Here - KU Leuven

ICEHL 18
International Conference
on English Historical
Linguistics
KU Leuven
14-18 July 2014
2
Plenary sessions
English historical philology past, present, and future: A narcissist’s view
Robert D. Fulk
Indiana University Bloomington
The ultimate aim of this paper is to provide a sketch of what the future
likely holds for English historical philology. Defining what philology is,
however, demands a substantial preamble, since quite possibly no two
scholars would agree on the meaning of the word; hence, any definition will
to some degree be personal, a product of individual practice. One fairly
objective way of approaching the subject is to trace the history of the
discipline and show how present circumstances are the product of
disciplinary changes over time. Even so, a scholar’s background and
personal interests cannot help but influence the ways that the various subdisciplines of philology come to play the greater or lesser roles that they do:
these sub-disciplines include historical linguistics and the study of
manuscripts (including paleography, codicology, stemmatics, and scribal
practices), orthographic systems (including orthoepy), poetic meter, rhyme,
translators’ practices, and numismatics, among other concerns. A series of
case studies illustrating the development of a philologist (me, if you care to
know) shows how such areas of study are related to one another. These
include, in a series of developments over time, (1) etymological studies in
the lexicons of Old English and Middle Welsh, (2) morphological studies,
focusing particularly on Germanic verbs and the Verschärfung (or
“Holtzmann’s law”), (3) studies of poetic meter, shedding light on the
dating and editing of anonymous texts, (4) linguistic and manuscript studies
in relation to textual criticism and textual interpretation, and (5) the
construction of up-to-date handbooks and textbooks of historical English as
a necessity for the continuance of English philology as a viable set of
practices.In some respects the practice of philology appears to face a
difficult future, in part because the corporatization of higher learning
disfavors fields like this one. In some other respects the future holds
considerable promise, largely as a result of the digitization of research
tools, which has made it easier to engage effectively in philological pursuits.
Books that were once hard to acquire are now freely available
electronically, and electronic resources have greatly simplified the task of
replacing aging editions, handbooks, and instructional tools and thus
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keeping the discipline relevant. Digitization has also enabled the rise of
corpus linguistics, which in some of its forms has taken a decidedly
philological turn, for example encoding paleographical and codicological
information within texts in historical databases. Challenges remain;
opportunities abound.
Gradualness vs. abruptness in acquisition and change
Marit Westergaard
UiT The Arctic University of Norway
A central issue in historical syntax is whether changes are typically gradual
or abrupt, i.e. whether they may span several centuries or whether they
appear between one generation of speakers and the next. This question
may have different answers depending on whether change is considered at
the level of the speech community or in the grammatical competence of
individual speakers. In this talk, I briefly outline some central issues related
to gradualness vs. abruptness, such as reanalysis, grammar competition and
the distinction between I-language and E-language, illustrating with some
central examples and pointing out some problematic issues. I also discuss
some examples of synchronic variation, providing evidence from language
acquisition studies that children are sensitive to fine syntactic distinctions
from early on. Finally, I suggest that the key to understanding variation and
change is in identifying the size of syntactic rules, and argue that most
changes affect very small parts of the grammar. Thus, a possible
reconciliation of the two perspectives, gradualness vs. abruptness, may lie
in considering change in terms of what I refer to as micro-cues.
Flanders Fields and the consolidation of Canadian English
Charles Boberg
McGill University, Montreal
World War I, in which over half a million Canadians served, played a
decisive role in forging a new Canadian nation. Beyond the tragedy it
wrought, it gave English Canadians a clearer sense of who they were as a
people and contributed to the consolidation of a national variety of
Standard Canadian English. This paper will present evidence of this
formative period from acoustic analyses of interviews with Canadian First
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World War veterans, demonstrating the value of archival materials in the
historical linguistics of the recent past.
Identifying stances: The (re)construction of strategies and practices of
stance in a historical community
Peter J. Grund
University of Kansas
Recent sociolinguistic research (e.g., Englebretson 2007; Jaffe 2009) has
shown the complex ways in which different present-day communities and
individuals construct and signal stance, or, simply put, a speaker’s position
as regards the content of his/her message. While stancetaking has received
increasing attention in English historical linguistics, studies have focused on
the inventory of linguistic resources available to express stance (e.g., Biber
2004) or the employment of a limited set of features by particular authors
or in particular text categories (e.g., Fitzmaurice 2004). Little research has
considered in depth how the full inventory of stance markers can be
utilized by historical communities or members of those communities for
particular discoursal, interactional, and social purposes. Such a
sociopragmatic approach to stance points up the challenge, and at the
same time – as present-day sociolinguistic research suggests – the
necessity, of reconstructing the community contexts in order to fully
comprehend the discursive goals underpinning community members’
stancetaking.
Focusing on a particular historical community, my talk demonstrates
the complexity of delineating that community and the norms and
motivations of its members in order to map their construction of stance.
My focus is on the colonial American community of Salem (Village and
Town) and neighboring localities that responded to the perceived attack on
community members from witches in 1692–1693. A study of stancetaking
devices in the more than 400 witness depositions extant from the trial
proceedings against alleged witches highlights the collaborative and
communal nature of stancetaking. Furthermore, it underscores the
community members’ negotiation of stance in response to the legal
context, the sociocultural setting, and the conventions of narrative
retelling. Not until these intersecting contexts and factors are carefully
considered do the complex dynamics of stancetaking emerge at Salem.
In addition to revealing the multifaceted, strategic use of stance in a
specific socio-historical setting, my study thus suggests the importance to
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us as historical linguists of anchoring our interpretations firmly in the
historical communities whose usage we are investigating. Although
reconstructing such communities can be difficult, devoting attention to
them has significant payoff: they will help us add depth to our
understanding of how language users at early stages of English shaped,
negotiated, and utilized linguistic resources for particular pragmatic and
social purposes.
Biber, Douglas. 2004. “Historical Patterns for the Grammatical Marking of Stance: A
Cross-Register Comparison.” Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5(1): 107‒136.
Englebretson, Robert (ed.). 2007. Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation,
and Interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Fitzmaurice, Susan. 2004. “Subjectivity, Intersubjectivity, and the Historical
Construction of Interlocutor Stance: From Stance Markers to Discourse
Markers.” Discourse Studies 6: 427‒448.
Jaffe, Alexandra (ed.). 2009. Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
On structural hypercharacterization:
Some examples from the history of English syntax
María José López-Couso
University of Santiago de Compostela
Hypercharacterization (Lehmann 2005) or accretion (Kuteva 2008) is a
widely attested cross-linguistic phenomenon which involves the
accumulation of redundant linguistic material. In this talk I examine a
number of cases of syntactic accretion from various periods in the history
of English, paying attention to the motivations and functions of
hypercharacterized forms and constructions. The selected case studies
include, among others, the use of resumptive pronouns in extraction
contexts and the development of so-called ‘strengthened’ adverbial
subordinators (e.g. for because, like as if). These examples show that
accretion is interesting not only in and of itself, but also because it provides
appealing instances of linguistic competition between variants and because
it may result in the development of new structures.
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General sessions and workshops
How them could have been his
Rhona Alcorn
University of Edinburgh
Keywords: Pronoun, Middle English, Etymology
Personal pronoun paradigms of Middle English show some radical
developments from their Old English precursors, e.g. the introduction of 3
pl. th- forms, and the transition from Old English 3 nom. sg. fem. hēo to
Middle English she. (On the history of ‘she’, see the abstract by Roger Lass
and Margaret Laing.) One seldom-mentioned development is the
appearance from about 1200 of a new, s-ful form type in contexts where
one might expect a reflex of Old English acc. pl. hīe, as in (1), or (less
commonly) acc. sg. fem. hīe, as in (2).
(1)
(2)
Þet is þe felliste best þet me clepeþ hyane / þet ondelfþ þe bodies
of dyade men and hise eteþ
‘That is the most savage beast that one calls ‘hyena’ / which digs
up the bodies of dead men and eats them’
(Morris 1866 [1965]: 61, ll.23–25)
Huoþet ziȝþ ane wyfman, and wylneþ his ine herte …
‘Who-that sees a woman, and desires her in (his) heart …’
(Morris 1866 [1965]: 11, ll.1–2)
th
Such forms did not survive beyond the 15 century.
The origin of these forms has never been satisfactorily explained.
Noting corresponding s-ful forms in other Germanic varieties (e.g. Old
Frisian acc. sg. fem. and acc. pl. s(e), Old Saxon acc. sg. fem. sia and acc. pl.
sia (masc. & fem.), siu (neut.)), Nielsen (1981: 165 (§21), 227 (§7)) suggests
their appearance in Middle English is perhaps a result of ‘contacts with the
Continent’ but supplies no further detail. Morsbach (1897: 331), on the
other hand, takes them to be native formations, originating in forms
corresponding to other Germanic s-initial forms and later worn down to a
clitic ‘s’, which subsequently evolved into non-clitic variants including
Middle English as, es, is, hes, his, hise. Morsbach does not, however, tackle
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the obvious question of why acc. pl. and acc. sg. fem. forms in (-)s(-) are not
attested in English until a comparatively late date (Howe 1996: 140).
I will argue that these s-ful forms are indeed native English formations
but will propose a different origin—one which explains (a) why they were
confined to the contexts illustrated by examples (1) and (2), and (b) why
these forms emerged when they did.
Howe, S. 1996. The personal pronouns in the Germanic languages. Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter.
Morris, R. (ed.) 1866. Dan Michel Ayenbite of Inwyt, vol. I: Text, EETS OS 23.
[Reissued P. Gradon 1965.] London: Oxford University Press.
Morsbach, L. 1897. Review of O.F. Emerson, The history of the English Language.
Anglia Beiblatt 7/11:321-38.
Nielsen, H.F. 1981. Old English and the continental Germanic languages. Innsbruck:
Ins tut f r Sprachwissenscha der niversität Innsbruck.
Heaven and earth: Some metaphorical connections
Marc Alexander & Christian Kay
University of Glasgow
Keywords: lexicon, thesaurus, category, metaphor, supernatural
Completion of the Historical Thesaurus of English project (HT) has opened
up new possibilities for the study of the English lexicon. It is now available
in print as the Historical Thesaurus of the OED (Kay et al. 2009), as a
searchable online resource (www.glasgow.ac.uk/historicalthesaurus/), and,
for subscribers, as a component of the online Oxford English Dictionary
(www.oed.com/). Users of the latter should note (a) that it is under revision
and therefore not an exact match for the other versions, which are based
on the second edition of the OED, and (b) that it does not contain Old
English words unrecorded after 1150. These are included in the print and
Glasgow online versions, using material from A Thesaurus of Old English
(Roberts and Kay 2000).
The HT database contains some 793,742 word forms arranged in
225,131 semantic categories, linked vertically by relationships such as
hyponymy and meronymy and horizontally by synonymy and, to a lesser
extent, antonymy. Automatic routines enable links between categories in
this hierarchy to be identified and quantified through tracking of recurrent
word forms. In a current project, Mapping Metaphor with the Historical
Thesaurus (www.glasgow.ac.uk/metaphor, funded by the Arts and
8
Humanities Research Council from January 2012 to December 2014),
researchers are examining these links with a view to creating a ‘metaphor
map’ showing the development of systematic metaphors throughout the
history of English. This paper will describe these procedures and the
problems involved in applying them, such as the elimination of homonymy
and unmotivated polysemy. It will focus particularly on issues for historical
linguists in identifying metaphors, such as semantic change, both within
English and in source languages, and shifting world-views. Discussion will
centre on a case study of metaphorical links evidenced in categories of
Supernatural Phenomena, including Deity, Angel, Devil, Heaven and Hell. It
is hypothesized that these categories will link to concepts in the physical,
emotional and moral universes, and that decisions about metaphor will
need to take account of prevailing world-views, such as belief or otherwise
in the ‘reality’ of the supernatural. In conclusion, the paper will introduce
another new project: SAMUELS (Semantic Annotation and Mark Up for
Enhancing Lexical Searches, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research
Council from January 2014 to March 2015), which is exploring the
contribution HT can make to disambiguating polysemous word forms in
texts, including those from earlier periods.
Kay, Christian, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels and Irené Wotherspoon (eds). 2009.
Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Roberts, Jane and Christian Kay with Lynne Grundy. 2000. A Thesaurus of Old English,
King’s College London Medieval Studies XI, 1995, 2 vols. Second edition,
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. http://oldenglishthesaurus.arts.gla.ac.uk/
The get-passive in nineteenth-century English:
Corpus analysis and prescriptive comments
Lieselotte Anderwald
University of Kiel
Keywords: GET-passive, GET-constructions, corpus analysis, prescriptive
grammar, nineteenth century English
The GET-passive, together with HAVE GOT, has seen considerable prescriptive
criticism in the twentieth century (e.g. reported in Ballard 1939: 23-26;
Mittins et al. 1970: 33-35). Since we know from historical corpus studies
that the rise of the GET-passive is a Late Modern English phenomenon
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(Denison 1993, 1998; Hundt 2001; cf. also Gries and Hilpert 2012 for the
twentieth century), it makes sense to assume a link with the onset of
prescriptive grammar writing (in the second half of the eighteenth, and in
particular in the nineteenth century). And indeed, prescriptive grammars
have been blamed for the comparatively slow rise of the GET-passive over
the course of the nineteenth century (Hundt 2001). However, this claim has
not been substantiated by evidence from the grammars themselves yet. In
this talk, I will trace the rise of GET over the nineteenth (and into the
twentieth) century in corpora and differentiate the individual constructions
that GET was (and is) used in. I will then correlate the shift in constructional
use with prescriptive comments in nineteenth-century grammar books,
based on my Collection of Nineteenth-Century Grammars, which contains
over 250 grammar books from Britain and the US. As my talk will show,
criticism of GET and GET-constructions occurs; however, the GET-passive
curiously is almost exempt from this criticism. I will propose some
speculative reasons why this may be so. However, it seems likely that
criticism of the GET-passive is a truly twentieth-century phenomenon – one
of the striking cases where nineteenth-century normative grammar writing
is much less normative than often thought.
Ballard, Philip Boswood. 1939. Teaching and Testing English. London: University of
London Press.
Denison, David. 1993. English Historical Syntax: Verbal Constructions. London & New
York: Longman.
Denison, David. 1998. “Syntax.” In Suzanne Romaine, ed. The Cambridge History of
the English Language Vol. IV: 1776-1997. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press: 92-329.
Gries, Stefan Th., and Martin Hilpert. 2012. “Variability-based Neighbor Clustering: A
bottom-up approach to periodization in historical linguistics.” In Terttu
Nevalainen and Elizabeth Closs Traugott, eds. The Oxford Handbook of the
History of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 134-144.
Hundt, Marianne. 2001. “What corpora can tell us about the grammaticalisation of
voice in get-constructions.” Studies in Language 25: 49-88.
Mittins, William Henry, Mary Salu, Mary Edminson, and Sheila Coyne. 1970. Attitudes
to English Usage. London: Oxford University Press.
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Personal pronouns as clitics in Middle English:
Between spelling and sound
Anna Antkowiak
Adam Mickiewicz University
Keywords: pronoun, clitic, Middle English
This paper is a part of a PhD project which aims at depicting aspects of
pronominal cliticisation regarding environmental conditioning factors
governing the process in the Middle English period. Although, classical
handbooks on the history of the English language barely mention the
process (Mossé 1952, Mustanoja 1960, Fisiak 1965, Visser 1978, Blake
1992), diachronic and contemporary studies often refer to English pronouns
as clitics. The main rift lies in the perspectives on the defining criteria:
whether the syntactic and phonological features ought to co-occur, or
whether the two planes of criteria should not to be taken as mutually
complementary (Anderson 2005: 32).
Due to the nature of the data considered, spelling was taken as a
starting point, with the assumption that with the lack of standard
orthography scribal spellings might have mirrored actual pronunciation.
Under the individual entries for personal pronoun the Middle English
Dictionary Online [MED] lists several contractions which are specific to this
word category, e.g.:
(1)
segget
tis
artou
shere
shaltus
yave
< segge hit
< hit is
< art thou
< she were
< shalt hes, shalt them
< ye have
The sample is representative in terms of phonological contexts
illustrated by MED. Such phonological reduction might be a sign of
cliticisation, as clinging for stress is one of the prerequisites of the process.
However, even a quick look reveals a flaw. Pronominal ‘cliticisation’ as
illustrated under (1) seems to be restricted only to a subset of the
pronominal paradigm; the preference appears to stem from only a handful
of environments being favoured. Whereas clitics, unlike affixes, are claimed
to be phonologically indifferent to a host.
The present research aims at verifying whether pronouns were as prone
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to cliticisation, in phonological terms, already within Middle English, as they
seem to be now (cf. Dixon 2007). Research aims at utilising the poetic
dictum of the times, incorporating metre and the remaining alliteration, as
the major source of information regarding placement of stress (Minkova
2003), however, it seemed crucial to incorporate syntactic criteria, albeit
very carefully considering the specificity of the text types chosen, in order
to complement the findings based on the phonological factors, in the hope
of establishing that the contracted spellings do mirror the clitic status of the
pronouns in question, and are not merely scribal ease aimed at quicker
execution of commonly found pronoun combinations.
Anderson, Stephen R. 2005. Aspects of the theory of clitics. Oxford University Press.
Beukema, Frits - Marcel den Dikken (eds.). 2000. Clitic phenomena in European
languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Blake, N. (ed). 1992. The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol.II 10661476. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dixon, R. M. W. – Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald (eds.). 2002. Word: Across-linguistic
typology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dixon, R. 2007. “Clitics in English”, in English Studies 88.5: 574-600.
Fischer, Olga. 1992. “Syntax”. In: Blake, N. (ed). 1992. The Cambridge History of the
English Language. Vol. II 1066-1476. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fisiak, Jacek. 1965. Morphemic Structure of Chaucer’s English. University of Alabama
Press.
Gerlach, Brigit – Janet Grijzenhout (eds.). 2000. Clitics in Phonology, Morphology and
Syntax. Lingustik Aktuell – Lingustics Today 36. Amsterdam – Philadelfia:
Benjamins.
Kemenade, Ans van – Nigel Vincent (eds.).1987. Parameters of Morphosyntacitc
Change. Cambridge University Press.
Klavans, Judith. 1995. On clitics and cliticization. New York: Garland Publishing Inc.
Koopman, Willem, F. 1994. “Evidence for Clitic Adverbs in Old English. An Evaluation.”
In: Britton, Derek. (ed.). 1994. English Historical Linguistics. Papers from the 8th
international conference on English Historical Linguistics. Amsterdam;
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Koopman, Willem, F. 1997. “Another look at clitics in Old English”, in Transactions of
the Philological Society 95.1: 73-93.
Minkova, Donka. 2003. Alliteration and sound change in early English. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Mossé, Fernand. 1952. A Handbook of Middle English. (Translated by James A.
Walker.) Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press.
Mustanoja, Tauno F. 1960. Middle English Syntax. Helsinki: Societe Neophilologique.
Pintzuk, Susan. 1996. Cliticization in OE. In Aaron L Halpern – Arnold Zwicky (eds)
Approaching second: second position clitics and related phenomena, Stanford
CA: CSLI, 3758-409
Somers Wicka, Katerina. 2009. From phonology to syntax: pronominal cliticization in
Otfrid’s ‘Evangelienbuch’. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.
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Visser, F. Th. 1978. An historical syntax of the English language. Leiden: E.J. Brill.
Zwicky, Arnold – Geoffrey K. Pullum. 1983. “Cliticization vs. Inflection: English N’T.” ,
in Language 59.3: 502-513.
Zwicky, Arnold M. 1985. “Clitics and particles”, in Language 62.2: 283-305.
Headless free relatives and resumption in Old English
Bartnik, Artur
Catholic University of Lublin
Free relatives illustrated in (1) are analysed as headless because the case of
the underlined pronoun is assigned by the embedded verb and the
structure contains a resumptive pronoun (cf. Allen 1980).
(1)
And ðone ðe ðu nu hæfst, nis se ðin wer (Alc.P.V.37)
Another possible analysis of such structures employed in this paper
involves correlativization, as illustrated in (2) (cf. Liptak 2009, Truswell
2008):
(2) [correlative clause… relative phrase...] [main clause... correlate…]
Correlativization is a non-local relativization strategy (cf. Srivastav 1991,
Bhatt 2003), in which a restrictive relative clause appears to the left of a(n)
(non)-adjacent nominal expression linked to it. The Old English structure
shown above meets all the criteria established for correlatives: a relative
clause appears in the left periphery, the correlate contains a demonstrative
and the syntactic relation between the two constituents is loose though
they form one semantic unit (Liptak 2009, Truswell 2008).
A corpus-based study shows that free headless relatives exhibit
different syntactic properties and two types should be distinguished:
‘demonstrative’ correlatives (þone þe) and ‘whoever’ correlatives (starting
with swa..). Both types feature two patterns, identical and non-identical, in
which the cases of the correlative elements are the same or different.
Consider:
(3)
identical pattern type 1
þam þe ge nellað forgifan, þam ne beoð forgifene. (coaelhom,
ÆHom_7:53.1090)
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(4)
(5)
(6)
non-identical pattern type 1
And ðone ðe ðu nu hæfst, nis se ðin wer (Alc.P.V.37)
identical pattern type 2
eal swa hwæt swa ic þe gehet eal ic hit gesette. (coblick,LS_20
:147.155.1807)
non-identical pattern type 2
mid swa hwam swa ic hit mid fynde, beo he min þeow.
(cootest,Gen:44.10.1883)
We will argue that those patterns exhibit a number of differences. First, in
identical patterns (type 1) the dative case is common, while in identical
patterns (type 2) the accusative is practically the only option. Second, nonidentical patterns are more common in type 2 with more case
combinations. This means that relativizers can carry any non-nominative
case just like their correlates in the main clause. The case combinations in
non-identical patterns of type 1 are limited. Third, both types do not have
the same case assignment mechanism: while in type 2 cases are
independently assigned within the clauses, in structures of type 1 cases can
be assigned by case attraction, as shown in (7):
(7)
þone þe hæme wið nyten, ne læt ðu hine libban. (cootest,
Exod:22.19.3279)
Measures in medieval English recipes: Culinary vs. medical
Magdalena Bator & Marta Sylwanowicz
University of Social Sciences, Warsaw
Keywords: recipe, measure, Medieval
The recipe has been categorized as a separate text type investigated among
others by such scholars as Görlach (e.g., 1992, 2004), Carroll (1999, 2004)
or Mäkinen (2004, 2006). It has been defined as 1) ‘formula for remedy’, 2)
‘prescription’, and 3) ‘statement on ingredients required’ (Görlach 2004). A
diachronic study of the recipe shows a great way of development the text
type has undergone, since the earlier a recipe the more it varies from what
we know today.
th
th
The proposed paper deals with medieval recipes from the 14 and 15
c. Two types of recipes will be analyzed and compared, i.e., the culinary and
the medical recipe. The function of both types seems to be very similar, i.e.,
14
to instruct how to prepare a particular dish/medicine. Thus, the recipes
should be structured in a similar manner. Appearances can be deceitful,
however. A closer look at samples of both types proves that the two are far
apart.
The paper attempts at providing a general examination of one of the
distinctive features of the recipe, i.e., the way of giving measures (mostly
the weights and amounts). There are three basic systems of weight: (i) the
apothecaries’ weight, (ii) the avoirdupois weight, and (iii) the troy weight.
Firstly, each of the systems will be briefly discussed. Next, the vocabulary
referring to measures in both corpora (i.e., the culinary and the medical)
will be presented. And finally, the two ways of measure specification will be
compared in order to reveal differences in the structure of particular
recipes.
The corpus used for the present study can be divided into the culinary
and the medical corpus. The former consists of recipes found in Hieatt and
th
th
Butler’s Forme of Cury (14 c.), Austin’s Two 15 -century cookery books
th
th
th
(15 c.) and Hieatt’s A gathering of Medieval English recipes (14 and 15
c.). The latter consists of medical texts collected in the Middle English
Medical Texts (MEMT) corpus, an electronic collection of medical treatises
from c. 1375 to c. 1500 compiled by Taavitsainen, Pahta and Mäkinen
(2005). These texts are subdivided into three categories, i.e., Surgical texts,
Specialized texts, and Remedies and materia medica. The medical corpus
used for the present study will consist of the material from the last
category, illustrating the remedy-book tradition, i.e., writings of a less
learned and theoretical character. Most texts included in this section are in
the form of recipes. In addition, the material will be supplemented with the
medical recipes written c. 1330, included in the Appendix to the MEMT
corpus.
Austin, T. (ed.) 2000. Two 15th-c. cookery books. Oxford: OUP.
Carroll, R. 1999. “The Middle English recipe as a text-type”, Neuphilologische
Mitteilungen 100: 27-42.
Carroll, R. 2004. “Middle English recipes: Vernacularization of a text-type”, in:
Taavitsainen, I. ‒ P. Pahta (eds.), Medical and scientific writing in Late Medieval
English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 174– 196.
Görlach, M. 1992. “Text-types and language history: The cookery recipe”, in:
Rissanen, M. et al. (eds.), History of Englishes: New methods and interpretations
in historical linguistics. Berlin; New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 736-761.
Görlach, M. 2004. Text types and the history of English. Berlin; New York: Mouton de
Gruyter.
Hieatt, Constance B. (ed.) 2008. A gathering of Medieval English recipes. (Textes
Vernaculaires du Moyen Age 5). Turnhout: Brepols.
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Hieatt, Constance B. – Sharon Butler (eds.) 1985. Curye on Inglysch: English culinary
manuscripts of the 14th c. (Early English Text Society, SS 8). London: Oxford
University Press.
Mäkinen, M. 2004. “Herbal recipes and recipes in herbals – intertextuality in early
English medical writing”, in: Taavitsainen, I. ‒ P. Pahta (eds.), Medical and
scientific writing in Late Medieval English. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 144 – 173.
Mäkinen, M. 2006. Between herbals et alia: Intertextuality in Medieval English
herbals. Doctoral dissertation. University of Helsinki, Faculty of Arts, Department
of English and The Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English.
Taavitsainen, I. ‒ P. Pahta ‒ M. Mäkinen (eds.) 2005. Middle English Medical Texts
(MEMT). CD-ROM with MEMT Presenter software by Raymond Hickey.
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
(W)ho, w(h)en, w(h)ere, and w(h)at?
The eighteenth-century pronunciation of ‘wh’
Joan Beal & Ranjan Sen
University of Sheffield
Compared to other areas of the language, there is relatively little research
on the phonology of Late Modern English, arguably due to the idiosyncratic
notation used by eighteenth-century authors, rendering it difficult to search
for phonological information. We outline plans for a searchable database of
eighteenth-century English phonology, and test whether such a resource
might usefully answer questions about phonological variation and change.
Our test case involves the representation of ‘wh’ in nine eighteenthcentury pronouncing dictionaries. In present-day RP, whale, what, where
begin with /w/, whilst who, whole have initial /h/. Eighteenth-century
sources present evidence, through their orthographic systems, of variation
across authors between /hw/ and /w/ for the first set, hence a preserved
versus unpreserved contrast in where/wear. Walker presents the loss of the
contrast as a special case of ‘h-dropping’, which was just beginning to
attract social stigma at this time in lower-class London English. Burn and
Perry (Scottish) usually have /w/, although there are interesting isolated
instances of /hw/. Spence (from Newcastle with Scottish heritage) uses
distinct symbols for the initial consonants in where and wear, and even
uses this symbol in who, whole. Therefore, in addition to the apparent
social variation in the pronunciation of such words, geographical diversity
can also be reconstructed, reflected in modern-day reflexes of the contrast
16
in the British Isles, with /w, h/ the norm in England, but with /hw/ and even
/f/ in Scotland.
By examining a pilot transcribed corpus of lexical items from nine
pronouncing dictionaries, and also incorporating modern phonetic evidence
into the realisation of ‘wh’, we are able to analyse the data in terms of
segmental and suprasegmental phonology, morphology, homophony,
onomatopoeia, and frequency, identifying clear influences of each to
varying degrees according to geography and chronology.
Old ‘truths’, new corpora: Old English conjunct clauses revisited
Kristin Bech
University of Oslo
Keywords: Old English, conjunct clauses, discourse function, word order,
verb-final
This paper returns to the issue of the word order of conjunct main clauses
in Old English. It has often been claimed, to the point of becoming an
axiom, that Old English conjunct main clauses, i.e. clauses starting with the
coordinating conjunction and or but, and which contain an overt subject,
typically have verb-final (surface) word order (see e.g. Mitchell 1985; van
Kemenade 1987; Traugott 1992; Pintzuk 1995, Baker 2012), as in (1).
