Title: Old English : a historical linguistic companion /
Authors: Lass, Roger.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press,
Year: 1994
Subjects: English language Grammar, Historical.; English language Grammar; English language Grammar History; English language Grammar Research.
Abstract: Old English is a companion to Old English studies and to historical studies of early English in general. It is also an introduction to Indo-European studies in the particular sense in which they underpin the history of English. Professor Roger Lass makes accessible in a linguistically up-to-date and readable form the Indo-European and Germanic background to Old English, as well as what can be reconstructed about the resulting state of Old English itself. His book is a bridge between the more elementary Old English grammars and the major philological grammars and recent interpretations of the Old English data.Old English assumes a basic knowledge of phonetics and phonology, the elements of syntactic and morphological theory, and an introduction to historical linguistics. An extensive glossary gives definitions of the major technical terms used. -- Publisher description.
Contents: Introduction and caveats: the notion 'Old English' -- pt. I. Historical prelude -- 1. Background and origins -- 2. Indo-European to Proto-Germanic to West Germanic -- pt. II. Old English Phonology -- 3. Evolution of Old English phonology: the major early sound changes -- 4. Suprasegmentals -- pt. III. Morphophonemic intermezzo -- 5. Ablaut, the laryngeals and the IE root -- pt. IV. Morphology, lexis and syntax -- 6. Inflectional morphology, I: nouns, pronouns, determiners and adjectives -- 7. Inflectional morphology, II: The verb -- 8. Vocabulary and word-formation -- 9. Topics in OE historical syntax: word-order and case -- pt. V. Historical postlude -- 10. The dissolution of Old English -- Index of Old English words and affixes.