Abstract
Abstract This article discusses proof-of-concept research into the structure of the vocabularies of three Old English texts, Beowulf, Andreas and the Old English Martyrology. With the help of the Web application Evoke, which makes A Thesaurus of Old English (TOE) available in Linguistic Linked Data form, the words that occur in these three texts have been tagged within the existing onomasiological structure of TOE. This tagging process has resulted in prototypes of ‘textual thesauri’ for each of the three texts; such thesauri allow researchers to analyse the ‘onomasiological profile’ of a text, using the statistical tools that are built into Evoke. Since the same overarching structure has been used for all three texts, these texts can now be compared on an onomasiological level. As the article demonstrates, this comparative approach gives rise to novel research questions, as new and distinctive patterns of vocabulary use come to the surface. The semantic fields discussed include “War” and “Animals”.
Highlights
How many Old English words that express the concept of ‘warrior’ occur in Beowulf? Are the text’s hapax legomena confined to specific semantic fields or are they distributed evenly across the poem’s semantic range? How ambiguous are the words used in Beowulf? And how does this vocabulary use compare to that in other Old English texts, such as Andreas and the Old English Martyrology? These are relatively basic questions and it is not difficult to imagine how the answers to these questions might provide information about the particular style, nature and preoccupations of these Old English texts
After briefly covering some of the theoretical background and introducing the concept of an onomasiological profile, this article describes how the Web application Evoke (Stolk, 2018) was used to create prototypes of ‘textual thesauri’ for each of the three texts. The vocabulary of these three Old English texts will be compared on an onomasiological level, answering such basic questions as the ones above as well as demonstrating how comparing the onomasiological profiles of different texts may give rise to novel research questions, as new and distinctive patterns of vocabulary use come to the surface
For the purpose of this article, the headwords listed in the published glossaries of Beowulf, Andreas and the Old English Martyrology were tagged in the Thesaurus of Old English (TOE)-Linguistic Linked Data (LLD) dataset, along with an additional tag “hapax” to indicate hapax legomena
Summary
How many Old English words that express the concept of ‘warrior’ occur in Beowulf? Are the text’s hapax legomena confined to specific semantic fields or are they distributed evenly across the poem’s semantic range? How ambiguous (or: polysemous) are the words used in Beowulf? And how does this vocabulary use compare to that in other Old English texts, such as Andreas and the Old English Martyrology? These are relatively basic questions and it is not difficult to imagine how the answers to these questions might provide information about the particular style, nature and preoccupations of these Old English texts. How many Old English words that express the concept of ‘warrior’ occur in Beowulf? This article introduces proof-of-concept research into the ‘onomasiological profiles’ of these three Old English texts that digitally facilitates answering these and other questions relating to the structure of the vocabularies of these texts. After briefly covering some of the theoretical background and introducing the concept of an onomasiological profile, this article describes how the Web application Evoke (Stolk, 2018) was used to create prototypes of ‘textual thesauri’ for each of the three texts. The vocabulary of these three Old English texts will be compared on an onomasiological level, answering such basic questions as the ones above as well as demonstrating how comparing the onomasiological profiles of different texts may give rise to novel research questions, as new and distinctive patterns of vocabulary use come to the surface.
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