(1)
7 On his broke he Gode
fela behæsa behet
and in his illness he God.DAT many promises made
‘and in his illness he made many promises to God’
(cochronE,ChronE_[Plummer]:1093.3.3116)
However, although Bech (2001a, 2001b) showed that only a small
proportion of conjunct clauses are in fact verb-final, the conception that
conjunct clauses are typically verb-final is still prevalent, and the topic thus
needs to be re-addressed. In this paper, I therefore first corroborate the
earlier empirical findings with new, robust, and replicable data from the
York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (YCOE). The data
show that only 9.5% of the conjunct main clauses are in fact verb-final. If
verb-late constructions are included as well, the percentage rises to 21.6%,
which is still low. I then have a fresh look at a crucial point made in the
early studies, namely that even though conjunct main clauses are not
typically verb-final, a majority of verb-final main clauses (57%) are conjunct
17
clauses. The question is what motivates this ‘asymmetry’. I claim that it is
due to information structure and discourse factors, more specifically the
intersection between the discourse function of conjunct clauses and the
discourse function of the different word order patterns. I compare the
verb-final pattern to the verb-second pattern (XVS), in which no asymmetry
is found: conjunct clauses are not V2, and V2 clauses are not conjunct
clauses. As regards syntax, there is still no consensus in the literature
concerning the exact landing sites of clause elements in the structure, and
the syntactic models developed so far are not able to account for all the
empirical facts. Hence, at present much research is concerned with the
possible influence of information-structural factors on the word order of
Old English. The ultimate aim of this paper is to illustrate the fine-grained
system of Old English sentence structure, in which the various syntactic
possibilities are exploited to the full for communicative purposes.
Baker, Peter S. 2012. Introduction to Old English. Wiley-Blackwell.
Bech, Kristin. 2001a. Are Old English conjunct clauses really verb-final? In L.J. Brinton
(ed), Historical linguistics 1999: selected papers from the 14th International
Conference on Historical Linguistics, Vancouver, 9-13 August 1999, 49-62. John
Benjamins.
Bech, Kristin Bech, Kristin. 2001b. Word Order Patterns in Old and Middle English: A
Syntactic and Pragmatic Study. PhD dissertation, University of Bergen.
<https://bora.uib.no/handle/1956/3850>
van Kemenade, Ans. 1987. Syntactic Case and Morphological Case in the History of
English. Foris Publications.
Mitchell, Bruce. 1985. Old English Syntax, vols. I & II. Clarendon Press.
Pintzuk, Susan. 1995. Variation and change in Old English clause structure. In D.
Sankoff, W. Labov and A. Kroch (eds), Language Variation and Change 7, 229260.
Taylor, Ann, Anthony Warner, Susan Pintzuk & Frank Beths. 2003. The York-TorontoHelsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (YCOE). Department of Linguistics,
University of York. Oxford Text Archive, first edition.
<http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~lang22/YcoeHome1.htm>
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1992. Syntax. In R. M. Hogg (ed), The Cambridge History of
the English Language.
18
I didn’t dare to make the smallest repartee, I need hardly tell you:
A corpus-based study of the infinitival complements governed by need
and dare in the recent history of English
Sofia Bemposta-Rivas
University of Vigo
Keywords: Complement
grammaticalization.
clause;
modal;
lexical
verb;
retraction;
This paper aims to shed light on the status of the verbs need and dare as
either lexical or auxiliary verbs in Late Modern and Present Day English.
These verbs are attested already in OE and are grammaticalized at different
points in time (Warner 1993; Beths 1999; Krug 2000; Taeymans 2004, 2006;
Loureiro-Porto 2009). This study analyses their infinitival complementation
options and their textual distribution, as well as their morphological and
syntactic features in an attempt to explain the nature of the linguistic
change undergone by these verbs. The Penn Parsed Corpus of British
Modern English, a large parsed corpus containing data from 1770 to 1914,
provides an excellent collection to test these assumptions in the Late
Modern English period. The British National Corpus Baby will be used to
compare the results of need in Late Modern and in Present Day English.
The analysis of the morphological and syntactic features of these verbs
suggests that need and dare illustrate a change in progress towards a more
regularized status from Late Modern English onwards. Morphologically,
there is some connection between the type of complement and the
presence or absence of -(e)s and -ed as, respectively, inflectional markers of
third-person singular present and past tenses. In the earlier periods, the
uninflected forms of both verbs are the dominant ones attested in these
contexts. This situation changes from 1770 onwards, when dare always
shows the inflected forms and need tends to exhibit the morphemes -(e)s
and -ed. Further, the fact that need and dare show non-finite forms, i.e. toinfinitive and -ing forms, when they select a to-infinitive or an NP
complement remark their lexical status.
Syntactically, the preference for a to-infinitive complement can be
related to the use of need and dare in complex contexts (Rohdenburgh
2003, 1996) and also to the role of iconicity (Fischer 1992 and Fischer and
Nänny 1999). In contrast to need, the position of lightly stressed adverbs is
indicative of the status of dare in the clause. As for the co-occurrence with
auxiliaries, this is restricted to NP complementation in the case of need and
to to-infinitives with dare. In addition, whereas need is neutral as regards
19
polarity when it selects a to-infinitive clause, dare tends to occur more
often in non-assertive contexts. Following Tagliamonte (2004: 50), I claim
that the more grammaticalized constructions, i.e. need and dare with bare
infinitive clauses, are entrenched in formulaic utterances or are used in
certain discourse rituals.
This study accounts for the varying layers of grammaticalization
accomplished by the different forms of these verbs (see Hopper 1991: 23),
and serves as an illustration of the unidirectionality hypothesis (Traugott
2001, Haspelmath 2004; contra Fischer 2000 and Norde 2012)
Beths, Frank 1999: ‘The History of Dare and the Status of Unidirectionality*’.
Linguistics 37-6: 1069-1110.
Fischer, Olga 1992: ‘Syntax’. The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. II:
1066-1476. Norman Blake, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 207-408.
Fischer, Olga 2000: Pathways of Change: Grammaticalization in English. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins.
Fischer, Olga and Max Nänny 1999: ‘Iconicity as a Creative Form in Language Use’.
Form Miming Meaning: Iconicity in Language and Literature. Max Nänny and
Olga Fischer, eds. Amsterdam: John Benhamins. 26-36
Haspelmath, Martin 2004: ‘On Directionality in Language Change with Particular
Reference to Grammaticalization’. Up and Down the Cline – The Nature of
Grammaticalization. Olga Fischer, Muriel Norde and Harry Perridon, eds.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. 17-44.
Hopper, Paul J. 1991: ‘On some Principles of Grammaticalization’. Approaches to
Grammaticalization, Volume I. Elizabeth Closs Traugott and Bernd Heine, eds.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 17-35.
Krug, Manfred 2000: Emerging English Modals. A Corpus-based Study of
Gramaticalization. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Loureiro-Porto, Lucía 2009: The Semantic Predecessors of Need in the History of
English (c750-1710). Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.
Norde, Muriel 2012: ‘Degrammaticalization’. The Oxford Handbook of
Grammaticalization. Heiko Narrog and Bernd Heine, eds. Oxford: Oxford
University Press. 475-546.
Rohdenburg, Günter 1996: ‘Cognitive Complexity and Increased Grammatical
Explicitness in English’. Cognitive Linguistics 7: 149-182.
Rohdenburg, Günter 2003: ‘Cognitive Complexity and Horror Aequi as Factors
Determining the Use of Interrogative Clause Linkers in English’. Determinants of
Grammatical Variation in English. Günter Rohdenburg and Britta Mondorf, eds.
Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 205-49.
Taeymans, Martine 2004: ‘An Investigation into the Marginal Modals DARE and NEED
in British Present-day English: A Corpus-based Approach’. Up and Down the Cline
– The Nature of Grammaticalization. Olga Fischer, Muriel Norde and Harry
Perridon, eds. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. 97-114.
20
Taeymans, Martine 2006: An Investigation into the Emergence and Development of
the Verb Need from Old to Present-Day English: A Corpus-based Approach. PhD
dissertation. Antwerp: Universiteit Antwerpen.
Traugott, Elisabeth Closs 2001: Legitimate Counterexamples to Unidirectionality.
Paper presented at Freiburg University, 17 October 2001.
Tagliamonte, Sali 2004: ‘Have to, Gotta, Must. Grammaticalization, Variation &
Specialization in English Deontic Modality’. Corpus Approaches to
Grammaticalization in English. Hans Lindquist and Christian Mair, eds.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 35-55.
Warner, Anthony R. 1993: English Auxiliaries. Structure and History. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Composite predicate constructions: Lexicalisation or delexicalisation?
Eva Berlage
University of Hamburg
Keywords: lexicalisation, delexicalisation, fossilisation, decategorialisation,
composite predicate constructions
In this paper, I will compare two types of composite predicate constructions
which are syntactically and semantically parallel: those of the type make
fun of and those of the type take notice of. Both patterns are introduced by
a so-called light verb (make, take) and both of them are followed by an NP
(fun, notice) and a preposition (of). My claim is that these constructions
have undergone two different types of language change: composite
predicate constructions without a simple verb counterpart (like make fun
of) go down the path of lexicalisation while those that contain a simple verb
counterpart (like take notice of, which has the simple verb counterpart
notice) become delexicalised.
With reference to Trousdale (2008) and Berlage (forthcoming),
lexicalisation processes affecting the constructions will be accounted for in
terms of a) the extent to which the construction (e.g. make fun of, take
notice of) has become fossilised and b) the extent to which the nominal
(e.g. fun or notice) has become decategorialised, losing e.g. the ability to
take determiners and/or premodifiers. By contrast, constructions in which
the NP enhances its prototypical grammatical properties (to occur e.g. as
the subject of a passive construction) and in which the nominal shows an
increasing syntactic freedom (in terms of its modifiability) will be
interpreted as being part of the process of delexicalisation. These claims
21
will be tested against corpus data which represent fictional British English
from the 16th century to the present day.
The empirical analyses are followed by a discussion of why we find so
diverse syntactic developments in constructions that superficially look so
similar. Here, I take into consideration both semantic reasons which relate
to aspectual differences between composite predicates and simple verb
counterparts (cf. e.g. Prince 1972; Vogt 2002; Huddleston/Pullum et al.
2002) and discourse-functional explanations. Discourse-functional
explanations draw attention to speakers’ need for flexible modification
patterns (cf. e.g. Jespersen 1942: 117; Nickel 1968: 15-6; Brinton 1996: 194;
Kytö 1999: 179) and their striving for economy of expression (cf. e.g. Biber
2003; Biber et al. 2009; Leech et al. 2009; Biber/Gray 2011).
Berlage, Eva (Forthcoming). “Opposite developments in composite predicate
constructions: The case of take advantage of and make use of.” In: Marianne
Hundt (ed.), The Syntax of Late Modern English. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Biber, Douglas (2003). “Compressed noun phrase structures in newspaper discourse:
The competing demands of popularization vs. economy.” In: Jean Aitchison and
Diana M. Lewis (eds.), New Media Language. London: Routledge. 169-81.
Biber, Douglas and Bethany Gray (2011). “Grammatical change in the noun phrase:
the influence of written language use.” English Language and Linguistics 15(2):
223-50.
Biber, Douglas, Jack Grieve and Gina Iberri-Shea (2009). “Noun phrase modification.”
In: Günter Rohdenburg and Julia Schlüter (eds.), One Language, Two Grammars?
Differences between British and American English. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. 182-93.
Brinton, Laurel J. (1996). “Attitudes towards increasing segmentalization: Complex
and phrasal verbs in English.” Journal of English Linguistics 24: 186-205.
Huddleston, Rodney, Geoffrey K. Pullum et al. (2002). The Cambridge Grammar of
the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jespersen, Otto (1942). A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles. Vol. VI:
Morphology. Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard.
Kytö, Merja (1999). “Collocational and idiomatic aspects of verbs in Early Modern
English: A corpus-based study of MAKE, HAVE, GIVE, TAKE, and DO.” In: Laurel J.
Brinton and Minoji Akimoto (eds.), Collocational and Idiomatic Aspects of
Composite Predicates in the History of English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia:
Benjamins. 167-206.
Leech, Geoffrey, Marianne Hundt, Christian Mair and Nicholas Smith (2009). Change
in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Nickel, Gerhard (1968). “Complex verbal structures in English.” International Review
of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching 6: 1-21.
22
Prince, Ellen (1972). “A note on aspect in English: The take a walk construction.” In:
Senta Ploetz (ed.), Transformationelle Analyse. Frankfurt: Athenum. 409-19.
Trousdale, Graeme (2008). “Constructions in grammaticalisation and lexicalization:
Evidence from the history of composite predicate constructions in English.” In:
Grame Trousdale and Nikolas Gisborne (eds.), Constructional Approaches to
English Grammar. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 33-67.
Vogt, Helmut (2002). “Semantische Unterschiede zwischen komplexen
Verbalfügungen vom Typ give/have/take a look und ihren einfachen
Verbentsprechungen.” In: Reinhard Rapp (ed.), Sprachwissenschaft auf dem Weg
in das Dritte Jahrtausend. Akten des 34. Linguistischen Kolloquiums in
Germersheim 1999. Bern: Lang. 237-44.
The paths and pace of deverbal derivation in the earliest quotations of
the Oxford English Dictionary
Michael Bilynsky
Ivan Franko National University in Lviv
Keywords: verbs, deverbal derivatives, OED earliest quotations, sequential
paths, electronic modeling
Shared-root derivation from over 17,000 English verbs has been put into
eighteen single or multiple (owing to variant suffixes) slots inserted with
deverbal nouns, adjectives and participles as well as second order adverbs
and nouns. The aim of the study lies in the elaboration of the many-faceted
software-enriched heuristics of the corpus of the OED first quotations for
the study of deverbal word families and the reflections of the synonymy of
verbs in the strings of their derivatives over time.
All possible combinations of the categories of shared-root lexemes
within deverbal families have been examined for the sequence of the
attestation of the respective elements and the chronological width
between them.
Historically, the constituents of a synonymous string represent a chain
of onomasiological events reflected in the OED-dated textual prototypes. A
similar view on the reconstruction of historical synonymy by docking the
OED textual prototypes of senses of words and the synonymy of words
taken from the canonical Roget’s thesaurus has been implemented in [1]. In
the suggested framework we use the strings of synonymous verbs from all
the available alternative dictionaries of synonyms.
Each pair of strings consisting of a string of synonymous verbs with the
chronologically positioned constituents and a derivationally reflected string
23
of coinages with the constituents placed in the order of the elements of the
former string, thus (mis)matching their own successive chronology, builds
up a matrix. The matrix is reversible by exchanging the column and line
status of the respective strings. Such matrices are also built on the pairs of
strings of derivatives. An average thesaurus yields several hundred
thousand matrices. We will generalize on the tendencies of the sequential
similarity (chronotropism) of the expansion of the compared strings.
A synonymous string and its diachronic reconstruction are
characterized by a succession of their elements. In some cases these
successions are identical, but in most they are characterized by a
reshuffling of the constituents.
Each of the two successions of elements in the synonymous string is
representable as a vector. The length of the vector equals the sum total of
the weight factor values of all the elements in the dominant of the string.
This value takes into account the number of synonyms in the string and the
present-day ordinal or relative chronological (alternatively, OED-dated)
positions of a synonym, respectively. The difference in the lengths of the
two vectors constitutes the geometry of a diachronic reconstruction of the
present-day synonymy. The fluctuations of this difference are established
for strings of varied lengths and categorical affiliation. They reveal the
sequential intactness and reshuffling of elements in parent and derived
(near-)synonymy among the stringed deverbal word families over time.
The suggested electronic framework admits of the diversely partitioned
processing of the material according to the relevant etymological or
synchronic (sub-)layers. All the queries are supported by the on-site
precedent/exhaustive downloading of examples as well as re-settable
curvature visualizations of the distribution of quantitative parameters.
Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. With additional material from
A Thesaurus of Old English. Christian Kay, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels, Irène
Wotherspoon. Volume 1: Thesaurus. Oxford University Press. 2009. Vol. 1783 p.
24
Mortal lazy and deadly curious: Some diachronic notes on the intensifiers
mortal and deadly
Zeltia Blanco-Suárez
University of Santiago de Compostela
Keywords: intensifiers, subjectification, grammaticalisation, mortal, deadly
Intensification strategies in language are manifold, including prosody and
repetition (cf. Bolinger 1972; Claridge 2011). Intensifiers, as perhaps the
most prototypical of the intensification strategies, have for long been at the
forefront of academic discussions. The reason for such prominence in
scholarly debates owes to their tendency to rapid change and to their
constant ‘recycling’ (Tagliamonte 2008) or renewal (cf. Méndez-Naya 2008;
Barnfield and Buchstaller 2010; D’Arcy 2013).
The present paper is also concerned with intensifiers. More specifically,
it sets out to explore the diachronic development of the death-related
intensifiers deadly and mortal. In spite of the long-recorded history of these
two words with the meaning ‘causing or liable to cause death’ (first records
th
th
dating from the 11 and 14 centuries, respectively), mortal did not
th
develop a purely intensifying function until the 18 century (cf. the OED). In
the case of deadly, however, the boosting function emerged much earlier,
th
already in the 14 century, according to the OED.
Deadly and mortal share a common path of evolution, originally
expressing literal or descriptive meanings, ((1)-(2)), later on rising in
subjectivity and expressing more subjective or affective meanings ((3)-(4)),
and eventually grammaticalising as intensifiers, as in (5) and (6). They thus
seem to develop along the lines of Adamson (2000).
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
He wonded þe Kyng dedely fulle sore. (1330. OED, s.v. deadly adv.
1a).
At mortal batailles hadde he been fiftene. (1387-95. OED, s.v.
mortal a. 1b).
They..Gazde each on other and lookt deadly pale. (1597. OED, s.v.
deadly adv.3).
The Nymph grew pale, and in a mortal fright. (1693. OED, s.v.
mortal a. and adv.4).
I þat es sa dedli dill [‘foolish, dull’] (1400. OED, s.v. deadly adv.4).
But that, he being very gay and lively, she was mortal jealous of
him; (ECF. 1748. Samuel Richardson. Clarissa, vol. 5, Letter I, p.7).
25
Through a collocational analysis, it will be shown that these forms,
despite their parallel evolution and shared meanings, differ in regard to
their uses and degrees of productivity as intensifiers. This diachronic study
will thus reveal how deadly and mortal peaked to fame and went out of
fashion again, being therefore ‘recycled’, in line with many other
intensifiers in the history of English.
Data for the present paper have been drawn from a variety of sources,
including the OED, the MED, Early English Books Online (EEBO), Eighteenth
Century Fiction (ECF), Nineteenth Century Fiction (NCF), and the extended
version of the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts (CLMETEV).
Adamson, Sylvia. 2000. ‘A lovely little example: Word order options and category
shift in the premodifying string’. In Pathways of change. Grammaticalization in
English, eds. Olga Fischer, Anette Rosenbach, and Dieter Stein: 39-66.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Bolinger, Dwight. 1972. Degree words. The Hague: Mouton.
Barnfield, Kate, and Isabelle Buchstaller. 2010. ‘Intensifiers in Tyneside: Longitudinal
developments and new trends’. English World-Wide 31(3): 252-287.
Claridge, Claudia. 2011. Hyperbole in English: A corpus-based study of exaggeration.
Cambridge: CUP.
D’Arcy, Alexandra. 2013. ’So slow yet totally frenetic: Intensification in longitudinal
perspective’. Paper presented at Studies in the History of English (SHEL-8).
Brigham Young University. September 2013.
Méndez-Naya, Belén. 2008. ‘Introduction’. Special issue on English intensifiers,
English Language and Linguistics 12(2): 213-219.
Tagliamonte, Sali A. 2008. ‘So different and pretty cool! Recycling intensifiers in
Toronto, Canada’. English Language and Linguistics 12(2): 361-394.
CLMETEV = Corpus of Late Modern English Texts. Compiled by Hendrik de Smet.
Department of Linguistics, University of Leuven.
ECF = Eighteenth Century Fiction. Chadwyck Healey. 1996-2013. Available online at:
http://collections.chadwyck.co.uk/home/home_c18f.jsp.
EEBO = Early English Books Online. Chadwyck Healey. 2003-2013. Available online at:
http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home.
MED = Middle English Dictionary. Kurath, Hans et al., eds. 1952-2001. Ann Arbor, MI:
University
of
Michigan
Press.
Available
online
at:
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/.
NCF = Nineteenth Century Fiction. Chadwyck Healey. 2000-2013. Available online at:
http://collections.chadwyck.co.uk/home/home_c19f.jsp.
OED= Oxford English Dictionary. 1989. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Online
version with revisions available
26
Verbal misconduct through the lens of Victorian London newspapers
Birte Bös
University of Duisburg-Essen
Keywords: Metalinguistic labels, Victorian newspapers, verbal misconduct,
conceptual space
This study investigates the conceptualisations of inappropriate verbal
behaviour in Victorian London newspapers, drawing on material from the
British Newspaper Archive. In line with the tenets of corpus-assisted
discourse studies (CADS), it combines quantitative and qualitative
approaches, constantly moving “back and forth between data in the form
of concordances, collocations and clusters on the one hand and, on the
other, the contextual information (i.e. the actual texts)” (Haarman and
Lombardo 2009: 8; see also Brownlees 2012: 21f.).
This study firstly compiles an inventory of metalinguistic labels for
verbal misconduct, including, for example, representations such as abusive,
insulting and foul language, profanities, obscenities and vulgarities. Verbal
misconduct, a criminal offence by definition of the Metropolitan Police act
1839 (sect. 54, no. 13), was often reported in the popular ‘Petty crime’
sections of Victorian papers. Yet, instances are, for example, also found in
political hard news.
Based on the cotext and the implications of the sociohistorical contexts
(cf. Pahta and Taavitsainen 2010: 551), the metalinguistic labels retrieved
are, in a second step, mapped in conceptual space. Comparable to
Culpeper’s outline of modern impoliteness labels (2012: 98), this mapping
considers dimensions of usage, one of the most important ones being that
of public vs. private spheres. In this way, this study aims to capture the
historical facets of such metalinguistic labels and to shed more light on
Victorian norms and expectations regarding (in-)appropriate verbal
behaviour.
Brownlees, Nicholas (2012), “The beginnings of periodical news (1620-1665)”. In:
Roberta Facchinetti; Nicholas Brownlees; Birte Bös & Udo Fries, News as
Changing Texts: Corpora, Methodologies and Analysis, Newcastle upon Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 5-48.
Culpeper, Jonathan (2012), Impoliteness. Using Language to Cause Offence,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
27
Haarman, Louann and Linda Lombardo (2009), “Introduction”. In: Louann Haarman &
Linda Lombardo (eds.), Evaluation and Stance in War News. A Linguistic Analysis
of American, British and Italian Television News Reporting of the 2003 Iraqi War.
London: Continuum, 1-26.
Pahta, Päivi & Irma Taavitsainen (2010), “Scientific discourse”. In: Andreas H. Jucker
& Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), Historical Pragmatics. Handbooks of Pragmatics 8.
Berlin, New York: de Gruyter Mouton, 549-586.
Free adjuncts in Late Modern English: A corpus-based study
Carla Bouzada-Jabois
University of Vigo - KU Leuven
Keywords: free adjunct, adverbial, dependency, control, text type
Free adjuncts (FA) are typically non-finite constructions conveying
adverbial meaning with respect to a main clause, as in then advancing to
their City, they humbled themselves to the Ground (COOKE1712,1,427.140). This paper aims to study the distribution of FAs in the Late
Modern English (LModE) period and to compare the results with those of
other studies based on data from Early Modern (Río-Rey 2002) and
Contemporary English (Kortmann 1991). For that purpose, a corpus-based
study has been carried out, with examples retrieved from the Penn Parsed
Corpus of Modern British English. Two main variables will be analysed: (i)
subject control and (ii) textual distribution.
(i) Subject control: Syntactically, FAs are dependent subjectless
constructions and this implies that the subject of the FA must be found in
the main clause (Visser 1972: 1132, Kortmann 1991: 5), as illustrated in It
was taken about the middle of June, creeping on the ground, near Charlton
in Kent (ALBIN-1736,24.665). It has been claimed in the literature that
subject identity between the subject of the main clause and the subject of
the FA is the default case. Accordingly, FAs have been classified as either
related (subject-identity) or unrelated (no subject-identity) (Kortmann
1991: 43). In this study I depart from such proposal and will classify FAs that
find their controller inside the main clause (either explicit or even implicit)
as related even if this controller is not the subject. My data confirm that
the default case recognised by the literature is indeed the trend in the
LModE period since it accounts for 78 percent of the examples in the
database. Only 12 percent of the examples are unrelated, and around 10
percent correspond to the group of related examples in which the referent
is found in a constituent in the main clause that is not the subject. In my
28
account control properties have an influence on the position of the FA with
respect to its main clause. In short, final extraclausal position is favoured by
the data when there is subject identity and, in consequence, the subject is
discourse-activated. In FAs without subject identity, either initial or final
position are feasible with similar frequencies.
(ii) Textual distribution: In the study of FAs’ textual distribution, I will
examine the productivity of the different text types in which they occur.
Studies on FAs usually claim that FAs are clearly preferred in written
discourse (and that, in consequence, they even show text-type
dependency) rather than in spoken language (Thompson 1983: 45-46;
Kortmann 1991: 38; Río-Rey 2002: 315). This study confirms that the
productivity of FAs in written-related texts overtakes, by far, the use of FAs
in speech-related genres. With respect to specific text-types, those genres
of a more narrative type seem to account for most of the instances of FAs
in the database.
Kortmann, Bernd. 1991. Free Adjuncts and Absolutes in English: Problems of control
and Interpretation. London: Routledge.
Kroch Anthony, Beatrice Santorini and Ariel Diertani. 2010. Penn Parsed Corpus of
Modern British English.
Rio-Rey, Carmen. 2002. Subject control and coreference in Early Modern English free
adjuncts and absolutes. English Language and Linguistics 6(2): 309-323.
Thompson, Sandra A. 1983. Grammar and Discourse: The English Detached Participial
Clause, in F. Klein-Andreu (ed.) Discourse Perspectives on Syntax. New York:
Academic Press, 43-65.
Visser, Fredericus Th. 1972. An Historical Syntax of the English Language, Part II: 2:
Syntactical Units with One Verb. Leiden: Brill.
The development of ‘conditional’ should in English
Anne Breitbarth
Ghent University
Keywords: conditionals, modal verbs, tense, should, grammaticalization
The development of the ‘conditional’ use of should, (1-2), has several
interesting properties.
29
(1)
(2)
But it shows the immediate chaos that could be triggered if
Greece should leave the eurozone. (http://tinyurl.com/7gcb6a8)
Should Real survive, their Dutch coach, Leo Beenhakker, is likely to
find himself facing Ajax, the club he left in November, in the final.
(BNC:AKM)
Originally, the sequence of tenses is observed, but this restriction is
now lost. In Early Modern English, still only about 30% of all sentences with
formally past tense ‘conditional’ should in the protasis occurred with a
present-tense verb in the apodosis, the figures rises to c. 50% in older
Modern British English, and the original percentages are reversed in
Present-day British English, where the verb of the apodosis is in present
tense in c. 70% of all sentences, as in (2).
The present paper will account for (i) the meaning change (deontic >
‘conditional’) and (ii) the change in the tense of the verb in the apodosis
using a refined version of Roberts & Roussou’s (2003) theory of
grammaticalization as upwards reanalysis and loss of movement (in terms
of LF scope positions).
Ad (i), it is argued that should underwent a lexical split. ‘Conditional’
should (as well as ‘subjunctive’/’putative’ should) came to lexicalize
Kempchinsky’s (2009) quasi-imperative operator in FinP (cf. Haegeman’s
1986 case for a silent should in subjunctives), while other modal meanings
realize lower modal heads.
Ad (ii), it is argued that its position in FinP accounts for its demonstrable
scope over Tense. It reached this position by upward reanalysis from the
lower LF-position of deontic modals, accounting for the diachronic change
w.r.t. the tense in the apodosis.
It is furthermore argued that conditional should Agrees with Force,
where Bhatt & Pancheva’s operator quantifying over the world variable in
conditional clauses is located (cf. also Kempchinsky 2009), and moves there
unless there is an overt complementizer if (cf. Haegeman 2010 for
(dialectal) Dutch mocht/moest). The increasing use of present tense in the
apodosis is taken to be an indication that a further upward reanalysis, at LF,
this time from Fin to Force, is currently underway, turning should into a
pure conditional marker. That this is plausible is witnessed by attested
examples such as (3) with a finite main verb.
(3) Should Obama gets the nomination, my vote goes to John McCain.
(Trousdale 2012: 173)
30
Bhatt, Rajesh, and Roumyana Pancheva. 2006. Conditionals. In The Blackwell
Companion to Syntax, volume 1 , ed. Martin Everaert and Henk van Riemsdijk,
638–687. Oxford: Blackwell.
Haegeman, Liliane. 2010. The movement derivation of conditional clauses. Linguistic
Inquiry 41:595–621.
Haegeman, Liliane. 1986. The present subjunctive in contemporary British English.
Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 17: 61–74.
Kempchinsky, Paula 2009. What can the subjunctive disjoint reference effect tell us
about the subjunctive? Lingua 119:1788–1810.
Roberts, Ian, and Anna Roussou. 2003. Syntactic Change. A Minimalist Approach to
Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Trousdale, Graeme. 2012. Grammaticalization, constructions and the
grammaticalization of constructions. In Grammaticalization and Language
Change. New Reflections , ed. Kristin Davidse, Tine Breban, Lieselotte Brems, and
Tanja Mortelmans, 167–198. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.
