A Computer-Assisted Study of Stylistics in Old English with Special Regard to Metaphorical and Formulaic Expressions

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In this project the investigator reconsiders and explains cruces in the form of metaphor or formula in verse works and Biblical translations. His material and tools are far-ranging, including machine-readable texts and concordances of Old English poems, various dictionaries of Old English and English Etymology, and thirty modern English translations of Beowulf.In the term of four years he newly wrote five papers on the translations of Old English poems and three consecutive papers on the collocation of red gold (pure gold) from stylistic point of view. In the course of his study he utilized A Thesaurus of Old English and found its merit and several shortcomings, publishing two review-articles. He read a paper on the thesaurus on the tenth International Symposium on Lexicography at Copenhagen University (2000) and then designed and chaired a symposium on the same subject on the sixteenth general conference of the Japan Society for Medieval English Studies (2000).He also revised his nine papers to form a collection of articles on Old English stylistics, titled Metaphorical and Formulaic Expressions in Old English, which explains, for example, a hitherto unnoticed significance of some phrase in Beowulf and clarifies the lineages of two formulaic expressions and several poetic compounds from Old English to Modern English. It includes: (I) Beowulf 1020b: brand Healfdenes, (II) scridan in Beowulf, (III) poet waes god cyning in Old English poems, (IV) Diametrically Opposed Meanings of aspringan, (V) Neglected Aspects of the Combination egesa stod, (VI) The Lineage of the Biblical Phrase while the world standeth, (VII) Review, Heaney's Translation of Beowulf (2000), (VIII) A Thesaurus of Old English: Poetic Compounds and Metaphorical Expressions, and (IX) Quotations from Old English poems in The Oxford English Dictionary.This collection of papers is further to be revised and presented as a doctoral thesis.