Multi-verbal expressions of ‘giving’ in Old English and Old Irish
Patricia Ronan
Department of English
University of Lausanne
p.ronan@gmx.net

Gerold Schneider
Department of English
Universität Zürich
gschneid@es.uzh.ch

Abstract

In both Modern English and Modern Irish, multi-verb expressions can be found to 
express verbal concepts that could also be expressed by simple verbs, e.g. to give an 
answer or to make a suggestion. Similar collocations are already observable in both early English and early Irish. They are assumed not to have been grammaticalised at the early stages (Traugott 1999), but examples of various inflected verbs are found to be complemented by nominalizations.  
The present paper investigates examples containing the expression of giving with Old 
English sellan and Old Irish do-beir. We compare the noun complements used in the two languages under investigation and the frequencies of the examples based on data 
collected from the Toronto Corpus of Old English and from a corpus collected 
from 120,000 words of Old Irish text. 

1. Introduction

The current paper is part of an ongoing larger project to describe mulit-word verbal constructions in Early Celtic and Early English. It is well known that the English language has increased the analyticity of its verbal constructions over time (e.g. Hiltunen 1983), and the gradual rise of multi-verb or supportverb constructions has been described in this context (e.g. in Brinton & Akimoto (eds) 1999). With the exception of a preliminarly study published by Akimoto & Brinton (1999), there are no larger scale corpus studies of multi-verb constructions in Old English. Even though the possibility of Celtic, and in particular Early Welsh language, influence on the development of verbal perhiphrasis in general, and do-periphrasis in particular, has been discussed (e.g. Poussa 1990, Klemola 2002, Filppula, Klemola & Paulasto 2008), no work previous corpus work has been done on multi-verbal in early Celtic languages. The present authors hold corpus studies of all the languages in question to be a necessity for the assessment of the languages in question and this research paper on multi-word verbs from the semantic fields of ‘giving’ intends to provide a first step in this direction. The investigation centres on the early attested periods, between the 8th and 10th centuries. The languages under investigation are Early English, and, as comprehensive Early Welsh attestations only date from about the 12th century onwards, Early Irish.
	The core of the word-field of words of giving in Old English is made up by the expressions sellan (‘give’, ‘give in exchange’ and ‘give against remuneration’), beran ‘bear to(wards)’ and gifan (‘give’). Historically, beran has cognates as an expression indicating ‘to bear towards’ in other language groups, such as Old Irish berid ‘to bear’. However, in Old English the use of beran is restricted mainly to senses equivalent to Present Day English ‘to bear’, and sellan expressed the concept of ‘handing over of an entity’. Furthermore, the word giefan ‘give’ was used in similar contexts, but it is attested considerably less frequently than sellan in the corpus material investigated. Where giefan is used, if is found mostly together with sellan, as illustrated by the following example:

(1)	& him Bryttas sealdan & geafan eardungstowe
‘… the British give and hand him a dwelling place’ (B1 [0178 (12.50.29)])

According to Bosworth and Toller (s.v. sellan), the Old English sellan is attested with the following nomina agentis and nomina actionis: gifu ‘gift’, gafol ‘tax, due’, leoht ‘light’, treow ‘truth’, wær ‘convenant’, gebod ‘commandment’, andswar ‘answer’, að ‘oath’, geþafung ‘permission’, leaf ‘permission, leave’, forgifnyss ‘forgiveness’, sibb ‘peace’, ræst ‘rest’, sige ‘victory’, ár ‘honour’, fultum ‘help’ and mildheortness ‘mercy’. This indicates a wide variety of possible verbal object nouns. The following study tests on a sample corpus of 100,000 words of Old English prose whether these constructions can be considered frequent overall, and which collocations appear most frequently in the corpus. These data are then compared to data from the same word field in Old Irish, i.e. the verbs berid ‘to bear’ and do-beir ‘to give’, likewise collected from a sample corpus of 100,000 words. The aim of the study is to show how the frequencies of multi word verbs containing inflected verbs that express ‘give’ compare in the two languages, which semantic fields they centre on, and to assess whether the presence of a related simplex plays a role in their use.

