The participle in two corpora of Old English. Descriptive and empirical questions

Abstract

This article deals with the present and past participle of Old English. Its research method is based on the idea that the specific characteristics of a given corpus make it more suitable for certain types of analysis. In the analysis, the York Corpus of Old English is used for assessing the inflection of the participle with respect to tense, case and genre, while the Dictionary of Old English Corpus is searched for the present and past participles of strong verbs in all the inflections. The main conclusion on the descriptive side is that only 42.52 percent of the participles in the corpus are inflected, the ratio of inflection being lower in the past participle than in the present participle. On the empirical side, the main conclusion is that, of the variants considered, tense, morphological class and genre prove more useful than case and adjectival inflection, which are essentially contextual.