Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-sxzjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-24T13:38:03.264Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Contact effects of translation: Distinguishing two kinds of influence in Old English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 August 2008

Ann Taylor
Ann Taylor
Affiliation:
University of York
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Many of our surviving Old English (OE) texts are translations from Latin originals. Given that the syntax of Latin and OE differ in a number of ways, the possibility of transference in the process of translation is an important issue for studies of OE syntax. This article examines one syntactic structure where the syntax of the languages differ: the prepositional phrase (PP) with pronominal complement. In Latin, PPs with pronominal complements are essentially head-initial, while in OE they vary between head-initial and head-final. I show that two distinct translation effects can be distinguished, one direct and one indirect, and that these effects apply differentially to two different types of translation, biblical and nonbiblical. I relate these different translation effects to the different strategies of OE translators when faced with biblical and nonbiblical texts.

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , July 2008 , pp. 341 - 365
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Bately, Janet. (1980). The Old English Orosius. Early English Text Society (hereafter EETS) Supplementary Series (hereafter S.S.) 6. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bethurum, Dorothy. (1957). The homilies of Wulfstan. Oxford: Clarendon Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bock, J. Kathryn. (1986). Syntactic persistence in language production. Cognitive Psychology 18:355–387.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clemoes, Peter. (1997). Ælfric's catholic homilies: the First series. EETS S.S. 17. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Colgrave, Bertram, & Mynors, Roger A. B. (1969). Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Crawford, Samuel J. (1922). The Old English version of the Heptateuch. Ælfric's treatise on the Old and New Testament and his preface to Genesis. EETS 160. London: Oxford University Press. Reprinted with additions by N. R. Ker 1969.Google Scholar
Cross, James E. (1996). Two Old English apocrypha and their manuscript source: the Gospel of Nichodemus and the Avenging of the Saviour, with contributions by Denis Brearley, Julia Crick, Thomas Hall and Andy Orchard. Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 19. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 139–247.Google Scholar
de Lubac, Henri, & Daniélou, Jean (eds.) (1979). Grégoire le Grand Dialogues. Sources Chrétiennes. Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf.Google Scholar
Endter, Wilhelm. (1922 [1964]). König Alfreds des Grossen Bearbeitung der Soliloquien des Augustinus. Bibliothek der Angelsaechsischen Prosa 11. Reprint. Darmstadt, Germany: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.Google Scholar
Estival, Dominique. (1985). Syntactic priming of the passive in English. Text 5:7–21.Google Scholar
Fischer, Olga. (1988). The origin and spread of the accusative and infinitive construction in English. Folia Linguistica Historica 8.1:143–217.Google Scholar
Fischer, Olga (1992). Syntactic change and borrowing: the Case of the accusative and infinitive construction in English. In Gerritson, M. & Stein, D. (eds.), Internal and external factors in syntactic change. Trends in Linguistics/Studies and Monographs 61. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 17–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fischer, Olga (1994). The fortunes of the Latin-type accusative and infinitive construction in Dutch and English compared. In Swan, T., Mørck, E., & Westvik, O. J. (eds.), Language change and language structure: Older Germanic languages in a comparative perspective. Trends in Linguistics/Studies and Monographs 73. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 91–133.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goolden, Peter. (1958). The Old English “Apollonius of Tyre.” London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Gries, Stephen Th. (2005). Syntactic priming: a Corpus-based approach. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 34.4:365–399.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harris, Christopher D. (2006). On the distribution of personal pronouns in the syntax of Old English. MA dissertation, University of York.Google Scholar
Hartsuiker, Robert J., & Westenberg, C. (2000). Word order priming in written and spoken sentence production. Cognition 75:B27–B39.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hartsuiker, Robert J., Pickering, Martin J., & Veltkamp, Eline. (2004). Is syntax separate or shared between languages? Cross-linguistic syntactic priming in Spanish-English bilinguals. Psychological Science 15.6:409–414.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hecht, Hans. (1965 [1900–1907]). Bischof Wærferth von Worcester Übersetzung der Dialoge Gregors des Grossen. Bibliothek der Angelsächsischen Prosa, 5. Reprint. Darmstadt, Germany: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.Google Scholar
Herzfeld, George. (1973 [1900]). An Old English martyrology. EETS 116. London: Trübner.Google Scholar
