'Someone' to love: an investigation into OFr pronouns with special attention to Ma
dc.contributor.advisor
Los, Bettelou
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dc.contributor.author
Colleran, Rebecca
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dc.date.accessioned
2014-03-28T10:20:44Z
dc.date.available
2014-03-28T10:20:44Z
dc.date.issued
2013-11-27
dc.description.abstract
Pronouns in Old English (OE) display striking differences from full noun phrases (NPs), maintaining Subject-Order syntax and failing to invert in situations where we would expect inversion in a Germanic language. This paper takes advantage of that asymmetry between OE NPs and pronouns to investigate the relationship, whose origins remain undetermined, between OE and its nearest linguistic relative, Old Frisian (OFr). A newly available OFr text, Apographa, is studied using a combination of corpus linguistics and traditional methods to determine whether pronouns in OFr share the behaviour of their OE counterparts in certain contexts, including fronting (topicalization) of various constituents. An in-depth investigation into the indefinite OFr pronoun ma ‘one, someone’, which in OE shows its own asymmetries within the NP/pronoun division, offers further insight into the divisions between NPs and types of pronouns, the OFr contexts in which they are investigated, and to what extent OE and OFr share these features. The relationship between OE and OFr has primarily been explored from a phonological perspective to date, and a new, syntactic approach is especially timely in light of recent archaeological finds that raise questions about Frisian identity and make scholars reconsider the nature of the link between English and Frisian.
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dc.identifier.uri
http://hdl.handle.net/1842/8644
dc.language.iso
en
dc.publisher
The University of Edinburgh
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dc.relation.hasversion
Colleran, R. (2013). The weight of the evidence: Evaluating claims of Anglo-Frisian. Unpublished paper. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh.
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dc.relation.references
van Bergen, L. (2003). Pronouns and word order in Old English with particular reference to the indefinite pronoun man. Hampshire: Routledge.
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dc.relation.references
Koopman, W. (1998). Inversion after single and multiple topics in Old English. In J. Fisiak and Marcin Krygier (Eds.), Advances in English historical linguistics (pp. 135-150). Berlin/New York, NY: Mouton de Gruyter.
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dc.subject
Old Frisian
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dc.subject
Old English
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dc.subject
ma
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dc.subject
pronouns
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dc.subject
indefinite pronouns
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dc.subject
topicalization
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dc.title
'Someone' to love: an investigation into OFr pronouns with special attention to Ma
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dc.type
Thesis or Dissertation
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dc.type.qualificationlevel
Masters
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dc.type.qualificationname
MSc Master of Science
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dcterms.accessRights
Restricted Access
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