Folk-Taxonomies in Early English

This book studies the folk-taxonomy for English, and to some extent for the Germanic and Indo- European language families. The semantic fields studied are basic color terms, seasons of the year, geometric shapes, the five senses, the folk-psychology of mind and soul, and basic plant and animal life-forms. AndersonOs emphasis is on folk-taxonomies in Old and Middle English, and also on the implications of semantic analysis for our reading of early English literary texts.