Volume 120, Issue 4

The subject of Riddle 15 of the Exeter Book is an animal that lives with its cubs in a burrow where it is hunted by an aggressive intruder. The poem describes how the family escapes through the tunnels of the burrow and how the mother reaches the open; there, she turns on her enemy to strike him with her ‘war-darts’. The proposed solutions to the riddle are usually either ‘badger’ or ‘fox’, whereas the alternative, ‘porcupine’, which was first suggested more than a century ago, has traditionally been rejected on the grounds that the porcupine is not an indigenous species in England. However, there are several strong arguments in favour of the porcupine. In the Latin tradition, the porcupine occurs not only in the zoological writings of Pliny the Elder and Solinus, but also in the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, which already provided the Anglo-Latin enigmatists (Aldhelm, Tatwine and Eusebius) with both facts and legends about beasts. Among these is the old belief that the porcupine is able to shoot out its long, sharp quills, especially at dogs pursuing it – just like the animal in Riddle 15. Other details and clues, too, tally with the characteristics of the porcupine, which was said to resemble the hedgehog and, therefore, was known to the Anglo-Saxons as se mara igil (‘the larger hedgehog’). This paper explores the imaginative language and rhetoric of Riddle 15 and discusses the solutions hitherto proposed in the light of Latin animal riddling and animal lore, both of which informed the Old English riddles of the Exeter Book. In this context, the ‘porcupine’ – though exotic and long refuted – emerges as the most likely solution to Riddle 15.

The B-Text of the English Ordinance and Custom of St Laurence's Hospital, Canterbury has never been published. However, this version of the text, as an example of Canterbury usage around 1400, is of considerable interest to philologists. It provides sufficient linguistic information to allow for an interesting comparison to be made with the prototypical Canterbury text from seventy years before, Dan Michel's holograph Ayenbite of Inwyt of 1340. In this paper, an edition of the B-text is offered, with accompanying glossary and linguistic discussion.

The article deals with the problem of complementation of ‘multiword verbs’ in English. Contrary to the wide-spread idea of the possibility of ‘multiple analysis’, it is argued that, syntactically, these verbs invariably follow an SVO-pattern. Such a view, however, entails the further analytical problem of determining the morphematic function of the verbs' particles and/or prepositions. Drawing on diachronic as well as contrastive evidence, it is suggested that the word formation process in question is a ‘pseudo-suffixation’, resulting from a loss of prefix forms in the case of the phrasal verbs and from analogical realignment as far as the prepositional verbs are concerned.

Faced with the problem that neither a traditional morphological nor a syntactic interpretation sufficiently explains the unique function of word-formation, this paper explores the possibilities offered by a cognitive approach. Assuming conceptual reorganization as the general goal of wordformation, the function of suffixation is specified as conceptual recategorization, producing stable context-independent concepts, some of them identical with grammatical word classes, others more specific, such as person and domain concepts or nominal action, quality and status concepts. Additional conceptual categories arise where recategorization combines with metonymy, e. g. in collective and result concepts. Also in a cognitive vein, prefixation is seen as conceptual anchoring in a spatial or temporal setting or on a scale of gradation and antonymy. Comparing derivation with composition, the analysis shows that while basically a different conceptual process is involved, composition also includes large areas where it fades into prefixation and suffixation. Finally, derivation is contrasted with conversion, a process based on varied constellations of source and target concepts, but generally requiring a larger degree of contextual support than derivation, and this is regarded as the major reason for the continuing productivity of derivational word-formation in English.

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