Article: Nim or take? A competition between two high frequency verbs in Middle English.

ABSTRACT

The paper discusses the fates of the verb nim (OE niman) which began to be displaced in later Old English by its synonym ON take. The native verb was eliminated from the standard speech in the 15th century, although it still survived until the 17th century in non-standard varieties of English. In order to establish the circumstances of the replacement the study concentrates on the chronological and geographical aspects of the process. Also, it confronts the research data with the statistics offered in Rynell's similar study (1948). The evidence comes from corpora such as the MED, the OED and selected Middle English texts.

1. Lexical ...

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