Old English Adjectives Functioning as Nouns in Beowulf

This paper examines morpho-syntactic features of Old English adjectives used as nouns (e.g., seælmihtiga ‘the almighty’). Adjectives are found to function as nouns in the Old English epic poem, Beowulf: they can be a subject, an object or a complement of a preposition in sentences; they can be modified by a demonstrative or another adjective; they denote an individual or object rather than a property. On the other hand, the adjectives in their nominal use appear to maintain their own adjectival features: they inflect for comparison; they have two types of inflectional endings (strong and weak endings). Noting the nominal and adjectival characteristics of the adjectives, and addressing the issue concerning the lexical category they belong to, I attempt to offer a quantitative and descriptive analysis of the 58 adjectives (108 tokens) which are found to function as nouns in Beowulf. Based on the statistic analysis of the morpho-syntactic features of the adjectives, I argue that they constitute a mixed category which stands on the continuum of the two categories: adjectives and nouns (cf. Bhat 1994).