PCEEC (c. 1410–1681) Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence, parsed
version. 2006. Annotated by Ann Taylor, Arja Nurmi, Anthony Warner, Susan
Pintzuk, and Terttu Nevalainen. Compiled by the CEEC Project Team. York:
University of York and Helsinki: University of Helsinki.
http://www.users.york.ac.uk/lang22/PCEEC-manual/PPCEME (1500-1710)
Kroch, Anthony, Beatrice Santorini, and Ariel Diertani. 2004. Penn-Helsinki Parsed
Corpus of Early Modern English.
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/PPCEME-RELEASE-2/index.html
PPCMBE (1700-1914) Kroch, Anthony, Beatrice Santorini and Ariel Diertani. 2010.
Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English. http://www.ling.upenn.edu/histcorpora/PPCMBE-RELEASE-1/index.html
BNC (1980s-1993) The British National Corpus, version 3 (BNC XML Edition). 2007.
Distributed by Oxford University Computing Services on behalf of the BNC
Consortium. URL: http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/
Negation, grammaticalization and subjectification: The development of
polar, modal and mirative no way-constructions
Lot Brems, Kristin Davidse, Jakob Lesage & An Van Linden
KU Leuven
Keywords:
mirativity
grammaticalization,
subjectification,
negation,
modality,
This paper investigates the paths of grammaticalization and semantic
change that led from structures with lexical uses of way to grammatical
operators containing ‘no’ way that convey polar, modal and mirative
31
meanings. Preliminary analysis of data from the OED, the Penn Corpora of
Historical English, the Corpus of Late Modern English (CLMET), Wordbanks
(WB) and the Corpus of American Soap Operas suggests the following main
lines of development, which will be further detailed on the basis of
extensive qualitative and quantitative data-analyses.
The earliest grammaticalization path yielded emphatic adverbial
th
th
negators of the forms noneways (13 C) and no way (14 C), via bridging
contexts allowing both a lexical ‘in no manner’ and grammatical ‘not at all’
meaning, as in (1).
(1)
How miʒte þei mon of synne make clene? Certis, no wey, as hit is
sene. (c1325 Cursor Mundi)
In Late Modern English, a new grammaticalization cycle recruited in no
way which numerically took over as negator in the same structural contexts
as no way, e.g.
(2)
these things need not be specially forced upon him. In no way
should he be led to emphasize them (CLMET)
A different and more recent grammaticalization path has, via bridging
contexts such as (3), where a reading of situation- or participant-inherent
impossibility can be inferred, led to verbo-nominal expressions (LoureiroPorto 2010) of modality, which in Present-day English express mainly
dynamic (cf. 3), but also epistemic (4) and deontic meanings (Saad et al.
2012).
(3) he … thanked her rather shortly, but said there was no way of
managing it. (CLMET)
(4) There’s no way it was a domestic murder. (WB)
In a final semantic shift, which can be related to the two main
grammaticalization paths, no way acquires mirative value, i.e. the
conveying of surprise, roughly paraphrasable as ‘I can’t believe …’, which
may either be blended with negation or modality, or form the sole meaning
(5). Mirative no way relates both to the proposition and the interaction
between the speech participants.
(5) … a figure appeared by the side of the road. ‘A hitchhiker!’ said Ellie
excitedly. ‘Yeah, no way,’ said Julia. (WB)
32
This paper seeks to explain the semantic shifts in light of the conceptual
relations (Lesage 2013) between the negation of propositions, whose
“function … is … to emphasize that a fact is contrary to expectation” on the
part of the hearer (Wason 1965: 7, cf. Werth 1999), modality, the speaker’s
evaluation of the likelihood or desirability of a state-of-affairs, and
mirativity, surprise regarding a fact that thwarts the speaker’s expectations
(Peterson 2013). We will verify Lesage’s (2013) hypothesis that the
development of no way involves a gradual increase in subjectivity (Narrog
2012) and discourse-orientation.
Lesage, Jakob. 2013. Surprise and modality, negation and subjectification: Mirative
functions of no way. Unpublished term paper. Linguistics department, KU
Leuven.
Loureiro-Porto, Lucía. 2010. “Verbo-nominal Constructions of Necessity with þearf n.
and need n.: Competition and Grammaticalization from OE to eModE.” English
Language and Linguistics 14 (3): 373–397.
Narrog, Heiko. 2012. Modality, Subjectivity, and Semantic Change: A Cross-Linguistic
Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Peterson, Tyler. 2013. “Rethinking Mirativity: The Expression and Implication of
Surprise”. University of Toronto.
http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/2FkYTg4O/Rethinking_Mirativity.pdf.
Saad, Khalida, Wouter Parmentier, Lot Brems, Kristin Davidse, and An Van Linden.
2012. “The Development of Modal, Polar and Mirative No Way-constructions”.
Paper presented at ICAME 33, 31 May-5 June, University of Leuven.
Wason, Peter Cathcart. 1965. “The Contexts of Plausible Denial.” Journal of Verbal
Learning and Verbal Behavior 4 (1): 7–11.
Werth, Paul. 1999. Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse. Textual
Explorations. London: Longman.
Take my advice for what it’s worth: The rise of parenthetical for what it’s
worth
Laurel Brinton
University of British Columbia
Keywords: parenthetical, politeness, bridging context
In Present-day English, for what it’s worth may function as a syntactically
independent parenthetical:
33
(1)
a. For what it’s worth, April is supposedly the driest month and
May and June, the sunniest (COCA: MAG)
b. His dad, for what it’s worth, says he always tries to help his son
(COCA: NEWS)
c. I did not tell him about you, for what it’s worth (COCA: FIC)
Literal uses are possible, though increasingly less common:
(2)
I’m willing to buy that for what it’s worth (1952 McCarthy, Groves
of Academe; OED)
In parenthetical use, for what it’s worth does not directly modify the
host clause but must be inferred to be modifying an implicit statement such
as “I [the speaker] offer you [the hearer] this piece of information for what
value it may have”. Thus, like parentheticals in general, it is “nonrestrictive”, or “concerns the situation of discourse” (see Kaltenböck, Heine,
and Kuteva. 2011: 856; Huddleston and Pullman 2002: 1352).
According to the OED (s.v. worth, def. 3d), for what it’s worth is a
“dismissive phr[ase] intimating that something (esp. an accompanying
statement) is of uncertain or little value”. But online discussions (see
References) come closer to capturing the form’s force and pragmatic
function. For what it’s worth is typically appended to expressions of
speaker opinion, where it has politeness functions, as in:
(3)
For what it’s worth, I was right about my student’s thesis. It
needed more work (COCA: MAG)
Assuming that the opinion expressed perhaps differs from the hearer’s,
the speaker adds the parenthetical in order to mitigate the attack on the
speaker’s negative face.
Synchronic evidence suggests two possible sources where for what it’s
worth is adjoined to an explicit expression of speaker opinion, either a noun
phrase (conclusion, opinion, view, judgment) or a full clause (I tell you, I give
it to you, you can take it):
(4)
a. My suspicion, for what it’s worth, is that Dutch did authorize
the transfer (COCA: SPOK)
b. “Well,” she conceded at last. “I’ll tell you. For what it’s worth”
(Norton, Borrowers; OED)
34
This paper samples a number of historical corpora of English in order to
determine the possible diachronic origins of this parenthetical, with special
attention to the role of bridging contexts (Evans and Wilkins 2000). In
addition to explicating the development of this particular construction, the
paper sheds light on the broader question of the origin of parentheticals.
English Language and Usage.
http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10274/what-does-for-what-itsworth-mean (accessed 10 Nov. 2013).
Evans, Nicholas and David Wilkins 2000. In the mind’s ear: the semantic extensions of
perception verbs in Australian languages’, Language 76: 546–592.
The Free Dictionary. idioms.thefreedictionary.com/for+what+it’s+worth (accessed 8
November 2013).
Huddleston, Rodney and Geoffrey K. Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the
English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kaltenböck, Gunther, Bernd Heine, and Tania Kuteva. 2011. On thetical grammar.
Studies in Language 35.4: 848–893.
Oxford English Dictionary. John Simpson, ed. 3rd ed. online. See www.oed.com.
Wiktionary.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/for_what_it’s_worth
(accessed
8
November 2013).
The simultaneity as construction from Old English to Middle English
Cristiano Broccias
University of Genoa
Keywords: subordination, simultaneity, Old English, Middle English
This paper aims to investigate the development of subordinate temporal
clauses expressing simultaneity with the event coded by the main clause
(e.g. Present-day English (PDE) Sally saw a cat as she was strolling down the
street) from Old English (OE) to Middle English (ME). Recent work has
addressed the issue of simultaneity subordination (SS) in Modern English
and has pointed out, in particular, the importance of as for the structuring
of the SS domain (see Broccias and Smith 2010). However, no systematic
analysis of previous stages of the language has yet been carried out (but
see Kortmann 1998 for a diachronic overview of various subordinators;
Schleburg 2002 for a detailed description of the uses of OE swa and Lenker
2010 on the history of when). Hence, this study will try to fill this gap by
focussing in particular on the connectors out of which PDE as emerged (e.g.
swa, ealswa, etc., referred to as AS for the sake of convenience). It will be
35
argued that the AS simultaneity construction developed from an essentially
correlative construction with verbs of motion or construable as such into a
“pure” simultaneity (cf. Kortmann’s 1998 “simultaneity duration”)
construction, which hosts other activity, non-motion verbs such as sleep,
lie, etc. Importantly, it will be pointed out that such constructional growth
resulted in types that are no longer possible (or, at best, marginal) in PDE.
In particular, although in PDE as, unlike while/when, is not found with
copular be (Eat it while/*as it’s hot), see Morris (1996), it will be shown
that this type does occur in ME (all examples will be from the on-line
Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse):
(1)
a. At mydnyght they sette vpon them as [= PDE while] they were
in theyr pauelyons ... (Malory, Le Morte Darthur, 1.13)
b. And as [= PDE while/when] he was in the water, þere come a
man in his owen lyknesse ... (Early English versions of the Gesta
Romanorum, XXIII)
It will be argued that such occurrences may be due to the influence of
relative as, as in the TIME AS construction exemplified in (2):
(2)
a. And fell a time, as [= PDE while/when] he was oute, ... (Gower,
Confessio Amantis, 1.1418)
b. So on a tyme as [= PDE while] he was in his prayers he fell on
slep ... (Alphabet of tales: an English 15th century translation of
the Alphabetum narrationum of Etienne de Besançon, CCCCXXIV)
It will then be discussed whether the disappearance of examples such as (1)
may be related to that of relative as from the standard language. In
general, it will be stressed that a full understanding of the SS domain can be
arrived at only by invoking a network model of language (e.g. temporal as
vs. while and temporal as vs. relative as).
Broccias, Cristiano and Nicholas Smith. 2010. Same time, across time: Simultaneity
clauses from Late Modern to Present-Day English. English Language and
Linguistics 14.3: 347–371.
Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/)
Kortmann, Berndt. 1998. Adverbial Subordinators in the Languages of Europe. In: van
der Auwera, Johan (ed.). Adverbial Constructions in the Languages of Europe.
Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 457–561.
Lenker, Ursula 2010. Argument and Rhetoric: Adverbial Connectors in the History of
English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
36
Morris, Loris. 1996. Time and cause in the English connector as. LACUS Forum
23:417-28.
Schleburg, Florian. 2002. Altenglisch swa: Syntax und Semantik einer
polyfunktionalen Partikel. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter.
The present participle mark-ing in Northern Middle English: A corpus
study
Anna Budna
University of Social Sciences, Warsaw
Keywords: corpus, dialect, North, present participle
Although the provenance of the current form -ing of the present participle
remains obscure, it is certain that its rise reflects the transformation of the
earlier present participle marker –ende to Middle English –inde. The most
difficult seems to be the explanation of the reason for the emergence of
the velar cluster -ng, also typical of gerund, and the demise of the
characteristic Germanic present participle marker containing the dental
cluster –nd. The most general description of the problem can be found in
the Oxford English Dictionary, whose editors consider disappearance of the
present participle marker –ende a consequence of the phonetic and
orthographic confusion.
Of the five Middle English dialects, the North exhibited the most
characteristic features, especially as regards morphology and phonology. In
Middle English some of its major grammatical innovations spread
southwards, thus contributing to the formation of the 16th century English
grammar. Consequently, the data from texts composed in the North are
considered particularly important for the historical study of English,
although Northern scant textual resources representing Early Middle
English make the linguistic analysis of that dialect a very difficult task.
The Northern present participle was equipped with quite a unique
feature as it attached the suffix –ande, considered typically Scandinavian,
although some scholars have launched a hypothesis of its native origin; cf.
Björkman (1900).
The evidence for the present study comes from the prose and poetic
texts covering the period 1400-1450 and includes data compiled in the
electronic versions of the Innsbruck Computer Archive of Machine-Readable
English Texts (ICAMET), The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English
(PPCME2), Chadwyck-Healey’s English Poetry Full-Text Database, and the
37
Michigan Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse. The selected texts are
those from localized manuscripts, established on the basis of the Catalogue
of Sources for a Linguistic Atlas of Early Medieval English (LAEME) and A
Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (LALME).The data scrutiny (also
including statistics) is expected to reveal the degree of the influence of the
Northern dialect on the formation of the new participle south of the river
Humber.
Björkman, Erik (1900-1902) Scandinavian Loan-words in Middle English (Studien zur
englischen Philologie 7, 11). Halle/Saale: Max Niemeyer.
Chadwyck-Healey (1992) English Poetry Full-Text Database. Cambridge: ChadwyckHealey Ltd.
Jordan, Richard (1974) Handbook of Middle English Grammar: Phonology. Translated
and revised by Eugene J. Crook. The Hague: Mouton.
Kroch, Anthony — Ann Taylor (eds.) (2000) The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of
Middle English (PPCME2) (2nd ed.). CD-ROM version. Helsinki: University of
Helsinki.
Laing, Margaret (1993) Catalogue of Sources for a Linguistic Atlas of Early Medieval
English. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer.
Markus, Manfred (ed.) (2008) Innsbruck Computer Archive of Machine-Readable
English Texts. CD-ROM Full Version 2.3. Innsbruck: University of Innsbruck.
McIntosh Angus― Michael Louis Samuels― Michael Benskin (1986) A Linguistic Atlas
of Late Mediaeval English. Vol. 1. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press.
McSparran, Frances (ed.) The Middle English Compendium: The Middle English
Dictionary, A HyperBibliography of Middle English Prose and Verse, a Corpus of
Middle English Prose and Verse. Ann Arbor: Humanities Text Initiative, University
of Michigan. www.ets.umdl.umich.edu
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (2002) (2nd ed. CD-ROM version 3). Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Linguistic appropriation of slang in historical context(s)
Roxanne But
University of Sheffield
Keywords: linguistic appropriation, slang, historical pragmatics, context,
eighteenth century
Linguistic appropriation describes the process whereby speakers of a
particular social group (e.g. Asian American teenagers) borrow or adopt
language features associated with another social group (‘aite’ for “all right”
in AAVE) in their speech for communicative purposes (to sound “black”)
38
(Reyes 2005: 511). ‘Appropriation’ differs from ‘borrowing’ as studied by
historical linguists in that the latter focuses on the language internal
aspects of the process: What features of a language are borrowed? How do
loanwords affect the existing vocabulary in the dominant language?
(Campbell 2004: 62). ‘Appropriation’, on the other hand, as studied by
sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists, is considered in relation to the
external factors involved: Who appropriates the words? What are the social
motivations for appropriating a particular linguistic feature?
While linguistic appropriation has received some attention in
sociolinguistic and anthropological studies on present-day English slang
(see Reyes 2005; Hill 2008), it has not been studied in the history of English
(apart from Taavitsainen 2005). This paper aims to describe and analyse the
appropriation of a particular slang term, ‘cull’, in a historical context,
addressing the following questions: What are the mechanisms behind the
appropriation of ‘cull’ and how do these interact? To what extent does
appropriation affect the form, functions and lexical/social meanings of the
term? Taking a qualitative, historical pragmatic approach, I will explore how
‘cull’ is appropriated in a wide range of eighteenth-century texts, drawn
from The Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
The results of my discourse analysis on ‘cull’ will show that different
contextual factors (writer, intended readership, activity type, and
cultural/background knowledge of the participants) play a role and interact
when appropriation of the term takes place in its situational context. As for
the effects of the process, ‘cull’ remains stable in terms of its form and
lexical meanings; it is generally used in the conventional sense of “a
particular kind of fellow”, e.g. “she nailed a queer cull” (The Aviary, 1760).
However, the functions and social meanings of the term are negotiable and
subject to change, as different writers appropriate ‘cull’ in different kinds of
texts (verse and prose) for various and multiple communicative purposes
(such as character depiction or identity construction).
This paper will conclude that a contextual approach is crucial for the
study of linguistic appropriation, because it can shed light on how and why
linguistic features like ‘cull’ are constantly recontextualised and circulated
in eighteenth-century texts.
Anonymous. 1765. The Aviary: Or Magazine of British Melody Consisting of a
Collection of One Thousand Five Hundred Songs. With Titles of the
Principal Tunes … London.
Campbell, Lyle. 2004. Historical Linguistics. An Introduction. 2nd ed. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Hill, Jane H. 2008. The Everyday Language of White Racism. Malden, MA and Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell.
39
Reyes, Angela. 2005. ‘Appropriation of African American Slang by Asian American
Youth’, Journal of Sociolinguistics 9 (4), 509-532. Available from
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1360-6441.2005.00304.x/
[Accessed 28 November 2013]
Taavitsainen, Irma. 2005. ‘Genres and the Appropriation of Science: Loci Communes
in English in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period’, In Janne
Skaffari, Matti Peikola, Ruth Carroll, Risto Hiltunen and Brita Wårvik,
Opening Windows on Texts and Discourses of the Past (eds). Amsterdam
and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 176-196.
A Tretys of Goostely Batayle:
One scribe facing more Middle English dialects
Luisella Caon
Leiden University
A Tretys of Goostely Batayle is a Middle English allegorical work of unknown
origin in which leading a spiritual life is compared with preparing for battle.
It is found in seven manuscripts, i.e. Bodl. Rawlinson C 894, Harley 1706,
Roy. 17.C.xviii, Bodl. Douse 322, Corpus Christi College Oxford E 220, John
Rylands Lib. Eng 94 and Corpus Christi College Cambridge, MS 142 (Jolliffe
1974:92).
The text of A Tretys has received little scholarly attention so far, except
1
for an unpublished dissertation and an old printed edition (Horstman
1896). The version in Corpus Christi College Cambridge, MS 142 (henceforth
CCCC 142), folios 111r-121r is noteworthy because of its language. Its
contents draw on several sources and combine other religious treaties such
as parts of The Pore Caitif or the entire Three Arrows on Doomsday,
sometimes with mistakes. Likewise the language combines variants from
different Middle English dialects. The author and the scribe are unknown,
but the scribe has left us a text written in a script that contains features of
Anglicana Formata and Secretary alongside a number of idiosyncratic
scribal features (Parkes 1969). Several things seem change in this text: the
script, the sources and the dialects; yet, while the first two features point
towards a sloppy scribe, the preservation of the dialect variants indicates
that he must have been a faithful scribe according to Mc Intosh’s
classification (1986, vol. I:13).
1
Murray, Valerie, An Edition of ‘A Tretise of Gostly Batayle’ and ‘Milicia Christi’,
unpublished D.Phil. Thesis,
Oxford University, 1970.
40
This paper intends to explore the relevance of the dialectal features in
A Tretys in CCCC 142. Do the dialectal features create boundaries between
the texts used for composing A Tretys? A comparison of this version with
the same text in other witnesses should shed light on this matter.
Moreover, is it possible to speculate on the scribe’s attitude towards this
text? Was the scribe familiar with the subject matter of A Tretys? Some
mistakes in the text suggest otherwise. Likewise, if he copied his exemplar
faithfully, thus preserving the dialectal features in it, he probably did not
know well which kind of text he had in front of his eyes; hence he was not a
clergyman. This hypothesis is also supported by the contents of A Tretys,
which suggest that its audience were men and women from both the laity
and the clergy, thus not excluding that the version in CCCC 142 is the work
of a professional scribe and not a clerical one.
Baker, Denise N., “Mystical and Devotional Literature”. A Companion to Medieval
English Literature and Culture c.1350–1500, Peter Brown ed, Malden: Blackwell,
2007.
Berkhout, Ellen, A Tretys of Goostely Batayle: an edition of Corpus Christi College
Cambridge, MS 142, folios 111r-121r, unpublished MA Thesis, Leiden University,
2013.
Blake, N. F. Middle English Religious Prose. London: Arnold, 1972. Corpus Christi
College Cambridge, MS 142, Parker Library on the Web, Corpus Christi College,
Stanford University Libraries and Cambridge University Library,
<http://parkerweb.stanford.edu>.
Horstmann, C., ed. Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle of Hampole and his Followers. Vol
II. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co, 1896. 2 vols.
James, M. R., A Descriptive Catalogue of The Manuscripts in the Library of Corpus
Christi College Cambridge, Cambridge: The Univeristy Press, 1909–12. 2 vols.
Jolliffe, P.S., A Check-List of Middle English Prose Writings of Spiritual Guidance,
Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1974.
McIntosh, Angus, M.L. Samuels, M. Benskin (eds), A Linguistic Atlas of Late
Mediaeval English, Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1896.
Parkes, M. B. English Cursive Book Hands, 1250–1500, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969.
http://researchcommons.waikato.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10289/2578/;jsessionid=8
01D5A2885455F2D94279029E7480C7C?sequence=2
41
Arguing with the jurors: Personal pronouns and identities in the opening
statements of criminal trials (1759-1789)
Krisda Chaemsaithong
Hanyang University Seoul
The connection between the use of pronouns and identity has been a
subject of academic interest for some time, both in synchronic and
diachronic studies. It has generally been accepted that identity is never
stable but always fluid, only emerging locally as the result of processes of
construction and negotiation, and so is primarily achieved through
discourse.
In courtroom discourse, there has been some evidence that the
manipulation of reference strategies and interpersonal devices such as
pronouns can lend power to the user, enabling her to control the witness’s
narrative, to depict a witness as worthless, and to shape questions in
accordance with her goals (Walker 2007:91-92; Cecconi 2008; Cavalieri
2011; Shi 2011). However, the research literature has focused far more on
the examination phase than on other sub-genres of courtroom discourse.
The opening statement is no exception to this trend. Thus, it is the aim of
this paper to explore the multiple identity roles the lawyers constructed for
themselves through their pronoun choices, as they presented their cases in
this monologic genre of discourse, and how they positioned themselves visà-vis other participants.
In particular, this study looks at various ways in which personal
pronouns (focusing on first and second person pronouns) may be used in
legal discourse, explicating how a set of identities emerge in and through
the discourse of the opening statements. Drawing upon fifty-one opening
statements as recorded in Proceedings of the Old Bailey, between 1759 and
1789, the qualitative and quantitative analysis shows how personal
pronouns constitute an integral part of this monologic genre, thereby giving
rise to fictive interaction (Pascual 2002, 2006) between the lawyers and
other participants. In addition, this study reveals how the lawyers may shift
between identities as storyteller, guidance, and participant in the discourse.
Shi, Guang. 2011. An analysis of modality in Chinese courtroom discourse. Journal of
Multicultural Discourses. 7(2): 1-18
Pascual, E. 2002. Imaginary Trialogues: Conceptual Blending and Fictive Interaction in
Criminal Courts. Utrecht: LOT.
Walker, Terry. 2007. Thou and You in Early Modern English Dialogues. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins.
42
Generating Vfin-IO(Dat)-Vnon-fin-DO(Acc) and Vfin-DO(Acc)-Vnon-fin-IO(Dat)
orders in Old English and Old Icelandic
Yana Chankova
South-West University ‘N. Rilski’
Keywords: Scrambling, internal adjunction,
movement, semantic/pragmatic effects
non-feature-triggered
From the perspective of a Minimalist syntax, this paper discusses the core
properties of Scrambling and reviews some basic assumptions regarding
these properties (e.g. Roberts 1997, Haeberli 1999, Pintzuk 1999 and Trips
2001 for Old English; Rögnvaldsson 1996, Haugan 2001 and Hróarsdóttir
2001 for Old Icelandic, and Thráinssson 2001 and papers in Corver & van
Riemsdijk 1994 for Modern Icelandic). I argue for a movement approach to
Scrambling phenomena and, following Wallenberg 2009, I take Scrambling
to be an optional (i.e. non-feature-triggered) displacement operation that
moves internal Arguments and Adjuncts out of their source positions into
phrasally-adjoined positions in the left periphery of vP/VP. Specifically,
Scrambling is herein described as an instantiation of internal adjunction
that obeys Wallenberg’s Conservation of C-Command. But contra
semantically-vacuous-movement approaches, this analysis claims that
Scrambling is semantically and pragmatically effective movement device.
Crucially, the application of Scrambling has to be relativized to the type
of constituent moving and to the type of site it moves into: Vfin-IO(Dat)-Vnonfin-DO(Acc) and Vfin-DO(Acc)-Vnon-fin-IO(Dat) orders in Old English and Old
Icelandic double object constructions involving three place predicates of
the give-class are the focus of this study. The scrambleability of the internal
Arguments in Old English and Old Icelandic constructions involving trivalent
verbs of the give-class characterized by the Theta grid <Agent,
Benefactive/Recipient, Theme> is considered with respect to different
referential types of objects. Examples from two corpora have been
considered, namely the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English
Prose (Taylor, Warner, Pintzuk, Beths 2003) and the Corpus of Íslendinga
Sögur (Bergljót Kristjánsdóttir 1998).
Among the conclusions are the following:
i) Scrambling affects XPs, definite and overtly case-marked object DPs
included;
ii) Scrambling moves XPs from case-marked source positions into noncase marked target positions, whereby case-licensing of XPs does not
require for checker and checked to be adjacent;
43
iii) Scrambling cannot cross a c-commanding functional head;
iv) Scrambling involves crossing of at least one non-empty Argument
base position;
v) Scrambling can have semantic/pragmatic effects.
Corver & van Riemsdijk 1994: Studies on Scrambling: Movement and Non-movement
Approaches to Free Word-order Phenomena. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994
Haeberli 1999: Features, categories and the syntax of A-positions. Synchronic and
diachronic variation in the Germanic languages. Doctoral dissertation, University
of Geneva, 1999
Haugan 2001: Old Norse Word Order and Information Structure. Trondheim: NUSTP,
2001
Hróarsdóttir 2001: Word Order Change in Icelandic: From OV to VO. Amsterdam &
Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2001
Pintzuk 1999: Phrase Structures in Competition: Variation and Change in Old English
Word Order. New York: Garland, 1999
Roberts 1997: Restructuring, Head Movement and Locality. Linguistic Inquiry 48.3,
1997, 423−460
Rögnvaldsson 1996: Word Order Variation in the VP in Old Icelandic. Working Papers
in Scandinavian Syntax 58, 1996, 55−86
Thráinsson 2001: Object Shift and Scrambling. The Handbook of Contemporary
Syntactic Theory. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2001, 148- 212
Trips 2001: From OV to VO in Early Middle English. PhD Dissertation, University of
Stuttgart, 2001
Wallenberg 2009: Antisymmetry and the Conservation of C-command: Scrambling
and Phrase Structure in Synchronic and Diachronic Perspective. Publicly
accessible Penn Dissertations: http://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/77
Compounds: Poetry vs. prose
Don Chapman
Brigham Young University
Keywords: Old English compounds, Noun-Noun compounds, poetic
compounds, semantic analysis of compounds.
Compounding has long been recognized as a characteristic device of Old
English poetry, and several studies have examined the ways that
2
compounds contribute to poetic style. Other studies have also identified
2
Some important studies include Krackow (1903), Carr (1939), Brodeur (1959), and
Fulk (1992).
44
3
“poetic compounds” that occur only or primarily in poetry. Few studies,
however, have tried to identify whether the compounds occurring in poetry
4
constitute different types of compounds.
In other words, do the
compounds occurring solely or predominantly in poetry have different
linguistic characteristics from those occurring in both prose and poetry or
predominantly in prose? That is the question that this paper will address.
This study will focus on Noun-Noun (NN) compounds, the most prolific
type in Old English prose and poetry. In particular, it will focus on the
relationships between elements of the compounds, and the relationship
between the compound and the referent. The first step of the study will be
to expand on Thomas Gardner’s study (1968), to see whether NN
compounds that occur predominantly in poetry are more strongly
associated with any of the particular relationship categories that Gardner
defines. Gardner lists about 6500 compounds, which will constitute the
basis of this study.
The second step of this study will be to try to adapt insights from
Chapman and Christensen (2007), which accounted for the higher incidence
of Noun-Adjective compounds in poetry in terms of restrictive and nonrestrictive modification. This proposed paper will see whether the notion of
restrictive vs. non-restrictive modification can be useful in separating poetic
from non-poetic NN compounds, as well. It is expected that non-restrictive
modification will be more characteristic of poetry than prose.
