Old English Prefixes: Some Observations on their Base-type, Frequency and Semantic Function

Old English prefixation as a means of word-formation has been examined in classical handbooks and journal articles (Campbell 1959, Kastovsky 1992, Quirk and Wrenn 1994, Mitchell and Robinson 2001, Minkova 2008, among others). In spite of their historical information on Old English prefixes, their treatments of this issue are patchy and morphological features of Old English prefixes still require more comprehensive descriptive work. The main goal of this paper is to provide the analysis of Old English prefixes and their morphological characteristics, attempting to answer the following questions, which have not been fully answered in the previous studies: “What prefixes are used in Old English morphology (inventory of Old English prefixes)?”; “What base-words are they combined with (base-type)?”; “How frequently do individual prefixes occur (frequency)?”; “What meaning do they add to the base to which they are attached (semantic function)?”. This article reexamines these questions, expands considerably the empirical data-base for their analysis, and offers a descriptive account of the observed morphological patterns.