The uses and meanings of the Middle English verb "haven": a corpus-based study

• Ano de defesa: 2020
• Autor(a) principal: Izabella Rosa Malta
• Orientador(a): Heliana Ribeiro de Mello
• Banca de defesa: Giulia Bossaglia, Aparecida de Araújo Oliveira
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
• Programa de Pós-Graduação: Programa de Pós-Graduação em Estudos Linguísticos
• Departamento: FALE - FACULDADE DE LETRAS
• País: Brasil
• Palavras-chave em Português: Historical Linguistics; Corpus Linguistics; Middle English; Verb valency
• Link de acesso: http://hdl.handle.net/1843/33475

Historical Linguistics research approaches have changed drastically from document-based studies to corpus-based studies with modern methods to investigate diachronic linguistic phenomena, such as the linguistic change of Middle English verbs. This study aims to investigate the syntactic-semantic behaviour of the Middle English verb haven (‘to have’). This study draws on the interface between Corpus Linguistics (henceforth CL) and Historical Linguistics (henceforth HL) through a syntactic-semantic viewpoint on verb valency (Perini, 2015). For this purpose, CMEL – Corpus of Middle English Lyrics was compiled, comprehending lyrics from the timespan between the 12th to the 15th centuries. The corpus analysis was conducted according to the following procedures: a) selecting philological editions of lyrics; b) creating one subcorpus for each century; c) processing data with UAM CorpusTool 3.3m and R (R CORE, 2019); d) filtering the lexical occurrences of haven, and e) sampling them for each century. Based on a CMEL’s sample of lexical occurrences, an indepth discussion from a diachronic point of view suggested that the syntactic-semantic behaviour of haven, more specifically its set of valency and argument structures, has changed over the covered centuries. This resulted in more syntactic fixity and more specific uses and meanings of haven. In other words, haven had two uses, grammatical and lexical, the latter relevant to show that different meanings arose. In conclusion, linguistic change in respect to meanings and verb valency of haven was a matter of fact in this research. This work will benefit not only interfaces of CL with HL, but also other studies investigating different word classes and phenomena.