Of course it is unlikely that any type will behave categorically; whatever
the type, it is likely to occur in both poetry and prose. The goal of this study
will be to see if there are statistically strong predilections of certain types to
occur only in poetry or only in prose. In a preliminary study of 300 of these
compounds selected randomly, Gardner’s classification system was not
statistically significant, but a system based on restrictive/non-restrictive
modification was. If these distributions hold up with a larger sample size,
they will provide some evidence that a key difference between compounds
in prose and poetry is the degree to which the modification is restrictive.
Brodeur, Arthur Gilchrist. 1959. The Art of Beowulf. Berkeley: University of California
Press.Carr, C. T. 1939. Nominal Compounds in Germanic. London: Oxford
University Press.
Chapman, Don and Ryan Christensen. 2007. “Noun-Adjective Compounds as a Poetic
Type in Old English.” English Studies 88: 447-64.
3
Griffith (1991), Lapidge (2008).
Russom (1987) gives a preliminary definition of poetic compounds as those that
have a first-element that is redundant to some degree, like the compound guðbill
“battle-sword” since swords are meant to be used in battle anyway.
4
45
Fulk. R. D. 1992. A History of Old English Meter. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Gardner, Thomas J.
1968 “Semantic Patterns in Old English Substantival
Compounds.” Diss. Heidelberg.
Griffith, M. S. 1991. “Poetic Language and the Paris Psalter.” Anglo-Saxon England
20: 167-86.
Krackow, Otto. 1903. Die Nominalcomposita als Kunstmittel im altenglisch Epos.
Weimar: R. Wagner Sohn.
Lapidge, Michael. 2008. “Old English Poetic Compounds: A Latin Perspective.”
Intertexts: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Culture Presented to Paul E. Szarmach. Eds.
Virginia Blanton and Helene Scheck. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and
Renaissance Studies. 17-32.
Russom, Geoffrey. 1987. Old English Meter and Linguistic Theory. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
The V-2 phenomenon in Old English and Old High German translations
Anna Cichosz, Jerzy Gaszewski & Maciej Grabski
University of Lodz
Keywords: V-2 phenomenon, word order, Old English syntax, Old High
German syntax, translations
Even though both in OE and OHG the most frequent word order of main
declarative clauses was V-2, this clause type could also demonstrate other
word order patterns. The most interesting area of research are main
clauses in which the first position is occupied by an element other than the
subject, which in a V-2 language should result in a S-V inversion. In OE the
word order of such clauses depends on subject type (pronominal/nominal).
In OHG, there is no similar tendency describing the behaviour of personal
pronouns (Axel 2007). In addition, in both languages certain introductory
phrases never cause inversion, while in OE some phrases cause inversion
regardless of subject type (cf. Fischer et al. 2000, Haeberli 2002, Kroch &
Taylor 1997). Finally, V-1 main declaratives are relatively common in OHG
(e.g. Lippert 1974) unlike in OE.
Since OHG is studied mostly on the basis of translated texts, at least
some of these differences may be the result of foreign syntax, which makes
comparative studies of these languages challenging from the point of view
of methodology. To ensure the comparability of the material from OHG and
OE, we decided to use only translated texts from both languages, also
paying proper attention to originals (source of potential calques). The
46
analysis makes use of a parallel corpus containing samples of translated
texts and their originals (Tatian, Isidor and Physiologus for OHG, The Book
of Genesis, The West Saxon Gospels and Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica for OE,
ca. 10,000 clauses).
The aim of the study is to investigate the V-2 phenomenon in OE and
OHG, providing detailed information on the frequency of V-2 and non-V-2
patterns, the behaviour of personal pronouns and the influence of the
introductory phrase on inversion. Our research questions are: a) what word
order patterns do OE and OHG main declarative clauses demonstrate? b)
which of these are departures from the V-2 order and how can these
departures be explained? c) can the selected translations be treated as
representative sources of syntactic information? We expect to produce a
systematic comparison of OE and OHG word order patterns in a similar
textual environment, showing that translations can be valuable sources of
syntactic information and that analysing translation strategies in the
context of specific structures can shed more light on the similarities and
differences between the two languages.
Axel, Katrin. 2007. Studies on Old High German Syntax: Left Sentence Periphery, Verb
Placement and Verb Second. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Fischer, Olga, Ans van Kemenade, Willem Koopman and Wim van der Wurff. 2000.
The syntax of early English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Haeberli, Eric. 2002. “Observations on the loss of Verb Second in the history of
English.” In C. Jan-Wouter Zwart and Werner Abraham (eds.), Studies in
comparative Germanic syntax, 245-272. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Kroch, A. and Taylor A. 1997. “Verb movement in Old and Middle English: dialect
variation and language contact.” In A. van Kemenade and N. Vincent (eds.),
Parameters of morphosyntactic change, 297-325. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Lippert, Jörg. 1974. Beiträge zu Technik und Syntax althochdeutscher Übersetzungen
unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Isidorgruppe und des althochdeutschen
Tatian. München: Wilhelm Fink.
Mitchell, Bruce. 1985. Old English syntax (Volume II). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Petrova, Svetlana. 2006. “A discourse-based approach to verb placement in early
West-Germanic.” In Ishihara, S., Schmitz, M. & Schwarz, A. (eds.), Working
Papers of the SFB632, Interdisciplinary studies on information structure (ISIS) 5.
Potsdam: Universitätsverlag Potsdam.153-182.
Pintzuk, Susan. 1993. “Verb seconding in Old English: verb movement to Infl.” The
Linguistic Review 10. 5-35.
Robinson, Orrin W. 1996. Clause Subordination and Verb Placement in the Old High
German Isidor Translation. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter.
Stockwell, Robert. 1984. “On the history of the verb-second rule in English.” In Jacek
Fisiak (ed.), Historical syntax, 575-592. Berlin/New York/Amsterdam: Mouton de
Gruyter
47
Middle English preposition and adverb emell(e)
Ewa Ciszek-Kiliszewska
Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznan
Keywords: preposition, emell(e), Middle English, dialect and textual
distribution, token frequency
Selected Medieval English prepositions have been recently subject to more
detailed studies. However, numerous Middle English prepositions still lack
proper description or even a mention in Middle English grammars or
handbooks.
The present paper focuses on the Middle English preposition and
adverb emell(e). The aim of the study is to thoroughly discuss emell(e)’s
etymology, semantic profile, dialect distribution, textual distribution, the
actual frequency of use (token frequency), spelling and syntax as recorded
in the preserved Middle English linguistic material. The analysis relies on
acknowledged historical English dictionaries such as the Middle English
Dictionary online and the Oxford English Dictionary online as well as on an
extensive electronic database, i.e., the Corpus of Middle English Prose and
Verse. The results of the analysis demonstrate the use of emell(e) in four
more texts and nine more manuscripts than those listed by the Middle
English Dictionary online. One of these extra texts discloses the highest
token frequency of all texts including the investigated preposition and
adverb. Moreover, since emell(e) reveals to be attested exclusively in Late
Middle English and most manuscripts employing it have been localized by A
Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, it is possible to create a detailed
map illustrating the dialect distribution of emell(e). The results of the
recorded spelling examination call for a spelling change of the Middle
English Dictionary online headword.
48
Speech, thought and writing presentation in medieval history writing
Claudia Claridge
University of Duisburg-Essen
Keywords: speech presentation, historiography, Old English, Middle English,
genre analysis
Speech presentation has been part of history writing since its Greek
beginnings, but it has hardly been looked at in detail, let alone from a
linguistic perspective. Historians, for example, have commented on the
rhetorical nature of Thucydides’ speeches, perhaps reflecting vaguely the
original speakers’ message but mostly the authorial perspective (Burrow
2007), and on Froissart’s uses of direct speech, such as creating emotional
emphasis or focusing on a character’s personality (Nichols 1964). Moore
(2011) focused on the effect that indeterminate boundaries between direct
speech, indirect speech, and narration have on the notion of faithfulness of
representation.
Speech as well as writing and thought presentation can indeed be
linked to important aspects of historical writing, such as cause-and-effect
interpretations (e.g. speakers’ motivations), (creating) empathy with
historical persons, providing proof (e.g. sources, witness statements), and
indirect, seemingly non-authorial evaluation, apart from being also a choice
for more general rhetorical effects (e.g vividness). The hypothesis is that
specific uses and also frequencies of quoting are an important marker of
the medieval genre as such, distinguishing it from later history writing (this
study is preparatory to a larger chronological investigation).
The paper therefore aims at providing an inventory of possible forms
and, in particular, functions of speech, writing and thought presentation in
medieval history writing. It also aims at an assessment of its contribution to
the historiographer’s specific perspective on and construction of the past.
Semino and Short’s (2004) model of speech, writing and thought
presentation, in particular those forms involving reported content, will be
used in a both quantitative, corpuslinguistic and qualitative investigation of
the material. The data consists of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, the AngloSaxon Chronicles (A), the Peterborough Chronicle, the Brut Chronicles (with
continuations), Trevisa’s Polychronicon, and The English Conquest of
Ireland. A small selection of modern history writing (partly from the FLOB
corpus, partly miscellaneous sources) will be used for comparative
purposes. Attention will also be paid to the question whether originally
English works, translated texts, and foreign originals differ in their usage.
49
Burrow, John. 2007. A History of Histories. London: Penguin.
Nichols, Stephen G. 1964. “Discourse in Froissart’s Chroniques.” Speculum: A Journal
of Medieval Studies 39.2: 279-87.
Moore, Colette. 2011. Quoting Speech in Early English. Cambridge: CUP.
Semino, Elena and Mick Short. 2004. Corpus Stylistics. Speech, writing and thought
presentation in a corpus of English writing. London: Routledge.
The Celtic influence on the Old English beon on V-unge construction reevaluated
Robert A. Cloutier
University of Amsterdam
Keywords: Old English, Celtic, progressive, language contact, contactinduced change, verbal noun
One theory on the origin of the progressive in present-day English (PDE) is
an Old English (OE) construction comprised of a form of beon ‘to be’
followed by the preposition on ‘on/in’ and a verbal noun formed by adding
some variant of the suffix –unge to a verbal root. Some scholars have
proposed that this OE construction, and ultimately the PDE progressive, is
the result of early language contact between speakers of OE and Brythonic
Celtic (BC) (Ó Corráin 1997; Mittendorf & Poppe 2000; Vennemann 2001;
Poppe 2002, 2003; Filppula 2003; Ronan 2003; Filppula, Klemola & Paulasto
2008); both Old and Middle Irish and Welsh have attestations of a
progressive construction very similar in structure to the OE construction
(Ronan 2006). An underlying, and until now unquestioned, assumption in
this theory is that BC speakers chose to use the OE verbal noun in this
construction as a substitute for their verbal noun presumably because both
are verbal nouns; however, BC speakers would have been confronted with
three non-finite verb forms in OE, namely the infinitive, present participle
and verbal noun, each of which would be used to translate their singular
non-finite verb form depending on the context. How can we determine
which choice a BC speaker would most likely have made? Siegel (1999)
examines six constraints on the transfer and retention of substrate features
into Melanesian Pidgin and identifies congruence, perceptual salience and
frequency as the most important. This would suggest that BC speakers
learning OE would have chosen the non-finite verb form that most closely
corresponded functionally and structurally to their verbal noun. Using
50
Siegel’s constraints as a framework to determine whether the OE verbal
noun was the most logical choice for BC speakers, I will compare the
structural and functional properties of the Old and Middle Irish and Welsh
verbal noun to the properties of the three candidates in both OE and Old
Saxon, which will serve as a control. I will rely primarily on Ronan (2006) for
the Celtic facts; the OE data will come from the Helsinki corpus and the Old
Saxon data from the Heliand.
Filppula, Markku. 2003. More on the English progressive and the Celtic connection. In
Hildegard Tristram (ed.), The Celtic Englishes III, 150-168. Heidelberg: C. Winter.
Filppula, Markku, Juhani Klemola & Heli Paulasto. 2008. English and Celtic in contact.
New York: Routledge.
Mittendorf, Ingo & Erich Poppe. 2000. Celtic contacts of the English progressive?. In
Hildegard Tristram (ed.), The Celtic Englishes III, 117-145. Heidelberg: C. Winter.
Ó Corráin, Ailbhe. 1997. On verbal aspect in Irish with particular reference to the
progressive. In Séamus Mac Mathúna & Ailbhe Ó Corráin (eds.), Miscellanea
Celtica in Memoriam Heinrich Wagner, 159-173. Uppsala: University of Uppsala.
Poppe, Erich. 2002. The ‘expanded form’ in Insular Celtic and English: Some historical
and comparative considerations, with special emphasis on Middle Irish. In
Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola & Heli Pitkänen (eds.), The Celtic roots of
English, 237-270. Joensuu: University of Joensuu.
Ronan, Patricia. 2003. Periphrastic progressives in Old Irish. In Hildegard Tristram
(ed.), The Celtic Englishes III, 150-168. Heidelberg: C. Winter.
Ronan, Patricia. 2006. Aspects of verbal noun constructions in Medieval Irish and
Welsh with reference to similar constructions in Basque. Maynooth: National
University of Ireland dissertation.
Siegel, Jeff. 1999. Transfer constraints and substrate influence in Melanesian Pidgin.
Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 14:1. 1-44.
Vennemann, Theo. 2001. Atlantis Semitica: Structural contact features in Celtic and
English. In Laural Brinton (ed.), Historical Linguistics 1999: Selected papers from
the fourteenth International Conference on Historical Linguistics, 351-369.
Amsterdam & Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.
51
Where did they come from? A native origin for they, their, them
Marcelle Cole
Leiden University
Keywords: Old Northumbrian, personal pronouns, demonstrative pronouns,
Old English, Old Norse contact
The conviction that the English third-person plural pronouns THEY, THEIR,
THEM are not descended from Old English, but are Scandinavian in origin,
has been widely held in the literature since Kluge (1899: 940). This view is
propagated, not only by textbook descriptions of the history of English, but
also by recent in-depth studies (Morse-Gagné 2003). Indeed, the imposition
of such Old Norse function words in English is considered indicative of both
the intensity and the nature of Old English-Old Norse contact during the
late Old English period (Kroch et al. 2000). Doubts have nevertheless been
voiced, or at least implied, as to the wholly Scandinavian origin of THEY,
THEIR, THEM by scholars who have highlighted the possible implication of
the Middle English demonstratives þa, þare, þam in the replacement
process (Moore & Marckwardt 1951; Werner 1991). In the light of
pronominal usage found in the interlinear gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels,
which has previously remained uncommented on, this paper will argue that
there is evidence in Old Northumbrian of personal and demonstrative
pronoun merger that suggests the emergence of THEY, THEIR, THEM might
be a native development after all.
Kluge F. 1899. Geschichte der Englischen Sprache. 2 volumes. Berlin: Felber.
Kroch, A., A. Taylor & D. Ringe. 2000. The Middle English Verb-Second Constraint: A
Case Study in Language Contact and Language Change. In S. Herring, P. van
Reenen & L. Schoesle (eds.), Textual Parameters in Older Languages, 353-391.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Moore, S. & A. H. Marckwardt. 1951. Historical Outlines of English Sounds and
Inflections. Ann Arbor: George Wahr.
Morse-Gagné, E. 2003. Viking Pronouns in England: Charting the Course of THEY,
THEIR, and THEM. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
Werner, Otmar. 1991. The Incorporation of Old Norse Pronouns into Middle English:
Suppletion by Loan. In P. Sture Ureland & G. Broderick (eds.), Language Contact
in the British Isles, 369-401. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.
52
Explaining verbal morphosyntactic variation in early English dialect
Marcelle Cole
Leiden University
Keywords: morphosyntactic variation, Northern Subject Rule, subject-type
constraint, agreement levelling
At first glance, the subject-type constraint found to condition the
distribution of present-tense markings in Old Northumbrian (Cole forthc.,
2012) appears to strengthen the argument for a Brittonic derivation of the
so-called Northern Subject Rule (cf. Klemola 2000; Vennemann 2001;
Benskin 2011; de Haas 2011). When set within a broader framework of
diachronic variation, however, the subject effects that condition processes
of levelling in Northumbrian are also found to govern non-standard
agreement patterns and levelling processes in varieties of Early Modern
and Present-Day English. Pietsch (2005) argues that the emergence of
subject effects is likely in a situation where levelling and erosion has led to
a breakdown of the inherited agreement system based on person and
number. A similar tendency towards morphological restructuring, this time
based on a morphological distinction between positive and negative
contexts rather than a number distinction, has also been identified in
modern dialects where was(n’t)/were(n’t) variation occurs (Wolfram &
Schilling-Estes 1996; Anderwald 2001). All this suggests that there is a
tendency within English to accommodate alternative agreement systems in
linguistic scenarios in which variation has resulted in the inherited concord
system based on a person/number distinction becoming opaque.
This paper will explore data from a variety of studies which suggest that
the (near) categorical manifestation of a subject-type constraint, typical of
northern Middle English and Middle Scots, and the variable effects
witnessed in late Old Northumbrian, Early Modern English and in some
non-northern and overseas varieties of Present-Day English should be
viewed as manifestations of the same agreement phenomenon. Namely, a
concord system based on a pronominal versus non-pronominal distinction,
rather than on person-number features, typically characterizes the patterns
of variation that appear when covariant forms compete in the same
environments. From this perspective, while contact scenarios of population
and language contact are undoubtedly conducive to triggering processes of
regularisation and morphological simplification, the syntactic constraints
that govern the resulting variation require no external input.
53
Anderwald, Lieselotte. 2001. Was/Were-Variation in Non-Standard British English
Today. English World-Wide 22.1-21.
Benskin, Michael. 2011. Present Indicative Plural Concord in Brittonic and Early
English. Transactions of the Philological Society 109.158-185.
Cole, Marcelle. forthc. Old Northumbrian Verbal Morphology and the (Northern)
Subject Rule.
Cole, Marcelle. 2012. The Old English Origins of the Northern Subject Rule: Evidence
from the Lindisfarne gloss to the Gospels of John and Mark. In M. Stenroos, M.
Mäkinen & I. Særheim (eds.), Language Contact and Development around the
North Sea, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 321, 141-168. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Haas, Nynke de. 2011. Morphosyntactic Variation in Northern English: The Northern
Subject Rule, its Origins and Early History. PhD dissertation, Radboud University
Nijmegen.
Klemola, Juhani. 2000. The Origins of the Northern Subject Rule: A Case of Early
Contact? In H. Tristam (ed.), The Celtic Englishes II, 329-346. Heidelberg: Carl
Winter.
Pietsch, Lukas. 2005. ‘Some do and some doesn’t’: Verbal Concord Variation in the
North of the British Isles. In B. Kortmann, T. Herrmann, L. Pietsch & S. Wagner
(eds.), A Comparative Grammar of British English Dialects. Agreement, Gender,
Relative Clauses, 125-209. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Schilling-Estes, Natalie & Walt Wolfram. 1996. Dialect change and maintenance in a
post-insular island community. In Edgar W. Schneider (ed.), Focus on the USA,
103-48. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
The development of the “causative V-ing” construction in American
English
Mark Davies
Brigham Young University
Keywords: corpus, historical, causative, construction, into
The typical “causative V-ing” construction is composed of a verb of force or
persuasion (beguile, fool, and embarrass below) + into + an “-ING clause”:


They would beguile us into believing that we are to fall down and
worship the image (COHA NF 1847)
I don't see why you should fool yourself into thinking you're sorry
(COHA FIC 1922)
While the construction in contemporary English has been studied in some
detail, the historical dimension has received relatively little attention.
54
Our study of historical changes with “causative V-ing” is based on more
than 5,600 tokens of the construction in the Corpus of Historical American
English and the TIME Corpus. This is supplemented by more than 10,000
additional tokens from corpora of contemporary English (COCA, BNC, and
GloWbE) – all of which yielded tokens with more than 800 different matrix
verbs. This is a much larger and robust dataset than has been used in any
previous study.
Some of the historical changes that we will discuss include the
following:









Has the construction become more common or less common in
English over time?
How much lexical diversity has there been over time, in terms of
new matrix verbs (e.g. talk, coerce, trick) that have been used in
different periods?
What changes have there been in the semantic classes of verbs
that take the construction (e.g. verbs of force, persuasion,
trickery, etc)?
Is the use with “neutral” verbs (e.g. lead) and “positive” verbs
(e.g. encourage) a recent innovation (as some have suggested), or
have these uses been around for a much longer period of time?
What changes have there been in the degree of “directness” of
force or persuasion by X on Y to do Z (e.g John (X) coerced Mary
(Y) into coming (Z))?
What is the relationship between the “causative V-ing”
construction and the simple “to” construction (e.g. he forced her
to leave vs he forced her into leaving), especially with regards to
the presumed “Great Complement Shift” in English?
How has the “causative V-ing” construction been related over
time to the “way construction” (e.g. they lied their way into taking
our country into war)?
Did the construction arise “ex nihilo” and “full formed” at some
point in time, or did it arise gradually, and what evidence is there
for this (i.e., where did the construction come from)?
And finally, what does an in-depth study of this construction tell
us about the value of large and diverse historical corpora, and
their role in researching syntactic and semantic change?
55
Bridgeman, Lorraine, Dale Dillinger, Constance Higgins, P. David Seaman & Floyd A
Shank. 1965. More Classes of Verbs in English. Bloomington, Indiana, Indiana
University Linguistics Club.
Francis, Gill, Susan Hunston and Elizabeth Manning, eds. 1996. Collins Cobuild
Grammar Patterns 1: Verbs. London, HarperCollins
Goldberg, Adele. 1995. Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to
Argument Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gries, Stefan Th., and Anatol Stefanowitsch. 2003. Co-Varying Collexemes in the IntoCausative. In Michel Achard and Suzanne Kemmer (eds.), Language, Culture, and
Mind, 225-36. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Hunston, Susan, and Gill Francis. 2000. Pattern Grammar: A Corpus-Driven Approach
to the Lexical Grammar of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Rohdenburg, Gunter. 2007. Functional Constraints in Syntactic Change: The Rise and
Fall of Prepositional Constructions in Early and Late Modern English. English
Studies, 88:2, 217-233
Rudanko, Juhani.1991. On verbs governing in -ing in present-day English. English
studies 72.1:55-72.
Rudanko, Juhani. 2000. Corpora and Complementation: Tracing Sentential
Complementation Patterns of Nouns, Adjectives, and Verbs Over the Last Three
Centuries. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
Rudanko, Juhani. 2002. Complements and constructions. Lanham, MD: University
Press of America.
Rudanko, Juhani. 2005. Lexico- Grammatical Innovation in Current British and
American English: A Case Study on the Transitive into -ing Pattern with Evidence
from the Bank of English Corpus. Studia Neophilologica 77: 171-87.
Rudanko, Juhani. 2006. Emergent Alternation in Complement Selection: The spread
of the Transitive into -ing Construction in British and American English. English
Linguistics 34.4: 312-331.
Rudanko, Juhani. 2011. Changes in Complementation in British and American English.
London: Palgrave / Macmillan.
Vosberg, U. 2003. Cognitive complexity and the establishment of -ing constructions
with retrospective verbs in Modern English. In Dossena, M. and C. Jones (eds.),
Insights into Late Modern English, 197-220. Bern: Peter Lang.
Wulff, S., A. Stefanowitsch and S. Gries. 2007. “Brutal Brits and persuasive
Americans: Variety-specifc meaning construction in the into-causative.” In G.
Radden, K. Köpcke, T. Berg and P. Siemund (eds.), Aspects of Meaning
Construction, 265-281. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
56
Is retrievability a guarantee for omission?
A look into the recent history of contextual object deletion in American
English
Tania de Dios
Universidade de Santiago de Compostela
Keywords: English verb, direct object, object omission, contextual factors,
historical American English.
In studies dealing with object omission, a capital distinction is normally
made between indefinite and contextual deletions. This contrast, originally
introduced by Allerton (1975), made popular by Fillmore (1986) and
preserved in many subsequent works on the topic (Groefsema, 1995;
Herbst and Roe 1996; García Velasco and Portero Muñoz 2002; Möhlig and
Klages 2002; Liu 2008; Glass 2012, among others), allows to set apart
instances of real object unelaborations (e.g. She is eating) from cases in
which the elided referent can easily be retrieved from the surrounding
linguistic or situational context (e.g. She looked at me and I noticed).
Indefinite omission has been recurrently discussed in the literature, where
several accounts of its nature have been posited (Goldberg 2001; Möhlig
and Klages 2002; Glass 2012 among others). Contextual object deletion, on
the other hand, has received comparatively less attention, although several
authors have hinted at interesting issues such as why deletion is open with
certain verbs while it does not seem viable with others (Fillmore 1986;
García Velasco and Portero Muñoz 2002; Liu 2008). Some of these linguists
have argued that it is possible to come across semantically related pairs of
verbs where each member behaves differently in terms of object elision
licensing. Thus, while an utterance like I’ll be back, I promise would sound
perfectly normal, I’ll be back, I guarantee would be considered
ungrammatical by these authors. Other scholars (Scott 2006), however,
would consider both constructions as acceptable linguistic realizations. In
spite of the existence of all these contributions, it seems, nevertheless, that
a comprehensive and systematic study of the actual behaviour of these
related verbal forms as regards complement deletion is still lacking.
The aim of the present paper is to throw some light on the workings of
contextual object omission in the recent history of English. With this
objective in mind, I will carry out a corpus-based study of three pairs of
verbs formed by items traditionally considered to show differing degrees of
object omission admissibility: promise vs. guarantee, look vs. seek and find
out vs. discover. For my purposes, data will be drawn from the Corpus of
57
Historical American English (COHA; Davies 2010), which covers the period
from 1810 to 2009. The detailed analysis of the data will allow me to (i)
determine the omissibility rate of direct objects with each of the selected
verbal forms; (ii) elucidate the contextual factors that may favour or
disfavour such elisions; (iii) trace potential patterns of usage; and (iv)
identify the changes, if any, in the use of these forms in the recent history
of American English.
Allerton, D.J. 1975. ‘Deletion and proform reduction’. Journal of Linguistics 11(2):
213-237.
Davies, Mark. 2010. The Corpus of Historical American English: 400 million words,
1810-2009. Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/.
Fillmore, Charles. 1986. ‘Pragmatically controlled zero anaphora’. Proceedings of
Berkeley Linguistics Society 12: 95-107.
García Velasco, Daniel and Carmen Portero Muñoz. 2002. ‘Understood objects in
functional gramar’. Working Papers in Functional Grammar 76: 1-24.
Glass, Lelia. 2012. ‘Honing a pragmatic account of English implicit objects’.
(Unpublished paper).
Goldberg, Adele. 2001. ‘Patient arguments of causative verbs can be omitted: The
role of information structure in argument distribution’. Language Sciences 23:
503-524.
Groefsema, Marjolein. 1995. ‘Understood arguments: A semantic/pragmatic
approach’. Lingua 96: 139-161.
Herbst, Thomas and Ian Roe. 1996. ‘How obligatory are obligatory complements?: An
alternative approach to the categorization of subjects and other complements in
valency grammar’. English Studies 77(2): 179-199.
Liu, Dilin. 2008. ‘Intransitive or object deleting?: Classifying English verbs used
without an object’. Journal of English Linguistics 36(4): 289-313.
Möhlig, Ruth and Monika Klages. 2002. ‘Detransitivization in the history of English
from a semantic perspective’. In Teresa Fanego, María José López-Couso and
Javier Pérez Guerra (eds.). English Historical Syntax and Morphology: Selected
papers from 11 ICEHL, Santiago de Compostela, 7-11 September 2000.
Amsterdam: Benjamins: 231-254.
Scott, Kate. 2006. ‘Wen less is more: Implicit arguments and Relevance Theory’. UCL
Working Papers in Linguistics 18: 139-170.
58
The Northern Subject Rule in Northern and Midlands Middle English
dialects:
Adding be to a picture of morphosyntactic dialect variation
Nynke de Haas
Utrecht University
The Northern Subject Rule (NSR) is one of few well-documented points of
morphosyntactic dialect variation in early English (cf. Cole 2012a,b for Old
English; de Haas 2011, in preparation, for Middle English). By analysing new
data on the verb be, this paper will add more detail to our knowledge of the
syntactic conditions governing verbal inflection in the NSR in Middle
English, and diatopic and diachronic variation in their occurrence.
De Haas (2011, in preparation) analysed data on inflection of strong and
weak verbs from two corpora of localized Middle English texts from
Northern England and the Northern Midlands, one early Middle English,
comprising texts mainly from LAEME (Laing & Lass 2008-) and one late
Middle English, comprising local documents from the MEG corpus
(Stenroos, Mäkinen, Horobin & Smith 2011). This paper will integrate data
on the verb be in the same corpora with the earlier findings, thus refining
the analysis of the two syntactic conditions involved in the NSR. This
includes the subject condition (under which pronoun subjects trigger
different inflection than full noun phrase subjects), but may especially
enlighten the analysis of the adjacency condition (under which the special
inflection with pronoun subjects is only triggered when verb and subject
are adjacent), as the effects of various types of non-adjacent syntactic
configurations are relatively poorly understood.
