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Motion and the English Verb offers an extensive study of motion encoding in medieval English, including an investigation of the range of verbs occurring in the medieval English intransitive motion construction and an analysis of which verbs and structures are employed most frequently in talking about motion. On this basis, it analyses the various cognitive and contact-linguistic aspects of the integration of "typologically different" French loan verbs expressing path of motion.
List of contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Chapter 1. Introduction
- Chapter 2. Theoretical framework
- Chapter 3. Problems with historical data
- Chapter 4. Talking about motion in medieval English: aims, material, and method
- Chapter 5. Talking about MOTION in Old English
- Chapter 6. Talking about motion in Middle English
- Chapter 7. Latin and medieval French in the motion verb typology
- Chapter 8. Borrowed PATH verbs in Middle English: preliminary considerations
- Chapter 9. Borrowed PATH verbs in Middle English
- Chapter 10. General Conclusion
- Appendix C
- References
About the author
Judith Huber is assistant professor in English linguistics at Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nÿrnberg (FAU). She studied English and Romance linguistics and literature in Hamburg and Munich, and was previously lecturer in English linguistics at the Catholic University of EichstÃtt-Ingolstadt and at LMU Munich. Her main fields of interest are processes of language change and language contact, in particular with respect to English historical lexicology and syntax.
Summary
In Motion and the English Verb, a study of the expression of motion in medieval English, Judith Huber provides extensive inventories of verbs used in intransitive motion meanings in Old and Middle English, and discusses these in terms of the manner-salience of early English. Huber demonstrates how several non-motion verbs receive contextual motion meanings through their use in the intransitive motion construction. In addition, she analyzes which verbs and structures are employed most frequently in talking about motion in select Old and Middle English texts, demonstrating that while satellite-framing is stable, the extent of manner-conflation is influenced by text type and style.
Huber further investigates how in the intertypological contact with medieval French, a range of French path verbs (entrer, issir, descendre, etc.) were incorporated into Middle English, in whose system of motion encoding they are semantically unusual. Their integration into Middle English is studied in an innovative approach which analyzes their usage contexts in autonomous Middle English texts as opposed to translations from French and Latin. Huber explains how these verbs were initially borrowed not for expressing general literal motion, but in more specific, often metaphorical and abstract contexts. Her study is a diachronic contribution to the typology of motion encoding, and advances research on the process of borrowing and loanword integration.
Additional text
The volume [...] should stand as required reading for future studies of historical semantics, not least thanks to the clarity and thoroughness with which its methodology is set out
