Posted: May 24th, 2015

Word Study

This assignment is a short analysis of a dictionary entry of a single word ( Dream (noun ). You are to show a pattern / patterns of development of the wordâs meaning and pronunciation from Old English to Modern English. You should use the Oxford English Dictionary (The Oxford dictionary of English, accessible via the QU library web site) for the dates when new meanings were first recorded. In addition, I want you to use at least one other resources, such as a dictionary or corpus: Dictionaries: Dictionary of Old English (see below) Electronic Middle English Dictionary: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/ Corpora: Corpus of Historical American English: http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ Corpus of Contemporary American English: http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/ British National Corpus: http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/ Google Ngram Viewer (https://books.google.com/ngrams) is a convenient tool to monitor the frequency of the word(s) usage in texts over time. Your analysis of semantic changes should include observations about the time frame when the word has been in use in English, as well as description of one or two new meanings with a reasonable explanation of the type of semantic change (amelioration, pejoration, generalization, specialization, metaphor, metonymy, semantic loan etc. â see textbook Ch.3, pp.81­92 for reference). Your analysis of phonetic/phonological changes should include at least two sound changes during OE, ME and/or MnE that were discussed in class. Please include the Great Vowel Shift (if applicable). Your analysis must be around 250 words.