Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang

Old English weorðan and its replacement in Middle English 27
weorðan and its replacement by becuman, we are fortunate enough to be dealing
with the most frequent kind of verbs found in language, namely copulas. Of the
copulas under investigation, only becuman is somewhat less frequent. Still, because
of the overall high frequencies involved, we do not have to make the painful choice
between resigning and ignoring. In this case, it is possible to come to a scientifically
sound solution.
To that effect, we compiled our own corpus making use of several existing corpora.
For the OE period, we used the York Parsed Corpus of OE (YCOE), to which
we added all verse from the York-Penn parsed Corpus of OE poetry (YPC), as well
as the complete Paris Psalter and Meters of Boethius. We added the verse to the
prose YCOE, mainly because OE verse is almost never purely WS, the dialect that
is least interesting for purposes of comparison between OE and ME data. We also
included fragment H of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. This fragment contains the
first instance of becuman + NP, whose absence in the other OE texts of our corpus
so far appears to constitute an accidental gap, and as such provides important additional
information on the chronology of becuman. For the ME period, we used the
Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English (PPCME2), with the addition of
all texts found additionally in the Helsinki Corpus (mainly verse). We also included
in the ME data the first half of The Middle English Genesis and Exodus, as well as
the Winteney manuscript of the Benedictine Rule, which is a twelfth-century copy
of an OE text, and whose language is sufficiently influenced by the early Middle
English scribe to consider it an early ME text as regards copula use (it is also a rare
example of the southern dialect in early ME).
Given the material thus compiled, there are three possible ways to compare
the OE and ME data. Applying the policy of ignoring the problem, we could simply
use all of the material. If we did this, the frequency history of weorðan would
show a development such as represented by line (A) in Figure . It is at once clear
that this pattern of changing frequencies is highly unrealistic. Indeed, if it signalled
a real development within a homogeneous dialect group, weorðan would
have steadily increased during OE, and then all of a sudden, from the start of ME,
would have drastically decreased (from 3,339 occurrences pmw in 05 – 50 to
,5 4 pmw, i.e., less than half, in 5 – 250). This type of scenario is not very
probable. The reason why the top line in Figure charts an unlikely development
is that it is obviously based on an overrepresentation of WS in the OE material – in
effect, this tells us that in WS weorðan was not disappearing at all, but was instead
on the increase. While this increase in WS is interesting in its own right, our present
purpose is to compile a corpus enabling a reliable comparison between OE
and ME. An alternative way of selecting data from the OE material is to take up
Anglian texts only (either purely Anglian or of mixed dialectical make-up). Such a