2. Previous research

Collocations of semantically low-content, inflected verbs and predicate nouns are structures that have been observed and described in various languages. Often these collocations are paralleled by morphologically related simple verbs, such as e.g. to give something a thought versus to think about something. The terminology that is used by authors working in this field includes expanded predicate (Algeo 1995), complex verb (Brinton 1996), light verb constructions (various authors, going back to Jespersen 1909-49, IV: 117), Funktionsverbgefüge (van Pottelberge 2002, Balles 2003), verbonominale Konstruktion (van Pottelberge 1996), or support verb construction (Oyharçabal 2004, Langer 2009). 
While many scholars confine themselves to structures that are paralleled by simple verbs, others include structures that do not have parallel simplexes in their research (e.g. Claridge 2000, Balles 2003). There is overall agreement on these collocations being analyticising as the semantic content can be separated from the inflected verb. It is pointed out by a number of authors (e.g. Jacobi 1903, Brinton 1996) that the use of these structures is a sign of elevated stylistic levels, and Jacobi (1903) stresses the possibility to use verbal collocations to specify verbal aspect in particular. Other authors working from an early Indo-Iranian perspective, stress the function to create new verbal concepts (Balles 2003, Scarlatta 1999, Tristram 2002). It has also been observed (Hiltunen 1983, van Pottelberge 1996) that the early loss of prefixation to specify aktionsart has contributed to the rise of verbal periphrasis in the linguistic development of Germanic languages.
That early English contains examples of the expression of one verbal concept by more than one verb is a well known fact. Prominent descriptions of collocations of certain verbs with nouns are given in Visser (1963) and Hiltunen (1983), Denison (1981) has investiaged multi-word verbs with an emphasis on the Ormulum. A comprehensive corpus based investigation of support verb constructions in Old English has been carried out by Akimoto & Brinton (1999). The authors restrict their study to those verbs that correspond to the most frequently used verbs in Modern English, namely do, give, have, make and take (1999: 23). The predicate nouns investigated are those which had a corresponding simple verb in Old English (Akimoto & Brinton, ibid.). This approach has the result that cases without an equivalent simple verb are excluded. While type frequency, i.e. the number of different collocational types, is indicated in the study, token frequency, i.e. the overall number of examples, is not mentioned.
Multi-word verbs are also found in modern Irish and first investigations have been carried out (Tristram 2002, Bloch-Trojnar 2008). First results from the ongoing investigation of the Old Irish data have recently become available. (Ronan 2007, Ronan 2009, Ronan fc. a, b).

3. Methodology

The data has been extracted from Early English and Early Irish texts of more than 100,000 words each. The composition of the texts is shown in the following table:

Old English text	Name	Size	
	Bede	80,000	
	Beowulf & Judith	12,000	
	Orosius	2,000	
	Anglo-Saxon Chron. A	15,000	
Old English total		109,000	
Old Irish text	Würzburg Glosses (Wb)	21,000	
	Milan Glosses (Ml)	33,000	
	St. Gall Glosses (Sg)	11,000	
	Thesaurus II (Thes II)	10,000	
	Bethu Brigte (BB)	6,000	
	Táin Bó Fraech (TBF)	5,000	
	Immram Brain (IB)	4,500	
	Scéla Mucce Meic Dathó (SMMD)	3,000	
	Compert Con Culainn (CCC)	1,000	
	Táin Bó Cuailgne	40,000	
Old Irish total		134,500	
Table 1: The Old English and Old Irish text corpus

