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

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.

Changes in progress in late Northumbrian: the extension of -s as genitive and plural marker

“…These results are not in line with those obtained from the study of accusative/dative syncretism in Lindisfarne, which show that this process is not even throughout the gloss, with the section corresponding to John having the lowest degree of syncretism in a statistically significant way 32 (cf. Fernández Cuesta & Rodríguez Ledesma 2020).…”

“… 6 For the same view, see Adamczyk (2018: 13) and Fernández Cuesta & Rodríguez Ledesma (2020: 41). Keeping the traditional model is useful for comparison with other texts written in other dialects or at different stages in the Old English period, many of which preserve the etymological inflections to a much greater extent than Lindisfarne or Durham do.…”

Timofeeva, Olga. 2022. Sociolinguistic Variation in Old English. Records of Communities of People. Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pp. xv + 204. ISBN 9789027211347.

“…The only section that I find somewhat incomplete is the one on glosses. There is no mention of the work by Pons-Sanz on Norse-derived words in the Northumbrian glosses (2000,2004), by Kotake on Mercian glosses (2010, or recent work on various aspects of the Northumbrian glosses by Cole (2014), Fernández Cuesta andPons (2016) and Fernández Cuesta and Rodríguez Ledesma (2020). Cole (2014) is not mentioned, even though it is a quantitative/statistical work that is carried out employing variationist methods.…”