The striking similarities between Old English (OE) and its neighbour Old Frisian (OFris)—including aspects of phonology, morphology, and alliterative phrases—have long been cause for comment, and often for controversy. The question of whether the resemblance was caused by an immediate common ancestor (Anglo-Frisian) or by neighboring positions in a dialect continuum/Sprachkreis has been hotly disputed using phonological and toponymic evidence, but not in recent years. Consensus in the nineties fell in favour of the dialect continuum, and there the issue has largely rested. However, recent finds in archaeology, history, and genetics argue that the case requires a second look. Developments in grammaticalization theory and contact linguistics give us new tools with which to investigate. Are the similarities between OE and OFris due to an exclusive shared ancestor, or are those languages merely part of a dialect continuum, with no closer relationship than that shared with the other early West Germanic dialects? And are there any reliable criteria to separate out inheritance-based similarities from those that are spread by contact? Shared developments seem, primo facie, to be evidence of shared inheritance, but there are other possible explanations. Parallel drift after separation, convergent development, or coincidence might be the cause of any shared feature. In this paper, I discuss recently proposed methods of distinguishing inheritance from drift and contact, focusing on how morphosyntax can help explore the shared history of OE and OFris. While grammaticalization processes often lead to cross-linguistic similarities, the fact that OE and OFris display a cluster of grammaticalizations not found in other early West Germanic dialects may be significant. The exclusive developments under investigation include aga(n) ‘have’ > ‘have to’ and the present participle as verbal complement. By comparing the forms, meanings, and distribution of these grammaticalized forms in the OFris corpus to that of their cognate forms in OE, I show that the two languages probably diverged from one another substantially later than they diverged from Old Saxon and Old Low Franconian.

The purpose of this study is to recover and revise the contribution made to women's writing by the English minor novelist and poet, Isabella Jane Blagden (1817-1873), who was the centrifugal force of an influential literary and artistic milieu in Italy, in the mid-nineteenth-century. Key figures in the group were the poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning and the American writer, Henry James. This study is a revisionist critique which questions the prevailing masculine discourse and conventions which oppressed women in terms of their sexual, political and economicfreedom. This, therefore, fits into the Victorian phenomenon of women poets finding their own space and expression against patriarchal norms. My focus on Blagden's poetry, with its scope for liminal/subliminal suggestiveness, enables an explorationof her subversive and transgressive feminist-lesbian poetics. Recent contributions from feminist and lesbian theorists and critics, are examined in order to establish a feminist-lesbian interpretation of gender, sexuality, subversion and transgression. A secondary consideration is Blagden's role in the aesthetic consciousness of others and her apparent inspirational position at the centre of the creative groups of intellectual emigrės in her circle. While most of her friends and acquaintances had a public persona, Blagden did not, and her work has received little discussion anddebate. In order to ensure her significance as a feminist-lesbian poet and Muse, this study will focus on her contribution to nineteenth-century women's poetry. As a contribution to literary scholarship my aim is to bring Blagden in from the margins asa poet of non-canonical status, to one whose status is placed firmly within the continuous literary tradition of radical feminist-lesbian women writers in the nineteenth century.

As a semantic investigation into Anglo-Saxon medicine, this thesis investigates the ways in which the Old English language was adapted to the technical discipline of medicine, with an emphasis on semantic interference between Latin medical terminology and Old English medical terminology. The main purpose of the examination is to determine the extent to which scholarly ideas concerning the nature of the human body and the causes of disease were preserved between the Latin texts and the English texts which were translated and compiled from them. The main way in which this has been carried out is through a comparative analysis of technical vocabulary, excluding botanical terms, in medical prose texts utilising the Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus of texts, and a selection of printed editions of Latin texts which seem to have been the most likely sources of medical knowledge in Anglo-Saxon England. As a prerequisite to this comparative methodology it has been necessary to assemble a corpus of Latin textual parallels to the single most significant Old English medical text extant, namely Bald’s Leechbook. These parallels have been presented in an appendix alongside a transcript and translation of Bald’s Leechbook. A single question thus lies at the heart of this thesis: did Old English medical texts preserve any of the classical medical theories of late antiquity? In answering this question, a number of other significant findings have come to light. Most importantly, it is to be noted that modern scholarship is only now beginning to focus on the range of Late Antique and Byzantine medical texts available in Latin translation in the early medieval period, most notably for our present purposes Alexander of Tralles, but also Oribasius, Galen, pseudo-Galen and several Latin recensions of the works of Soranus of Ephesus, including the so-called Liber Esculapii and Liber Aurelii. The linguistic study further demonstrates that the technical language of these texts was very well understood and closely studied in Anglo-Saxon England, the vernacular material not only providing excellent readings of abstruse Latin technical vocabulary, but also demonstrating a substantial knowledge of technical terms of Greek origin which survive in the Latin texts.

abstract: The nature of imperative syntax has remained an elusive, yet ever-present, subject in syntactic research, spanning several decades of linguistic inquiry and analysis, and it is therefore unsurprising that current views on the subject continue to be somewhat divided. This thesis examines the syntactic evidence from imperatives in Old English and ultimately seeks to develop a picture of the possibilities for imperative clauses in OE alongside an overall framework for imperative syntax within contemporary theoretical models of syntactic structure. The general, perceived pattern for OE imperative clauses (e.g. Millward 1971) is “verb−first,” and statistical data from the corpora confirm this perception, with the majority of imperative clauses exhibiting the verb in clause−initial position. Imperative constructions with post− and preverbal overt subjects are also examined at length, and postverbal subjects are found to be the majority case. These results are further expanded by examinations of data from verb−second and verb−third contexts, which include possibilities for topicalized constituents and adverbs. Ultimately, the relative position of both the verb and the subject and the relationship between these and other elements in the totality of the data provide essential clues for constructing a clearer model of OE imperative syntax. Within a relatively rich cartographic framework (Rizzi 1997), I therefore argue that the imperative verb is standardly fronted to the head of ForceP, with the overt subject remaining in spec−FinP, in parallel with other models for imperative syntax and OE syntax. Exceptions to this pattern for imperatives which suggest lower positions for the imperative verb (e.g. verb−second and verb−third constructions) are also accounted for, all with the central goal of demonstrating a consistent pattern underlying the realization of imperative syntax in Old English. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. English 2012

