On sarnesse bu acenst cild: Being born in the history of English, with special reference to the Old and Middle English periods.

Abstract

In this paper, I propose a diachronic reconstruction of a part of the Old English vocabulary of birth. Starting from a careful and systematic analysis of the semantic entries in the Thesaurus of Old Englishand of the syntactic complementation patterns in the Helsinki Corpus and the Oxford English Dictionary, I have attempted to derive the internal hierarchical grading of the verbs included in the OE lexical subdimension of birth: in this way, the most significant parameters of categorization can be determined, each of which highlights a given aspect of how this vital process was categorized by Anglo-Saxon speakers, and how its collective mental representation has been changed in the later history of the English language.