Data have been extracted in a semi-automatic search: from the Old English corpus material, all possible variants of the stem forms attested in the dictionary were searched for, i.e. sel, sil, syl, sal, seal, and sæl for sellan, ber, beor, bir, byr, bær, and bor for beran, and gif, gyf, gief, geof, giof, geaf, gaef, gaf, and gef for giefan. All these were also searched for with the prefix ge-.
Data from those Old Irish texts that are not available electronically, i.e. all texts except for Táin Bó Cuailnge, have been extracted manually. Data from Táin Bó Cuailgne are available electronically and have likewise been searched semi-automatically. The Old Irish paradigms are considerably more complex than their Old English counterparts as, in addtion to suppletive paradigms in the preterite, initial mutations and the systematic loss of every second, non-final syllable need to be taken into account. Thus the basic stem forms searched for were beir, ber, bir, bre, ucc and rucc for berid and do-beir, tab, taib, do-ucc and tuc for do-beir, and all possible stem form variations cited by the online version of the Dictionary of the Irish Language.
The advantages of the semi-automatic method are almost complete recall. Precision is, however, very low and extensive manual filtering of false positives, such as concrete objects, took place, e.g. 

(2)	dobeir		a	chend 	&	a 	muicc 	laiss 
	take.3sg.pres. 	his 	head 	&	his	pig 	with.3sg.m
	‘He takes his head and his pig with him.’ (LU 4950)

(3)	Beir	 	síst	 lim 
	carry.imp	while	with.1sg
	‘Carry (it) a while with me!’ (LU 4935)

Further, derived verbal forms had to be filtered out, e.g. forms of as-beir ‘say’, as in

(4)	 Asbeir 		Conchobar 	fri 	Coin Culaind 
	say.3sg.pres.	PN		against	PN.acc.
	‘Conchobar said to Cú Chulainn’ (LU 4995)

 Further more, a number of coincidentially similar graphemes had to be filtered:

(5) 	Bertaigth-us 		for 	lár 	in 	taige 
	shake.3sg.-suff.pron 3pl	on	floor	of the	house.gen
	‘He shakes them on the floor of the house.’ (LU 5044-45)

4. Results
4.1 Counts and frequencies

Overall, a considerably larger number of examples of support verb constructions with verbs of giving has been found in Old Irish than in Old English. The following counts have been obtained for the Old English and Old Irish data investigated:

Language	WORDS giving	Instances	Corpus size	F(100,000)	
OIr	Do-beir	167	134,500	124.2	
OIr	Berid	15	134,500	11.2	
OIr	Total	182	134,500	135.3	
OE	Sellan	41	109,000	37.7	
OE	Beran	7	109,000	6.4	
OE	Giefan	2	109,000	1.8	
OE	Total	50	109,000	45.9	
Table 2: counts of support verb collocations with verbs of giving in Old English and Old Irish

Collocations with the Old Irish do-beir ‘gives’ clearly dominate in the OIr expressions of ‘giving’, collocations with the Old English sellan dominate in Old English expressions of ‘giving’. Further, the differences between the Old Irish and Old English frequencies are highly significant (according to chi-square significance testing). We have explicitly included all words of the semantic class in order to minimise the risk of skewing the data by missing out possible expressions of ‘giving’.

4.2 Verbal Object Nouns

We encountered a sparse data problem for the object nouns. On the other hand, comparison with some of the most highly frequent support verb constructions in Present Day English makes it clear that even the prominent examples given below are no rarer in PDE than some of the Old English and Old Irish examples found.

Construction	f(ICE-GB)	f(100,000 words)	
Take place	101	10	
Give way	20	2	
Have look	20	2	
Take advantage	16	1.6	
Give answer	6	0.6	
Make suggestion	6	0.6	
Do business	5	0.5	
Have drink	3	0.3	
Table 3: Frequencies of Support Verb Constructions in PDE

The above table illustrates the frequency of prominent support verb constructions in the English language. Frequencies in ICE-GB range from 10 examples per 100,000 words for the well established take place to 0.3 examples for have a drink. In the following the frequencies are illustrated for the corpus texts in early Irish.

