent affix of the language by type count.
  • It occurs in every major category.
  • It takes part in both recursive and inter-categorial derivation.

A second aim is to test Nerthus itself. Simple and combined queries were enough to collect near-exhaustive evidence. However, the database still needs more formal meaning definitions before ambiguous ge- pairs can be properly sorted. The work matters both for the theory of Old English word formation and as a case study in evaluating a lexical resource.

Key points

  • Nerthus holds about 30,000 headwords, each coded on more than sixty variables. These fall into three blocks: predicate, derivation and compounding. The entries rely mainly on Clark Hall (1996).
  • ge- attaches to 1,270 predicates, close to 9% of the lexicon:
    • 532 nouns (92 masculine, 193 feminine, 185 neuter, the rest ambiguous);
    • 359 adjectives;
    • 84 adverbs;
    • 293 verbs (15 strong, 278 weak);
    • 2 minor-category words;
    • no adpositions.
  • Derivations can branch in several directions. For example, hand leads both to gehendnes via ge- plus Ablaut and to handlung via suffixation, which the author takes as evidence against strictly one-way derivation.
  • Among adjectives, the mixed alternation appears mostly with -ed (e.g., glof~geglofed 'gloved'). It appears far less with -lic, -en, -ende and -sum.
  • Verbal ge- never combines with ofer-, for-, of- or to-, and rarely with be- or on-. The author tentatively links its meaning to repeatedness (iterative Aktionsart) rather than quantification. He also notes a nominal-aspect use, as in ban~geban 'bones'.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. An alternation is counted only when the form difference comes with a functional contrast in meaning or category; pairs that mean the same thing (gylden~gegylden) are excluded as mere variants.
  • I2. Each entry carries a three-valued feature for the affix (+ge, −ge, ±ge), with the ambiguous value kept explicit instead of forced into yes/no, and this makes combined queries much more productive.
  • I3. Derivation is encoded as chains, split into terminal ones (non-recursive) and non-terminal ones (a pre-final step of recursive derivation). Branching paradigms are allowed when one chain cannot capture the family.
  • I4. Which affixes never or rarely co-occur with ge- is used as indirect evidence of what ge- means. Its absence alongside quantifier and telic prefixes points toward an iterative reading.
  • I5. The database is judged by whether ordinary simple and combined searches can retrieve a phenomenon near-exhaustively, and by where they fail (missing formal meaning definitions).

For Mova

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

  • I1 (tokens): the lemmatizer could keep "same-lemma spelling variants" separate from "derivationally related, different lexeme" pairs, so morphology links never silently merge distinct meanings.
  • I2 (world): lexicon and ontology entries could store an explicit "both/undetermined" value for optional features, so knowledge queries can flag uncertain cases rather than mislabel them.
  • I3 (world): word-family knowledge (e.g., hand → handle → handful) could be stored as a small derivation graph with step types, giving explainable links between related entities and actions.
  • I4 (frames): co-occurrence gaps between particles or affixes and verb classes could serve as negative evidence when assigning aspect or Aktionsart features to frames.
  • I5 (learn): resources like VerbNet mappings or treebanks could be audited by trying to extract one well-known phenomenon completely, with the gaps logged as concrete repair targets.

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

Cite

Cite as Francisco Javier Martín Arista. 2008. Old English Ge- and the Descriptive Power of Nerthus. Journal of English Studies 5.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18172/jes.129

@article{arista2008old,
  title = {{Old English Ge- and the Descriptive Power of Nerthus}},
  author = {Francisco Javier Martín Arista},
  journal = {Journal of English Studies 5},
  year = {2008},
  doi = {10.18172/jes.129},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18172/jes.129}
}

