"He is sunu witodlice þæs gebletsodan Godes": Characterising the lexical field of holiness in Old English prose: gebletsod and gehalgod
Abstract
The presented paper is a continuation of the effort of the authors to map all the adjectives in the lexical field of Holiness in Old English (defined in the Thesaurus of Old English online as: "Holiness: Characterized by holiness, blessed.") in the perspective of Trier's (1931) lexical field theory and its later modifications (Schwyrter, 1996). The Old English adjectives gebletsod and gehalgod are examined as to their syntactic use, semantic meaning, as well as genre distribution, following the methodology presented in Fúsik (2018) for halig and Fúsik and Novotná (forthcoming 2022) for gesælig, the two adjectives from the field that have already been investigated.
The paper shall compare the meaning of gebletsod and gehalgod in the context of prose texts as they are presented in the York Helsinki Toronto Parsed Corpus of Old English (by using the queries [word=".*blets.*d.*" & tag="VBN.*|ADJ.*"] and [word=".*hal.*g.*d.*"&tag="VBN.*|ADJ.*"]) as well as identify their conceptual fields, i.e., who or what can be described as gebletsod and gehalgod.