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Old English Legal Language
The lexical field of theft
This corpus-based study examines the lexical field of theft in the Anglo-Saxon law-codes and documents containing reports of lawsuits (charters, writs, and some chapters of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle). The individual Old English lexemes are analysed not only in terms of their meaning, collocation patterns, and Latin translations, but also, more unusually in a field-approach, with reference to their distribution over the various textual genres and the discourse strategies dominant in these. Although primarily linguistic in focus, a detailed description of the theft-offences and the wider context in which they occur should also be of interest to the historian.
[NOWELE Supplement Series, 15] 1996. iv, 197 pp.
Publishing status: Available | Original publisher:Odense University Press
Published online on 16 August 2012
Published online on 16 August 2012
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Typographical Conventions
- Abbreviations
- The Manuscripts
- Introduction
- The Legal Corpus and Questions of Method
- The Lexical Field of Theft: Lexemes and Distribution
- Style, Text Strategy, Syntax, and Theft-lexemes
- Collocation Patterns of Theft-lexemes
- The Latin Translation Evidence of the Law-codes
- Summary and Agenda
- Appendix A
- Appendix B
- Appendix C
- Appendix D
- Appendix E
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Quotation Index (Primary Sources)
Cited by (7)
Cited by seven other publications
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Brennan, Roland K.
2019. Conditional sentences in the Old East Frisian Brokmonna Bref. NOWELE. North-Western European Language Evolution 72:1 ► pp. 11 ff.
Moessner, Lilo
2018. Old English wills. In Sociocultural Dimensions of Lexis and Text in the History of English [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 343], ► pp. 103 ff.
Moessner, Lilo
Schwyter, Jürg Rainer
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