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

28 Peter Petré & Hubert Cuyckens
3500
3000
2500
2000
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1000
500
0
750–950 951–1050 1051–1150 1151–1250 1251–1350
Corpus Size
(k = 1000 words)
(A)
(B)
(C)
(D)
750 – 950
360 k
120 k
120 k
951–1050
850 k
230 k
110 k
110 k
Figure 1. Weorðan: frequencies per million words.
1051–1150
340 k
110 k
120 k
30 k
1151–1250
270 k
270 k
245 k
190 k
(A) All texts
(B) Present
sample
(C) Only
Anglia/Midlands
(D) = (C) without
outliers
selection turns out to be much more promising. The development resulting from
it is represented in Figure as line (C). 3
There is still a peculiar increase in late OE. This peak, however, can be
accounted for by the presence of two outliers. First, in the period 05 – 50,
Gregory’s Dialogues, which constitutes in itself about half of the entire Anglian
corpus, contains twice as many occurrences of weorðan as the rest of the Anglian
material (2,5 3 versus ,303 pmw). Since this text is a later copy of a WS original
made by an Anglian scribe, rather than a WS copy based on an Anglian original
(the usual situation for most other texts), it can be assumed that this scribe silently
adopted the many occurrences of weorðan from the WS original, because
they were not ungrammatical in his own dialect, only less frequent. The second
outlier, the Ormulum (?c 200), is even more extreme: 3,089 occurrences pmw
versus , 26 for the rest of the early ME material. In this case, the explanation
for the idiosyncratic character of this text lies with its repetitive character and
the frequent use of two idioms in particular, the first of them patterned after
the phrase Godd warrþ mann ‘God became man [i.e., through Christ’s birth]’
(39 occurrences versus only one in the rest of the ME corpus), the second patterned
after ʓho wass wurrþenn wiþþ childe ‘She [i.e., Mary or Elizabeth] became
. Foreign words have been excluded in the word and frequency counts in Figure .
1251–1350
175 k
175 k
96 k
96 k