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

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 nominativ...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Fernández Cuesta, Julia María, Rodríguez Ledesma, M. Nieves
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2020
País:España
Institución:Universidad de Sevilla (US)
Repositorio:idUS. Depósito de Investigación de la Universidad de Sevilla
OAI Identifier:oai:idus.us.es:11441/153320
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/11441/153320
https://doi.org/10.1515/flih-2020-0002
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Glosses
Lindisfarne gloss
Old Northumbrian
Syncretism
Descripción
Sumario: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 aimof 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 contextswhere the Latin lemma is either accusative or dative.Wehave tried to determine whether variables such as syntactic context, noun class, and frequency condition the presence or absence of the -e inflection, andwhether 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.