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Article published In: NOWELE
Vol. 77:2 (2024) ► pp.110–144

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Old and Middle English adverbs of degree in their wider West Germanic context

ORCiD logo with link | University of Groningen
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with University of Groningen.

Published online: 3 December 2024
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https://doi.org/10.1075/nowele.00087.vis
Abstract
Research on adverbs of degree in Old and Middle English has been largely self-contained and has paid little attention to developments that were happening in the neighbouring West Germanic languages. While research on these other languages is less extensive, “Middle” Germanic has been identified as a period of convergence for the usage of adverbs of degree (Visser, L. 2023. Old Saxon and Middle Low German adverbs of degree: A case of diachronic discontinuity?. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 35(3). 266–306. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). The present study analyses the usage patterns of seven adverbs in both Old and Middle English using data from different corpora: swīðe/swīthe, ful, miċle/muchel, sāre/sǭre, ġearwe/yāre, fela/fę̄le, and hearde/harde. It is found that their development differs strikingly from their Continental West Germanic counterparts, and they appear to preserve more primary usage patterns.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Adverbs of degree
    • 2.2English adverbs in their West Germanic context
    • 2.3Degree prefixes
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Materials
    • 3.2Method
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Swīðe/swīthe
    • 4.2Ful
    • 4.3Miċle/muchel
    • 4.4Sāre/sǭre
    • 4.5Ġearwe/yāre, fela/fę̄le, and hearde/harde
  • 5.Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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