Moreover, the locations of origin of all the corpus texts will be plotted
on maps, indicating the strength of the NSR conditions in various locations
and, to the extent that this is possible, in different time periods. It will be
shown that although the traditional dialect differences between Northern,
East Midlands and West Midlands dialect areas remain visible (especially in
the verbal morphology employed), the primary dialect division revealed by
the NSR variation is one between North and South. The early Middle English
data show strong NSR patterns in the Northern dialect area, with a
transitional zone extending southward into the Northern Midlands. By
comparison, the late Middle English material shows an extended core NSR
area which included northern parts of the East Midlands and a transitional
zone extending further than before into the East and West Midlands.
59
Cole, Marcelle (2012a). Old Northumbrian Verbal Morphology in the Glosses to the
Lindisfarne Gospels. PhD dissertation. Seville University.
Cole, Marcelle (2012b). ‘The Old English Origins of the Northern Subject Rule:
Evidence from the Lindisfarne gloss to the Gospels of John and Mark’. In M.
Stenroos, M. Mäkinen & I. Særheim (eds.), Language Contact and Development
around the North Sea, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 321, 141-168.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
de Haas, Nynke K. (2011). Morphosyntactic variation in Northern English: the
Northern Subject Rule, its origins and early history. Dissertation. Utrecht: LOT.
Available online via <www.lotpublications.nl>
de Haas, Nynke K. (in preparation). ‘The Northern Subject Rule in late Middle English:
beyond subject type and adjacency’. Manuscript, Radboud University Nijmegen /
Utrecht University and University of Stavanger.
LAEME: Laing, Margaret, & Roger Lass (2008-). A linguistic atlas of early Middle
English 1150–1325. Version 1.1. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh. Online at
<http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laeme1/ laeme1.html>
MEG Corpus: Merja Stenroos, Martti Mäkinen, Simon Horobin, & Jeremy Smith
(2011). The Middle English Grammar Corpus. version 2011.1. University of
Stavanger. Online at <http://www.uis.no/research-and-phd-studies/researchareas/history-languages-and-literature/the-middle-english-scribal-textsprogramme/meg-c/>
From quantifiers to focus adverbs:
The developments of mostly and at least
Tine Defour
Ghent University
Keywords: focus adverbs, grammaticalization, subjectification, corpus
linguistics, scalarity
Particularizing focus adverbs (e.g. notably, particularly, at least) are
traditionally classified as a subcategory of restrictive adverbs (Nevalainen
1991), because they limit the application of an utterance predominantly
(though not exclusively) to a focused constituent. The inclusion of focused
values necessarily implies the exclusion of implied ‘alternatives’.
Particularizers are therefore said to evoke speaker-based scales of semantic
strength (König 1991; Traugott 2009), on which all relevant values can be
ranked. This subjective ranking can result in different degrees of inclusion
for different particularizers, ranging from a strong focus (e.g. specifically) to
a weak one (e.g. at least) (cf. Ernst 1984).
60
The focus adverbs selected for this study, i.e. mostly and at least, both
derive from Old English adjectives with quantifying meanings (læst and
mæst, i.e. ‘smallest vs. greatest’ in size or degree). At (the) least mainly
modifies quantitative constituents in Middle English data, indicating clear
measures or numbers (e.g. “send more money, at the leeste [4,000]”). Later
focus modification also includes non-measurable constituents, with
increasingly scalar readings indicating that the focused constituent forms
the lower limit on a scale of acceptable values (e.g. “[…] search his study (or
at least his cabinet)” (CED 1603)). Most(ly) moves from a concrete adverbial
use with limited focus modification, signifying ‘to the greatest extent’ (e.g.
“the partes that shall be mostly touched be the hart [and] chest” (OED
1580)) to a scalar reading in which mostly indicates that a specific value is
applicable to the greater part of a broader group (e.g. “they were mostly
good guys”).
Our aim is to describe the forms’ semantic and structural
diversifications and interpret their respective developments within a
broader frame of grammaticalization and subjectification theories. This
allows us to attest a) whether hypothesized shifts from a limited to broader
range of modified focus constituents, and from concrete to scalar meanings
correlate with higher frequencies and more advanced levels of
grammaticalization and subjectivity (cf. Nevalainen 1991), and b) in which
ways scalar aspects in early quantifying meanings can trigger later
developments towards scalar focus modification (e.g. Traugott 2009). The
material for this paper is taken from a selection of historical corpora,
including the Helsinki Corpus, A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560-1760, the
Corpus of Late Modern English Texts and ARCHER. Results are based on a
detailed formal and functional analysis taking into account frequencies,
semantic-pragmatic changes and structural properties (i.e. focus
constituents, scope).
Ernst, Thomas Boyden (1984) Towards an Integrated Theory of Adverb Position in
English. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club.
König, Ekkehard (1991) The meaning of focus particles. A comparative perspective.
London: Routledge.
Nevalainen, Terttu (1991) But, only, just. Focusing adverbial change in Modern
English 1500-1900. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs (2009) [2006] The semantic development of scalar focus
modifiers. In Handbook on the History of English, Ans van Kemenade and
Bettelou Los (eds.). Oxford: Blackwell, 335-359.
61
From spatial concepts to time in the history of English:
Continuity and remoteness in time: Metonymy and Metaphor
Xavier Dekeyser
KU Leuven – University of Antwerp
In this study we highlight the transition of the temporal adverbs
always/algates, expressing continuity in time, and ago, expressing
remoteness in time, from their historical prototypical concept of space to
that of time and beyond. In these processes both metonymy and metaphor
play an important role.
The data in the Middle English Dictionary and the Oxford English
Dictionary regarding always and algates suggest a gradual cline from
SPACE to TIME (continuity and recurrence) as well as a variety of other
meanings, subsumed under the cover-term UNCONSTRAINEDNESS. The
SPACE-TIME -X chain (with X standing for some other more abstract
meanings) is by no means uncommon, as it seems to occur in most
languages of the world (Heine, Claudi and Hünnemeyer, 1991a and 1991b).
The semantic development of these temporal adverbs also features all the
properties normally associated with a change like this: metonymy followed
by ever increasing or even proliferating metaphorization, fuzzy or nondiscrete categories resulting in new meanings (Geeraerts, 1997 and Taylor,
1997).
As is generally known, ago owes its origin to the grammaticalization of
the past participle of a verb of movement meaning ‘from one place to
another’: Old English agan, Middle English ago(n). This prototypical spatial
concept is metaphorically mapped on to a new temporal prototype, in the
sense of ‘movement from the present time or the time in question to the
past’.
As compared with always/algates, the temporal frame of ago is
remarkably monosemous. Indeed, it is marked throughout by a single
process of metaphorization from ‘remoteness in space’ to ‘remoteness in
time’. Metonymy is only very marginally involved , as in several meetings
ago, and affects the entire adverbial phrase and not the adverb ago as
such.
Interestingly, an identical metaphorical process has been at work in
Dutch: English ago translates as Dutch verleden, which is the past participle
of a former, now obsolete verb lijden, meaning ‘go’ or ‘pass away’; so drie
jaar geleden is fully congruent with three years ago.
62
Geeraerts, D. 1997. Diachronic prototype semantics. A contribution to historical
lexicology. Oxford Studies in Lexicography and Lexicology. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Heine, B., Claudi, U. and Hünnemeyer, F. 1991 a From cognition to grammar –
Evidence from African languages.” In: Traugott, E.C. and Heine, B. (eds).
Approaches to Grammaticalization. Vol. I: 149-187. Amsterdam/Philadelphia,
John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Heine, B., 1991b Grammaticalization: a conceptual framework. Chicago and London:
The University of Chicago Press.
Taylor, J. 1997 Linguistic categorization: prototypes in linguistics. 2nd edition. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Which comes first in the double object construction?
David Denison & Nuria Yáñez-Bouza
University of Manchester
Keywords: double object, dialect, early English, Modern English, precept
Competition between two methods of marking recipient/beneficiary and
theme figures in much recent research:
(1)
(2)
Jim gave the driver £5.
Jim gave £5 to the driver.
(iO before dO)
(dO before PP)
Less frequently acknowledged is a reverse double object variant:
(3) a. ?Jim gave £5 the driver.
b. Jim gave it him.
(dO before iO)
If noticed at all, the pattern in 0 is mostly described as a variant confined to
clauses where both objects are pronominal, as in 0b (Quirk et al. 1985:
1396n, Huddleston & Pullum 2002: 248 and n23, Biber et al. 1999: 927-30).
However, pattern (3) was much more widespread even in late ModE
(Denison 1998: 239, Poutsma 1914-29: I.426), while there is clear dialectal
variation within present-day British English (Upton 2006: 329, Siewerska &
Hollmann 2007, Gerwin 2013). There is a lack of frequency data on both the
history and the dialect distribution of this alternative construction.
In this paper we embark on a systematic investigation of the
distribution of pattern 0, mainly in relation to pattern 0. We wish principally
to track 0 through space and time in order to understand better its
63
progressive restriction in distribution. In the other direction, we wish to test
whether or not variation between 0 and 0 is a straightforward descendant
of the Old English system, when object NPs were case-marked and the two
orders were equally common (Koopman 1990a, 1990b; Gast 2007). We are
examining a rich array of dialect and/or historical English corpora for
coverage and representativeness (including ARCHER, CONCE, Corpus of Late
18C Prose, DECTE, FRED, Old Bailey, PCEEC, the Penn parsed corpora,
Salamanca Corpus among others), from a careful selection of which we will
create a database of examples. We will also examine works in the
normative grammatical tradition (e.g. Miège 1688, Ward 1765, Scott 1793,
Mitchell 1799) for metalinguistic data on the changing status of variants as
dialectal or preferred.
Analysis of the results will offer an important corrective to the bulk of
research on the so-called dative alternation between patterns 0 and 0, as
well as contributing to a recent strand of theorising that actually recognises
the existence of order 0 in PDE (e.g. Bruening 2010a, Bruening 2010b,
Haddican & Holmberg 2012, Haspelmath 2004). The history of double
object order touches on many linguistic domains, and we expect our data
will allow us to work towards a reasonably comprehensive history.
Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad & Edward Finegan.
1999. Longman grammar of spoken and written English. Harlow: Pearson.
Bruening, Benjamin. 2010a. Ditransitive asymmetries and a theory of idiom
formation. Linguistic Inquiry 41.4, 519-62.
Bruening, Benjamin. 2010b. Double object constructions disguised as prepositional
datives. Linguistic Inquiry 41.2, 287-305.
Denison, David. 1998. Syntax. In Suzanne Romaine (ed.), The Cambridge history of
the English language, vol. 4, 1776-1997, 92-329. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Gast, Volker. 2007. I gave it him – on the motivation of the ‘alternative double object
construction’ in varieties of British English. Functions of Language 14.1, 31-56.
Gerwin, Johanna. 2013. Give it me! Pronominal ditransitives in English dialects.
English Language and Linguistics 17.3, 445-63.
Haddican, William & Anders Holmberg. 2012. Object movement symmetries in British
English dialects: Experimental evidence for a mixed case/locality approach.
Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 15.3, 189-212.
Haspelmath, Martin. 2004. Explaining the ditransitive person-role constraint: A
usage-based approach. Constructions 2, 1-71.
Huddleston, Rodney & Geoffrey K. Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge grammar of the
English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
64
Koopman, Willem. 1990a. The double object construction in Old English. In Sylvia
Adamson, Vivien A. Law, Nigel Vincent & Susan Wright (eds.), Papers from the
5th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics: Cambridge, 6-9
April 1987 (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 65), 225-43. Amsterdam and
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Koopman, Willem F. 1990b. The order of dative and accusative objects in Old English.
In Willem Koopman (ed.), Word order in Old English: With special reference to
the verb phrase, 133-223. Amsterdam: n.p.
Miège, Guy. 1688. The English grammar, or, The grounds and genius of the English
tongue with a prefatory discourse. London.
Mitchell, Hugh. 1799. Scotticisms, vulgar Anglicisms, and grammatical improprieties
corrected, with reasons for the corrections. Glasgow.
Poutsma, Hendrick. 1914-29. A grammar of late Modern English, (part I) 2nd edn,
(part II) 1st edn. Groningen: Noordhoff.
Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech & Jan Svartvik. 1985. A
comprehensive grammar of the English language. London and New York:
Longman.
Scott, William. 1793. A short system of English grammar; with examples of improper
and inelegant construction, and Scotticisms. Edinburgh.
Siewerska, Anna & Willem B. Hollmann. 2007. Ditransitive clauses in English with
special reference to Lancashire dialect. In Mike Hannay & Gerard J. Steen (eds.),
Structural-functional studies in English grammar, 81-102. Amsterdam &
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Upton, Clive. 2006. Modern regional English in the British Isles. In Lynda Mugglestone
(ed.), The Oxford history of English, 305-33. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ward, William. 1765. An essay on grammar, as it may be applied to the English
language. In two treatises. London.
“Dispensers of knowledge”:
An early investigation into nineteenth-century popular(ized) science
Marina Dossena
Università degli Studi di Bergamo
Keywords: Late Modern English, knowledge dissemination, lexicography,
specialized discourse, periodicals
Knowledge dissemination is hardly a new phenomenon. People have
communicated their discoveries to each other since prehistoric times,
though of course the modes of expert-to-expert and expert-to-non-expert
communication have varied considerably as thought-styles changed and
new scientific approaches developed over the centuries (see for instance
Alonso-Almeida & Marrero-Morales 2011). Within this framework, this
65
contribution aims to concentrate on the nineteenth century, a time in
which – according to the statistics in the website of the Oxford English
Dictionary (www.oed.com) – more lexical items were recorded for the first
time than at any other point in the history of the English language (Dossena
2012: 888-889). Of course, many of these new dictionary entries referred to
the discoveries, inventions and innovations that make Late Modern times
so interestingly close to, and yet still so intriguingly distant from, our own
times. In my presentation I intend to outline some research paths for the
investigation of the ways in which such novelties were presented to the
general public, in order to identify the most significant strategies employed
in the texts to elicit the interest of non-experts. The investigation will rely
on a specially-compiled corpus of articles published in periodicals both in
the UK and in the US, and will combine quantitative and qualitative
approaches. After an overview of the most frequent (and significant)
sources of new vocabulary in the Oxford English Dictionary, my analysis will
concentrate on documents addressed to lay audiences. Special attention
will be given to titles on account of the multiple functions they may have,
and which are summarized by Sala (forthcoming); the role of illustrations,
where available, will also be considered; finally, intertextual references will
be discussed, on account of their value as sources of further information
and – consequently – as potential links meant to maintain the readers’
interest in the topics under discussion.
Alonso-Almeida, Francisco & Marrero-Morales, Sandra 2011. Introduction to the
special issue ‘Diachronic English for Specific Purposes’. Revista de Lenguas para
Fines Específicos (LFE) 17, Autumn 2011, 13-22.
Dossena, Marina 2012. Late Modern English – Semantics and Lexicon. In Bergs,
Alexander & Brinton, Laurel (eds), HSK 34.1 – English Historical Linguistics – An
International Handbook. Berlin: De Gruyter, 887-900.
Sala, Michele forthcoming. Language Change in Legal Research Article Titles. In
Poppi, Franca & Cheng, Winnie (eds), The Three Waves of Globalization: Winds of
Change in Professional, Institutional and Academic Genres. Newcastle u.T.:
Cambridge Scholars.
66
The increasingly marked status of non-subjects in initial position
after the loss of verb second
Gea Dreschler
University of Amsterdam - Radboud University Nijmegen
Keywords: syntax, information structure, verb second, Old English,
markedness.
Old English verb second, originally treated as a purely syntactic
phenomenon (e.g. Van Kemenade 1987 and Pintzuk 1999), has increasingly
come to be considered in terms of information-structural factors (see Bech
2001, Van Kemenade & Westergaard 2011, Hinterhölzl & Petrova 2011).
The general consensus in these works is that information-structural factors
guide the variation between verb-second and verb-third orders in Old
English main clauses: discourse-old subjects precede the finite verb
(resulting in v3 order), while discourse-new subjects follow the finite verb
(resulting in v2 order). This new perspective on verb second in Old English
has in turn led to adaptations of the scenarios about the decline of this
word order pattern, which is dated between 1400 and 1500 (van Kemenade
1987, Haeberli 2002). It is in this respect that Los (2009) identifies another
main information-structural aspect of Old English as a verb-second
language, namely a multifunctional first (i.e. pre-subject) position which can
host both unmarked and marked themes. When verb-second is lost, the
first position loses its multifunctional character and as the subject then
becomes the unmarked theme (cf. Halliday 1967), the pre-subject position
acquires a marked character (see also Los & Dreschler 2012).
In this paper I will investigate the timing of these developments and the
relation to the loss of verb second. I will present an analysis of the types of
elements in clause-initial position, together with their informationstructural properties, in texts from 1500 to 1910. The study will be based
on the syntactically annotated corpora for Early Modern English (PPCEME,
Kroch, Santorini & Diertani 2004) and Modern British English (PPCMBE,
Kroch, Santorini & Diertani 2010). I focus on three different informationstructural aspects: information status (or accessibility), anaphoricity (or
discourse-oldness) and markedness (e.g. contrast or frame-setting). The
data show that after 1500, the proportion of subject-initial clauses steadily
increases, with the most important change taking place in the Modern
English period. In the same period, prepositional phrases (PPs) become the
most important non-subject clause-initial elements, and their function
67
changes from predominantly providing unmarked links to the previous
discourse to an increasingly contrastive or frame-setting use.
Bech, Kristin (2001). Word order patterns in Old and Middle English: a syntactic and
pragmatic study. PhD dissertation. University of Bergen.
Halliday, Michael A. K. (1967). Notes on transitivity and theme in English. Part 2.
Journal of Linguistics 3: 199-244.
Haeberli, Eric (2002). Observations on the loss of Verb Second in the history of
English. In: C. J.-W. Zwart & W. Abraham (eds.). Studies in comparative Germanic
syntax: Proceedings from the 15th workshop on Comparative Germanic Syntax.
Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins, 245–72.
Hinterhölzl, R. & S. Petrova (2010). From V1 to V2 in West Germanic. Lingua 120,
pp.315-328
Kemenade, Ans van (1987). Syntactic Case and Morphological Case in the History of
English. Dordrecht: Foris.
Kemenade, Ans van and Marit Westergaard (2012). Syntax and Information
Structure: Verb Second variation in Middle English. In: Anneli Meurman-Solin,
Maria Jose Lopez-Couso, and Bettelou Los (eds). Information Structure and
Syntactic Change in the History of English. Oxford University Press, 87-118.
Kroch, Anthony R., Santorini, Beatrice & Diertani, Ariel. 2004. Penn-Helsinki Parsed
Corpus of Early Modern English, <http://www.ling.upenn.edu/histcorpora/PPCEME-RELEASE-2/index.html >.
Kroch, Anthony R., Santorini, Beatrice & Diertani, Ariel. 2010. Penn Parsed Corpus of
Modern British English, <http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/PPCMBERELEASE-1/index.html >.
Los, Bettelou ( 2009). The consequences of the loss of verb-second in English:
information structure and syntax in interaction. English Language and Linguistics
13(1): 97–125.
Los, Bettelou & Gea Dreschler (2012). The loss of local anchoring: From adverbial
local anchors to permissive subjects. In: Terttu Nevalainen & Elizabeth Traugott
(eds.). The Oxford Handbook of the History of English. New York: Oxford
University Press, 859-871
Pintzuk, Susan (1999). Phrase structures in competition: Variation and change in Old
English word order. New York: Garland
68
Moving beyond date of first attestation and language of origin:
Examining the impact of loanwords on a lexical field in Early Modern
English
Philip Durkin & Kathryn Allan
Oxford English Dictionary & University College London
Keywords: lexicology, loanwords, synonymy, lexical fields, Early Modern
English
Studies of loanwords in Early Modern English (and in most other periods of
the history of the language) have long struggled to move beyond an
examination of dates of first attestation and language of immediate origin,
usually based on the data of the Oxford English Dictionary. Such data has
the virtue of being readily extracted, summarized, and quantified, in a
manner that can readily be applied to a large sample, and can easily be
replicated by other researchers. However, such an investigation gives little
insight into questions of word frequency, register, or relationships with
other lexical items, such as competition with near or full synonyms. This
paper will examine how the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English
Dictionary (HTOED) and Early English Books Online can be used in
conjunction with data from historical dictionaries (including the Middle
English Dictionary and the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue as well as
OED) in order to gain insight into the growth and development of a lexical
field over time, particularly through the accommodation of words that
were borrowed from Latin and French in late Middle English and Early
Modern English. It will take as a test case the group of words placed in
HTOED in the category ‘sweet’ (adjective) as a subsection of section
01.03.05 ‘taste’, particularly in the period 1400 to 1700. It will investigate
how far it is possible to establish (using the tools outlined above): relative
word frequency in a particular meaning; use in different registers or in
varieties of technical and non-technical discourse; and any tendencies to
restriction to particular subcomponents of a broader meaning. In so doing,
it will attempt to identify methodologies that can be applied across large
datasets to test empirically the hypothesis that the huge influx of
loanwords in Early Modern English (and to an extent also in the later
fifteenth century) is closely connected with the expansion of the distinctive
lexical resources of different stylistic and technical registers, and with the
exploitation of full or partial synonyms in literary language for rhetorical
purposes.
69
Valency effects in English verb-particle and light verb constructions (and
what it tells us about grammaticalisation)
Marion Elenbaas
Leiden University
In this talk I compare the argument structure of two well-known English
examples of complex predicates: the Verb-Particle Construction (VPC),
illustrated in (1), and the Light Verb Construction (LVC), illustrated in (2).
(1)
(2)
He pulled up the blind.
She took a walk.
While acting as a single predicate, each component part of the complex
predicate acts as a predicate in its own right, and contributes to the
argument structure. In (3), the particle away has a transitivising effect
(compare (3’)), and in (4), a nominalised intransitive verb (see (4’)) occurs in
a transitive structure.
(3)
(3’)
(4)
(4’)
He slept the afternoon away. (VPC)
He slept (*the afternoon).
He had a sleep. (LVC)
He slept.
The complex predicate in (3) is transitive, the internal argument
introduced by the particle, but the complex predicate in (4) is strictly
speaking intransitive: it licenses an external argument only. The deverbal
nominal appears to be predicate and argument at the same time, however,
as shown by the fact that the deverbal nominal can be the subject of a
passive, as indicated in (5) (see also Mohanan 2006:470).
(5)
A short sleep was had.
If VPCs and LVCs are both complex predicates, these apparent
differences in argument structure have to be accounted for. The main
research question I will address is given in (6).
(6)
What do the valency properties of the component parts of LVCs
and VPCs reveal about the synchronic and diachronic status of
these component parts and of the entire complex predicate?
70
In order to answer this question, I examine corpus data from Modern
English (1500-1900) (The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpora, Kroch et al. 2004
and Kroch et al. 2010) and Present-Day English (1900-present) (The British
National Corpus, BNC).
I then provide a unified account of both types of complex predicate in
terms of Ramchand’s (2008) split vP analysis, in which the verbal domain is
decomposed into three subevent projections: INIT(iation)P, PROC(ess)P, and
RES(ult)P. The maximal decomposition is presented in (7).
(7)
[initP init [procP proc [resP res XPrheme]]]
Particles (VPCs) and deverbal nominals (LVCs) lexicalise the Rheme,
which is part of the description of the predicate (see Pantcheva 2009). In
the analysis I propose, particles head a PP and may introduce an argument
(see Ramchand and Svenonius 2002). Deverbal nominals are ambiguous
between predicate and argument. I will argue that particles are more
grammaticalised than deverbal nominals, and therefore that VPCs are more
grammaticalised than LVCs.
Kroch, Anthony, Beatrice Santorini, and Ariel Diertani. 2004. The Penn-Helsinki
Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English. Online: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/histcorpora/PPCEME-RELEASE-2/index.html.
Kroch, Anthony, Beatrice Santorini, and Ariel Diertani. 2010. The Penn Parsed Corpus
of Modern British English. Online:
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/PPCMBE-RELEASE-1/index.html.
Mohanan, Tara. 2006. Grammatical verbs (with special reference to light verbs). The
Blackwell Companion to Syntax ed. by Martin Everaert & Henk van Riemsdijk,
vol. II, 459-492. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing.
Pantcheva, Marina. 2009. First phase syntax of persian complex predicates:
Argument structure and telicity. Journal of South Asian Linguistics 2:1.53-72.
Ramchand, Gillian. 2008. Verb meaning and the lexicon: A first phase syntax.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ramchand, Gillian, and Peter Svenonius. 2002. The lexical syntax and lexical
semantics of the verb-particle construction. Proceedings of the West Coast
Conference on Formal Linguistics, ed. by Line Mikkelsen and Christopher Potts,
387-400. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
71
Why Scotsmen will drown and shall not be saved:
On the development of will and shall in Older Scots
Christine Elsweiler
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Keywords: Older Scots, modal verbs, will, shall, future reference
Present-day Scots and British Standard English share the core modal verbs
can, must, may, will and shall. Although, formally, these modals are very
similar in both varieties, in Scots they are used differently from Standard
English (cf. Miller 1993 and Beal 1997). According to the prescriptive
st
tradition, in Standard English shall is used in the 1 person to denote mere
nd
rd
future. In the 2 and 3 person will is required. In Scots, will is used in the
st
1 person without expressing volition. Shall, on the other hand, expresses
nd
rd
determination in the 2 and 3 person (cf. SND, s.v. will).
Whereas the history of the modal verbs is well documented for English
(e.g. Fischer 2007, Gotti et al. 2002, Warner 1993), to date, a description of
the historical development of the modal verbs in Scots is still wanting,
th
although as early as the 18 century Scottish writers such as Beattie (1797)
provided lists of Scotticisms, which included, among others, the diverging
use of will in Scots. Studies of modal verbs in both Older and Modern Scots
are few and far between (e.g. Dossena 2003, Brown & Miller 1975).
This paper investigates the origin of the deviating distribution of will
and shall in Scots. It aims to provide a descriptive account of the semantic
th
th
development of will and shall from the 14 to the 18 century based on a
corpus study using the Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots database (1380–
1500), the Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots (1450–1700) and the Corpus of
Scottish Correspondence (1500–1715). The study analyses the distribution
of the modal meanings of will and shall with a particular focus on
grammatical person and time reference across different genres and dialect
th
th
areas. In the 14 through to the 16 centuries the grammatical person in
which will and shall are used mainly depends on the genre and does not yet
show the present-day distribution. As concerns tense and modality, the
th
th
deontic uses of will and shall prevail in the 14 and 15 centuries, in
particular in regulative texts. Epistemic uses are typical of other genres,
such as biblical texts. There are also several examples where will and shall
are used interchangeably, without any apparent difference in modal
meaning. Such cases could be especially interesting as a source of incipient
change. Generally, shall and will have future reference with modal
72
overtones. Mere future reference predominantly features in dependent
clauses, particularly in relative clauses.
Beal, Joan. 1997. “Syntax and Morphology”. Charles Jones. ed. The Edinburgh History
of the Scots Language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 335-377.
Beattie, James. 1797. Scoticisms, arranged in alphabetical order, designed to correct
improprieties of speech and writing. Edinburgh: printed for the booksellers, 2930.
Brown, Keith and Jim Miller. 1975. “Modal verbs in Scottish English”. Work in Progress
8. Edinburgh: Department of Linguistics, University of Edinburgh, 99-114.
Dossena, Marina. 2003. “Hedging in Late Middle English, Older Scots and Early
Modern English: The Case of SHOULD and WOULD”. Hart, David. ed. English
Modality in Context: Diachronic Perspectives. Bern: Peter Lang, 197-222.
Fischer, Olga. 2007. Morphosyntactic Change. Functional and Formal Perspectives.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 159-258.
Gotti, Maurizio et al. 2002. Variation in Central Modals. A Repertoire of Forms and
Types of Usage in Middle English and Early Modern English. Bern: Peter Lang.
Miller, Jim. 1993. “The Grammar of Scottish English”. J. Milroy and L. Milroy. eds. Real
English: The Grammar of English Dialects in the British Isles. Harlow: London, 99138.
SND = Grant, William and David Murison. eds. 1941-76. The Scottish national
dictionary designed partly on regional lines and partly on historical principles,
and containing all the Scottish words known to be in use or to have been in use
since c. 1700. Edinburgh: Scottish National Dictionary Association.
Warner, Andrew. 1993. English Auxiliaries: Structure and History. Cambridge: CUP.
Because her Majesty said...:
Agency, power and reported speech in Early Modern correspondence
Mel Evans
University of Birmingham
Keywords: reported discourse, Early Modern English, correspondence,
pragmatics, stylistics
Following Leech and Short’s ([1981] 2007) influential formal framework for
literary prose, the study of reported discourse in English has received
increasingly nuanced examinations of the formal and functional dimensions
of the quoted utterance. Analyses of witness statements (e.g. Matoesian
2000) and conversational narratives (e.g. Johansen 2011) have illustrated
the significant pragmatic force of reported speech, which can manipulate
the perception of agency and attitude of both the original speaker and the
73
reporter. Relatedly, studies of literary genres have demonstrated the
diverse narrative effects of the conventionalised formal modes, and the
degree of artifice and idealisation bound-up with representations of
fictional speech (e.g. Thomas 2012). Yet questions remain about the
development of reported speech in historical varieties English, particularly
in terms of the (bi-directional) relationship between form and function.
