--- title: "Semantic Primes in Old English: a preliminary study of descriptors" description: "The study offers a method for mapping universal concepts onto a historical language. Cited by 1 paper here." authors: ["Isabel de la Cruz Cabanillas"] year: 2007 venue: "SELIM 14" source: "https://reunido.uniovi.es/index.php/SELIM/article/view/13415" doi: "10.17811/selim.14.2007.37-58" licence: "CC BY-NC-ND (journal licence per DOAJ; SELIM)" licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/" summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/cabanillas-2019-semantic-primes-old-english-preliminary/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/cabanillas-2019-semantic-primes-old-english-preliminary/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [2007](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2007/page/2/) / Semantic Primes in Old English: a preliminary study of descriptors # Semantic Primes in Old English: a preliminary study of descriptors **Authors:** [Isabel de la Cruz Cabanillas](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/isabel-de-la-cruz-cabanillas/) · **Year:** 2007 · **Venue:** [SELIM 14](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/selim-journal-of-the-spanish-society-for-medieval-english-language-and/) ([SELIM Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature 2007](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/selim-journal-of-the-spanish-society-for-medieval-english-language-and/2007/)) · **Publisher:** [University of Oviedo](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/university-of-oviedo/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-ND (journal licence per DOAJ; SELIM)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) **Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.17811/selim.14.2007.37-58) · [PDF](https://reunido.uniovi.es/index.php/SELIM/article/download/13415/12147) · [DOI 10.17811/selim.14.2007.37-58](https://doi.org/10.17811/selim.14.2007.37-58) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W6887829580) **Citations:** 0 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [1](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/cabanillas-2019-semantic-primes-old-english-preliminary/cited-by/) in our library, of the 149,439 papers whose bibliographies we read ## Summary The paper tests whether the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) of Goddard and Wierzbicka, which posits a small set of universal, innate semantic primes, is a workable framework for lexical-semantic study of Old English. It extends earlier NSM work on Old English, which covered the grammatical classes of substantives, determiners and quantifiers, to the lexical class of Descriptors (BIG/SMALL). Because no native speakers exist, the author relies on lexicographic resources: candidate exponents come from A Thesaurus of Old English (Roberts and Kay), with definitions from Clark Hall's A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary and the OED. Usage is then checked in a sample of The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, supplemented by The Dictionary of Old English Corpus. Old English has many near-synonyms for both primes, so the author picks the best general term (the "hyperonym") using two criteria: how often each word occurs and how many different collocations it has. The author concludes that NSM is applicable to Old English. Settling the hyperonym question needs further work, and the untagged corpora force heavy manual filtering. The study offers a method for mapping universal concepts onto a historical language. ## Key points - The analysis covers the NSM Descriptors BIG/SMALL and follows the method of Martín Arista & Martín de la Rosa, who earlier treated substantives, determiners and quantifiers. - Roberts and Kay list many candidates for each prime: - BIG: micel, great, brad, wid, sid, ormæte, unlytel, swiþlic. - SMALL: lytel, smæl, medmicel, hwon, lyt, læst. - Modern *big* and *large* are absent from Old English. *Big* appears late in northern writers, possibly from Norse, and *large* first appears in Middle English. - The hyperonym is selected by two criteria, corpus frequency and range of collocations. Two corpora supply the evidence, the Dictionary of Old English Corpus and the Helsinki Corpus, with the former recovering items missing from the latter. - The research was funded by a Spanish Ministry project on an online database of Old English derivative morphology (HUM2005-07651-C02-02/FILO). ## Interesting ideas - When a concept has too many plausible words rather than too few, rank them by how frequent they are and how widely they combine with other words, then pick the most general one. - A universal concept should be recorded with all its lexical variants (allolexes) and the grammatical frames it appears in, not as a single word. - Use a thesaurus to list candidates, then confirm them against corpus usage, and use a second corpus to fill gaps in the first. - A small set of universal primes can act as a metalanguage that defines all other meanings in plain words. - The author notes that untagged corpora make every query depend on manual filtering. ## For Mova How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests: - **I1** (world): In the ontology, choose the canonical head word for a cluster like size or quantity by frequency plus collocational spread, and keep the other words linked to it as variants. - **I2** (frames): Store each core meaning (BIG, SMALL, etc.) with its variant lemmas and allowed syntactic frames, so frame extraction maps different surface words to one explainable meaning. - **I3** (learn): Build lexicon entries from WordNet/FrameNet proposals and keep only those supported by corpus evidence from more than one source, as a cheap witness-agreement filter. - **I4** (back): Produce explanations of the text-world in a restricted prime-like vocabulary, giving readable and checkable paraphrases of the meaning graph. - **I5** (tokens): This supports investing in reliable tagging and lemmatization first, since every later lexical query depends on it. *Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.* 📚 Shelves (3): [🎭 Arts and Humanities](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/) · 16,039 works · [🗣️ Language and Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/language-and-linguistics/) · 15,891 works · [🎭 Classics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/classics/) · 116 works 🧭 Topics (2): [English](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/english/) · 2,263 works · [⏳ Historical linguistics & language change](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/language-change/) · 249 works ## Cite Cite as: Isabel de la Cruz Cabanillas. 2007. Semantic Primes in Old English: a preliminary study of descriptors. SELIM 14. The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @inproceedings{cabanillas2007semantic, title = {{Semantic Primes in Old English: a preliminary study of descriptors}}, author = {Isabel {de la Cruz Cabanillas}}, booktitle = {SELIM 14}, year = {2007}, doi = {10.17811/selim.14.2007.37-58}, url = {https://doi.org/10.17811/selim.14.2007.37-58} } ``` - [← previous Enhancing image-based Arabic document translation using noisy channel correction model](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/chang-2007-enhancing-image-based-arabic-document/) - [next → Absolute constructions in the Old English Gospels: a case-study](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/segura-2019-absolute-constructions-old-english-gospels/) - [↑ back to papers of 2007](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2007/page/2/) *Updated 29 October 2026*