The Grammar of Names in Anglo-Saxon England: The Linguistics and Culture of the Old English Onomasticon

Naming is fundamental to language. Like a common-word lexicon, an onomasticon contains the lexical information that allows names, as lexical items, to function in language use. But names lack the sense relations that correlate with the denotations of common words. An onomasticon lacks such information. The construction of an onomasticon contributes to theories of grammatical structure in general, and to variation in such structure: in primary syntactic categories, lexical-item formation (including derivational morphology), inflectional morphology, phonology. An onomasticon is both a linguistic and cultural product susceptible to language-internal and language-external influences, and to experience-conditioned variation from speaker to speaker. The generously attested Germanic names of Anglo-Saxon England (not all native Old English), typically formed from elements based on common words, have dithematic and monothematic structures, analogous to common-word compound and morphologically simplex words. Descriptions of these names invoke the vocabulary of heroic verse, alliteration, etymology, folk etymology, paronomasia, and child language. The data, notably moneyers’ names on Anglo-Saxon coins, invite assessment of evidence for distinguishing the gender of a name. The analyses are grounded in notional dependency grammar, whose exposition gently progresses with the linguistic characterization of names in Part I, and informs revisions to certain tenets of Germanic philology in Part II, notably on the weak declension of various word classes as well as names, and its Indo-European origins.