Last updated by tomash on 2010-01-21. Originally submitted by tomash on 2010-01-15.
Joanna Kopaczyk
IFA Scholarly Meeting, January 2010
Standardisation in medieval legal texts – a Scottish example.
This presentation stems from my post-doctoral research into the language of Scottish burghs (1380-1560), which came down to us in the form of legal and administrative records. In 2008, the Edinburgh Corpus of Older Scots, the most comprehensive corpus of that language to date, has become publicly available. It consists of burgh records and other documents compiled in urban settings or with reference to Scottish medieval burghs, which creates a good opportunity for a systematic inquiry into formal uses of Scots when it was still the language of the independent Scottish kingdom.
I'm going to explore the formulaic nature of the texts in the corpus, arguing that in repetitive constructions and formulas one can look for text-type standardisation. As my research is still in progress, I will concentrate on defining the phenomenon of text-type standardisation and the methodological issues arising in my esearch. I will also explain the choice of analytical tools for exploring my corpus and their practical application .
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Elżbieta Adamczyk
IFA Scholarly Meeting, January 2010
Disintegration of nominal inflection in the early germanic languages: The case of old english
The presentation is devoted to a discussion of the shape of the early Germanic nominal inflection. The focus is on the interparadigmatic developments which brought about far-reaching changes to the system inherited from Proto-Germanic and contributed to its extensive restructuring in individual Germanic dialects. A salient feature of the early Germanic substantival inflection was an evident predilection, revealed by nouns traditionally classified as minor, i.e. synchronically unproductive, to appropriate the inflectional endings of the major, productive declensional types, such as a-stems, ō-stems and n-stems. The resulting fluctuation of nouns between the inherited and innovative paradigms obscured the once stable and neatly organised system and, consequently, shattered the stability of certain declensional paradigms. The tendency is amply evinced in all early Germanic dialects (including the earliest attested and usually conservative Gothic), but its extent, dating and precise conditioning appear to be different in particular dialects. This pan-Germanic phenomenon, affecting individual dialects independently, resulted in gradual redistribution of nouns over different inflectional paradigms and eventually occasioned a demise of the etymological stem-type distinctions. In the most extreme cases, such as in English, these developments induced a complete disintegration of the original inflectional pattern and led to the subsequent change of its overall typological profile.
