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.