Old and Middle English Sickness-nouns in Historical Perspective

Download or read book Old and Middle English Sickness-nouns in Historical Perspective written by Marta Sylwanowicz and published by Æ Academic Publishing. This book was released on 2014 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The monograph aims at filling a long-existing gap in English historical linguistics by offering a comprehensive account of the semantic development of Old and Middle English synonyms of the term sickness, and an examination of possible conditioning factors leading to the loss of Anglo-Saxon lexical items, presented within the context of previous research on the semantic change in general, and theoretical and practical discussion of English medieval medicine, in particular. Analyzing the origin and meaning of the terms within the overall structure of the lexical field, the author also considers different chronological layers of the sickness-nouns and the explicatory techniques used by the scribe when presenting those terms to their reader. The book will be of interest to lexicologists, scholars interested in historical language for specialized purposes, as well as historians of medicine.