Old English Legal Language

Download or read book Old English Legal Language written by J. R. Schwyter and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1996-01-01 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This corpus-based study examines the lexical field of theft in the Anglo-Saxon law-codes and documents containing reports of lawsuits (charters, writs, and some chapters of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle). The individual Old English lexemes are analysed not only in terms of their meaning, collocation patterns, and Latin translations, but also, more unusually in a field-approach, with reference to their distribution over the various textual genres and the discourse strategies dominant in these. Although primarily linguistic in focus, a detailed description of the theft-offences and the wider context in which they occur should also be of interest to the historian.