van Kemenade, Ans. (1987). Syntactic case and morphological case in the history of English. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Foris.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koopman, Willem F. (1997). Another look at clitics in Old English. Transactions of the Philological Society 95:73–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kotzor, Güntor. (1981). Das altenglische Martyrologium. Vol. 2. Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse. Abhandlungen, Neue Folge, Heft 88/2. Munich, Germany: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.Google Scholar
Kÿto, Merja, & Rissanen, Matti. (1993). “By and by enters [this] my artificiall foole … who, when Jack beheld, sodainely he flew at him”: Searching for syntactic constructions in the Helsinki Corpus. In Rissanen, M., Kÿto, M., and Palander-Collin, M. (eds.), Early English in the computer age: Explorations through the Helsinki corpus. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 253–266.Google Scholar
Labourt, Jerome. (1949–63). Saint Jérôme: Lettres. Paris: Société d'Edition “Les Belles Lettres.”Google Scholar
Loebell, Helga, & Bock, Kathryn. (2003). Structural priming across languages. Linguistics 41:791–824.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Migne, Jaques-Paul. (1862). Regula Pastoralis. Patrologia Latina 77:13–128. Paris: Migne.Google Scholar
Miller, D. Gary. (2002). Nonfinite structures in theory and change. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, Thomas. (1959–63 [1890–98]). The Old English version of “Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People.” EETS 95, 96, 110, 111. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Bruce. (1978). Prepositions, adverbs, prepositional adverbs, postpositions, separable prefixes, or inseparable prefixes, in Old English. Neuphilologische mitteilungen 79:240–257.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Bruce (1985). Old English syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morris, Richard. (1967 [1874–80]). The Blickling homilies. EETS 58, 63, 73. London: Trübner.Google Scholar
Napier, Arthur S. (1971 [1916]). The Old English version, with the Latin original, of the Enlarged Rule of Chrodegang together with the Latin original. EETS 150. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., Ltd. and Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Nichols, Ann E. (1964). Awendan: a Note on Ælfric's vocabulary. Journal of English and Germanic Philology 63:7–13.Google Scholar
Nunnally, Thomas E. (1992). Man's son/son of man: Translation, textual conditioning, and the history of the English genitive. In Rissanen, M., Ihalainen, O., Nevalainen, T., & Taavitsainen, I. (eds.), History of Englishes: New methods and interpretations in historical linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 359–371.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pickering, Martin, & Branigan, Holly. (1998). The representation of verbs: Evidence from syntactic priming in language production. Journal of Memory and Language 39:633–651.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pintzuk, Susan. (1999). Phrase structures in competition: Variation and change in Old English word order. New York: Garland.Google Scholar
Pintzuk, Susan, & Taylor, Ann. (2006). The loss of OV order in the history of English. In van Kemenade, A. & Los, B. (eds.), Blackwell handbook of the history of English. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.Google Scholar
Pope, John C. (1968). Homilies of Ælfric, a supplementary collection. EETS 260. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Salamoura, Angeliki, & Williams, John. (2006). Lexical activation of cross-language syntactic priming. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 9.3:299–307.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schröer, Arnold. (1964 [1885–88]). Die angelsächsischen Prosabearbeitungen der Benediktinerregel. Bibliothek der Angelsächsischen Prosa 2. Kassel. Reprinted with appendix. Darmstadt, Germany: H. Gneuss.Google Scholar
Scragg, Donald G. (1992). The Vercelli homilies and related texts. EETS 300. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Skeat, Walter W. (1970 [1871–87]). The holy gospels in Anglo-Saxon, Northumbrian and Old Mercian versions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reprinted Darmstadt; Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1970.Google Scholar
Skeat, Walter W. (1966 [1881–1900]). Ælfric's Lives of Saints. EETS 76, 82, 94, 114. Reprint. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Stanton, Robert. (2002). The culture of translation in Anglo-Saxon England. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.Google Scholar
Sweet, Henry. (1958 [1871]). King Alfred's West-Saxon version of Gregory's Pastoral Care. EETS 45, 50:3–9. Reprint. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Sweet, Henry (1959 [1883]). King Alfred's Orosius. EETS 79. Reprint. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt. (2006). Morphosyntactic persistence in spoken English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, Ann, Warner, Anthony, Pintzuk, Susan, & Beths, Frank. (2003). The York-Toronto-Helsinki parsed corpus of Old English prose. Available from Oxford Text Archive (ota.ahds.ac.uk).Google Scholar
Thorpe, Benjamin. (1844–46). The homilies of Ælfric. London: Richard and John E. Taylor.Google Scholar
Timofeeva, Olga. (forthcoming). Translating texts where et verbum ordo mysterium est: Late Old English idiom vs. ablativus absolutus. Journal of Medieval Latin.Google Scholar
Warner, Anthony. (1982). Complementation in Middle English and the methodology of historical syntax. London: Croom Helm.Google Scholar
Weber, Robert. (1975). Biblia Sacra iuxta vulgatam versionem. 2nd ed.Stuttgart: Württemburgische Bibelanstalt.Google Scholar
Wende, Fritz. (1915). Über die nachgestellten Präpositionen im Angelsächsischen. Palæastra 70. Berlin: Mayer & Müller.Google Scholar