English Department

Curriculum vitae

Olga Timofeeva received her MA in English philology from the University of St Petersburg (Russia) and completed her first postgraduate degree – Candidate of Sciences in Philology – for the same university. She went on to study Latin influence on Old English syntax at the University of Helsinki (Finland) under Dr. Matti Kilpiö. Her doctoral dissertation “Non-finite constructions in Old English: with special reference to syntactic borrowing from Latin” is a corpus-based study of several infinitival and participial constructions that were used in Old English in imitation of Latin. This research concentrated on the linguistic comparison of Latin texts against their Old English translations and original Old English texts produced between the late 9th and early 11th centuries. She was also employed by both universities as a lecturer in the history of the English language.

Since spring 2010 Olga Timofeeva has been working on her postdoctoral project “Language Attitudes and Language Identities in Early Medieval England.” It concentrates on the sociolinguistic situation in medieval England in the Old English period (c. 7th–11th A.D.), deriving the data for its description from both English and Latin sources. Assuming that language attitudes and identities are dynamic, she is analysing how they evolve and change overtime. More specifically, she is looking into three socio-historical settings, in which English comes into contact with three other languages whose social significance and typological relatedness to English are very different: (1) English and Latin in the Old English period; (2) English and Celtic languages; and (3) English and Scandinavian languages.

Because written texts of the Old English period survive in both English and (predominantly) in Latin, this corpus study will have to take into account literary production in both languages. For Old English, Olga Timofeeva is using existing electronic resources, such as the Dictionary of Old English Corpus, Thesaurus of Old English, etc., while for medieval Latin, she is compiling a new corpus. This corpus, Medieval Latin from Anglo-Saxon Sources, will be the first electronic resource for the study of the medieval lingua franca as used in Anglo-Saxon England. It will initially include English authors from 7th to 11th centuries writing in Latin, and may eventually be extended to medieval Latin on the British Isles more generally. This corpus will provide comparative data on the use of linguistic and social terminology in Old English and Latin.

Publications

Monographs

Timofeeva, Olga (2010) Non-finite Constructions in Old English, with Special Reference to Syntactic Borrowing from Latin, PhD dissertation, Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki, vol. LXXX, Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.

Timofeeva, Olga (2006) Latinskie sintaksicheskie zaimstvovania v drevneanglijskom jazyke (‘Latin syntactic borrowing in Old English’), Candidate of Sciences in Philology dissertation, St. Petersburg: Gelikon Plus.

Articles

Timofeeva, Olga (submitted) “Of ledenum bocum to engliscum gereorde: Bilingual Communities of Practice in Anglo-Saxon England.”

Timofeeva, Olga (accepted) “Hearsay and Lexical Evidentials in Old Germanic Languages, With Focus on Old English,” in Comparative Studies in Early Germanic Languages: With a Focus on Verbal Categories, ed. by Gabriele Diewald, Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, and Ilse Wischer. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Timofeeva, Olga (2013) “Latin Loans in Old English and Finnish Loans in Modern English: Can We Distinguish Statistics from Myth?” in Selected Proceedings of the 2012 Symposium on New Approaches in English Historical Lexis (HEL-LEX3), ed. by R.W. McConchie, Teo Juvonen, Mark Kaunisto, Minna Nevala, and Jukka Tyrkkö. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. http://www.lingref.com/cpp/hel-lex/2012/abstract2845.html/

Timofeeva, Olga (in press) "Anglo-Latin and Old English: A case for Intergrated Bilingual Corpus Studies of Anglo-Saxon Registers." in New Methods in Historical Corpus Linguistics, ed. by Paul Bennett, Martin Durrell, Silke Scheible, and Richard J. Whitt. Corpus Linguistics and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Language, vol. 3. Narr: Tübingen.

     2012

Timofeeva, Olga (2012) “Latin Absolute Constructions and Their Old English Equivalents: Interfaces between Form and Information Structure,” in Information Structure and Syntactic Change in the History of English, ed. by Anneli Meurman-Solin, María José López-Couso, and Bettelou Los, Oxford Studies in the History of English, pp. 228–242. New York: Oxford University Press.