verb 	 object 	simplex 	 f(LU) 	 f(Wb) 	 f(Ml 	 f(other) 	f(sum= 134000)	
Do-beir 	 dígal `punishment' 	yes		12	49		61	
Do-beir 	 fortacht `help' 	yes			10		10	
Do-beir 	 fochaide `tribulation' 	yes			7		7	
Do-beir 	 teist `testimony' 	no		6		1	7	
Do-beir 	 cobais `confession' 	yes		1		4	5	
Do-beir 	 forcell `testimony' 	yes		3	1	1	5	
berid 	 brith `judgement' 	yes		5			5	
Do-beir 	 armiten `honour' 	yes		1	3		4	
Do-beir 	 gell `pledge' 	yes				4	4	
Do-beir 	 cath `battle' 	no	3				3	
Do-beir 	 cobair `help' 	yes	2	1			3	
Do-beir 	 comairle `advice' 	yes			1	2	3	
Do-beir 	almsine `alms' 	no		1	1		2	
Do-beir 	bendacht `blessing' 	no			1	1	2	
berid 	buaid `victory' 	no	1	1			2	
Do-beir 	commain `communion' 	no				2	2	
Do-beir 	comram `combat' 	yes				2	2	
Do-beir 	fobairt `immersion' 	yes	2				2	
Do-beir 	ícc `healing' 	yes			2		2	
Do-beir 	maldacht `curse' 	no	1			1	2	
Do-beir 	menmain `opinion' 	no	1		1		2	
Do-beir 	mess `judgement'  	yes		1	1		2	
Do-beir 	onóir `honour' 	no				2	2	
Do-beir 	pian `pain' 	yes			2		2	
Do-beir 	sercc `love' 	yes		2			2	
Do-beir 	srém `snort' 	yes	2				2	
Do-beir 	tinscara `separation' 	yes				2	2	
Do-beir 	tofonn `hunting' 	yes	2	 	 	 	2	
	Total		14	34	79	22	149	
Table 4: Frequencies of Support Verb Constructions with ‘Giving’ in Old Irish

In the above table only collocations with a frequency (f > 1) are included. While the majority of the observed frequencies are between 2 and 10 examples per 100,000 words, collocations with dígal ‘punishment’ are particularly frequent, but have been observed only in religious texts. Overall, however, frequencies are comparable to examples of support verb constructions in a Present Day English sample corpus. For comparison, attestations collected from Old English by means of semi-automatic extraction from The Dictionary of English Corpus are as follows:

verb 	 object 	 simplex 	 f(Bede) 	 f(other) 	 f(sum)	
sellan 	 leafness `leave' 	no	6		6	
beran 	 Ansægdness `sarifice' 	yes	5		5	
sellan 	 ælmessan `alms' 	no	5		5	
sellan 	 wif `wife' 	no	4		4	
sellan 	 gifu `gift' 	yes	2	1	3	
sellan 	 að `oath' 	no 	1	1	2	
sellan 	 alysnesse `redemption' 	yes	2		2	
sellan 	 bysne `example' 	yes	2		2	
sellan 	 deað  `death' 	no 	2		2	
sellan 	 sige `victory' 	no	2		2	
sellan 	 sped `success' 	yes	2		2	
sellan 	 wysc `choice' 	yes	2	 	2	
	Total		35	2	37	
Table 5: Frequencies of Support Verb Constructions with ‘Giving’ in Old English

Comparison of the Old Irish and Old English data shows that OIr has considerably more multi-verb expressions with giving than Old English. The Old Irish data reach frequency levels that are comparable to those also observable in prominent support verb constructions in Present Day English. On a frequency count of examples from this sample corpus alone it seems as if these constructions may have been no less grammaticalised in Old Irish than in PDE. Even the Old English examples from the sample corpus have frequency counts that, though considerably lower than the Old Irish ones, match those of the PDE constructions. As this observation is based on very small sample corpora, consisting of very few sample texts, testing should be done on considerably larger corpora in order to verify or falsify this impression.

