The influence of Latin on Old English adjectival postposition

Q2 Arts and Humanities

Research in Language Pub Date : 2022-12-30 DOI:10.18778/1731-7533.20.4.03

Maciej Grabski

引用次数: 0

Abstract

The article is a systematic, corpus-based account of Latin’s influence on the position of Old English (OE) adnominal adjectives. While multiple studies on phrase-level syntax suggest that source-text interference may have been partly responsible for placing the adjective after the head noun, this observation has so far received little quantitative underpinning. The present article offers a detailed comparison of OE target noun phrases containing postnominal adjectives with their Latin counterparts to determine the exact extent to which this arrangement may have been a syntactic calque from a foreign language. The study has found that while a fair number of OE postposed adjectives did copy their Latin originals, their placement could be accounted for through reference to tendencies characteristic of OE (i.e. the adjective displays different degrees of “verbalness” or is part of a heavy phrase). Therefore, it appears that translated texts do not have to be excluded or treated with particular suspicion in studies concerned with the position of adnominal adjectives.

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拉丁语对古英语形容词后置的影响

这篇文章是一篇系统的、基于语料库的关于拉丁语对古英语（OE）和名词形容词地位的影响的报道。尽管对短语级句法的多项研究表明，源语篇干扰可能是将形容词放在主名词后面的部分原因，但到目前为止，这一观察结果几乎没有得到定量的支持。本文对含有名词后形容词的OE目标名词短语与拉丁语短语进行了详细的比较，以确定这种排列在多大程度上可能是外语的句法变体。研究发现，虽然相当多的OE后置形容词确实复制了它们的拉丁语原文，但它们的位置可以通过引用OE的特征趋势来解释（即形容词表现出不同程度的“动词性”或是重短语的一部分）。因此，在有关形容词位置的研究中，翻译文本似乎不必被排除在外，也不必受到特别的怀疑。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Research in Language Arts and Humanities-Language and Linguistics

CiteScore

0.40

自引率

0.00%

发文量

期刊介绍： Research in Language (RiL) is an international journal committed to publishing excellent studies in the area of linguistics and related disciplines focused on human communication. Language studies, as other scholarly disciplines, undergo two seemingly counteracting processes: the process of diversification of the field into narrow specialized domains and the process of convergence, strengthened by interdisciplinarity. It is the latter perspective that RiL editors invite for the journal, whose aim is to present language in its entirety, meshing traditional modular compartments, such as phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and offer a multidimensional perspective which exposes varied but relevant aspects of language, e.g. the cognitive, the psychological, the institutional aspect, as well as the social shaping of linguistic convention and creativity.