References

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

  1. Adelung, J. C. 1796. Grammatisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch der Hochdeutchen Mundart. Leipzig. Benson, T. 1701. Vocabularium Anglo-Saxonicum. find
  2. Bernhardt, E. 1870. “Ge- als Hilfsmittel bei der gotischen Conjugation.” ZfdPh II: 158-166. find
  3. Bybee, J. 1985. Morphology. A Study of the Relation between Meaning and Form. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. find
  4. Clark Hall, J. R. 1996. A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. find
  5. de la Cruz, J. 1975. “Old English Pure Prefixes: Structure and Function.” Linguistics 145: 47-81. ↗
  6. Dorfeld, K. 1885. Über die Function des Präfixes ge- (got. ga-) in der Composition mit Verben, Teil I: Das Präfix bei Ulfilas und Tatian. Giessen. find
  7. Grimm, J. 1878. Deutsche Grammatik. Berlin. find
  8. Healey, A. di Paolo. 2003. The Dictionary of Old English in Electronic Form A-F. Toronto: Dictionary of Old English Project, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto. find
  9. Hiltunen, R. 1983. The Decline of the Prefixes and the Beginnings of the English Phrasal Verb. Turku: Tutun Yliopisto. find
  10. Hinderling, R. 1967. Studien zu den starken Verbalabstrakten des Germanischen. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. find
  11. Hollmann, E. 1936. Untersuchungen über Aspekt und Aktionsart unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Altenglischen. Jena. find
  12. Horgan, D. 1980. “Patterns of Variation and Interchangability in some Old English Prefixes.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 91: 127-130. find
  13. Jensen, J. 1913. Die I. und II. Ablautsreihe in der ae. Wortbildung. Kiel: H. Fiencke. find
  14. Kastovsky, D. 1968. Old English Deverbal Substantives Derived by means of a Zero Morpheme. PhD Dissertation. Tübingen: Eberhard-Karls-Universität. find
  15. Journal of English Studies, vol. 5-6 (2005-2008), 209-231 find
  16. Kastovsky, D. 1986. “Deverbal nouns in Old and Modern English: from stem-formation to word-formation.” Historical Semantics-Historical Word Formation. Ed. J. Fisiak. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 221-261. ↗
  17. Kastovsky, D. 1990. “The typological status of Old English Word Formation.” Papers from the 5th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics. Eds. S. Adamson, V. Law, N. Vincent and S. Wright. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 205-224. ↗
  18. Kastovsky, D. 1992. “Semantics and vocabulary.” The Cambridge History of the English Language I: The Beginnings to 1066. Ed. R. Hogg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 290-408. ↗
  19. Krapp and Kennedy. 1929. An Anglo-Saxon Reader. New York. find
  20. Lenz, P. 1886. Der syntactische Gebrauch der Partikel “ge” in den Werken Alfreds des Grossen. Darmstadt. find
  21. Lindemann, J. W. R. 1953. “Old English preverbal ge-: a re-examination of some current do.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 64: 65-83. find
  22. Lindemann, J. W. R. 1970. Old English Preverbal Ge-: Its Meaning. Charlottesville: Virginia University Press. find
  23. Lorz, A. 1908. Aktionsarten des Verbums in Beowulf. Würzburg. Backers Universitätbuchsdruckerei. find
  24. Martens, H. 1863. “Die verba perfecta in der Nibelungedichtung.” KZ XII (31-41): 325-335. find
  25. Martín Arista, J. 2006. “Alternations, relatedness and motivation: Old English A-.” Where Grammar Meets Discourse: Functional and Cognitive Perspectives. Eds. P. Guerrero Medina and E. Martínez Jurado. Córdoba: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Córdoba. 113-132. find
  26. Martín Arista, J. and E. González Torres. 2005. “Productivity as type frequency in Old English verbal prefixation.” Paper presented at the 2005 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society. find
  27. Martín Arista, J. and V. Martín de la Rosa. 2006. “Old English Semantic Primes: Determiners, Substantives and Quantifiers.” ATLANTIS 28 (2): 9-28. Martín Arista, J., L. Caballero González, E. González Torres, A. Ibáñez Moreno and R. Torre Alonso. Forthcoming. Nerthus: An Online Lexical Database of Old English. find
  28. Nicolai, O. 1907. Die Bildung des Adverbs im Altenglischen. Kiel: H. Fiencke. find
  29. Niwa, Y. 1966. “The prefix ge- added to niman in the OE Gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels.” Studies in English Literature (Tokyo). English number: 65-79. find
  30. Journal of English Studies, vol. 5-6 (2005-2008), 209-231 find
  31. Palmgren, C. 1904. English Gradation-Nouns in Their Relation to Strong Verbs. Uppsala: University of Uppsala. find
  32. Samuels, M. L. 1949. “The Ge- Prefix in the OE Gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels.” Transactions of the Philological Society: 62-116. find
  33. Schön, E. 1905. Die Bildung des Adjectivs im Altenglischen. Kiel: Verlag von Robert Cordes. find
  34. Schuldt, C. 1905. Die Bildung der schwachen Verba im Altenglischen. Kiel: Verlag von Robert Cordes. find
  35. Sosa Acevedo, E. Forthcoming. “The Semantic Representation of Anglo-Saxon (Ge-) séon and (Ge-)lócian: Syntactic Evidence and Meaning Decomposition.” RæL-Revista Electrónica de Lingüística Aplicada 6. Stark, D. 1982. The Old English weak verbs. A diachronic and synchronic analysis. Tübingen: Niemeyer. find
  36. Streitberg, W. 1943. Urgermanishe Grammatik. Heidelberg: Winter. Swaay, H. A. J. van. 1901. Het prefix ga- gi- ge-, zijn geschiedniss, en zijn invloed op de ‘actionsart’, meer bijzonder in hed Oudnederfranzisch en het Oudsacksisch. Utrecht. find
  37. Van Valin, R. and R. LaPolla. 1997. Syntax: Structure, Meaning and Function. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. find
  38. Wackernagel, W. 1878. Altdeutches Wörterbuch. Basel. find
  39. Weman, B. 1933. Old English Semantic Analysis and Theory with Special Reference Denoting Locomotion. Lund: Lindstedts Univ.-Bokhandel. find
  40. Wustmann, R. 1894. Verba Perfectiva namentlich im Heliand. Leipzig. find
  41. Journal of English Studies, vol. 5-6 (2005-2008), 209-231 find

Updated

↑ back to top

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/arista-2008-old-english-ge-descriptive-power/