Reduced forms in the nominal morphology of the Lindisfarne Gospel Gloss. A case of accusative/dative syncretism?

Abstract

Abstract One of the most characteristic features of the grammar of the Lindisfarne Gospel gloss is the absence of the etymological -e inflection in the dative singular in the paradigm of the strong masculine and neuter declension (a-stems). Ross (1960: 38) already noted that endingless forms of the nominative/accusative cases were quite frequent in contexts where a dative singular in -e would be expected, to the extent that he labeled the forms in -e ‘rudimentary dative.’ The aim of this article is to assess to what extent the dative singular is still found as a separate case in the paradigms of the masculine and neuter a-stems and root nouns. To this end a quantitative/statistical analysis of nouns belonging to these classes has been carried out in contexts where the Latin lemma is either accusative or dative. We have tried to determine whether variables such as syntactic context, noun class, and frequency condition the presence or absence of the -e inflection, and whether the distribution of the inflected and uninflected forms is different in the various demarcations that have been identified in the gloss. The data have been retrieved using the Dictionary of Old English Corpus. All tokens have been checked against the facsimile edition and the digitised manuscript in order to detect possible errors.