James Stratton (UBC\, Department of English Language and Literatures) w ill present an in-person research seminar on September 22nd\, 3:30-4:30pm a t Totem Field Studio (TFS) seminar room (121).
The title of his talk is "Where did wer go? Lexical variation and change in the semantic field of ‘man’ in Old and Middle English". A detailed abs tract of the talk can be found below.
Where did wer go?
Lexical variation and change in the seman tic field of ‘man’ in Old and Middle English
To refer to a m ale adult\, speakers of Present Day English have several lexical items to c hoose from (e.g.\, man\, guy\, dude\, fella< /em>\, bloke\, gentleman\, and geezer). However\ , variation within this semantic field is not new. According to The The saurus of Old English\, there were at least 25 lexical items which den oted ‘male adult’ in Old English (e.g.\, guma\, man\, wer) which could occur in referentially comparable contexts. This stu dy uses variationist quantitative methods to examine the evolution of this semantic field from Old English and Middle English. Specifically\, this stu dy examines changes in lexical preference over a period of 600 hundred year s and investigates whether any factors influenced lexical choices within th is semantic domain.
The results show that wer is replaced by the gender-specific use of man\, a change that is almost complete by Early Middle English. As wer decreases in frequency\, man< /em> takes on the former function of wer\, with the diachronic shi ft in frequency following a prototypical s-curve distribution. Language-int ernal (e.g.\, alliteration) and language-external factors (e.g.\, text type \, text origin) are found to significantly affect variation within this sem antic field. By showing the replacement follows an s-curve distribution\, t his study provides evidence for the applicability of s-curve patterns for d iachronic lexical variation and change.
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