동사의 대안적 격 표시와 Beowulf의 해석

Alternative Case Markings and the Interpretation of Beowulf

Alternative case marking is a linguistic phenomenon in which a verb varies in assigning case to its direct object without involving any important difference in grammatical relationship or meaning. This paper investigates how alternative case markings are implemented in Old English and tries to verify and provide further supporting evidence for the proposal presented and argued for in Goh (2000a). After briefly reviewing relevant insights from previous studies into what Old English morphological cases encode, this paper, on the basis of a corpus analysis of Beowulf, demonstrates that the context of many examples from Beowulf strongly supports the proposed interpretation of the alternative case markings, which in turn illuminates the meaning of the passages involved.