On the Development of Text Types: Evidence from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

초록

This paper explores generic variations in Old English texts from the perspective of appraisal and genre theory within the systemic functional linguistic (SFL) model of language. For the data, the Winchester manuscript, the oldest surviving version of the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, was used. Expressions of the language of appraisal and of conjunctive relations are analyzed using the SFL discourse semantic model. The text analysis shows that while a number of chronicle entries share similar distributional patterns of appraisal and conjunctive items, the target of the attribution of appraisal and of causality plays a crucial role in how the texts take on generic patterns similar to some Modern English generic text types. Based on this finding, these differences are interpreted in terms of the semogenetic expansion of generic meaning potential.

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