Moore’s (2011) study of Middle English suggests that modern concepts of
authenticity, verisimilitude, and clear, bounded categories were at a
nascent stage throughout the 15th and early 16th century, with a more
fluid and variable practice identified across, and between, literary and nonliterary genres. The subsequent stages of the development of reported
speech in English thus warrant attention, in order to identify how the
formal and functional dimensions of modern reported speech became
established in written formats.
The present paper reports early findings of an investigation into the
distribution, forms and function of reported speech in Early Modern
correspondence, a genre conventionally situated towards the ‘spoken’ end
of the spoken-written continuum, and one that, to my knowledge, has not
been systematically studied in regards to reported discourse. Combining
corpus-based and qualitative analytic techniques, I analyse a range of
political and personal letters from CEEC and self-compiled corpora to
explore how the demands of information exchange, material constraints,
and other contextual elements influence the forms and possible functions
of reported discourse for sixteenth-century letter writers. In particular, I
consider how interpersonal factors, such as power, social distance, agency
and authenticity inform, or reflect, the selection and presentation of
reported speech. The original data provides a means to investigate the
hypothesis that the functions of reported speech required for
correspondence may have played a significant role in the development of
the formal characteristics present in later periods of English.
Johansen, M. 2011. ‘Agency and responsibility in reported speech’ Journal of
Pragmatics 43, 2845-2860.
Leech, G. and M. Short. 2007. Style in Fiction 2nd Edition. Harlow: Pearson Education
Limited.
Matoesian, G. 2000. ‘Intertextual authority in reported speech: production media in
the Kennedy Smith rape trial’, Journal of Pragmatics, 879-914.
Moore, C. 2011. Quoting Speech in Early English Cambridge: CUP
Thomas, B. 2012. Fictional Dialogue: speech and conversation in the modern and
postmodern novel Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press.
74
The spread of (in-)definiteness marking in Early English:
Reconstructing category emergence in the lab
Olga Feher, Kenny Smith, Nikolaus Ritt & Elnora Ten Wolde
University of Edinburgh - University of Vienna
Our paper deals with article emergence in Early English, focussing on the
spread of grammars in which first the definiteness (cf. McColl Millar 2000,
Sommerer 2012)and later the indefiniteness (cf. Rissanen 1967) of NP
reference was obligatorily marked (with the and a(n) as default markers).
We address the specific question why the emerging grammars with
obligatory (in-)definiteness marking managed to spread among speakers for
whom it must – in early phases – still have been optional.
On the basis of Accommodation Theory (e.g. Auer & Hinskens 2005,
Coupland 2010, Trudgill 1986), we hypothesize that speakers with optional
(in-)definiteness marking would have found it easier to accommodate to
speakers with categorical rules, because they merely had to increase their
usage of a grammatically viable option, while speakers with categorical
rules would have had to violate their grammars and might have been
insensitive to the finer pragmatic distinctions governing optional
determiner use. Therefore, speech produced in communication between
speakers with different grammars would have converged on patterns
reflecting categorical (in-)definiteness marking rules, so that these rules
would have inevitably spread.
We tested our proposal through a communication game with a
miniature language designed for this purpose (for experimental methods in
the study of cultural language evolution see e.g. Kirby, Cornish & Smith
2008). The language allowed the construction of simple Verb-Subject
sentences describing movement types (e.g. boingla for jumping) made by
either one or two animals (e.g. hoppo ‘frog’). While plurality was invariably
signalled by post-nominal particles (e.g. wib), singular marking (by different
particles, e.g. dak) was obligatory in one ‘variety’ and optional in the other.
As the absence of plural marking implied singular, explicit singular marking
was also redundant. In the communication game, participants trained on
obligatory singular marking were matched with participants trained on
optional marking. In each trial, one participant described a scene, and the
other had to identify it among a set of different pictures. A number of such
trials were played, with roles switching after each trial. This setup allowed
us to test the prediction inherent in our account of article emergence,
namely that accommodation would select obligatory rather than optional
category marking.
75
In our presentation, we explain our hypothesis, report the results of our
study, and discuss how experiments involving artificial languages can help
to test hypotheses actual changes like English article emergence.
Auer, Peter & Frans Hinskens. 2005. The Role of Interpersonal Accommodation in a
Theory of Language Change. In Peter Auer, Frans Hinskens & Paul Kerswill (eds.),
Dialect Change: Convergence and Divergence in European Languages, 335–357.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Coupland, Nikolas. 2010. Accomodation theory. In Jürgen Jaspers, Jef Verschueren &
Jan-Ola Östman (eds.), Society and language use, 21–27. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Kirby, Simon, Cornish, Hannah & Kenny Smith. 2008. Cumulative cultural evolution in
the laboratory: an experimental approach to the origins of structure in human
language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 105, 1068110686
McColl Millar, Robert. 2000. Some suggestions for explaining the origin and
development of the definite article in English”. In Olga Fischer, Annette
Rosenbach & Dieter Stein (eds.). Pathways of Change: Grammaticalization in
English. 275-310. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Rissanen, Matti. 1967. The uses of “one” in Old and Early Middle English. Helsinki:
Societé Néophilologique.
Sommerer, Lotte. 2012. Investigating the emergence of the definite article in Old
English: About categorization, gradualness and constructions. Folia Linguistica
Historica 33. 175–213.
Trudgill, Peter. 1986. Dialects in contact. Oxford: Blackwell.
English morphosyntax from the northern perspective: The resilience of
the Northern Subject Rule
Julia Fernández-Cuesta
Universidad de Sevilla
Keywords: Northern Subject Rule, Northern English, standardisation,
supralocalisation, historical sociolinguistics
This paper addresses the origin and diffusion of one of the most intriguing
features of varieties of northern British English, the Northern Subject Rule,
a syntactic pattern of agreement based on type of subject and adjacency
(proximity to the verb) rather than on person and number. In these
varieties verbal -s was the sole marker of the present indicative, except
when a personal pronoun subject was adjacent to the verb, in which case
the ending was zero (or the reduced ending) in all persons, except in the
second and third person singular, which always had -s. Although it has been
76
traditionally recognised as one of the most characteristic features of
Northern Middle English and Older Scots, the NSR is first attested in Old
Northumbrian (Cole 2012) and persisted as a low-frequency variant in Early
Modern English, and has been attested in varieties of Present-day northern
English (Beal and Corrigan 2000, Buchstaller et al. 2013).
Analysis of the distribution of the NSR in a corpus of wills and
inventories reveals that the syntactic pattern at the core of the rule was
one of the most resilient features of early Modern Northern English. Data
show that the NSR survived its original surface morphology in the North,
with local -s competing with supralocal -th throughout the 16th century, to
the extent that in texts written by members of the higher social ranks the
local suffix almost completely replaced the supralocal one. The results of
my analysis show that the resilience of the NSR in Early Modern English was
clearly conditioned by sociolinguistic factors, which also help to explain its
trajectory and final demise.
A further aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the presence of the
NSR in southern varieties of English, as is the case with other original
northern features such as present indicative -s and the plural forms of the
personal pronouns, can be explained as a result of diffusion at a time when
mobility and popular travel ‘lent shape to some of the definitive
transformations of the era.’ (McRae 2009: 7)
Beal, Joan & Karen Corrigan. 2000. ‘Comparing the present with the past to predict
the future for Tyneside English.’ Newcastle and Durham Working Papers in
Linguistics 6, 13-30.
Buchstaller, Isabelle, Karen Corrigan, Anders Holmberg, Patrick Honeybone & Warren
Maguire. 2013. ‘Investigating convergence in morphosyntactic and phonological
variability: A case study in 2 localities.’ Journal of English Linguistics 17(1). 85128.
McRae, Andrew. 2009. Literature and Domestic Travel in Early Modern England..
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
77
Contingent polysemy and discursive thresholds: Toward a sociohistorical
framework for semantic change
Susan Fitzmaurice
University of Sheffield
Keywords: Late Modern English, semantic change, sociohistorical
semantics, polysemy, discursive threshold.
Semantic change has long been understood as a set of processes that shape
the complexity of the lexicon within a particular set of situations and
contexts; that is, semantic change depends on the (social) conditions of
language use (e.g. Ullmann, 1962). What is more difficult, however, is to
yoke together the stages and types of change to the different material
circumstances that appear to be critical to change. In this paper, I situate
Traugott & Dasher’s (2002) Invited Inference Theory of Semantic Change
(IITSC) model of pragmatic and semantic change within a social framework
that attends to the cultural and discursive conditions that may be criterial
in change. I discuss the role of the ‘discursive threshold’ (Whitlock, 2000;
Pilosoff, 2012) in triggering change. I introduce the notion of ‘contingent
polysemy’ (the meanings of a word have different weight and relevance to
different speakers at the same time depending upon factors such as age,
education, gender, experience and socioeconomic and other social
attributes).
In order to illustrate the framework and test its efficacy, I examine the
historical polysemies in the vocabulary used to treat race in the heyday of
British colonialism, namely the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I
examine in particular the role of catastrophic events such as wars and key
political changes such as decolonisation and independence in shaping
meanings and promoting particular uses of words such as ‘native’ and
‘colonial’. This case study affords careful scrutiny of the social factors that
condition the focussing of particular meanings for particular groups of
speakers in a particular historical moment and how those meanings vary.
Concentrating on the history of the lexicon of British colonial administration
in late modern English, I show how its polysemy may be understood in
terms of the social and material circumstances of speakers operating in
different settings with different ideological and cultural contexts within the
same period. I also identify the moments at which Britain’s colonies
become independent as key discursive thresholds that trigger semantic
change. Accordingly, I will demonstrate how the history of meaning can
78
usefully be grounded in social and cultural change in general as well as in
terms of key historical events in a principled way.
Pilosoff, Rory. 2012. The Unbearable Whiteness of Being: Farmers’ Voices from
Zimbabwe. Harare: Weaver Press.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs & Richard B. Dasher. 2002. Regularity in Semantic Change.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ullmann, Stephen. 1962. Semantics: An Introduction to the Science of Meaning.
London: Blackwell.
Whitlock, Gillian. 2000. The Intimate Empire: Reading Women’s Autobiography.
London: Cassell.
All for one and one for all: The formation, evolution and functions of
Modern English ing-clauses
Lauren Fonteyn & Nikki van de Pol
KU Leuven
Keywords: diachronic corpus linguistics; Modern English; adverbial
subordinate clauses; non-finites with -ing; verbal gerunds; free adjuncts;
absolute constructions; conceptual networks; cognitive complexity
This paper provides an overview of the diachronic evolution of three nonfinite clauses in –ing in Modern English (1500-1914): the (verbal) gerund
(VG) (1), the free adjunct (FA) (2) and the absolute (AC) (3):
(1)
(2)
(3)
On beaching the boat on the sand, the lug-sail was taken down.
(PPCMBE, 1900)
Observing that he saw I was looking after him, I turned about and
followed him. (OBC, 1818)
The resistance of the air having been avoided, (…) all fall exactly in
the same time. (PPCMBE, 1859)
Based on detailed analysis of a dataset drawn from the PENN parsed
corpora (5000 ACs, 400 VGs, 400 FAs), we will argue that throughout the
Modern English period, these constructions came to be encapsulated in a
single conceptual network of backgrounding strategies.
We first consider the formation of the network. Initially, VGs occurred
with a limited set of prepositions in determinerless contexts and mainly
profiled generic or nonspecific indefinite events (4) (Fanego 2004; De Smet
2008). In Modern English, however, two important developments occurred.
79
The first involved the creation of a formal continuum (a) from VG to AC
when VGs started occurring with possessive ‘subjectoids’ (Huddleston and
Pullum 2002) and later also common case NPs (Fanego 2004) and (b) from
VG to FA when VGs started allowing controlled readings and combining
with prepositions which can also function as conjuctions (e.g. after, before,
etc.). Secondly, the VGs most dominant function became that of integrating
a specific event serving as a backgrounded adverbial into a foregrounded
event (5):
(4)
(5)
The remedie of this, doth not stand onelie, in making good
common laws for the hole Realme, but also (…) in obseruing
priuate discipline euerie man carefullie in his own house.
(PPCEME, 1563–8)
After being ready [VG], we took coach; and being very sleepy[FA],
drouzed most part of the way to Gravesend. (PPCEME, 1666-67)
This development caused a conceptual split between the VG in
subject/object use and the one in adverbial use (Houston 1989). The latter,
it is suggested, became part of a conceptual network with ACs, which had a
backgrounding function, and with FAs, which developed such a function in
Modern English (Killie & Swan 2009).
The second part of the study focusses on the interaction between
adverbial VGs, FAs and ACs. Once the network was established, the
constructions in it interacted and shifts in terms of the uses that they
preferred can be observed: While FAs and VGs developed a function closer
to that of core adverbials (5), the AC increasingly expressed quasicoordinate elaboration meanings (6) (van de Pol 2013):
(6)
This lady was in a gown …, and the skirt falling to her feet.
(PPCMBE, 1718)
It is argued that the interplay between factors such as cognitive complexity
and ease of processing (Rohdenburg 2009), on the one hand, and an
increasing inclination towards densification (Leech et al. 2009), on the
other, played a key role in determining which functions were adopted by
which constructions.
Finally, it is suggested that the formation of this network resulted in
the three -ing constructions strengthening each other’s place in the
language inventory. The decline of FAs and ACs in other Germanic
languages may in that sense be attributed to their lack of such network.
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De Smet, Hendrik. 2008. ‘Functional motivations in the development of nominal and
verbal gerunds in Middle and Early Modern English.’ English Language and
Linguistics 12.1. 55–102.
Fanego, Teresa. 2004. ‘On reanalysis and actualization in syntactic change: the rise
and development of English verbal gerunds’. Diachronica 21.1: 5-55.
Houston, Ann. 1989. ‘The English gerund: syntactic change and discourse function.’ In
Ralph W. Fasold and Deborah Schiffrin (eds.). Language change and variation.
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 173-196.
Huddleston, Rodney and Geoffrey Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the
English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Killie, K. & T. Swan. 2009. ‘The grammaticalization and subjectification of adverbial –
ing clauses (converb clauses) in English’. English Language and Linguistics 13.
337-363.
Leech, Geoffrey, Hundt, Marianne, Mair, Christian and Smith, Nicholas. 2009. Change
in Contemporary English: A grammatical study. Studies in English language.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
van de Pol, Nikki. 2013. ‘In absolute detail: the development of English absolute
constructions from adverbial to additional-context marker.’ presented at the
34th ICAME conference. Santiago de Compostella, 22-26 May.
Rohdenburg, Günter. 2009. ‘Cognitive complexity and increased grammatical
explicitness in English.’ Cognitive Linguistics 7.2. 149-182.
Does morphological simplification affect word-order in Early Middle
English? The case of labile verbs
Luisa García García
University of Seville
A substantial number of Old English causative pairs of the type lie/lay
undergoes a process of morphological syncretism in early English, whereby
both the intransitive and the causative sense come to be expressed by the
same invariable form; see e.g. melt intransitive in 1) The ice melts and
causative in 2) The sun melts the ice. García García 2012 puts forth the
hypothesis that morphological syncretism in the expression of valency (i.e.
intransitive and transitive-causative usages in a single form) may have a
connection with syntactic parameters, specifically the overt expression of
all verbal arguments and a fixed or at least consistent word order, in which
a certain element order is preferred to others. To verify this hypothesis a
comparison between the syntactic behaviour of labile verbs of the melttype and non-labile verbs (transitive- or intransitive-only verbs) has to be
carried out. Specifically, the relative position of subject, verb and object in
constructions with labile verbs used in a transitive sense has to be
81
compared with that in constructions with transitive-only verbs. Further, the
position of subject and verb in clauses with labile verbs used in an
intransitive sense should be contrasted to those using intransitive-only
verbs. Finally, the overt expression of arguments in labile and non-labile
verbs has to be quantified. In a previous paper in collaboration with Esaúl
Ruiz Narbona (García García & Ruiz Narbona forthcoming), a few early
Middle English verbs were analysed with respect to the parameters just
mentioned. In the present study, I intend to widen the scope of the analysis
to achieve more conclusive results. Both the number of verbs and the
conditioning factors under consideration will be increased. All labile verbs
originating from a former causative opposition present in LAEME (A
Linguistic Atlas of Early Medieval English) will be analyzed, and their
syntactic behaviour compared to transitive-only and intransitive-only verbs
with a similar number of occurrences. The conditioning factors that will be
considered in the present paper are clause type, subject type, object type
and constituent length.
García García, Luisa 2012. “Morphological Causatives in Old English: The Quest for a
Vanishing Formation”. Transactions of the Philological Society 110:1, 122-148.
García García, Luisa & Ruiz Narbona, Esaúl. “Labile verbs and word order in early
Middle English: an initial study”. Forthcoming in Selim.
LAEME: A Linguistic Atlas of Early Medieval English:
http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laeme/front_page/about_laeme.html
The literary dialect features of the linguistic South 1500-1900
Maria F. Garcia-Bermejo Giner, Javier Ruano García & Maria Pilar Sánchez
Garcia
University of Salamanca
Keywords: English Dialectology, Southern English Dialects, English Dialect
Literature, English Literary Dialects
The linguistic South has traditionally received less attention either from
researchers or from literary authors. South Western and Kentish Engish,
initially associated with country bumpkins and uncouth characters in the
Early Modern Period, were the varieties most frequently represented or
studied. In later centuries this trend continued although other southern
dialects became the focus of writers and researchers alike. The main reason
for this may have been its apparent similarity with Standard English.
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Compared with the North, the Southern sources for The English Dialect
Dictionary (1898-1905) seem scanty: c 428 items for the 11 (Survey of
English Dialects) southern counties, against c 808 items for the six northern
counties In recent years researchers are beginning to remedy this (For
instance, Liselotte 2004, Melchers 2010, Wagner 2013 or Wakelyn 1988).
The aim of this paper is a description of the main dialect features
(phonological as well as morphosyntactical) selected by writers in their
literary representation of the eleven southern counties in the Early and
Late Modern English periods. A comparison will be made with
contemporary philological literature. Research will be based on The English
Dialect Dictionary primary sources as well as on those now made available
in The Salamanca Corpus (2011-)
Anderwald, Liselotte. 2004. “The varieties of English spoken in the South-East of
England: Morphology and syntax”. In B. Kortmann et al. (eds.) A Handbook of
Varieties of English: Morphology and Syntax. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 175-95.
García-Bermejo Giner, María F. 2013. “The Southern Dialect in Thomas Churchyard’s
The Contention bettwixte Churchyearde and Camell (1552)”. Hans Sauer and
Gaby Waxenberger. eds. Recording English, Researching English, Transforming
English. Frankfurt-am-Main: 245-263.
García-Bermejo Giner, María F. et al. (eds.) 2011—. The Salamanca Corpus: A Digital
Archive of English Dialect Texts. Salamanca. Available at:
http://salamancacorpus.usal.es/SC/ index.html
Melchers, Gunnel. 2010. “Southern English in Writing”. Raymond Hickey. ed.
Varieties of English in Writing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins: 81-98.
Orton, Harold et al. 1967-71. Survey of English Dialects: The Southern Counties.
Leeds: E. J. Arnold & Son.
Wagner, Susanne. 2013. “South West English”. In T. Hopkins and J. McKenny (eds.)
World Englishes I - The British Isles. London: Bloomsbury Academics, 167-88.
Wakelyn, Martyn F. 1988. “The Phonology of South-Western English, 1500-1700.”
Jaceck Fisiak. ed. Historical Dialectology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter: 609-644.
Wright, Joseph (ed.) 1898-1905. English Dialect Dictionary. 6 vols. Oxford: Henry
Frowde.
Grammaticalization of markers of ingressive aspect in the English and
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Scots of the late 14 and the 15 centuries
Wojciech Gardela
University of Edinburgh
According to Brinton (1988), ginnan, fōn and tacan begin to function as
markers of ingressive aspect in Old English, whereas commencen (comsen,
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becomsen), prōcēden, fallen, gōn, grouen, setten, brēken and bresten
assume this function in Middle English only. However, her study does not
take into consideration dialectal data, especially as far as the
grammaticalization of markers of ingressive aspect is concerned in the
th
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English and Scots of the late 14 and the 15 centuries. Furthermore,
existing studies of the category of aspect in the English and Scots of the late
th
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14 and the 15 centuries are inadequate and incomplete (Devitt, 1989;
Görlach, 2002; King, 1997; Macafee, 1992-93; Moessner, 1997); they did
not have access to the kinds of corpora now available, and they did not deal
with this topic from the point of view of the grammaticalization theory.
King (1997: 158) states, “Older Scots was affected by the same sort of
fundamental linguistic restructuring undergone by English in its transition
from Old to Middle and Early Modern English.” Furthermore, King (1997:
158) adds, “the Scots and/or Northern linguistic input often differed from
that of Midland, Southern and South-eastern dialects of early Middle
English”, thus resulting in the emergence of features specifically
characteristic of Scots. While it is safe to assume that markers of ingressive
aspect found in Middle English also operated in Older Scots, the following
questions need to be addressed: a) what items serve grammatical function
as markers of ingressive aspect? b) in what ways these markers of
ingressive aspect constitute a case of grammaticalization which fills a gap in
the continuum from lexical to grammatical.
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I use late 14 and the 15 century English and Scots texts from the
following corpora to tackle the above research questions: a) the Edinburgh
Corpus of Older Scots; b) the Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots; c) the Helsinki
Corpus of English Texts; and d) the Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English
(sampler).
Brinton, L. (1988). The Development of English Aspectual Systems: Aspectualizers and
Post-verbal Particles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Devitt, A. J. (1989). Standardizing Written English: Diffusion in the Case of Scotland
1520-1659. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Görlach, M. (2002). A Textual History of Scots. Heidelberg: Winter.
King, A. (1997). ‘The inflectional morphology of Older Scots’ in C. Jones (ed.). The
Edinburgh History of the Scots Language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Macafee, C. (1992-93). A Short Grammar of Older Scots. Scottish Language, 11-12,
10-36.
Moessner, L. (1997). ‘The Syntax of Older Scots’ in C. Jones (ed.). The Edinburgh
History of the Scots Language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
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Towards the digitisation of the Lady Mary Hamilton archive (letters and
diaries)
Anne Gardner, Marianne Hundt & Moira Kindlimann
University of Zurich
Keywords: Late Modern English, XML annotation and digital editing, corpus
compilation
Held at The John Rylands University Library, Manchester, the Lady Mary
Hamilton Archive is a valuable, but still largely untapped resource for
linguistic, cultural and literary studies focussing on the late eighteenth
century. Lady Mary Hamilton (1756–1816) has been called the ‘female
Pepys’: her diaries, mostly written between 1782 and 1785, document her
daily life and her meetings with intellectual figures of the time which she
counted among her friends and acquaintances, for instance Sir Joshua
Reynolds, Horace Walpole, as well as members of the Bluestocking circle
which included Francis Burney, Mary Delaney, Eva Maria Garrick, Elizabeth
Montague and Elizabeth Vesey. The Archive also contains letters written to
Lady Mary Hamilton by her family and other members of her social
network.
With the exception of extracts from selected diaries and letters which
appear in Anson and Anson (1925), the material has not yet been edited.
The aim of this project is to prepare a digital edition of materials from the
Lady Mary Hamilton Archive with TEI-conformant XML mark-up in which
both a facsimile of the manuscripts and their transliterations (preserving
the original spelling, punctuation and layout) will be displayed. The corpus
will be annotated to facilitate searches for places, persons and literary
works, which will be of interest to literary and cultural-historical studies; it
will also assist searches for linguistic features which differ from Present-Day
English usage by providing normalised spellings in the annotation as, for
instance, in the case of the (non-)capitalisation of words such as english,
Breakfast and Garden, the occurrence of an apostrophe in the past tense or
past participle of regular verbs (e.g. dress’d, join’d, walk’d), the non-use of
apostrophes in genitive constructions as in a great favourite of her fathers,
or the missing genitive in Mrs. W. Maid.
Drawing on corpora such as ARCHER 3.2 and CLMET3.0 and letters
written to Lady Mary Hamilton by members of her social network, we will
provide case studies to illustrate the usefulness of the Lady Mary Hamilton
materials for the study of language change in the Late Modern Period.
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Anson, Elizabeth, and Anson, Florence, eds. 1925. Mary Hamilton, Afterwards Mrs.
John Dickenson, at Court and At Home. From Letters and Diaries, 1756 to 1816.
London: John Murray.
ARCHER 3.2 = A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers. 2013. 1990–
1993/2002/2007/2010/2013. Originally compiled under the supervision of
Douglas Biber and Edward Finegan at Northern Arizona University and University
of Southern California; modified and expanded by subsequent members of a
consortium of universities. Current member universities are Bamberg, Freiburg,
Heidelberg, Helsinki, Lancaster, Leicester, Manchester, Michigan, Northern
Arizona, Santiago de Compostela, Southern California, Trier, Uppsala, and Zurich.
CLMET3.0 = The Corpus of Late Modern English Texts, version 3.0. 2011. Compiled by
Hendrik De Smet, Hans-Jürgen Diller and Jukka Tyrkkö.
Subordinate clauses in selected Old English translations
Jerzy Gaszewski & Anna Cichosz
University of Lodz
Keywords: Old English syntax, subordinate clauses, verb-final order,
translated texts
Placing finite verbs in the clause-final position in subordinate clauses is one
of the basic and characteristic features of OE syntax (e.g. Mitchell 1985: II,
967). This is, however, no rigid rule but a tendency and other orders can be
found in the same general category of clauses (Traugott 1992: 170). Still,
verb-final order is seen as one of the signals of subordination in OE (Fischer
et al. 2000: 57).
Our paper investigates to what extent this general rule is followed by
selected OE texts which are translations. Firstly, are subordinate clauses
indeed predominantly verb-final in this somewhat problematic text type?
Furthermore, we check what other orders are used and how frequently. We
also pay attention to the properties of constituents following the finite verb
in the clauses not abiding by the verb-final rule. Syntactic variation in the
analysed material also stems from differences in the behaviour of particular
subtypes of subordinate clauses (cf. Suárez-Gómez 2008 and Fischer et al.
2000: 61) and differences between individual OE texts, which is also
investigated thoroughly. Last but not least, we analyse whether the
observed differences and peculiarities in our data are attributable to the
influence of the original Latin versions (cf. also criteria for “proper analysis
of word order” suggested by Liggins 1970, after Mitchell 1985: II, 959).
86
The results of our research will show how the abovementioned factors
influence element order in the analysed clauses, which of them are decisive
and under what circumstances. We analyse the material statistically, taking
into consideration the possible variables increasing or decreasing the
frequency of the verb-final order, including the element order of the
original Latin texts. In particular, patterns modelled on the original version
(potential calques) will be consistently differentiated from those that show
no such influence.
The analysed material comprises substantial portions of Ælfric’s
translation of the Book of Genesis, the Gospel of Luke from West Saxon
Gospels and Bede’s History. The texts have the form of a syntactically
annotated parallel corpus.
Fischer, Olga, Ans van Kemenade, Willem Koopman and Wim van der Wurff. 2000.
The Syntax of Early English. Cambridge: CUP.
Mitchell, Bruce. 1985. Old English Syntax. Vol. II Subordination, independent
elements and element order. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Suárez-Gómez, Cristina. 2008. “Do relative clauses in early English have their own
word order patterns?” Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense 16. 1529.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1992. “Syntax” In: Richard M. Hogg (ed.) The Cambridge
History of the English Language. Vol. I The beginnings to 1066. Cambridge: CUP.
168-289.
Syntactic dislocation in English congregational song between 1500 and
1900: A corpus-based study
Kirsten Gather
University of Cologne
Keywords: syntax, dislocation, corpus, diachronic, genre
(1)
O all you landes, the treasures of your joy,
In merry shout upon the Lord bestow:
Your service cheerfully on him imploy,
With triumph song into his presence goe.
(Mary Sidney Herbert 1599)
Already at first sight, this text looks like an English hymn. Why is that so?
Apart from the biblical topic and the regular metre, the rather
unexpected order of clause constituents also seems to be a significant
87
characteristic here. The verbs, for instance, are situated in clause-final
position (1a) where we would expect objects or adverbials (1b):
(1a) O all you landes, the treasures of your joy,
In merry shout upon the Lord bestow:
Your service cheerfully on him imploy,
With triumph song into his presence goe.
(1b) O all you landes, bestow the treasures of your joy
upon the Lord in merry shout:
Imploy your service cheerfully on him,
goe into his presence with triumph song.
In my corpus-based study, I look at these kinds of syntactic dislocation, i.e.
the deviation of obligatory clause constituents from their unmarked
positions in relation to subject and verb, in English congregational song
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from the 16 to the 19 century. Congregational song comprises all kinds
of metrical and rhymed poetry meant to be sung in church by a
congregation, usually as part of liturgical service. The most important
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subgenres are metrical psalmody (16 and 17 centuries) and hymnody
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(18 and 19 centuries). Hymns, as opposed to metrical psalms, are freely
authored poetry without any biblical model texts.
