Wow! eBook
Old English Legal Language
Author(s): Jürg R. Schwyter (Author)
- Publisher: Odense University Press
- Publication Date: January 1, 1996
- Language: English
- Print length: 201 pages
- ISBN-10: 8778381940
- ISBN-13: 9788778381941
Book Description
This corpus-based study examines the lexical field of theft in the Anglo-Saxon law-codes and documents containing reports of lawsuits (charters, writs, and some chapters of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle). The individual Old English lexemes are analysed not only in terms of their meaning, collocation patterns, and Latin translations, but also, more unusually in a field-approach, with reference to their distribution over the various textual genres and the discourse strategies dominant in these. Although primarily linguistic in focus, a detailed description of the theft-offences and the wider context in which they occur should also be of interest to the historian.