     2011

Kilpiö, Matti and Timofeeva, Olga (2011) “Semantic Polyfunctionality and Grammaticalization of the OE Subordinator be þæm þe: a corpus-based study,” in Typology of Adverbial Connectives, ed. by Anneli Meurman-Solin and Ursula Lenker, Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English, VARIENG ePublications. http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/journal/volumes/08/kilpio_timofeeva/

Timofeeva, Olga and Säily, Tanja (2011) “Introduction,” in Words in Dictionaries and History: Papers in Honour of R. W. McConchie, ed. by Olga Timofeeva and Tanja Säily, pp. xiii–xvi. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Timofeeva, Olga (2011b) “Infinitival Complements with the Verb (ge)don in Old English: Latin Influence Revisited,” in Leeds Studies in English 42: 93–108.

Timofeeva, Olga (2011a) “Battlefield Victory: Lexical Transfer in Medieval Anglo-Latin,” in Multilingual Discourse Production: Diachronic and Synchronic Perspectives, ed. by Svenja Kranich, Viktor Becher, Steffen Höder, and Juliane House, pp. 109–32. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

     2010

Hall, Alaric, Timofeeva, Olga, Kiricsi, Ágnes, and Fox Bethany (2010) “Introduction,” in Interfaces between Language and Culture in Medieval England: A Festschrift for Matti Kilpiö, ed. by Alaric Hall, Olga Timofeeva, Ágnes Kiricsi, and Bethany Fox, pp. vi–xi. Leiden: Brill.

Timofeeva, Olga (2010b) “Non-finite Constructions in Old English, with Special Reference to Syntactic Borrowing from Latin: Lectio praecursoria,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 4/2010.

Timofeeva, Olga (2010a) “Anglo-Latin Bilingualism before 1066: Prospects and Limitations,” in Interfaces between Language and Culture in Medieval England: A Festschrift for Matti Kilpiö, ed. by Alaric Hall, Olga Timofeeva, Ágnes Kiricsi, and Bethany Fox, pp. 1–36. Leiden: Brill.

     2008

Timofeeva, Olga (2008) “Translating the Texts where Et Verborum Ordo Mysterium Est: Late Old English Idiom vs. Ablativus Absolutus,” Journal of Medieval Latin 18: 216–28.

     2006

Timofeeva, Olga (2006) “Word be worde – andgit of andgite: A Study of the Medieval Rhetorical Formula,” in Selected Proceedings of the 2005 Symposium on New Approaches in English Historical Lexis (HEL-LEX), ed. R.W. McConchie et al., pp. 135–42. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. www.lingref.com, document #1354.

Reviews

Timofeeva, Olga (in press) Janie Steen (2008), Verse and Virtuosity: The Adaptation of Latin Rhetoric in Old English Poetry; Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 1/2013.

Timofeeva, Olga (2011) Kiriko Sato (2009), The Development from Case-Forms to Prepositional Constructions in Old English Prose; Leeds Studies in English 42.

Timofeeva, Olga (2009) Nicole Guenther Discenza (2005), The King’s English: Strategies of Translation in the Old English Boethius; Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 2/2009.

Timofeeva, Olga (2006) Robert Hasenfratz and Thomas Jambeck (2005), Reading Old English: A Primer and First Reader; Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 3/2006.

Timofeeva, Olga (2005) "Zvon sozvuchij." G. Chaucer. The Book of the Duchess. The Parliament of Fowls. Trans. from English and comm. by S.A. Aleksandrovskij (2004); NLO 76.

Co-edited volumes

(2011) Words in Dictionaries and History: Papers in Honour of R. W. McConchie, ed. by Olga Timofeeva and Tanja Säily, Terminology and Lexicography Research and Practice 14, Amsterdam: Benjamins.

(2010) Interfaces between Language and Culture in Medieval England: A Festschrift for Matti Kilpiö, ed. by Alaric Hall, Olga Timofeeva, Ágnes Kiricsi, and Bethany Fox, The Northern World 48, Leiden: Brill.

(2009) Anglo-Saxons and the North, Essays reflecting the theme of the 10th meeting of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists in Helsinki, 2001, ed. by Matti Kilpiö, Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, Jane Roberts, and Olga Timofeeva, Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

(2008) Methods and the Medievalist: Current Approaches in Medieval Studies, ed. by Marko Lamberg, Jesse Keskiaho, Elina Räsänen and Olga Timofeeva, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press.

(2006) Selected Proceedings of the 2005 Symposium on New Approaches in English Historical Lexis (HEL-LEX), ed. by R. W. McConchie, Olga Timofeeva, Heli Tissari, and Tanja Säily, Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Press.