For-Verbs in Old English

Abstract

All of the for-verbs in the Dictionary of Old English can have semantic features of ‘equal or emphatic’, ‘expanded or antonymous’, ‘rare’, ‘only in gloss’ and ‘poetic’, including overlapping types. Most for-verbs have a sense of emphasis in contrast to their non-prefixed counterparts; some mean almost the same as the non-prefixed ones, some seem to be always used with the for-prefix, and some cannot be precisely identified because of their very rare occurrences. In this paper, I classify Old English for-verbs with examples and try to show why they were chosen in contrast to their non-prefixed counterparts.