I will show that syntactic dislocation is indeed a significant feature of
congregational song. Apparently, the dislocation of clause constituents
depends essentially on constraints of metre and rhyme. In turn, these
constraints correlate with several syntactic factors, such as the position and
internal phrase structure of the dislocated constituent, so that two distinct
dislocation patterns emerge. The first pattern occurs predominantly in
metrical psalmody while the second pattern is mainly found in hymns.
Of course, the question arises whether syntactic dislocation is only
typical of congregational song. So in a final step, I will compare the results
obtained to secular poetry to show that the high dislocation frequencies
and the characteristic distribution of the two dislocation patterns are
indeed a unique feature of congregational song. Moreover, I will illustrate
why syntactic dislocation underlines the conservative nature of the genre
also in relation to religious prose (see Kohnen 2011, Kohnen et al. 2011).
Kohnen, Thomas. 2011. “Religious language in 17th-century England: progressive or
archaic?”. In: Frenk, Joachim und Lena Steveker (eds.). Anglistentag 2010.
Proceedings. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 279-287.
88
Kohnen, Thomas, Tanja Rütten and Ingvilt Marcoe. 2011. “Early Modern English
religious prose – a conservative register?”. In: Rayson, Paul, Sebastian Hoffmann
und Geoffrey Leech (eds.). Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English 6:
Methodological and Historical Dimensions of Corpus Linguistics. VARIENG
website: http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/journal/volumes/06/kohnen_et_al/.
Sidney Herbert, Mary, Countess of Pembroke, and Sir Philip Sidney. 1599. The
Psalmes of David translated into divers and sundry kinds of verse, more rare and
excellent for the Method and Varietie than ever hath been done in English. Begun
by the noble and learned Gent. Sir Philip Sidney, Knt. and finished by the right
honourable The Countess of Pembroke, his sister. London 1599.
On the relation between degree modifying and focusing adjective uses:
The case of sure and true
Lobke Ghesquière
KU Leuven
In recent years, quite a lot of research has been carried out into the
emphasizing uses of adjectives (Bolinger 1972), as in (1) and (2).
Emphasizers are characterized grammatically by their inability to be used in
predicative position or to be graded (e.g. *a favourite that is sure, *a very
sure favourite). Semantically, emphasizers do not describe distinct
properties of entities but convey speaker stance towards the referents.
(1)
(2)
Sun Valley Golden moments Chicken Kiev is now available in a
handy 4-pack: just right for storing in your freezer and a sure
family favourite. (WB)
‘He was a lovely man,’ Nancy recalls warmly, ‘a true gentleman.’
(WB)
A prenominal adjectival use that is only recently drawing linguistic attention
is the focusing use, as in (3) and (4) (Vandewinkel 2005, Vandewinkel &
Davidse 2008). Focusing adjectives do not reinforce semantic specifications
of the nominal description they are used with, but they delineate a specific
focus value in relation to alternative values.
(3)
(4)
The on-going recognition is the true reward for winning, not just
the golden gong I keep in a bank vault. (WB)
The true way and the sure way to friendship is through humilitybeing open to each other, accepting each other just as we are,
knowing each other. (WB)
89
Intriguingly, the few studies that mention focusing adjectives do not agree
on their function, classifying them either as a type of determining element
(Bolinger 1967, Adamson 2000) or degree modifier (Quirk et al. 1985,
Vandewinkel & Davidse 2008), and hypothesize they result from different
paths of change accordingly.
For this paper, I will carry out a diachronic and synchronic corpus study
of the prenominal adjectives true and sure, investigating the development
of their focusing uses in relation to descriptive and degree modifier uses
and secondary determiner uses. Descriptively, attention will go the finer
grammatical, collocational and semantic-pragmatic distinguishing features
of the different uses. The aim is to show that focusing adjectives serve a
function in their own right which has to be built into our understanding of
the English NP. Theoretically, the corpus study will allow reflection on the
functional structure of English NP, more specifically the status of
(inter)subjective meanings and scalarity across functional zones.
Adamson, S. 2000. A lovely little example: word order options and category shift in
the premodifying string. In Fischer et al. (eds.). Pathways of Change:
Grammaticalization in English. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 39-66.
Bolinger, D. 1967. Adjectives in English: Attribution and predication. Lingua 18: 1-34.
Bolinger, D. 1972. Degree words. The Hague: Mouton.
Quirk, R.; S. Greenbaum, G. Leech & J. Svartvik. 1985. A Grammar of Contemporary
English. London: Longman.
Vandewinkel, S. 2005. Attitudinal Adjectives and Category Shift in the Nominal
Group. MA Thesis. Linguistics Department. University of Leuven.
Vandewinkel, S. & K. Davidse. 2008. The interlocking paths of development to
emphasizer adjective pure. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 9. 255-287.
Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English (2nd edn.)
Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English
Corpus of Late Modern English Texts (extended version)
WordbanksOnline Corpus
90
Dyvers heynous sedicious and sclanderous Writinges: Adjective stacking in
the English NP
Victorina Gonzalez-Diaz
University of Liverpool
The combination of two or more adjectives in the NP premodifying string is
not uncommon in Present-day English (e.g. a nice new car, fat black cat).
However, adjective stacking does not seem to have been (fully) operative in
earlier stages of the language. Straddled modification (*golden vineyard
durable and firm), co-ordination (calm and blue sea) and postmodification
(*wife full true) were (more) frequent options until at least the end of the
ME period (Fischer 2000).
A number of concomitant morphosyntactic changes (e.g. loss of
inflections, increasingly fixed word order, development of a new
determiner system) have been mentioned in previous literature as key
factors in the change towards adjectival premodification, and suggestions
have also been put forward as to how these changes may have influenced
the rise of adjective stacking (Fischer 2006 Fischer and Van der Wurff 2006;
see also Raumolin-Brunberg 1991, 1993). Yet detailed quantitative and
qualitative information about how stacked modification developed in
English is needed.
Through a corpus-based study of NPs in the history of English (14001700), this paper begins to explore the issue. Preliminary analyses of the
PPCME2 and PPCME data: (a) confirm the role of adverbial submodification
(i.e. [[intensifier + adj] N]) in the analogical development of stacked
adjective combinations (Fischer 2006), and (b) suggest that the spread of
stacking at the expense of adjective co-ordination in the premodifying NP
string is influenced by a process of stylistic competition between the two
strategies. The data reflects a diachronic semantic narrowing of coordinated adjectives that makes them pragmatically similar to what
Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 561) define as ‘intensificatory tautology’
constructions (vid. examples from the corpus such as debauched and
dissolute son, true and lawful queen, principal and chief thing). This is
mirrored by a parallel increase in adjectives that enter stacked modification
at type (i.e. evaluative and descriptive) and token level.
More generally, the study contributes to a better understanding of the
diachronic ‘unfolding’ of the English NP structure (see Van de Velde 2009,
2011) and points at the importance of register and stylistic factors in the
process.
91
Fischer, O. (2000) “The position of the adjective in Old English”, in Bermúdez-Otero
et al. (eds.) Generative theory and corpus studies: A dialogue from 10 ICEHL,
Berlin: Mouton, pp. 153-181.
Fischer, O. (2006) “On the position of adjectives in Middle English”, English Language
and Linguistics, 10 (2), pp. 253-288.
Fischer, O. and W. Van der Wurff (2006) “Syntax”, in Hogg, R. and D. Denison (eds.) A
history of the English language, Cambridge: CUP, pp. 109-198.
Huddleston, R. and G. Pullum (2002) The Cambridge grammar of the English
language, Cambridge: CUP.
Raumolin-Brunberg, H. (1991) “The position of adjectival modifiers in Late Middle
English noun phrases”, in Fries, U. et al. (eds.) Creating and using English
language corpora, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 159-168.
Raumolin-Brunberg, H. (1993) “From Thomas More to present-day English: Noun
phrase stability and variability”, in Jucker, A. (ed.) The noun phrase in English. Its
structure and variability (Anglistik & Englishunterricht 49), Heidelberg: C.
Winter.
Van de Velde, F. (2009) “The emergence of modification patterns in the Dutch noun
phrase”, Linguistics 47(4), pp. 1021-1049.
Van de Velde, F. (2011)”Left-peripheral expansion of the English NP”, English
Language and Linguistics 15(2), pp. 387-415.
Late Modern English grammar writing and the aspectual restriction on the
progressive
Mariko Goto
Kyushu Institute of Technology, Iizuka
Keywords: progressive, aspectual restriction, standardization of English,
Late Modern English grammars, prescriptive grammars.
This paper explores why the progressive is aspectually restricted in presentday standard English, while it seems to have been aspect-neutral in earlier
English and still is in some present-day dialects. The paper first examines
grammars of the Late Modern period, focusing on Pickborn (1789) because
the restrictions on examples such as I am loving are not found in earlier
major grammars. In fact, the very sentence, I am loving, appears as an
illustration of the progressive in grammars in the period (e.g. Lowth: 1762:
56). Pickbourn mentions that Lowth’s use of the verb love for the form is
inappropriate and states that “we do not say, I am loving, I am fearing, I am
hating, I am approving, I am knowing; but we say, I love, I fear, I hate, I
approve, I know &c.”(Pickbourn: 1789: 81-82). The preface of Pickbourn’s
treatise suggests that the prescription was discerned and conceptualized
92
through his own research. Moreover, the prescriptive rule is elaborated on
the basis of his detailed description of the simple and progressive forms. No
earlier grammars elucidated them to the extent that Pickbourn did, but
later grammars, including Knowles (1796: 22, 59) and Angus (1839: 38,
150), evidently followed Pickbourn’s treatment of the two forms as well as
the restriction. According to Auer (2008: 59), Pickbourn was one of the
specialists on the English verb, and his treatise was highly evaluated by
reviewers. As many grammarians regarded the progressive and the simple
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forms largely as vague variants until the early 19 century, Pickbourn’s
studies on the two forms were seminal in nature.
In the second half of the paper, I discuss the relationship between the
standardization process of English and the restriction, taking into account
the social background behind grammar writing in the late modern English
period when the construction gained widespread currency in the written
record. In this period, the publication of grammars exploded to meet the
demands of social climbers who craved for linguistic norms, rules of syntax
and logical reasoning. The prescriptive rule was perfectly suited for the
purpose of using the simple and progressive forms, the most foundational
verbal structures of English, ‘correctly.’ Considering how grammar was
taught, the concomitant regulation and infiltration of the restriction in
English may not necessarily be the result of mere coincidence.
Angus, William (1839) English Grammar, Fifth Edition (First Published in 1825),
Glasgow: (Printed for) the Author.
Knowles, John (1796) The Principles of English Grammar with Critical Remarks and
Exercise of False Construction, London: (Printed for) the Author.
Lowth, Robert (1762) A Short Introduction to English Grammar; rpt. Menston: Scolar
Press. (1967)
Pickbourn, James (1789) A Dissertation on the English Verb; rpt. Menston: Scolar
Press. (1968)
Auer, Anita (2008) “Eighteenth-Century Grammars and Book Catalogues,” Grammars,
Grammarians and Grammar-Writing in Eighteenth-Century England,” ed. by
Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 57100.
93
Strong Class III verbs in time and space
Katrin Goundry
University of Glasgow
Keywords: strong verbs, strong-to-weak shift, dialectology, Middle English,
Late Modern English
Old English Class III verbs are often divided into two main sub-types,
depending on their ablaut pattern and stem structure (see Krygier 1994: 3233, 43-49). Type A includes stems ending in a nasal plus consonant (e.g.
drincan), while type B contains stems ending in a liquid-consonant cluster
(e.g. helpan). Their inflectional outcomes in the present-day English
standard are markedly different: most type-A verbs have remained strong
(e.g. drink/drank/drunk), whereas most type-B verbs have become weak
(e.g. help/helped). However, regional variants such as drinked and olp in
the English Dialect Dictionary indicate that their history is possibly more
variable and complex than their standard outcomes suggest.
Over the last decades, many scholars have examined the history of
Class III and other strong verb classes and accounted for the
preservation/loss of the strong inflection with factors such as the
functionality of the ablaut pattern, word structure, token/type frequency
and external contact (e.g. Wełna 1991; Krygier 1994; Branchaw 2010a-b).
However, except for the limited studies by Taylor (1994) and Görlach
(1994), their focus has been primarily on those forms contributing to the
Modern English standard.
By contrast, my paper investigates the strong/weak forms of historically
strong Class III verbs recorded in Middle English regional dialects. More
specifically, my aim is to shed light on the following questions:
1) To what extent do forms and developments vary in Middle English
dialects? Are the Middle English developments reflected in Late
Modern English dialects?
2) Is regional variation more pronounced in the paradigms of particular
verbs or sub-types?
3) What effect do the above factors (e.g. token/type frequency) have
on regional variation?
4) What evidence does the variation in regional dialects provide for the
origins and diffusion of the strong-to-weak shift?
94
My study offers both quantitative and qualitative analyses, drawing
data from three Middle English text corpora (A Linguistic Atlas of Early
Middle English, the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English and The
Middle English Grammar Corpus) and, as a reference point, The English
Dialect Dictionary.
I expect high-frequency verbs and sub-types to show less regional
variation than low-frequency ones. Moreover, I will use my findings to
reconsider Taylor’s suggestion that the strong-to-weak shift is more
advanced in the Northern and Eastern dialects of Middle English due to the
Scandinavian-English contact situation (1994: 149-56).
Branchaw, Sherrylyn E. 2010a. ‘Survival of the Strongest: Strong Verb Inflection from
Old to Modern English.’ In: Robert A. Cloutier, Anne Hamilton-Brehm and
William A. Kretzschmar, Jr. (eds.) Studies in the History of the English Language
V: Variation and Change in English Grammar and Lexicon: Contemporary
Approaches. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 87-109.
Branchaw, Sherrylyn E. 2010b. Survival of the Strongest: Strong Verbs in the History
of English. Unpublished thesis. Los Angeles: University of California. [available at
http://www.sbranchaw.com/home.html]
Bülbring, Karl D. 1889. Geschichte des Ablauts der starken Zeitwörter innerhalb des
Südenglischen. Strassburg: Trübner.
Görlach, Manfred. 1995 [1994]. ‘Morphological Standardization: the Strong Verbs in
Scots.’ In: New Studies in the History of English. Anglistische Forschungen (232).
Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, pp. 51-81.
Hanssen, Heinrich. 1906. Die Geschichte der starken eitw rter im Nordenglischen.
Kiel: L dtke & Martens.
Knopff, Paul. 1904. Darstellung der Ablautverhältnisse in der schottischen
Schriftsprache: mit Vergleichungen in bezug auf Abweichungen der anderen
mi elenglischen Dialekte. W rzburg: Memminger.
Krygier, Marcin. 1994. The Disintegration of the English Strong Verb System.
Bamberger Beiträge zur englischen Sprachwissenschaft (34). Frankfurt a. M.:
Peter Lang.
Long, Mary M. 1944. The English Strong Verb from Chaucer to Caxton. Menasha,
Wisconsin: George Banta Publishing Company.
Michelau, Erich. 1910. Der bertri starker Verba in die schwache Coniuga on im
Englischen. K nigsberg i. Pr.: Karg & Manneck.
Öfverberg, William. 1924. The Verbal Inflections of the East Midland Dialects in Early
Middle English. Lund: Håkan Ohlsson.
Price, Hereward T. 1910. A History of Ablaut in the Strong Verbs from Caxton to the
End of the Elizabethan Period. Bonn: Peter Hanstein.
Rettger, James F. 1934. The Development of Ablaut in the Strong Verbs of the East
Midland Dialects of Middle English. Philadelphia: Linguistic Society of America.
Studer-Joho, Nicole. 2012. Diffusion and Change in Early Middle English.
Methodological and Theoretical Implications from the LAEME Corpus of Tagged
Texts. Unpublished thesis. Zurich: University of Zurich.
95
Taylor, Ann. 1994. ‘Variation in Past Tense Formation in the History of English.’ In:
University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics. Philadelphia: Penn
Working papers in Linguistics, pp. 143-158.
Trudgill, Peter. 2010. ‘What really happened to Old English?’ In: Investigations in
Sociohistorical Linguistics: Stories of Colonisation and Contact. Cambridge, New
York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-35.
Wackerzapp, Adolph. 1890. Geschichte der Ablaute der starken Zeitwörter innerhalb
des Nordenglischen. Teil 1: Die Ablaute in den einzelnen Denkmälern. Münster:
E. C. Brunn.
Wełna, Jerzny. 1991. ‘The Strong-to-Weak Shift in English Verbs: A Reassessment.’
Kalbotyra, 42 (3), pp. 129-139.
A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, 1150-1325. Compiled by Margaret Laing.
Electronic text corpus with accompanying software, index of sources and
theoretical introduction (with Roger Lass).
[http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laeme1/laeme1.html] (Edinburgh: © 2008- The
University of Edinburgh)
Kroch, Anthony and Ann Taylor. 2000. Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English,
second edition. [http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/PPCME2-RELEASE3/index.html]
“MEG-C” = The Middle English Grammar Corpus, version 2011.1, compiled by Merja
Stenroos, Martti Mäkinen, Simon Horobin and Jeremy Smith, March 2011,
University of Stavanger.
<http://www.uis.no/research/culture/ the_middle_english_grammar_project/>.
Accessed: 1 April 2011.
Wright, Joseph. 1898-1905. The English Dialect Dictionary. Being the complete
vocabulary of all dialect words still in use, or known to have been in use during
the last two hundred years. London: Frowde.
The choice of relative pronouns in the writings of Jonathan
Edwards
Maciej Grabski
University of Lodz
Keywords: Early American English, Edwards, relative clauses
The strategies of relativization in English have attracted considerable
interest from a diachronic perspective. For instance, Romaine (1982) and
Devitt (1989) analyzed the distributional patterns of relativizers across
different genres and registers of Middle Scotts. In a similar vein, Rissanen
(1984) gave an orderly account of the behavior of relative pronouns in early
th
American English. Working on a multigenre corpus of mid and late 17
96
century, New England-based texts, he observed that the following factors,
among others, informed the choice of the relativizer: the tightness of the
link between the relative pronoun and its antecedent, the antecedent’s
type, and, superimposing on these, different degrees of formality and
relation to spoken idiom of the texts analyzed. In short, Rissanen’s data
th
suggest that toward the end of the 17 century, the gradual disfavoring of
which in formal style restrictive relative clauses took place, resulting in the
rise of that and who in the aforementioned context, while the more
informal texts appear to have retained a rather stable and higher rate of
which.
This paper draws on, and is intended to complement, Rissanen’s
findings, analyzing the selected writings of Jonathan Edwards, a prominent
th
figure of the American Puritan movement of the first half of the 18
century. The study is limited to restrictive clauses and aims at checking if
the distribution of realativizers in Edwards is genre-sensitive. Therefore, the
selection of texts under scrutiny encompasses private letters, philosophical
essays, and sermons (later delivered to the public). Also, the morphosyntactic constraints brought up by Rissanen will be considered as factors
influencing the choice of a relative pronoun, but due attention will also be
given to discourse constraints. In keeping with Bell’s (1984) observations,
the paper explores the possibility that Edward’s choice of a relativizer might
have been sensitive to such factors as recipients and topics, and to how he
intended to pass himself to different audiences on the receiving end of his
messages. The study will then also address the question as to whether
Edward’s idiolect is consistent with the dynamics of the change of the
relative pronouns distribution observed by Rissanen, who scrutinized the
material produced by Edward’s likes, i.e. the refined Puritan New
Englanders, in the decades directly preceding the eminent preacher’s
activity. Further regularization of that and who in “formal” restrictive
clauses is expected to be found, with the relatively higher frequency of
restrictive which persisting in less formal styles.
Bell, Allan. 1984. “Language style as audience design.” In Language in society, 13:
145-204
Devitt, Amy. 1989. Standardizing written English: Diffusion in the case of Scotland
1520-1659. Cambridge University Press.
Rissanen, Matti. 1984. “The choice of relative pronouns in 17th century American
English.” In J. Fisiak, Historical syntax, 417-434. Berlin: Mouton.
Romaine, Suzanne. 1982. Socio-historical linguistics: its status and methodology.
Cambridge University Press.
97
The history of English auxiliaries: Evidence from adverb placement
Eric Haeberli & Tabea Ihsane
University of Geneva
Keywords: auxiliaries, adverb placement, Middle English, Early Modern
English, Late Modern English
The aim of this paper is to shed new light on the history of English
auxiliaries by examining an empirical domain that has not been explored in
much detail yet, namely the distribution of auxiliaries with respect to
adverbs (but cf. Jacobson 1981 for an earlier study of this topic, based,
however, on a very small amount of sources). Throughout the history of
English, there has been variation in this area of the grammar as certain
adverbs can occur both before and after an auxiliary (1), a variation already
found in early English, as illustrated in (2) with Middle English.
(1)
(2)
a. They had probably seen her.
b. They probably had seen her.
a. And I always schall be yowre herault
‘And I shall always be your herald’
(PL 48.30; 1465-1484; from Jacobson 1981:68)
b. to thende that they may alwey perseuere
‘so that they may always persevere’
(CPE 86; 1475-1490; from Jacobson 1981:70))
This word order variation is a topic of interest for two main reasons: First, it
has been maintained for centuries and continues to exist in Present-Day
English (PDE) (cf. e.g. Waters 2013). Thus, the interaction of adverbs and
auxiliaries provides an interesting case study on syntactic variation and
change or the absence of change. Secondly, adverb placement is one of the
diagnostic tests to distinguish auxiliaries from lexical verbs, as finite
auxiliaries can precede adverbs like probably (1a) whereas finite lexical
verbs cannot (*They saw probably her). The emergence of this diagnostic
may therefore shed some light on the general diachronic development
towards the modern auxiliary system that characterizes PDE.
In this paper, we will examine four parsed corpora (PPCME2, PPCEME,
PCEEC and PPCMBE) covering nearly 800 years of linguistic history in order
to provide an overview of the development of the placement of auxiliaries
with respect to adverbs from Middle English to Late Modern English. We
will also consider this development against the background of the changes
98
affecting lexical verbs in their placement with respect to adverbs. On the
basis of these data, we will then explore some implications our data have
for the question of the categorial status of auxiliaries in the history of
English.
Jacobson, S. 1981. Preverbal Adverbs and Auxiliaries; a Study of Word Order Change.
Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell.
Waters, C. 2013. Transatlantic variation in English adverb placement. Language
Variation and Change, 25:179-200.
The rise of epistemic meaning:
A corpus-based perspective on subjectification
Stefan Hartmann & Susanne Flach
University of Mainz - FU Berlin
Keywords: Grammaticalization, Semantic Change, Epistemic Stance, Corpus
Linguistics
The diachronic process of subjectification has played a key role both in
Langacker’s (e.g. 2008) Cognitive Grammar and in Traugott’s (e.g. 1989,
1995, 1997) investigations of grammaticalization phenomena. In Traugott’s
(1997) definition, subjectification is the process “whereby meanings
become increasingly based in the speaker’s subjective belief state, or
attitude toward what is said”. For Langacker (1985, 1990), subjectification
pertains to the degree to which a conceptualizer is construed as “offstage”.
For example, a sentence such as He promised to be stout when grown up
(Daniel Defoe, 1722, OED) does not refer to a commissive speech act
uttered by the person referred to, but rather expresses the speaker’s belief
how this person will look like in the future. In contrast to a sentence like I
believe he’ll be stout when grown up, however, the speaker is not overtly
mentioned, i.e., in Langacker’s terms, not “onstage”.
This paper complements previous theoretical and corpus-illustrated
studies with a decidedly corpus-based, quantitative investigation of the
verbs promise and threaten (cf. Traugott 1997), which are often mentioned
as paragon examples of verbs with “subjectified” meaning variants.
Drawing on data from the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence
(PCEEC, Taylor et al. 2006), the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early
Modern English (PPEME, Kroch et al. 2004), and the Penn Parsed Corpus of
Modern British English (PPCMBE, Kroch et al. 2010), we investigate the
99
development of both verbs with regard to variables such as subject
animacy (She promised me vs. The weather promised to be great) and the
nature of the complement (intentional actions, e.g. She promised to come,
vs. non-intentional states and events), but also with regard to the
constructions in which they occur and their collocational preferences. Our
study may thus provide a solid empirical basis to a theory of
subjectification. In particular, it can help answer the question whether
different instances of subjectification follow a similar pattern or if epistemic
meaning variants arise in fundamentally different ways. In addition, the
question of the gradualness of subjectification can be addressed in an
empirical fashion: Can epistemic meanings arise in one fell swoop by means
of metaphoric transfer, or do they evolve gradually, as Traugott (1997)
assumes? Examining these questions in a bottom-up, corpus-driven way
promises new insights as to the nature of subjectification and the cognitive
underpinnings of language change in general.
Kroch, A., B. Santorini, and L. Delfs (2004): Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early
Modern English. http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/PPCEME-RELEASE-1/.
Kroch, Anthony, Beatrice Santorini, and Ariel Diertani (2010): Penn Parsed Corpus of
Modern British English. http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/PPCMBERELEASE-1/index.html
Langacker, Ronald W. (1985): Observations and Speculations on Subjectivity. In:
Haiman, John (ed.): Iconicity in Syntax. Prodeedings of a Symposium on Iconicity
in Syntax, Stanford, June 24-6, 1983. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins
(Typological Studies in Language, 6), 109–150.
Langacker, Ronald W. (1990): Subjectification. In: Cognitive Linguistics 1, 5–38.
Langacker, Ronald W. (2008): Cognitive Grammar. A Basic Introduction. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Taylor, Ann, Arja Nurmi, Anthony Warner, Susan Pintzuk, and Terttu Nevalainen
(2006): Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence.
http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~lang22/PCEEC-manual/
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs (1989): On the Rise of Epistemic Meanings in English. An
Example of Subjectification in Semantic Change. In: Language 65, 31–55.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs (1995): Subjectification in Grammaticalisation. In: Stein,
Dieter; Wright, Susan (eds.): Subjectivity and Subjectivisation. Linguistic
Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 31–54.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs (1997): Subjectification and the Development of Epistemic
Meaning. The Case of promise and threaten. In: Swan, Toril; Westvik, Olaf Jansen
(eds.): Modality in Germanic Languages. Historical and Comparative
Perspectives. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and
Monographs, 99), 185–210.
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Velarisation of /l/ in the history of English
Raymond Hickey
University of Duisburg-Essen
In the history of English there is evidence for at least two major realisations
of /l/: an unmarked alveolar one [l] and a marked velarised realisation [1].
The presence of the latter in Old English is indicated by the breaking of
preceding vowels, an effect which it shares with /x/ and /r/ (Jones 1989: 3357; Smith 2007: 98-100). For Middle English there is renewed evidence of
velarisation in words like talk, walk, holm, etc. Here the velarisation has
been carried further, resulting in vocalisation. Whether this is a
continuation of Old English velarisation is uncertain, in the case of walk (cf.
OE wealcan) this may be the case, but holm belongs to the set of Old Norse
loans in late Old English. Velarisation may have advanced to vocalisation
before borrowing as is seen in Middle English French borrowings such as
faute ‘fault’, cf. Latin fallitus.
In the Early Modern period there is further evidence of velarisation in
the occurrence of the diphthong /au/ before /l/ in the codas of syllables
with low or back vowels, e.g. cold, old, bold, hold, soul, etc. This
diphthongisation is already recorded in Ray (1674) and continued in many
non-standard varieties of English, but not in Received Pronunciation which
does not show any more l-vocalisations than those attested from Middle
English. Nonetheless RP does show velarisation of coda-l (Cruttenden 2008,
Wells 1982) and more vernacular London varieties show vocalisation as a
further stage.
The present paper will attempt to account for the rise of velarised [1] in
the history of English and to trace its diacrhonic development paying
special attention to the situation with non-standard varieties both in the
past and the present. The effects of velarisation on vocalic nuclei will also
form an important focus.
Cruttenden, Alan 2008. Gimson’s Pronunciation of English. Seventh edition. London:
Arnold.
Jones, Charles 1989. A History of English Phonology. London: Longman.
Lass, Roger 2006. ‘Phonology and morphology’, in: Hogg and Denison (eds), pp. 43108.
Lutz,Angelika 1991. Phonotaktisch gesteuerte Konsonantenverbindungen. Tübingen:
Max Niemeyer.
Minkova, Donka 2013. A Historical Phonology of English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
101
Ray, John 1674. A collection of English words not generally used with their
significations and original in two alphabetical catalogues. London: C. Wilkinson.
Smith, Jeremy 2007. Sound Change and the History of English. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Wells, John C. 1982. Accents of English. 3 Vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Relating language change to language processing: A second look at
asymmetric priming
Martin Hilpert
University of Neuchâtel
Why is meaning change in grammatical forms highly regular? Studies of
grammaticalizing forms show that their semantic trajectories instantiate
cross-linguistically similar pathways (Heine and Kuteva 2002). In a
programmatic paper, Jäger and Rosenbach (2008) relate this observation
about language change to a principle of language processing, namely
asymmetric priming. This paper presents work in progress that aims to
evaluate this proposal on the basis of experimental evidence.
