CAY DOLLERUP (ed.), Worlds of Words: A Tribute to Arne Zettersten. Pp. 274 (Nordic Journal of English Studies, Special Issue, Vol. 3, No. 1). Oslo: University of Oslo, Department of British and American Studies, 2004. Paperbound NOK300.00 (ISSN 1502 7694)

Abstract

THE breadth of the sixteen articles in this Festschrift mirrors the breadth of Professor Arne Zettersten's own work, ranging from linguistics and lexicography to literature and literary theory to medieval literature and manuscript tradition. Subjects under investigation range from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to movie subtitles, and the languages touched on are as varied as medieval English and modern Romanian, with a variety of theoretical approaches. There are investigations of etymology as well as translation, and examinations of language's place in society. Each of these articles is an important and interesting contribution to its respective field. Laurie Bauer's article ‘Adjectives, compounds, and words’ draws attention to the stress patterns of adjective-noun phrases and compound words and the difficulties in the classification of such constructions. In their article ‘The concept of “dictionary usage” ’ Henning Bergenholtz and Sven Tarp review the debate between Wolfgang Mentrup and Herbert Ernst Wiegand about the latter scholar's arguments about dictionary usage and its relationship to a comprehensive theory of lexicography, lamenting the fact that Wiegand's harsh response to Mentrup's useful critiques precluded them from being more widely adopted at the time. In his article ‘From Lidköping to Köpenhamn: Gone shopping?’, Charles Lock, inspired by the common place-name element of Zettersten's birthplace Lidköping and professional home at Köpenhamns Universitet, investigates the English words and place-name elements shop and cheap. In his article ‘The etymology of “brain” and cognates’, Anatoly Liberman first reviews and evaluates the history of etymological suggestions for English brain, before suggesting a new etymon, Celtic bran in the sense ‘refuse, rubbish, waste matter’. In his article ‘The etymology of “ríme” in the Ormulum’, Nils-Lennart Johannesson argues that the word ríme should not be taken as a French loanword in the sense ‘metre’, but should in fact be taken to mean ‘narration’, ‘story’, or ‘text’ and is derived from the Old English word (ge)rīm, and relates this suggested etymology to Orm's homiletic methods. Gunnar Persson's ‘Frames for the semantics of bachelor’ is an examination, based on prototype theory, axiological sense analysis, and frame semantics, of the development of the different senses for the English word bachelor. Norman Blake and Jacob Thaisen, in their article ‘Spelling's significance for textual studies’, using two manuscripts of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as test cases, argue that manuscript spellings, along with evidence of a manuscript's codicology, can provide useful information about the changes in exemplars and the number of exemplars that lie behind a given manuscript. In her article, ‘The Catholicon Anglicum (1483): A reconsideration’, Gabriele Stein points out that this fifteenth-century English–Latin dictionary is organized using ‘pedagogical and lexicographical methods that became commonplace in learners’ dictionaries only several centuries later’. Graham D. Caie's ‘Lay literacy and the medieval bible’ examines ‘what appears to be biblical reference in vernacular literature’ in an investigation of lay literacy and knowledge of biblical and pseudo-biblical material, focusing particularly on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Helmut Bonheim's ‘Detritus and literature’ is a meditation on the concept of rubbish and its role in determining literature and its value. Viggo Hjørnager Pedersen's ‘Anne Bushby, translator of Hans Christian Andersen’ is a defence of the previously maligned nineteenth-century English translator of Andersen's works. In ‘Pragmatic markers in spoken interlanguage’, Karin Aijmer investigates the differences in the way a native speaker of English and a non-native learner of English use discourse markers in informal speech in this study drawing on data from a Swedish learner of English. In ‘ “Kids” and German lexicography’, Ulrich Busse investigates the handling of Anglicisms in German dictionaries using the specific test case of the word ‘Kid(s)’. Hortensia Pârlog's ‘Recent Anglicisms in Romanian’ is a description of the morphological assimilation of English loanwords in Romanian. In ‘Subtitles and international anglification’, Henrik Gottlieb examines the practices of subtitling and dubbing films and their implications with respect to the linguistic influence of English in non-Anglophone countries. Editor Cay Dollerup's own contribution, ‘Translation today: a global view’, is a survey of the history and practice of translation as a part of society, with predictions of and suggestions for its future.