Intensives and Down-Toners Volume 1; A Study in English Adverbs (Abridged, Paperback, Abridged edition)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: meaning between the two phrases. But this would open up the general question as to the difference in nineteenth century English between not as . . as, and not so ... as, which will form the subject of one of the following chapters. V. So. The Old Engl. swa is a demonstrative adverb meaning 'in a manner or to a degree that is indicated by some other word or words following (usually forming a dependent clause, either abridged or unabridged), or implied in the general meaning of the sentence'. If the manner or the degree is implied, swa is not followed by a correlative. But if the manner or degree is indicated by some other word or words following, the adverb swa has for its correlative the conjunction swa, or the conjunction feet; e. g. Saxon Chronicle 896 [Sweet, A. S. Reader 41, 179]: pa weeron fulneah tu swa lange swa pa o?ru = 'they were very nearly twice as long as the others'; King Alfred's Preface to his version of Gregory's Cura Pastoralis [Ibid. 5, 15]: Swa clsene hlo wses offeallenu on Angelcynne dcette swiffe feawa wairon behionon Humbre de hiora tfeninga cMen understondan on Englisc = 'so completely was it [book-learning] fallen away in England, that there were few on this side the Humber that could understand their rituals in English'. In the correlative pair swa . . . swa, exemplified in the first of these quotations, the first swa is a demonstrative adverb, the second a relative conjunction. The adverb swa is often found strengthened by call; e. g. Matth. XX 14[Sweet, A. S. Reader 53, t5]: ic wylle feysum temestum syllan eall swd mycel swa fee = 'I will give unto this last quite as much as to thee'. Aelfric on the Old Testament [ibid. 57, 39]: God silf, se fee sifre feurhwunode .... eall swa mihtig swa he nu is = 'God himself, who has always continued quit...