The Old English Complex Plant Names: A Linguistic Survey and a Catalogue

This survey is a linguistic analysis of the morphological shapes and structures, the semantics and the etymological history of the Old English complex plant names. Their analysis requires the interplay of various disciplines, for instance word-formation, structural and cognitive semantics, contact linguistics, botany, and socio-cultural history.

This investigation is a qualitative analysis of the etymological, the morphological and the semantic history of the Old English complex plant names as a lexical field, and an in-depth study of the plant names as individual entities. Their particular interest results from the fact that they encode a wealth of information on the plants and their perception by the people, as well as on the psychological processes and the linguistic strategies that were used in the naming processes. Their analysis requires the interplay of various disciplines morphology and word-formation, structural and cognitive semantics, and contact linguistics. As plant names enjoy a special status as natural kind terms, this study also touches upon questions of scientific and folk taxonomic structures, of botany, and of socio-cultural history.

Autorentext

Ulrike Krischke received her PhD in English Historical Linguistics and Literature of the Middle Ages at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich in 2010. Since 2006, she has been a lecturer and research assistant at the Department of English and American Studies of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich.

Inhalt

Contents: Old English complex plant names Taxon, natural kind term, lexeme? Plant world, plant names and the Anglo-Saxon medico-botanical texts Folk taxonomy and scientific taxonomy Morphology and word-formation Semantics Associative relations Motivations Diachronic stratification and the effects of language contact Latin loan influence.