The Lexical Scandinavian Element in Early Modern English: Some Preliminary Considerations

Abstract

[Abstract] The aim of this paper is to compare the behaviour of Scandinavian loan-words in Early Modern English with the one they exhibited in Middle English. For this purpose, two corpora have been used: the EModE section of the computerized Helsinki Corpus and the ME corpus in Moskowich (1993), as these are representative of the language of both periods. Section 1 examines the features characterizing the corpora and also the variables studied, namely grammatical category, chronological subperiod, text-type and semantic field. The second section focuses on the statistical data emanating from the analysis of the corpus. A comparison between the behaviour of scandinavisms in ME and EModE is made in section 3. Finally, the hypothesis that the distribution of scandinavisms becomes less marked in EModE as regards text-types and semantic fields is confirmed by statistical data and examples drawn from both corpora.