4.3 Semantic specification

In a comparison of the semantic fields that are represented by the Old Irish and Old English data we find that in the corpora investigated here the collocations centre on similar semantic fields. Expressions of bestowing religious offerings, victory and defeat are prominent. While this may be due to a bias towards texts with religious or combative content it must be borne in mind that these topics were generally very prominent in early Medieval literature.
In both languages, Old English and Old Irish, constructions with and without parallel simple verbs may be observed in verbal contexts. Where equivalent simplexes exist, the collocation may offer semantic or pragmatic specification:

(6)	... bæd Þaet he him geþeaht sealde 
... ‘he asked that he give him council’ (Bede 4 [0608 (26.350.16)])

Geþeaht ‘council’ is related to the verb geþeahtian ‘to take council’, which is derived from it. In contrast to geþeahtian, which is non-agentative, geÞeaht sealde explicitly changes the argument structure of the verb and expresses agentative action. Similar concepts can be observed in the following example:

(7)	ða sealdon hi him bysne monige
‘Then they gave him many examples’ (Bede 1[0139 (9.46.8)])

Bysn ‘example’ relates to bysnian ‘to set an example’. In contrast to the simple form, bysne sellan again expresses agentivity, the same is the case in the example of geornesse sellan ‘to apply zeal to’. Georness can be related to non-agentative geornan ‘to desire’.

(8)	& ealle geornesse ic sealde to leornienne & to smeagenne halige gewritu. 
‘I applied all zeal to learning and investigating the Holy Scripture’ (Bede 5 0587(22.480.28))

This observation does not hold for all the early English examples, however, and these principles are even less obvious in the Irish examples, where agentivity does not appear to play a role. In the best attested examples in the corpus, do-beir digail ‘to give punishment’ we may nevertheless observe semantic specification:

(9)	in	 tan 	dober 		dia	 in 	digail 		do-mmuinetar	 
the 	time 	give.3sg. 	God 	the 	punishment 	believe.3pl. 
in	dóini 	is	 ferc	 do 	insin
the	people	is 	anger 	of-him	this
‘When God inflicts punishment, the people believe that this is due to his anger’ (Ml 49b7)

(10)	is 	di	 ráith 	dée 	dobeir 		dígail 		fort 
	is 	for	grace	of God	give.3sg		punishment	on.2sg
‘It is for God that he inflicts punishment upon you.’ (Wb 6a14)

Dígal ‘punishment’ is the verbal noun of do-fích ‘punish, avenge’. The examples of do-beir dígail are used in religious contexts, particularly referring to divine agency. In these cases we seem to be dealing with a semantic specialisation of the collocation: whereas the simplex is typically used with human agents in saga literature, the collocation with do-beir in the corpus predominantly refer to divine agency or causation. 
In both languages, there are also examples, however, which do not have equivalent simplex verbs. Examples can be observed in the following:

(11) 	& Scottas him aðas sealdan, ðæt hie woldan eal ðæt he wolde 
‘… and the Irish gave him oaths that they wanted all that he wanted’ (Chron A [0585 (946.3)])

(12) 	Raga, 		ar 	Brigit, … co 	tarda 			bennacht form 
	go.fut.1sg.	quoth	PN	so that	give.pres.subj.3sg		blessing on.1sg.
‘I will go, said Brigit, … so that he may bless me.’ (Bethu Brigte 434)

In the Old English corpus the expression sellan ælmesssan ‘to give alms’ is the most frequent example of this. Also the idea of (to give away in) marriage, though certainly much less of a cultural innovation, is expressed in a similar fashion, namely by sellan wif ‘give to wife’. Particularly in Irish, this strategy can be observed in expressions relating to new cultural concepts, such as Christianity.
	The following case seems to occupy a special position: 

(13) 	... Ebrinus se ealdormon him spede & leafnesse sealde to ferenne 
‘The alderman Ebrinus gave him means and leave to travel’ (B4 [0026 (1.256.9)])

Leafnesse in example (10) above is not a verbal noun form, but has been formed with the noun-forming suffix –ness from leaf ‘allow’. The nominalization of leaf can also be used as the predicate of verbs, as in leáfe hæfde ‘to be allowed, to have leave’. While the use of leáfe sellan ‘to give leave’ would have been conceivable on the base of leáfe hæfde, this is not used. At present we have no answer as to why this should be the case.
The status of those constructions without a simple verbal equivalent is noteworthy, however. Though both languages have examples of support verb constructions for which no simplex exists, their frequencies are quite different, however. In Old English those without simplex equialent are more prominent than in Old Irish as illustrated in the following charts: 

