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Old English geond expressing duration of time: The Winchester usage

Paper · 2009 · Kiriki Sato

Summary

This study asks whether the late Old English "Winchester group" shares grammatical habits, and not only vocabulary. That group includes Ælfric's works, the Lambeth Psalter gloss and other texts tied to Æthelwold's school. Earlier research (Gneuss, Hofstetter, Gretsch, Ono) had found only lexical uniformity. Sato examines one construction: the preposition geond ('through, throughout') used to mark how long something lasts. In Old English, duration was normally expressed by a bare accusative noun phrase.

Using the Dictionary of Old English Corpus, she collected every spelling variant of geond. She then isolated the durative uses and traced where they appear and which Latin wording they translate. Durative geond turns out to be rare and confined to Winchester-linked texts. Outside Ælfric, it always renders Latin per. Ælfric, however, also uses it where his Latin source has no per.

The result shows that a syntactic choice can identify a textual school. It also offers a way to tell a Winchester stylistic habit apart from simple chronological change toward prepositional syntax.

Key points

  • The DOE Corpus has 886 tokens of geond across 16 spelling variants. Only 38 (about 4.3%) express duration; distributive 'each day' uses were excluded from that count.
  • The durative uses are concentrated in a few texts:
    • Ælfric's works: 19
    • Lambeth Psalter gloss: 5
    • The Old English glossing written between the lines of the Regula S. Benedicti: 5
    • No other text has more than two.
  • Of the 19 non-Ælfric examples, 16 come from interlinear glosses and 3 from prose translations. All 19 translate Latin per. Every hosting text is classed as Winchester by Hofstetter, except the Bodley 865 Capitula Theodulfi, which the author nonetheless links to Winchester.
  • The two manuscripts of the Capitula Theodulfi differ. The literal Bodley 865 version uses geond, while the freer CCCC 201 version uses ofer. This suggests geond belonged to close, word-for-word translation.
  • Ælfric's handling of per is not uniform, but geond is his preferred rendering:
    • per as geond: 11 times (Table 1)
    • per as a bare accusative: twice
    • per as for: twice
    • He also adds geond where his Latin has no per.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Function-word and construction preferences can act as a fingerprint of a text's school or source, alongside content vocabulary.
  • I2. A bare noun phrase ("sat thirty years") and a prepositional phrase ("for thirty years") can carry the same duration meaning.
  • I3. The author keeps the durative sense ('for the whole night') apart from the distributive sense ('each day') of the same preposition before counting.
  • I4. Comparing a literal and a free translation of the same text helps isolate source-language interference.
  • I5. All spelling variants of a word are gathered before computing frequencies, so the ratios are not skewed.

For Mova

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

  • I1 (learn): Track construction statistics per source in silver data, so that parser disagreements caused by a source's style are not mistaken for parser errors.
  • I2 (world): Normalize obl:tmod/obl:npmod bare NPs and duration PPs into one duration value on the event, so that event ordering and time reasoning treat them alike.
  • I3 (frames): When assigning time roles, mark distributive readings as recurring events rather than single durations, so that word problems about "each day" compute totals correctly.
  • I4 (back): Use paired literal and free renderings to detect calqued constructions, and let generation prefer idiomatic English when translating through the meta-world.
  • I5 (tokens): Fold spelling and orthographic variants to a single lemma before frequency-based tagging decisions, especially for older or noisy English texts.

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 Kiriki Sato. 2009. Old English geond expressing duration of time: The Winchester usage. SELIM 16.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.17811/selim.16.2009.23-45

@inproceedings{sato2009old,
  title = {{Old English geond expressing duration of time: The Winchester usage}},
  author = {Kiriki Sato},
  booktitle = {SELIM 16},
  year = {2009},
  doi = {10.17811/selim.16.2009.23-45},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.17811/selim.16.2009.23-45}
}

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