
Binomials in Late Middle English to Early Modern English
Style, Frequency and Etymology
- 264 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
This book charts the development of style and lexicon in the English language from Late Middle English to Early Modern English through the analysis of binomials across a wide range of texts and genres.
The volume elucidates the forms, functions, and origins of binomials, otherwise understood as word pairs, such as "safe and sound, " as they manifest in representative prose texts from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and in the Helsinki Corpus from the fourteenth through to the early eighteenth centuries. The book begins with cross-comparative analyses of binomials, examining their frequency, etymological makeup, and repetition in prose texts including Chaucer and Malory to explore the stylistic characteristics of each text, toward zooming out to examine their development in texts across different genres, from political to philosophical to legal texts, in the Helsinki Corpus. In charting binomial development over both time and text type, the volume offers readers a unique historical perspective into the evolution of phraseology from Late Middle English through to Early Modern English and in turn, a solid foundation for future research on lexical development in the English language.
This book will be of interest to scholars in English historical linguistics, English stylistics, English corpus linguistics, and English lexicology.
Chapter 8 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 International license.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Half Title
- Series Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Table of Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 A Preliminary Survey of Binomials in Chaucerâs Prose Texts
- 3 Binomials in Caxtonâs Translations: Paris and Vienne and the History of Reynard the Fox
- 4 Binomials in a Chronicle and the âChronicle Styleâ: The Brut and Maloryâs Le Morte dâArthur
- 5 Binomials in Political and Philosophical Texts: On the Governance of England and On the Properties of Things
- 6 Binomials in Religious Texts: The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ and the English Wycliffite Sermons
- 7 Binomials in Epistolary and Legal Documents: The Signet Letters of Henry V and the Paston Letters and Papers
- 8 Grouping and Comparison of Texts Using Statistical Analyses of Binomials
- 9 Motivations for the Use of Binomials (1): Evidence from Chaucerâs and Caxtonâs Translations
- 10 Motivations for the Use of Binomials (2): Evidence from a Comparison of Binomials between Chaucerâs Verse and Prose
- 11 Historical Development of Binomials from 1350 to 1710 across Text Types in the Helsinki Corpus
- 12 Conclusion
- References
- Index