📄 Old and Middle English Bibliography 1992-1994

Summary

This item is not an experimental study. It is a reference list compiled by Antonio Bravo of the University of Oviedo and published in SELIM 4. It catalogues books on Old and Middle English that appeared in 1992–1994. The list is alphabetical by author or editor, and each entry gives title, publisher and year. It covers editions such as the Piers Plowman versions, Ancrene Wisse and the Exeter Book, along with monographs, festschrifts, companions, dictionaries, concordances and specialised bibliographies. Topics include Chaucer, Langland, Arthurian matter, hagiography, Anglo-Saxon history, metre and historical linguistics. There is no method, dataset or evaluation, and no annotations or commentary. The only "result" is the inventory itself. Its value is as a finding aid. For an NLP-oriented library, it mainly points to early digital and lexicographic resources for historical English, such as the Helsinki Corpus volume, computer-based Chaucer work, a rhyme concordance and the Middle English Dictionary. It also lists linguistic monographs on word order and auxiliaries.

Key points

• Plain alphabetical bibliography of about 111 entries, without annotations, covering publications from 1992–1994.
• Corpus and computing items include:
  • Rissanen, Kytö & Palander-Collin's 1993 Mouton de Gruyter volume, which uses the Helsinki Corpus to investigate early stages of English with computational methods.
  • Lancashire, Computer-Based Chaucer Studies (CCH Working Papers 3).
  • Wooldridge, Historical Dictionary Databases (CCH Working Papers 2).
• Lexical resources include:
  • the Middle English Dictionary (Part T.3).
  • Oizumi & Yonekura's two-volume Rhyme Concordance to Chaucer.
  • a concordance to Ancrene Wisse.
  • an historical dictionary of German Loanwords in English.
• Syntax and morphology titles include:
  • Fujiwara, Word Order in English.
  • Nakao & Amano on auxiliary do.
  • Warner, English Auxiliaries: Structure and History.
  • Zbierska-Sawala on derivational affixation in early Middle English.
• The extracted text is noisy: typos ("Devid", "Diccionary"), a duplicated Richards entry, and about six entries without a year.

Interesting ideas

• I1. The list bundles corpus, concordance and dictionary-database work together, treating them as one family of reusable infrastructure for historical text study rather than as isolated outputs.
• I2. A rhyme concordance indexes words by sound pattern rather than by meaning, which is a different access path to the same vocabulary.
• I3. Monographs devoted to auxiliary do and to English auxiliaries show that a small closed class of function words can carry a large share of syntactic history.
• I4. The bibliography itself is messy: spelling slips, a repeated entry and missing years appear within one short list.

For Mova

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

• I1 (world): Compiled lexical knowledge could likewise be organised by resource type, with provenance kept for each, so every lookup in the knowledge layer can be explained by its source.
• I2 (back): An index keyed by phonological form could support generation tasks that need rhyme or metre without falling back on bag-of-words similarity.
• I3 (tree): Auxiliary attachment (aux vs. main verb, do-support) deserves its own targeted test set and error analysis in the parser.
• I4 (learn): Such naturally noisy reference lists could serve as realistic negative controls for checking that tokenizer and NER-like components degrade gracefully on imperfect input.