This thesis investigates how Old English poets understood the processes of signification and interpretation through analysis of depictions of poor interpreters and the use of 'sign terms' such as tacen and beacen in the longer Old English poems. The first chapter deals with the Beowulf Manuscript, the second and third chapters consider Elene and Andreas within the network of related poems found in the Vercelli Book and the begin- ning of the Exeter Book, the fourth chapter is on the Junius Manuscript, and the conclusion looks at the use of the 'bright sign' motif across all four major poetic codices. I suggest that there is a 'heroic sign-bearing interpreter' character-type which several of the poems utilize or ironically invert, and that poor interpretation is nearly always asso- ciated with hesitation, which often resembles acedia. I also argue that there is greater nuance in the poems' depictions of modes of understanding than has previously been acknowledged: Eve in Genesis B does not stand for the senses which subvert the mind, but rather models the limits of rational thought as a means of understanding God, and Elene does not depict a simple opposition of letter and spirit, but a threefold mental pro- cess of learning about the Cross with analogues in exegesis and Augustine's Trinity of the Soul. Finally, I argue that there is a 'bright sign' motif which functions within a brightness-sign-covenant concept cluster, whose evocation as a traditional poetic unit is not identical to the denotation and connotation of its constituent parts. These strands of inquiry taken together demonstrate how Old English poems invest signs with significance by tapping into a specifically poetic network of allusion.

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This thesis comes under the terms of Clause 3.2 in the booklet Research Degrees, Regulations and Notes for Guidance for the University of North London where it is stated that 'A candidate may undertake a programme of research in which the candidate's own creative work forms, as a point of origin or reference, a significant part of the intellectual enquiry.' This work, 'shall have been undertaken as part of the registered research programme.' Furthermore, it is stated that the 'creative work shall be ... set in its relevant theoretical, historical, critical or design context.' (University of North London 1996: 6) The creative work consists of 65 poems intended for an audience of children and the critical work of the thesis is a process of research into the sources and origins of those poems. It is therefore an enquiry that seeks to uncover how a highly specific mode of literature comes to be written. It is my contention that descriptions of such a process are unsatisfactory unless they incorporate and combine the following four elements: i) an examination of how the particular self under consideration (me) was formed in a specific socioeconomic, and cultural moment; ii) an examination of how, within that moment, that self engaged with the texts made available in the institutions it occupied; iii) an explanation of how the writing involved a synthesis of experiences - of life, texts and audiences; iv) an explanation of how a writer reads his or her own writing. The first two of these elements comprise the 'historical ... context' noted above and the second two offer aspects of a 'theoretical ... context'.

In this paper, relative clauses in King Alfred’s Old English translation of Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care were examined using relative frequency as a tool to determine whether or not certain factors influenced the choice of relativization strategy. These factors include antecedent case, antecedent gender, antecedent number, distance, animacy, noun phrase type, case of relativized NP, and syntactic function. The method involved gathering together all the occurrences of relative clauses using the Old English corpus and a Modern English translation. This process was not unproblematic as the correct translation from Old English to modern English sometimes was left to the discretion of the translator. Some clauses that were initially thought to be relative clauses were, in fact, not relative clauses. The components of each of the clauses were then examined and categorized after any problematic examples were discarded. Relative frequencies for each of the categories were calculated and chi-square tests were performed to check the reliability of the results. The results of this paper were compared to another paper which did somewhat similar research to determine if the findings were consistent although that paper did not look at as many factors as this paper.

Most of the Germanic languages developed new tense forms allowing the grammatical expression of fine semantic distinctions, including periphrastic perfects and pluperfects; previously, the preterite alone had been used to express semantic content of this sort. In the absence of robust quantitative data regarding the subsequent development of these forms and distribution in the early Germanic languages, a relatively uncomplicated model has generally been assumed, in which there is little synchronic variation in their use and a steady, though not necessarily continuous, diachronic progress toward the state observed in the modern languages. The goal of this work is to provide accurate quantitative data regarding the apportionment of these semantic domains among the available grammatical forms in Old English and Old Saxon, in order to provide meaningful measurements of the synchronic and diachronic use of the periphrastic forms. Very different patterns were found in the use of these forms in the two languages. In Old Saxon the periphrastic forms are used freely, with a frequency similar to or greater than that of the preterites. In Old English there are no significant diachronic trends, but considerable variation exists synchronically among texts, with some making free use of the periphrastic forms and others preferring the preterite almost exclusively. A number of factors potentially responsible for this variation have been investigated, but none can account for the entire range of observed variation on its own. In the absence of any other account for the observed variation, the hypothesis is proposed that the periphrastic forms and the preterite differed in their perceived stylistic value, in a manner whose exact nature may be no longer recoverable; such a hypothesis would be in keeping with previous findings regarding languages such as Middle English and Middle High German. Old English and Old Saxon would therefore differ in the extent to which they make use of the potential for variation created by the absence of a paradigmatic opposition among the relevant grammatical categories.