A contribution to Old English lexicography

Abstract

This article contributes to Old English Lexicography with the lemmatisation of five Old English class VII verbs. The scope is restricted to utgangan, wiðhealdan, ofersceadan, onbefeallan and ongangan, for which very little information can be gathered from the available lexicographical sources. Lemmatisation is a pending task because there is not a complete list with all the attested forms by dictionary word, and because the available corpora are unlemmatised. The methodology focuses on the manual revision of the inflectional forms (retrieved from the DOEC) using lexicographical and textual sources with the aim of providing the citations together with their translation into Present-Day English. As a result, this work provides insights on building dictionary entries for these verbs, including the list of inflectional forms attested in the corpus, the meaning definition, and the morphology of the word formation. The entries for these lemmas, if listed by the dictionaries, are often incomplete, but more importantly, they are not based on a lemmatised corpus.