This work contributes to the research in the linguistic analysis of Old English with corpus-based lexical databases. In the specific area of Old English, which presents numerous morphological variations and lacks a written standard, a lemmatised corpus is necessary. Thus, the aim of this work is to lemmatise part of the verbal lexicon of Old English, combining aspects of Morphology, Lexicography and Corpus Analysis. The scope is restricted to the most morphologically complex verbal classes of Old English, including irregular verbs and reduplicative verbs, which comprise preterite-present, anomalous, contracted and strong VII verbs. This aim requires, firstly, the selection and management of the sources of data and verification of results; and secondly, the design and sequencing of the steps of the lemmatisation tasks. This research also raises the issue of the automatisation of the process of lemmatisation of Old English verbs, on which little previous literature has been found. In conclusion, this work offers an inventory of inflectional forms and lemmas of the verbs under analysis. On the applied side, this work presents different procedures of automatic and manual lemmatisation that can be applied to the fields of Lexicography and Corpus Linguistics.

Based on the surviving Old English textual material, as well as on Old English dictionaries and the relevant literature, this work studies the role of preverbs (eg. Byrnan, ābyrnan, forbyrnan, gebyrnan, onbyrnan) as a transitivising mechanism under the scope of the Cardinal Transitivity approach. Focus is laid on Old English morphological causative pairs that show signs of lability, i.e. verbs that can function transitively or intransitively with no morphological marking. This work has two main objectives. On the one hand, to examine to what extent preverbs may influence the valence of verbs that are ambivalent from the point of view of their valence as well as to shed light on the effects preverbs may have on other parameters of transitivity such as telicity or affectedness. On the other hand, this book also explores a rather neglected topic so far: the interaction of preverbs and the Germanic morphological causative marker -jan as transitivising mechanisms in Old English.

Participial prepositions and conjunctions such as considering, during, considered and except are a comparatively recent phenomenon in the history of the English language. They originated in the intense language contact situation between Anglo-French and Middle English in late medieval England. In this book, it is shown that the development is part of a long process of typological change both in the Romance languages and in the English language. Through language contact a productive pattern has been established in English, which still produces new participial prepositions today (e.g. following, based on and looking at). Participial prepositions and conjunctions therefore clearly illustrate the mechanisms and consequences of language change through intense language contact.

This volume synthesizes recent approaches to the study of historical English and long-established philological scholarship. Using this synthesis, it casts doubt upon the old antagonisms between modern linguistics and traditional approaches, and makes the historical study of English accessible to scholars and students of both backgrounds. This book brings together 10 studies on various characteristics of the historical development of English, and mainly Old and Middle English, first presented in workshops at the “Old and Middle English” and “Language Variation and Change in Ancient and Medieval Europe” summer schools, organized in Naxos, Greece. It includes studies derived from the first four workshops: “New Approaches to the History of Early English(es)” I, II and III and “Language Change in Indo-European” I. The first part of the volume emphasizes the synchronic description of syntactic, morphological and semantic features of Old English, while the second section emphasizes explanations of the development of various features of English, starting with Old English.

In order to guarantee open access and full searchability, research in historical lexicography and lexicology must follow the same directions as the evolution of the Internet, which has moved from hypertext-based resources to more significative services and products stored and disseminated through databases and, more recently, through knowledge bases. Against this background, this book addresses specific questions like What is involved in the digitisation of linguistic data? What annotation systems can give rise to datasets compatible with knowledge bases? What standards are needed to reach full searchability? What sources and methods can be used to gather the lemmas of a historical dictionary? What determines the obsolescence of lexicographical resources?

This volume brings together a collection of twenty contributions which offer a diversity of methodological tools and analytical issues concerning the study of different aspects of the role of verbs, clauses and constructions in a rich variety of languages such as Present-Day English, Old English, Old Saxon, French, Spanish, Arabic, German, Upper Sorbian, Latvian, Sino-Tibetan, and the Australian dialects Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara and Ngaanyatjarra. The use of empirical data and the wide range of languages are the two main challenges addressed here. The book will serve to contribute to current literature on functional-oriented linguistics, incorporating linguistic typology, and corpus-based and contrastive perspectives. The volume is divided into three main parts. The first brings together eight contributions centrally related to the category of the verb both from a synchronic and diachronic perspective. The second part consists of five chapters which revolve around the syntax and semantics of clauses. Finally, the seven essays in the third section explore different formal and functional aspects of the study of constructions in an assortment of languages.

Corpus-based contrastive and translation research are areas that keep evolving in the digital age, as the range of new corpus resources and tools expands, opening up to different approaches and application contexts. The current book contains a selection of papers which focus on corpora and translation research in the digital age, outlining some recent advances and explorations. After an introductory chapter which outlines language technologies applied to translation and interpreting with a view to identifying challenges and research opportunities, the first part of the book is devoted to current advances in the creation of new parallel corpora for under-researched areas, the development of tools to manage parallel corpora or as an alternative to parallel corpora, and new methodologies to improve existing translation memory systems. The contributions in the second part of the book address a number of cutting-edge linguistic issues in the area of contrastive discourse studies and translation analysis on the basis of comparable and parallel corpora in several languages such as English, German, Swedish, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Turkish, thus showcasing the richness of the linguistic diversity carried out in these recent investigations. Given the multiplicity of topics, methodologies and languages studied in the different chapters, the book will be of interest to a wide audience working in the fields of translation studies, contrastive linguistics and the automatic processing of language.