Repetitive and therefore fixed? Lemmatic bundles and text-type standardisation in 15th-century administrative Scots

Kopaczyk, J. (2012) Repetitive and therefore fixed? Lemmatic bundles and text-type standardisation in 15th-century administrative Scots. In: Sauer, H. and Waxenberger, G. (eds.) English Historical Linguistics 2008: Selected papers from the fifteenth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL 15), Munich, 24-30 August 2008. John Benjamins, pp. 189-208. ISBN 9789027248428 (doi: 10.1075/cilt.324.11kop)

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Publisher's URL: https://benjamins.com/catalog/cilt.324

Abstract

This is a pilot study investigating the role of phrasal fixedness in the development of a standardised text type. The linguistic material comes from the Edinburgh Corpus of Older Scots (ECOS), consisting of samples of administrative records from 15th-century Scotland. The corpus has been searched for re-occurring lemmatic bundles, which are the indicators of emerging patterns and standardising usage in the records, developing in the context of linguistic standardisation of Scots. The findings are interpreted with regard to their semantics and function in the records, and indicate that the text type as such was not yet fully standardised in its repertoire of fixed phrases serving a specific purpose. In individual locations, however, one finds a greater degree of consistency and a tendency to develop a local norm. Similarly, in some specific textual functions the lexical fixedness may be present to a larger extent than in others.

Item Type:Book Sections
Status:Published
Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID:Kopaczyk, Professor Joanna
Authors: Kopaczyk, J.
College/School:College of Arts & Humanities > School of Critical Studies > English Language and Linguistics
Publisher:John Benjamins
ISBN:9789027248428
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