Old English Keywords in Context. A Quantitative and Qualitative Corpus Analysis

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 14 Punkte, Saarland University (Fachrichtung 4.3 Anglistik, Amerikanistik und anglophone Kulturen), course: Corpus Linguistics, language: English, abstract: In the course of this paper, Old English key words are going to be analyzed with regard to their frequency and their characteristics in the respective context. First of all, I will present the compilation of the corpus and argue why the respective sources have been chosen.§I will also demonstrate some problems coinciding with the corpus compilation, before offering approaches to the problem of how to gain key words in a diachronic text. Afterwards, I will present the most frequent key words and give a first short interpretation of the results.§§All key terms are to be arranged in different semantic fields with respective subcategories and afterwards subjected to a quantitative analysis within these respective fields. Within this analysis I will start with comparing the different fields with each other, then I will compare the subcategories and finally examine the relations within the subcategories. Finally, a qualitative analysis will be performed, once again within the different semantic fields. In this respect, I will also examine the characteristics of pronouns in a separate section.