Figure 1: Type frequencies			Figure 2: Token frequencies

The charts show that in Old English (f > 1) 50% of the types (6 of the 12 types) and in Old Irish (f > 1) 68% of the types (19 of the 28 types) have an equivalent simples. Thus, while the Old English data shows no preferences for predicate nouns that have equivalent simplex, the Old Irish data shows a notable preference for predicate nouns that are related to simple verbs. This trend becomes even clearer where token frequency is concerned. 
In 43% of the Old English tokens (16 of the total of 37 tokens) there is an equivalent simplex related to the predicate noun, 57% of the tokens do not have a parallel simplex and they are arguably employed to create Old English verbal expressions. The situation is even clearer in Old Irish, where 84 % of the total tokens (125 of 149 tokens) have an equivalent simplex and only 16% have no parallel simplex. The Old Irish tokens therefore clearly indicate that collocations of inflected verbs denoting ‘giving’ and predicate noun centre not so much on creating new verbal phrases, but on offering alternative means of expressing verbal concepts. These alternative expressions may in some cases serve to offer semantic specification of the verbal concept in question. Alternatively, the possibility to influence word order may play a role: due to its strict VSO structure, Irish does not typically allow the verb to be assigned rhematic function in the sentence. Where support verb structures are used, the predicate noun can become the object of the sentence and the rheme of the expression.

5. Conclusions

From the above the following preliminarly conclusions can be drawn. Firstly, significantly more multi-word expressions of giving have been found in OIr than in OE, and frequencies are as high as those observed for prominent examples of support verb constructions in a Present Day English sample corpus.
While the even higher frequency in Old Irish than in Old English may be an indication of overall higher analiticity of OIr than of OE, this may also be due to the rigid VSO sentence structure in OIr, in which the use of multi-word verbs offer more syntatic flexibility.
Even though a tendency could be observed in both languages to use multi word collocations with ‘giving’ in order to express (new cultural) concepts for which a simplex does not exist, the presence of simplex equivalent did not have a unified influence on frequency: In the early English types of examples with and without a parallel simplex found in the corpus are similar in frequency, there are more tokens of collocations that are not paralleled by a simplex than there are tokens of collocations that have a parallel simplex. This is not the case for Irish, where examples of types, and particularly tokens, without a parallel simplex are a clear minority. As a choice between the use of a simplex and the periphrastic, support verb construction exists in these cases, the use seems to be conditioned by pragmatic considerations. In addition, cases of semantic specification, such as specification of agentivity have been suggested. Thus, the influence of semantic specification observed for example for Sanskrit by Jacobi (1903) also seems to play a role in the investigated collocations in the languages in question here. However, as yet these suggestions are mainly based on the collocation with one semantic group of inflected verbs, ‘giving’, and are in need of further investigation study of collocations with further support verbs.

6. Abbreviations

B		Bede				diPaolo Healy (2004)
BB		Bethu Brigte			Ó hAodha (1978)
CCC		Compert ConCulainn		van Hamel (1933)
CG		Críth Gablach			Binchy (1949)
EC		Echtrae Connlai		McCone (2000)
IB		Immram Brain			Meyer (1895)
LU		Lebor na hUidre		Best & Bergin (1929)
Ml		Milan Glosses			Stokes & Strachan (1901)
Sg		St. Gall Glosses		Stokes & Strachan (1903)
SMMD	Scéla Mucce Mac Dathó	Thurneysen (1935)
TBF		Táin Bó Fraech		Meid (1967)
Thes II		Thesaurus II 			Stokes & Strachan (1903)
Tur.		Turin Glosses			Stokes & Strachan (1901)
Wb		Würzburg Glosses		Stokes & Strachan (1901)

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