On Old English swa 'so'

What it is about

The paper asks what the Old English word swa 'so' contributes to sentence meaning. A corpus survey collects its uses: pronominal uses, subordinate clauses of manner, equatives, consecutives and conditionals. A compositional analysis of each use reduces its contribution to two basic functions: marking definiteness and marking predicate abstraction. The two can be covert, and the author argues that this links the uses and gives a path to reanalysis and semantic change. The paper is a semantic analysis with no numerical evaluation.

Ideas

• I1. Give function words a sense table, not only a form list. For English so and such in the Early Modern register, each occurrence gets one sense label from a small closed set (degree, manner clause, equative, consecutive, conditional). Keep the labels in 10. Vocabulary: archaic words and false friends and let en/src/emode.rs carry the sense next to the form. Measure: the share of so tokens in 14. Sample texts, read word by word that receive a sense.
• I2. Use the paper's use inventory as a test set: one sentence per use type. Each must get its own sense label. A control in which the sense labels are shuffled must score at chance.
• I3. Mark entries where the function is present but no overt form appears (covert definiteness or abstraction). Such entries are candidates for the ellipsis analysis; list them, but do not add them as rules until a count supports them.

For Mova

The relevant chapters are 10. Vocabulary: archaic words and false friends (sense table for so, such) and 29. Ellipsis, word order and information structure (covert elements). The code is en/src/emode.rs (closed table of Early Modern forms) and en/src/dict.rs. The measure: sense-label accuracy on the test sentences above. Run it twice and check that the output is identical.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.16995/glossa.5755

@article{beck2023old,
  title = {{On Old English swa 'so'}},
  author = {Beck, Sigrid},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.16995/glossa.5755},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5755}
}

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