Word formation of place names in old english /

Word Formation of Place Names in Old English This bachelor thesis is focused on word formation of place-names in Old English. The aim of this bachelor paper is to analyse word formation types of place-names found in Old English Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. To accomplish it, the following objectives were set: to make an overview about nominal word formation in Modern and Old English, and more specifically, place-name word formation, to collect the examples from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and lastly, to describe the collected data. The place-names were collected from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle edited and translated by B. Thorpe. Their meaning was then checked using Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, ‘Key to English Place-Names’ by University of Nottingham and Old English-German online dictionary by G. Köbler (Germ. Altenglisches Wörterbuch). According to linguists specialising in word formation, affixation and compounding are productive nominal word formation processes in both Modern and Old English. There are more productive word formation types in Modern English that did not yet exist in Old English, such as conversion, clipping and blending. Old English place-names have specific nominal suffixes that make them distinctive and therefore can be easily recognised. The study shows that a total of 250 Old English place-names was found in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The place-name suffixes from the most to the least common are -cester / -ceaster, -ford, sćir, -tún, -ham, -burh, -stead, -worth and -by. The most common word formation type used in the formation of place-names in Old English is affixation, more precisely – suffixation, adding a place-name suffix to an already existing river-name or to a personal name.

Grantor dc:publisher

Institutional Repository of Vilnius University

Year dc:date

2020

Author dc:creator

• Skladaitytė, Augustė,

• place-names, vietovardžiai, žodžių daryba, word formation, Old English, senoji anglų kalba

Statement dc:rights

• info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Language dc:language

eng

Repository record dc:identifier

https://repository.vu.lt/VU:ELABAETD193303439&prefLang=en_US

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vu.lt:elaba:193303439