<Originals>The adverbial use of ‘day’ and ‘night’ in Old English poems “Beowulf” and “Genesis A” and their contrast to prepositional phrases : Towards an explanation for their lexical tendency

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  • <論文>古英語詩『ベオウルフ』と『創世記A』における‘day’と‘night’の副詞的用法と前置詞句の対立 --その語彙的傾向--
  • 古英語詩『ベオウルフ』と『創世記A』における'day'と'night'の副詞的用法と前置詞句の対立 : その語彙的傾向
  • コ エイゴシ 『 ベオウルフ 』 ト 『 ソウセイキ A 』 ニ オケル'day'ト'night'ノ フクシテキ ヨウホウ ト ゼンチシク ノ タイリツ : ソノ ゴイテキ ケイコウ

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Abstract

Old English possessed four nominal cases, namely nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative. All of which, except for nominative, could serve as adverbials. There are a limited number of studies about such uses of nouns and our understanding of the exact functional difference between each case-form and potentially competing prepositional phrases remains incomplete. Just as studies on Modern English point out that such uses of nouns are lexically restricted, most Old English temporal nouns also show strong tendency towards one of these expressions, i.e., adverbial case or prepositional phrase. On the other hand, two Old English nouns dæg ‘day’ and niht ‘night’ are equally frequently used in both adverbial case-forms and prepositional phrase. This paper investigates these two words in two Old English poems. After having clarified the different usage of each adverbial case, the author points out that these two nouns show quite different behavior as to whether they are used adverbially or prepositionally. In the final section of this paper, the author argues that this tendency can be explained by metrical background.

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