Approaches to the old english vocabulary for 'mind'

Studia Neophilologica

Volumn 73, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 11-22

  Low, Soon Ai ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND BALTIMORE COUNTY   (United States)

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EID: 34248734629     PISSN: 00393274     EISSN: 16512308     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/713789805     Document Type: Article

References (28)

1. Malcolm Godden's "Anglo-Saxons on the Mind", Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Helmut Gneuss and Michael Lapidge, Cambridge, 1985, pp. 271-298
2. has been seminal in establishing the Anglo-Saxon notion of 'mind' as an area of inquiry, but is not primarily a semantic investigation. Two recent studies, Michael J. Phillips, Heart, Mind and Soul in Old English: A Semantic Study, Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1985
3. and Margrit Soland, Altenglische Ausdrücke für 'Leib' und 'Seele', Zürich, 1979, only treat a limited number of the 'mind' terms individually, and are commented upon at the end of this paper.
4. Anna Wierzbicka, Semantics, Culture and Cognition: Universal Human Concepts in Culture-Specific Configurations, Oxford, 1992, p. 41.
5. See Phillips, p. 19, and Godden, p. 289.
6. Unless otherwise noted, my citations of Old English texts will follow the standard editions and system of short titles (here expanded) and references used by the Dictionary of Old English as set out in A. diP. Healey and R. L. Venezky, A Microfiche Concordance to Old English: the List of 'Texts and Index of Editions, Toronto, 1980, revised May 1997.
7. See Dirk Geeraerts, Diachronie Prototype Semantics, Oxford, 1997, p. 17.
8. J. Bosworth and T. N. Toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, Oxford, 1898, reprinted 1964 with Supplement by T. N. Toller, Oxford, 1921, reprinted 1955.
9. A. diP. Healey et al., Dictionary of Old English: A, Toronto, 1994.
10. E. M. Uhlenbeck, "Some Remarks on Homonymy and Polysemy", Discourse and Meaning: Papers in Honor of Eva Hajičová, ed. Barbara Partee and Petr Sgall, Amsterdam, 1996, p. 121.
11. Uhlenbeck, p. 121.
12. Geeraerts, p. 95.
13. See, however, Geeraerts' s account of semantic polygenesis (pp. 24-25 and pp. 62-68), the process whereby a word may acquire a meaning more than once in its history, each time afresh.
14. See Geeraerts, "Vagueness's Puzzles, Polysemy's Vagaries", Cognitive Linguistics 4, 1993, p. 260.
15. Uhlenbeck, p. 122.
16. Diachronic Prototype Semantics, p. 114.
17. Examples are Pastoral Care 0.23.16: nu ic wilnige oœtte oeos sprœc stigge on diet ingeoonc oies leorneres, suœ suœ on sume hlœdre 'now I wish that this speech ascend in the mind of the learner, just as though on a ladder'; Pastoral Care 21.155.20: oa creopendan wuhta beinnan oam wage getacniao oa ingeooncas oe wealcao in oies monnes mode 'the creeping things within the wall betoken the thoughts that revolve in the human mind'; and Elene 679: pœt me halig God / gefylle, frea mihtig, feores ingepanc / weoruda wuldorgeofa, willan minne, / gasta geocend 'that the holy God, mighty Lord, Giver of gifts to men and Saviour of souls, may fulfil for me the purpose of my life, my desire'.
18. Stephen Ullmann, Semantics: An Introduction to the Science of Meaning, Oxford, 1962, p. 125.
19. Ullmann proposes four sources of vagueness: the generic character of our words, their multiplicity of aspect (which is an incipient polysemy), the lack of clear-cut boundaries in the non-linguistic world and speakers' lack of familiarity with the precise meaning of the terms they are using. Geeraerts distinguishes vagueness from polysemy as follows: "Distinctions among senses illustrate polysemy ... Distinctions among the members of a single sense are cases of vagueness: fruit is semantically vague with regard to the differences between oranges and watermelons, because those differences do not lie at the basis of a distinction between senses." (Diachronie Prototype Semantics, pp. 18-19). Geeraerts's notion of vagueness is obviously that described by Ullmann as pertaining to the generic character of terms.
20. Godden, p. 289.
21. As Godden has observed (pp. 296-98), this portion of Ælfric's homily ultimately derives from Alcuin's De animae ratione (Patrologia Latina 101, col. 644C), with the Latin version found in Boulogne, Bibliothèque Municipale, 63, being intermediate.
22. Diachronie Prototype Semantics, pp. 104-105.
23. Kathleen V. Wilkes, "The Relationship Between Scientific Psychology and Common Sense Psychology", Folk Psychology and the Philosophy of Mind, ed. Scott M. Christensen and Dale R. Turner, Hillsdale, N.J., 1993, p. 174.
24. Christensen and Turner, xvi.
25. Godden, p. 271.
26. Phillips, p. 71. See my article "Mental Cultivation in Guthlac B", Neophilologus 81, 1997, pp. 625-636.
27. Adrienne Lehrer, "A Theory of Vocabulary Structure: Retrospectives and Prospectives", Thirty Years of Linguistic Evolution: Studies in Honor of René Dirven on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Martin Pütz, Amsterdam, 1992, p. 243.
28. This table was compiled using the Word Wheel Interface facility of the Old English electronic corpus: A. diP. Healey et al., Searching the Dictionary of Old English Corpus, WWW-accessible version by Univ. of Michigan Humanities Texts Initiative, with TEI-conformant edition conversion by J. Price-Wilkins and Tak Ariga (http://www.hti.umich.edu/english/oec/: last updated October 6, 1998).