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Copyright of Verba: Anuario Galego de Filoloxia is the property of Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Servicio de Publicaciones and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This short paper introduces the HeliPaD, a new parsed corpus of Old Saxon (Old Low German). It is annotated according to the standards of the Penn Corpora of Historical English, enriched with lemmatization and additional morphological attributes as well as textual and metrical annotation. This paper provides an overview of its main features and compares it to existing resources such as the Deutsch Diachron Digital version of the Old Saxon Heliand as part of the Referenzkorpus Altdeutsch. It closes with a roadmap for planned future expansions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the effect of the unique contact situation between users of Afrikaans and the native variety of South African English (SAfE) on the propagation of the distinctive macro- and microsemantic properties of SAfE must. This modal verb has gradually become less face-threatening in SAfE over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, conveying a median (weaker) degree of force just as frequently as a higher degree of force by the 1990s, which has in turn led to its increased use in deontic (personal) contexts (Wasserman 2014).These semantic changes differ greatly from the changes that occurred in other native varieties of English in the world (cf. Leech et al. 2009). The primary question this article seeks to answer is whether these distinctive properties of SAfE must have developed due to the contact that this variety has maintained with Afrikaans over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. The discussion firstly provides extralinguistic motivation, and secondly linguistic (synchronic and diachronic) motivation based on corpus data, in support of the influence of Afrikaans moet on SAfE must. The extralinguistic discussion explores the complex sociopolitical relationship between users of Afrikaans and SAfE, along with issues of race and identity, and bilingualism and the education system. It is argued that the periods of fluctuating enmity and friendliness that the English and Afrikaans communities have maintained, as well as the somewhat forced contact situation instituted by racial segregation during the latter part of the 20th century, has allowed these communities to interact in such a way as to affect the mutual influence of their languages, even without the alignment of their identities. The social trend of Afrikaans-speaking teachers instructing English-speaking children during the 20th century has further contributed to the influence of Afrikaans on SAfE. The linguistic discussion on the other hand investigates if and how SAfE must fulfils the linguistic criteria for contact-induced change. This part of the discussion firstly emphasises the similarities between moet and must on grammatical and semantic levels, seeing that Afrikaans and English are close West-Germanic relatives. Special attention is devoted to a comparison between the levels of grammaticalisation of moet and must, especially regarding their respective negative forms moenie and mustn't. Both the synchronic and diachronic quantitative results clearly show the "pull" of Afrikaans moet on SAfE must in terms of usage frequency, which is also confirmed by the diachronic qualitative results. The diachronic qualitative analysis reveals a move toward the expression of very similar macro- and micro-meanings by Afrikaans moet and SAfE must in the written register during the course of the 1910's-1950's to the 1990's-2010's, especially in favour of the expression of a median-degree of obligation via an objective deontic source. SAfE must therefore does follow an Afrikaans-like semantic pattern, confirming the influence of Afrikaans on this English variety. The close, yet complex, relationship that SAfE and Afrikaans have maintained over the course of two centuries is not truly matched anywhere else in the world, and has indeed given rise to a usage pattern of must that is unique among other English varieties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces an innovative method to aid the study of conceptual onomasiological research, with a specific emphasis on diachronic variation in the metonymic patterns with which a target concept is expressed. We illustrate how the method is applied to explore and visualize such diachronic changes by means of a case study on the metonymic patterns for woman in the history of Chinese. Visualization is done with the help of a Multidimensional Scaling solution based on the profile-based distance calculation (; ) and by drawing diachronic trajectories in a set of MDS maps, corresponding to different metonymic targets. This method proves to be effective and feasible in detecting changes in the distribution of metonymic patterns in authentic historical corpus data. On the basis of this method, we can show that different targets exhibit different degrees of diachronic variation in their metonymic patterns. We find diachronically more stable targets (e.g. imperial woman), targets with a dominant trend in diachronic variation (e.g. a woman), and targets with highly fluctuating historical variation (e.g. beautiful woman). Importantly, we can identify the cultural and social changes that may lie behind some of these changes. Examining the results uncovered by the method offers us a better understanding of the dynamicity of metonymic conceptualizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]