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Social ties and negotiation of lexical norms in Old English: The vocabularies of vices

Paper · 2024 · Olga Timofeeva and Christine Wallis

Summary

The paper looks at how Old English writers named the capital sins and whether the Benedictine reform of the late tenth century produced a shared, standardized vocabulary for them. The authors compare lists of vices in works by Ælfric, Wulfstan and Byrhtferth, two Old English versions of the Capitula Theodulfi, and anonymous confessional prayers, directions for confessors, penitentials and the Scriftboc. Their method is partly data-driven: they work out what each sin-word means from the other words in the same list and from its use elsewhere in the same text, drawing on the DOEC. It is also data-informed, using the Thesaurus of Old English (TOE) and the Fontes anglo-saxonici source database. The vocabulary turns out to be fuzzy and highly varied, with one word often covering both a broad sin and a narrower one. Ælfric and Wulfstan were in direct contact, but Ælfric's preferred terms did not spread widely, especially into penitential texts. The authors suggest this lack of uniformity may explain why few Old English sin-words survived into Middle English.

Key points

  • The corpus groups texts by author and genre: Ælfric (ÆLS 16, ÆLW, ÆCHom, ÆHom 20), Wulfstan (WSL, WHomXc, WDB, WDUP), Byrhtferth's Enchiridion, ThCapA/ThCapB, confessional prayers (CPV, CPT1, CPT2, CPR), DC1–DC3, OEPen and Scr.
  • The Capitula Theodulfi survives in 46 Latin manuscripts, at least four of them made in England. It has two independent Old English translations: ThCapB in Late West Saxon and the slightly later ThCapA in Mercian, both dated c. 1000–1050.
  • Alcuin's De virtutibus et vitiis survives in about 140 copies. Its Old English fragments appear to have been adjusted to West Saxon lexical norms, which may hide an earlier Northumbrian gloss tradition.
  • Polysemy is built into the sin vocabulary:
    • gielp covers both pride and vanity;
    • gīfernes covers both avarice and gluttony;
    • PRIDE alone has many competing words, e.g. ofermodnes, modignys, ofermetto, oferhygd, orgello, and Wulfstan's pryte.
  • Most of the period works with a scheme of eight capital sins. In the Gregorian ordering, PRIDE is the root of all the others.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Sense is pinned down by the company a word keeps inside an enumerated list: the items in a list constrain each other's meanings, which helps disambiguate words with both broad and narrow senses.
  • I2. The study pairs corpus evidence ("data-driven") with a curated thesaurus ("data-informed"), while noting that the thesaurus can split concepts that the period treated as one family (PRIDE under Opinion, GLUTTONY under Material Needs).
  • I3. The Fontes anglo-saxonici database records which texts quote, translate or paraphrase which, so copied wording is not mistaken for independent agreement.
  • I4. Measuring how much variation each category shows, and how consistent each author is, exposes where a norm took hold and where it did not.
  • I5. The medieval sins form hierarchies in which a specific sin is a subtype of a general one (vanity under pride, gluttony under greed), and a single word can name either level.

For Mova

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

  • I1 (world): When a text lists coordinated nouns, the WordNet senses chosen for each item could be scored jointly, preferring senses that share a common hypernym.
  • I2 (world): Compiled ontology categories should be checked against how texts actually group concepts, and links that the text itself asserts should be kept even when the ontology separates them.
  • I3 (learn): Silver data agreed by witness parsers should record shared lineage (same training data or same teacher), so that agreement between related witnesses is not counted as independent confirmation.
  • I4 (learn): Disagreement among witnesses could be reported per label or construction type, showing which categories have an unstable annotation norm and need repair rules or teacher review.
  • I5 (frames): Role and frame assignment could allow a mention to attach to either a general or a specific frame, settling on one only when context provides evidence.

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

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 3The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 17,450 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 17,296 worksClassics · 116 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,379 worksHistorical linguistics & language change · 250 works

Cite

Cite as Olga Timofeeva and Christine Wallis. 2024. Social ties and negotiation of lexical norms in Old English: The vocabularies of vices. Lexis: Journal in English Lexicology 3.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.4000/12izd

@article{timofeeva2024social,
  title = {{Social ties and negotiation of lexical norms in Old English: The vocabularies of vices}},
  author = {Olga Timofeeva and Christine Wallis},
  journal = {Lexis: Journal in English Lexicology 3},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.4000/12izd},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.4000/12izd}
}

References

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