Folk-taxonomies in Early EnglishFairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 2003 - 587 pagina's A folk-taxonomy is a semantic field that represents the particular way in which a language imposes structure and order upon the myriad impressions of human experience and perception. Thus, for example, the experience of color in modem English is structured around an inventory of twelve "basic" color terms; but languages vary in the number of basic color terms used, from thirteen or fourteen terms to as few as two or three. Anthropological linguists have been interested in the comparative study of folk-taxonomies across contemporary languages, and in their studies they have sometimes proposed evolutionary models for the development and elaboration of these taxonomies. The evolutionary models have implications for historical linguistics, but there have been very few studies of the historical development of a folk-taxonomy within a language or within a language family. Folk-Taxonomies in Early English undertakes this task for English, and to some extent for the Germanic and Indo-European language families. The semantic fields studied are basic color terms, seasons of the year, geometric shapes, the five senses, the folk-psychology of mind and soul, and basic plant and animal life-forms. Anderson's emphasis is on folk-taxonomies in Old and Middle English, and also on the implications of semantic analysis for our reading of early English literary texts. |
Inhoudsopgave
17 | |
The Study of Color Terms across Languages | 55 |
Reconstruction of Color Taxonomies in ProtoIndoEuropean and in Historical Languages | 97 |
Basic Color Terms in Germanic and Old English | 123 |
Basic Color Terms in Middle and Modern English | 169 |
The Seasons of the Year | 219 |
Geometric Shapes | 267 |
The Five Senses | 309 |
Plant Lifeforms | 353 |
Animal Lifeforms | 405 |
Taxonomies and the Problem of Universals | 453 |
Notes | 485 |
507 | |
575 | |
579 | |
The FolkPsychology of Mind and Soul | 327 |
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Ælfric analysis Anglo-Saxon animal life-forms basic color terms basic term beasts Beowulf bird blak blue Boethius bright broun brown brun century chromatic classified cognate color vocabulary color words compounds contrast culture dark deor describes dialects Dictionary early early modern English EETS o.s. encoding sequence example fish five senses focal folk-taxonomy frequency geometric Germanic glosses gold Gothic græg gray Greek grene grerb hawen Hebrew herb Hittite horse human hwit hyponym Indo-European Indo-European languages Indo-Hittite John language Latin Level IA lexicalized linguistic loanword mammal means medieval merismus metaphor Middle English modern English native speakers Old English Old English poetry orange Oxford Pearl Poet plant life-forms poet poetry polysemy Proto-Indo-European purple refers seasons semantic soul species names Sprachbund sumer summer sweart symbolic taxa taxon taxonomy texts tion translation tree treow Trevisa University Press Wife's Lament wild winter worm wyrm wyrt yellow þæt þat