INDEFINITE-PERSONAL ‘MAN’ STRUCTURES IN OLD ENGLISH
Abstract
https://doi.org/10.18522/1995-0640-2025-2-49-60
The paper focuses on the specific features of the indefinite-personal syntactic structures with ‘man’-pronoun in Old English. The epic poem ‘Beowulf’ and Anglo-Saxon Chronicles provide valuable research material, as they help reconstruct the language potential of the selected structures in various literary genres. The continuous sampling and contextual analysis methods revealed considerable differences in frequency, meaning, and style of ‘man’-structures between the texts. The development of indefinite-personal structures in Old English is assumed to be underpinned by the semantic and grammatical transformation of the noun ‘man’ and fostered by the human-centered, or anthropocentric, view of the world as perceived by the Anglo-Saxons.
Key words: Old English, indefinite-personal structures, semantic transformation, grammaticalization, anthropocentric worldview
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