The Vulgate Commentary on Ovid\u27s Metamorphoses, Book 1

Composed around 1250 by an unknown author in the region of Orléans, the Vulgate Commentary on Ovid\u27s Metamorphoses is the most widely disseminated and reproduced medieval work on Ovid\u27s epic compendium of classical mythology and materialist philosophy. This commentary both preserves the rich store of twelfth-century glossing on the Metamorphoses and incorporates new material of literary interest, while the marginal glosses in many respects reflect the scholar interests of an early thirteenth-century schoolmaster. The Vulgate Commentary is always transmitted as a series of interlinear and marginal glosses surrounding the text manuscript, whereas other earlier commentaries were independent of a full text of the poem. The Vulgate Commentary exercised a wide-ranging influence on the understanding and presentation of Ovid\u27s Metamorphoses in the High Middle Ages and Renaissance, and the commentary exists in both French and Italian manuscripts.https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/mip_teamssc/1000/thumbnail.jp

Constraints on allomorphy in inflexion.

This thesis is concerned with the search for constraints on the relationship between morphosyntactic properties and their inflexional exponents - more precisely, constraints on deviation from the maximally simple 'agglutinative' pattern of one exponent to one property and vice versa. Three principal constraints are proposed the Peripherality Constraint, the Paradigm Economy Hypothesis and the Systematic Homonymy Claim. The Peripherality Constraint specifies that the realisation of a morphosyntactic property may be 'sensitive to' a property realised more centrally in the word (i.e. closer to the stem) but not to one realised more peripherally, unless it is sensitive in the same way to all the more peripheral properties in the same category. The Paradigm Economy Hypothesis concerns the upper limit on the number of distinct inflexional paradigms (declension-types or conjugation-types) into which the inflexional resources (affixes, ablaut etc.) of any part of speech in any language may be organized. Given an appropriate definition of 'paradigm', this upper limit is engaged to be extremely strict no more paradigms may occur than are required to put all the inflexions to work. This hypothesis has to be relaxed to permit 'paradigm mixture', but only under narrowly specifiable conditions. The Systematic Homonymy Claim presupposes a distinction between those homonymies within an inflexional paradigm which are systematic and those which are accidental from the morphological point of view. It is argued that systematic homonymies can occur only under certain morphological conditions, the principal class of systematic homonymies ('syncretisms') being ones where the morpohsyntactic conditioning factors are realized sinultaneously with the neutralised properties. Evidence for these claims is drawn from a number of languages, both Indo-European and non-Indo-European (including Hungarian, Zulu, Turkish, Dyirbal and Fulfulde). Suggestions are made about priorities for future work on the theory of inflexional morphology

Nostratic Dictionary

A revised edition can be found at http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/244080.Aharon Dolgopolsky is the leading authority on the Nostratic macrofamily. His 'Nostratic Dictionary' presented here is, of course, something very much more than a dictionary. It is the most thorough and extensive demonstration and documentation so far of what may be termed the Nostratic hypothesis: that several of the world's best- known language families are related in their origin, their grammar and their lexicon, and that they belong together in a larger unit, of earlier origin, the Nostratic macrofamily. It should at once be noted that several elements of this enterprise are controversial. For while the Nostratic hypothesis has many supporters, it has been criticized on rather fundamental grounds by a number of distinguished linguists. The matter was reviewed some years ago in a symposium held at the McDonald Institute, and positions remain very much polarized. It was a result of that meeting that the decision was taken to invite Aharon Dolgopolsky to publish his Dictionary - a much more substantial treatise than any work hitherto undertaken on the subject - at the McDonald Institute. For it became clear that the diversities of view expressed at that symposium were not likely to be resolved by further polemical exchanges. Instead, a substantial body of data was required, whose examination and evaluation could subsequently lead to more mature judgments. Those data are presented here, and that more mature evaluation can now proceed.McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research Alfred P. Sloan Foundatio