Asymmetric priming is a pattern of cognitive association in which one
idea strongly evokes another, while that second idea does not evoke the
first one with the same force. For instance, given the word ‘rowing’, many
speakers associate ‘water’. The reverse is not true: given ‘water’, few
speakers associate ‘rowing’. Asymmetric priming would elegantly explain
why many semantic changes in grammar are unidirectional: for instance,
expressions of spatial relations evolve into temporal markers (English be
going to), and expressions of possession evolve into markers of completion
(the English have‐perfect); the inverse processes are unattested. The
asymmetric priming hypothesis has attracted considerable attention (Chang
2008, Eckardt 2008, Traugott 2008), but as yet, empirical engagement with
it has been limited.
Methodologically, this paper relies on reaction time measurements
from self-paced reading. The experiments test whether asymmetric priming
obtains between lexical forms and their grammaticalized counterparts, i.e.
pairs such as ‘keep the light on’ (lexical keep) and ‘keep reading’
(grammatical keep). On the asymmetric priming hypothesis, the former
should prime the latter, but not vice versa. The stimuli that are presented
to readers are sentences such as the following:
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(1) The student keptlexical the light on to keepgrammatical reading.
(2) The student turnedunrelated the light on to keepgrammatical reading.
(3) The student keptgrammatical checking facebook to keeplexical up to date.
(4) The student wasunrelated checking facebook to keeplexical up to date.
The asymmetric priming hypothesis predicts that grammatical keep
should be processed faster in (1) than in (2). Crucially, however, no
difference is expected between (3) and (4), since grammatical keep should
not facilitate the subsequent processing of lexical keep. The full experiment
will test a group of 40 native speakers of English across a set of 50 pairs of
grammatical forms and their lexical counterparts. The results will allow us
to assess whether Jäger and Rosenbach’s hypothesis makes the right
predictions with regard to speaker behavior, and whether it seems feasible
to relate language change and language processing in this way.
Chang, Franklin. 2008. Implicit learning as a mechanism of language change.
Theoretical Linguistics 34/2, 115-123.
Eckardt, Regine. 2008. Concept Priming in Language Change. Theoretical Linguistics
34/2, 123-133.
Heine, Bernd and Tania Kuteva. 2002. World lexicon of grammaticalization.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Jäger, Gerhard and Anette Rosenbach. 2008. Priming and unidirectional language
change. Theoretical Linguistics, 34/2, 85-113.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 2008. Testing the hypothesis that priming is a motivation
for change. Theoretical Linguistics, 34/2, 135-142.
“Where did these Midland forms come from?”: A dialectological study of
the Voigts-Sloane Group of Middle English medical and alchemical
manuscripts
Alpo Honkapohja
University of Zurich
Keywords: Middle English, historical dialectology, medical and scientific
writing, codicology
This paper contains an analysis of the dialect of the Sloane Group, eleven
multilingual manuscripts, containing medical and alchemical texts. The
Group, originally described by Voigts (1990), can be further divided into the
Core Group, which have a very uniform mise-en-page, and the Sibling
Group, which share an anthology of twelve medical texts. Both groups can
103
be dated between 1450-1490 and were, most likely, connected to
commercial book trade in London based on codicological and textual
features. However, possibly because of the late date and the expected
southern provenance, the dialect of the Sloane Group has not been
subjected to a comprehensive analysis before.
The methodology used in the study consisted of using the Linguistic
Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (Benskin et. 2013) and applying the ‘fit’
technique to XML-transcriptions of the Middle English texts in the Sibling
Group (14,331 words) and the Core Group (17,879 words) manuscripts. The
aim was (1) to find out how their language compares to the incipient
th
standardisation of late 15 century, (2) whether some of the scribal dialects
can still be localised to area other than London, and (3) how close the Core
Group and Sibling Group are to each other dialectally. Because all of the
manuscripts date after 1450, the end point of LALME, I performed separate
analyses on features which are characteristic of incipient London
standard(s) and ones which may display local ‘colouring’. To determine the
spread of London or standard English forms, I compared the forms to a
checklist based on Samuels (1989 [1963]) and applied the fit technique on
features which are not part of the types of London English described by
Samuels.
The results show a mixture of forms which are part of the emergent
London standards (Types III and IV, cf. Samuels 1989 [1963]) and various
Midland forms. Most interestingly, despite of being copied by several
different scribes, all Core Group manuscripts are written in the same
dialect, which is a mixture of London forms and ones which can be localised
to four Central-Midland counties, Rutland, Northamptonshire,
Leicestershire and Warwickshire, (Honkapohja forthcoming), but is not the
same as Type I Central Midlands standard (cf. Samuels 1963 [1989],
Taavitsainen 2000) or the Chauliac/Rosarium Type, commonly found in
surgical manuscripts (cf. McIntosh 1983 [1989], Taavitsainen 2004). This is
either related to register variation within medical and scientific writing or
points to an origin in these counties.
Benskin, Michael, Margaret Laing, Vasilis Karaiskos and Keith Williamson. An
Electronic Version of A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English. 2013.
Edinburgh: © 2013 The Authors and The University of Edinburgh. 10 July 2013
<http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/elalme/elalme.html>. (Accessed on 22 November
2013)
Honkapohja, Alpo. Forthcoming. A Linguistic and Codicological Study of the Sloane
Group of Middle English Manuscripts. [A PhD thesis, accepted at the University
of Zurich, 3 October 2013]
104
McIntosh, Angus. “Present Indicative Plural Forms in the Later Middle English of the
North Midlands.” Middle English Dialectology: essays on some principles and
problems. Eds. Angus McIntosh, M. L. Samuels and Margaret Laing. Aberdeen:
Aberdeen University Press, 1989 [1983]. 116-22.
Samuels, M. L. “Some Applications of Middle English Dialectology.” Middle English
Dialectology: essays on some principles and problems. Eds. Angus McIntosh, M.
L. Samuels and Margaret Laing. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1989
[1963]. 64-80.
Taavitsainen, Irma. “Scientific language and spelling standardisation.”
The
Development of Standard English 1300-1800. Ed. Laura Wright. Studies in English
Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 131-54.
Taavitsainen, Irma. “Scriptorial ‘House-styles’ and Discourse Communities.” Medical
and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English. Eds. Irma Taavitsainen and Päivi
Pahta. Cambridge: CUP, 2004. 209-40.
Voigts, Linda Ehrsam. “The ‘Sloane Group’: Related Scientific and Medical
Manuscripts from the Fifteenth Century in the Sloane Collection.” The British
Library Journal 16 (1990): 26-57.
British Library, Add. 19674; Sloane 1118; Sloane 1313; Sloane 2320; Sloane 2567, and
Sloane 2948.
British Library, Sloane 3566; Cambridge, Trinity College O.1.77, Gonville and Caius
336/725; Boston, Countway Library of Medicine, MS 19, and Tokyo, Takamiya
33.
The ebb and flow of historical variants of betwixt and between
Ryuichi Hotta
Chuo University
Keywords: analogy, corpus, paragoge, preposition
The prescriptive tradition of English as to the correct usage of between and
among has familiarised us with the etymological analysis of the former as
“by” and “two.” Curiosity has hardly extended, however, to the question of
what is represented by -n in between or by -xt in betwixt. Even less
investigated is the way that between, and to a lesser extent betwixt, have
become predominant types over several earlier variants such as betweenen
and betwix.
The present paper has two aims. The first is to describe the historical
ebb and flow of variants from OE to PDE by means of historical corpora
including LAEME, Helsinki Corpus, and CLMET. In OE there were several
variants available that differed in the inflectional or derivational suffixes to
105
the second element “two.” ME was a period of great variation
diachronically as well as diatopically. From OE to ME, however, dominance
was maintained, broadly speaking, by the x-, nen-, ne-, and n-types. ModE
then saw the continued popularity of the n-type, but also began to see a
remarkable growth of the xt-type, which has survived to this day.
The second aim of the paper is to address the birth and growth of the
betwixt-type, in particular the question as to how paragogic t was
appended to its earlier betwix-type. I revisit two accounts previously
proposed in OED and Dobson (Section 437), one phonetic/morphological
and the other semantic/lexical, and enlarge on the argument with
evidence. My view is that the phonetic/morphological factor served as a
trigger of the xt-subtype in OE and ME, while the semantic/lexical factor
served as its stabiliser in ModE. On the one hand, the statistics indicates
that the phonetic sequence of the dentals around word boundaries likely
induced morphological reanalysis by which the dental was attracted to the
word on the left, resulting in the xt-type. On the other hand, I propose
three associations concerning the phonetic sequence -Cst and words that
have it like whilst, amongst, and amidst: semantic intensification as
assumed by the superlative of adjectives, the common semantic feature of
middle-ness, and attribution to functional class of words.
These
associations remained weak for a while after the first occurrences of the xtsubtype in OE and ME, but they grew stronger towards LME such that they
involved an increasing number of newborn -Cst words.
CLMET = De Smet, Hendrik, Hans-Jürgen Diller, and Jukka Tyrkkö, comps. The Corpus
of Late Modern English Texts, Version 3.0. 2013.
Dobson, E. J. English Pronunciation 1500–1700. 2nd ed. Vol. 2. Oxford: OUP, 1968.
Helsinki Corpus = Rissanen, Matti, Merja Kytö; Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, Matti Kilpiö;
Saara Nevanlinna, Irma Taavitsainen; Terttu Nevalainen, Helena RaumolinBrunberg, comps. The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts. Helsinki: Department of
Modern Languages, U of Helsinki, 1991.
LAEME = Laing, Margaret and Roger Lass, eds. A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle
English,
1150–1325.
Available
online
at
http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laeme1/laeme1.html. Edinburgh: U of Edinburgh,
2007.
106
Non-motion verbs in the intransitive motion construction
in the history of English
Judith Huber
LMU München
In the past few decades, linguistics has seen a proliferation of cognitive
research on motion, particularly in studies on motion expression inspired
by Talmy (e.g. 1985, 2000) and Slobin (e.g. 2004), but also in constructional
perspectives (e.g. Berthele 2007, Croft et al. 2010). However, research on
historical data in this area is as yet still scarce (notable exceptions are
Fanego 2012, Kopecka 2008, Mosca 2012). The present paper summarizes
the findings of an analysis of 188 Old English and 433 Middle English verbs
attested in intransitive motion uses. They range from highly frequent
general motion verbs such as OE faran ‘go’, cuman ‘come’ to verbs such as
OE feohtan ‘fight’ in (1) or ME winnen ‘to struggle’ in (2), i.e., verbs which
on their own do not evoke an intransitive motion frame, but are
nevertheless sporadically attested in motion uses:
(1)
(2)
þa gecwædon hie þæt [...] sume þurh ealle þa truman ut afuhten,
gif hie mehten (Or 5 7.121.27, DOE s.v. afeohtan, sense 2)
‘Then they said that some [...] would fight [their way] out through
all the troops, if they could.’
Helle [...] mai neveremor be full [...] what as evere comth therinne,
Awey ne may it nevere winne. ((a1393) Gower CA (Frf 3) 5.352,
MED s.v. winnen, sense 11.a.d)
‘Hell can never be full - what once has come into it can never get
away.’
The focus of the present paper will be on these uses, i.e., non-motion verbs
used in motion contexts such as (1) and (2). Among other things, it will be
shown that in a diachronic perspective, the arguments for a constructional
rather than a lexicalist approach to motion expression become more
compelling: motion meaning should thus not be seen as necessarily carried
by the verb alone, but is often brought about by the interaction of the verb
with the semantics of the intransitive motion construction. More
specifically, the non-motion verbs attested in motion uses will also be
discussed with regard to the question whether new extensions of a
construction should rather be seen as licensed through abstract r-relations,
or through item-based analogy (cf. Bybee 2013: 58).
107
Berthele, Raphael. 2007. “Sein+Direktionalergänzung: Bewegung ohne
Bewegungsverb”. Kopulaverben und Kopulasätze: Intersprachliche und
intrasprachliche Aspekte. Ed. Ljudmila Geist and Björn Rothstein. Tübingen:
Niemeyer. 229–252.
Bybee, Joan L. 2013. “Usage-based Theory and Exemplar Representations of
Constructions”. The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar. Ed. Thomas
Hoffmann and Graeme Trousdale. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 49–69.
Croft, William, Jóhanna Barðdal, Willem Hollmann, Violeta Sotirova and Chiaki Taoka.
2010. “Revising Talmy’s Typological Classification of Complex Event
Constructions”. Contrastive Construction Grammar. Ed. Hans C. Boas.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 201–235.
Fanego, Teresa. 2012. “Motion Events in English: The Emergence and Diachrony of
Manner Salience from Old English to Late Modern English”. Folia Linguistica
Historica 33: 29–85.
Kopecka, Anetta. 2008. “Continuity and Change in the Representation of Motion
Events in French”. Crosslinguistic Approaches to the Psychology of Language.
Research in the Tradition of Dan Isaac Slobin. Ed. Jiansheng Guo et al. New York:
Psychology Press. 415–426.
Mosca, Monica. 2012. “Italian Motion Constructions: Different Functions of
‘Particles’”. Space and Time in Languages and Cultures. Vol. II: Language,
Culture, and Cognition. Ed. Luna Filipović and Kasia M. Jaszczolt.
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 373–393.
Slobin, Dan I. 2004. “The Many Ways to Search for a Frog: Linguistic Typology and the
Expression of Motion Events”. Relating Events in Narrative. Typological and
contextual perspectives. Vol. 2. Ed. Sven Strömqvist and Ludo Verhoeven.
Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 219–257.
Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Vol. II: Typology and Process in
Concept Structuring. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT-Press.
Talmy, Leonard. 1985. “Lexicalization Patterns: Semantic Structure in Lexical Forms”.
Language Typology and Syntactic Description. Vol. 3: Grammatical Categories
and the Lexicon. Ed. Timothy Shopen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
57–149.
108
Cleft constructions in 18th and 19th century spoken English: A historical
sociolinguistic study based on the Old Bailey Corpus
Magnus Huber
University of Giessen
Keywords: cleft sentence, relativizer,
sociolinguistics, Old Bailey Corpus
pronoun
form,
historical
This paper investigates the forms and development of it + BE + NP + REL
cleft sentences in 18th and 19th century spoken English, as in
(1)
it was her son who took it (OBC t18261026-212).
Clefting is a relatively rare phenomenon and most corpora of earlier
spoken English are too small to study this construction in detail. For
instance, in the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560-1760 (1.2 million words,
cf. Kytö & Walker 2006) there are only about 20 clefts. This is why the social
and linguistic variables determining the variation between e.g. subject and
object pronoun forms or between the different relativizers have not
attracted much attention in the literature so far. This paper aims to redress
this situation by documenting the variants, influencing factors and
development of clefts in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Because of its sheer size and detail of sociolinguistic utterance-level
annotation, the Old Bailey Corpus (OBC, Huber et al. 2012) lends itself
ideally to the study of clefts. The corpus spans the years 1720-1913 and
contains 14 million words of spoken English. It is based on the Proceedings
of the Old Bailey (http://www.oldbaileyonline.org), London’s Central
Criminal court.
The OBC contains several hundred clefts, enough for a diachronic
sociolinguistic analysis considering speaker gender and social class. A pilot
study of relativizer choice indicates a considerable increase of who (from
ca. 11% to ca. 45%), a moderate increase of zero (4% to 15%) and a drastic
drop of that (86% to 40%) in the period considered here. Social class does
not seem to have an effect on the choice of the relativizer but there are
indications that gender differences emerge in the 19th century, with
women favouring that more, and who less, than men.
Regarding the form of the focussed pronoun in clefts where the
relativizer is in subject position, as in
(2)
It was not I, (said she) who took his Watch (OBC t17400709-5)
109
(3)
it was not me, who took the Man’s Watch (OBC t17400522-5),
there is a complete reversal, with subject forms dominating (65%) during
the first century and object forms during the second (65%). Gender has no
effect this time, but it appears that in the 19th century higher social classes
favour object over subject pronouns (70%:30%), while it is the other way
round with the lower classes.
The findings will be compared to ordinary relative clauses in the OBC.
Huber, Magnus; Nissel, Magnus; Maiwald, Patrick; Widlitzki, Bianca. 2012. The Old
Bailey Corpus. Spoken English in the 18th and 19th centuries. www.unigiessen.de/oldbaileycorpus.
Kytö, Merja & Terry Walker. 2006. Guide to A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560-1760.
Uppsala: Uppsala University.
How weird are teenagers? Variation and change in the use of noun-name
collocations
Marianne Hundt & John Payne
The University of Manchester
Keywords: syntactic change, noun-name collocations, constructionalisation
In English, title nouns such as president and professor can be used in noun
phrase name apposition constructions (such as the US President, Barak
Obama) or in a title construction combining the noun with a proper name
but no article (e.g. US President Barak Obama and Professor Noam
Chomsky). Other nouns, such as lawyer, headmaster or goalie can also be
used in a similar way; these have been referred to as pseudo-titles (e.g.
Meyer 2002). Previous research indicates that pseudo-titles are particularly
popular in American English (AmE) journalistic writing, but that they have
spread to British (BrE) and New Zealand English (NZE) (see e.g. Ryden 1975
and Jucker 1992 for BrE and Bell 1988 for NZE); evidence from the
International Corpus of English shows that they are used in contact varieties
of English, as well (see Meyer 2002 and Hackert 2012).
In our paper, we trace the historical development of the pseudo-title
construction. In particular, we test the hypothesis that the title
construction (i.e. the variant without the article) spread from proper titles
to function terms, e.g. lawyer, and subsequently to sporting terms (e.g.
golfer, goalie, quarter back), then to relation terms like mother, father,
110
sister etc., with age terms like teenager, toddler or baby being among the
more recent contexts in which the pseudo-title construction can be used.
We also hypothesize that nouns which assign stereotypical properties, e.g.
pensioner, are more likely to be used in the pseudo-title construction than
very general nouns like boy or man.
We use diachronic data from the Corpus of Historical American English
to test our hypotheses about the spread of the pseudo-title construction. In
addition, synchronic data from the British National Corpus and the Corpus
of Contemporary English are used to investigate whether function terms
and other additions to the pseudo-title construction are more likely to
feature pre- and postmodification, or other kinds of expansion, than
prototypical institutional titles. Our study therefore has two aims: first, to
investigate when certain types of nouns become attested in the pseudotitle construction in our AmE data (thereby testing for construction-hood of
pseudo-title NPs), and second, which factors enhance the acceptability of
the construction in two major reference varieties of English.
Bell, Allan. 1988. The British base and the American connection in New Zealand
media English. American Speech 63: 326-44.
Hackert, Stephanie. 2012. Pseudotitles in Bahamian English: A case of
Americanization? Paper presented at the 33rd ICAME Conference in Leuven (June
3rd 2012).
Jucker, Andreas. 1992. Social Stylistics: Syntactic Variation in British Newspapers.
Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Meyer, Charles F. 2002. Pseudo-titles in the press genre of various components of
the International Corpus of English. In Randi Reppen, Susan M. Fitzmaurice and
Douglas Biber. Eds. Using Corpora to Explore Linguistic Variation. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins. pp. 147-166.
Rydén, Mats. 1975. Noun-name collocations in British English newspaper language.
Studia Neophilologica 67: 14-39.
Prosodic movement and emphatic focus in Late Middle English
Richard Ingham
Birmingham City University
An analysis of 130 negated manner adjuncts in Late Middle English (LME)
prose (Helsinki Corpus, ME Compendium) showed that in almost all cases
they were accompanied by not when in clause-final position, e.g.:
(1)
For with-oute theire leve I will not go in no manere. Merlin XV
111
(2)
(3)
They wolden not therof yn no wyse.
I woll not do hit by no wey.
Shillingford 60
Gesta Rom.XXII
Not was typically absent when the negated manner adjunct stood
elsewhere (initial, medial). Negated manner adjuncts in final position thus
appear to confer emphatic focus on the polarity of the clause.
LME co-ordinated negative clauses commonly showed atypical
positioning before the finite verb of the negator or of a displaced negated
object, e.g.:
(4)
(5)
(6)
We are not throw yet, nor noght shal be tille I haue worde from
you (Paston 728, 15)
Th. M. paid to þis charge no peny, nor no day will sette to paie.
(Stonor 1, 74)
I coulde not answere that mateer without yow nor noght wolde
doo (Stonor 2, 18)
This construction is referred to as Coordinate Neg Vfin. The discourse effect
here is to confer emphasis on the finite verb/auxiliary and hence again to
emphasise the negative polarity of the clause.
In this paper it is argued that both LME constructions are accounted for
by prosodic movement, positioning the emphasised constituent to the right
of its unmarked position (Zubizarreta1998). The unmarked position of an
adjunct is taken to be left-adjunction to the Verb Phrase, so that in
P(rosodic)-movement the adjunct and the Verb Phrase commute, giving the
order observed in (1)-(3). The ordinary position of the negator not, and also
of a displaced negated object, was after the finite verb, so that Pmovement in Coordinate Neg Vfin inverts the auxiliary and the negative
constituent, producing the order observed in (4)-(6).
A key role in both developments is played by the presence of a NegP
constituent in LME syntax and its loss in Early Modern English (Ingham
2007). LME was a negative concord language in which n-words established
a syntactic relationship with NegP (Zeijlstra 2008), whereas in (Standard)
Modern English no such syntactic relationship exists, and NegP is absent. In
Middle English, emphatic negated manner adjuncts in final position could
not by themselves negate a clause: they stood in a negative concord
relationship with the negator not in NegP, which did so. Neither can they in
modern English (De Clercq, Haegeman & Lohndal 2012), unless they move
to clause initial position by Negative Inversion (Nevalainen 1997). In LME
Coordinate Neg Vfin, P-movement could commute the finite Verb with its
prosodic sister constituent, NegP, as long as the latter was projected. Once
112
not became a clitic this was no longer possible, and in EMnE the
construction disappears. Further considerations are discussed as to the
status of P-movement in Middle English, and its apparent loss thereafter.
Syntactic variation and change relating to causative make
in Early Modern English
Yoko Iyeiri
Kyoto University
Keywords: causative make, complementation, to-infinitive, bare infinitive
The present paper discusses the syntactic development of causative make
in early Modern English. Exploring some Middle English texts selected from
ICAMET (=Innsbruck Computer Archive of Machine-Readable English Texts),
Iyeiri (2012) demonstrates that the to-infinitival construction was still
common with causative make in the fifteenth century. Hence, the present
paper turns to the early Modern English period to see the process of the
development of bare infinitives after causative make. The texts analyzed in
this research have been selected from the Early English Books Online and
compiled in the form of a corpus, i.e. EMEPS (= Early Modern English Prose
Selections), whose details are given in Iyeiri (2011). While EMEPS consists
of A-texts and B-texts, the present paper focuses upon A-texts only, which
in total amount to some four million words.
The analysis reveals that the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries
are a key period in the development of causative make. The use of bare
infinitives has not yet been established in the first half of the sixteenth
century, whereas the overall tendency has been reversed by the second
half of the seventeenth century, when more than 80% of the examples in
the active voice display the employment of bare infinitives. The fact that
causative make in the passive voice is irregularly followed by to-infinitives
and bare infinitives is also relevant, as this shows that the distinction
between the active and passive voices has not been clearly made at this
stage of development. Furthermore, the choice of the complement seems
to be conditioned by various syntactic features. When the object of make is
a personal pronoun, for example, there is a fairly clear tendency for bare
infinitives (rather than to-infinitives) to be selected. Other factors
investigated in the present study include the type of verbs involved in the
infinitive and the occurrence of some infinitives in coordination. The results
are more or less consistent with the contentions adduced by Iyeiri (2012),
113
and the present study clearly demonstrates the declining phase of toinfinitives as a complement of causative make in the history of English.
Iyeiri, Yoko. 2011. “Early Modern English Prose Selections: Directions in Historical
Corpus Linguistics”. Memoirs of the Faculty of Letters, Kyoto University 50: 133199.
Iyeiri, Yoko. 2012. “The Complements of Causative make in Late Middle English”, in
Middle and Modern English Corpus Linguistics: A Multi-dimensional Approach,
ed. Manfred Markus, Yoko Iyeiri, Reinhard Heuberger, & Emil Chamson, pp. 5973. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
The function(s) of the have-perfect in Old English
Berit Johannsen
Freie Universität Berlin
Keywords: Grammaticalization, Old English, Perfect, Analytic Constructions
The function(s) of the periphrastic perfect in Old English texts are still a
matter of dispute. This study seeks to shed light on these functions and a
possible rise in obligatoriness of the periphrastic perfect within the Old
English period. It is generally assumed that the English perfect developed
from adjectival constructions with be and have as copula/lexical verbs and a
past participle functioning as an adjective that modifies the subject
(intransitives with be) or the object (transitives with have) (e.g. Traugott
1972). Later, have gradually replaced be as an auxiliary in all contexts, so
that by the end of the 19th century be had disappeared in periphrastic
perfects (McFadden & Alexiadou 2010). That the have-periphrasis was
grammaticalized to some extent, i.e. cannot be interpreted as a possessive
construction (lexical have + object + adjective participle) in the earliest
records of Old English has been claimed by Brinton 1988 and Wischer 2004.
Wischer (2008) further assumes consecutive developments of a) the
grammaticalization of have as an auxiliary and b) the functionalization/specialization of the whole construction, leading to a new semantic
distinction and finally a new grammatical category. The use of the perfect in
comparison to the preterite has risen since the Old English period (Elsness
1997), which indicates an increasing functionalization. Wischer (2008)
makes an attempt to capture the functional variation of the perfect
construction throughout the Old English period, but remains rather
superficial. She distinguishes resultative, anterior, past and perfective uses
for the perfect and pluperfect. The primary aim of the present study is to
114
reassess Wischer’s analysis and test whether variant uses of the perfect can
be detected in Old English texts. Further attention will be paid to
ambiguous cases, which can be indicative of bridging contexts (Heine 2002).
Have-perfects will be considered only. The pluperfect will be excluded. Data
(all instances of have + past participle) from the York-Toronto-Helsinki
Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (YCOE) will be categorized according to
the function of the construction and relevant contextual factors. The
expected result is that anterior uses of the have-perfect prevail, but that
ambiguous uses will show bridging contexts.
Brinton, Laurel J. (1988). The development of English aspectual systems. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Elsness, Johan. (1997). The perfect and the preterite in contemporary and earlier
English. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Heine, Bernd. 2002. “On the role of context in grammaticalization”. In: Ilse Wischer
and Gabriele Diewald (eds.). New reflections on grammaticalization. Amsterdam:
Benjamins. 83-101.
McFadden, Thomas and Artemis Alexiadou. (2010). “Perfects, resultatives and
auxiliaries in earlier English”. In: Linguistic Inquiry 41 (3), 389-425.
Taylor, Ann, Anthony Warner, Susan Pintzuk, and Frank Beths. (2003). The YorkToronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (YCOE). Department of
Linguistics, University of York. Oxford Text Archive, first edition, (http://wwwusers.york.ac.uk/~lang22/YcoeHome1.htm).
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. (1972). A history of English syntax: A transformational
approach to the history of English sentence structure. New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston.
Wischer, Ilse. (2004). “The ‘have’-perfect in Old English”. In: Christian Kay, Simon
Horobin, and Jeremy Smith (eds.). New perspectives on English historical
linguistics. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 243–255.
Wischer, Ilse. (2008). “Grammaticalization of periphrastic constructions”. In:
Elisabeth Verhoeven, Stavros Skopeteas, Yong-Min Shin, Yoko Nishina, and
Johannes Helmbrecht (eds.). Studies on grammaticalization. Berlin: De Gruyter.
241-250.
115
Code-switching and script-switching in Early Modern English
letters
Samuli Kaislaniemi
University of Helsinki
Keywords: Code-switching, manuscripts, Early Modern English, scribal
practice, palaeography
Code-switching in historical texts has been gaining attention from scholars
over the last few years (e.g. Schendl & Wright 2011). At the same time,
researchers working on code-switching in contemporary texts have started
to investigate the visual and multimodal aspects involved (e.g. Sebba 2013).
This turn to the visual has also been seen in work on historical texts (e.g.
Kendall et al. 2013), but research on visual aspects of code-switching in
historical texts remains in its infancy.
That said, there has been little work even on such common
contemporary conventions as typographic flagging (cf. Grant-Russell 1998:
479-480) – for instance, the practice of using italics or quotation marks to
indicate foreign elements. These conventions derive from historical
typographical practices for textual emphasis, which in turn were inherited
from conventions of matching typefaces with languages (indeed, the
Northern European practice of printing vernacular texts in blackletter and
Latin texts in roman typeface is not yet quite dead). These practices in
printed texts ultimately stem from medieval scribal traditions of associating
scripts with languages. Just as Tudor books printed in blackletter use roman
typeface to emphasise or flag words and phrases, in manuscripts of the
period written in Secretary script emphasis is similarly achieved by using
roman or italic script.
In analogy of the term code-switching, I call this practice scriptswitching. The practice of script-switching correlating with code-switching
has not gone completely unnoticed (see esp. Machan 2011). But we have
yet to see even pilot studies of script-switching in Early Modern English, and
its linguistic aspects remain uninvestigated. For instance, script-switching
can be used to determine code boundaries: the level of integration of
borrowings may be reflected by how or indeed whether borrowings or
code-switches are indicated by script-switches. Script-switching also reveals
information about scribal practices and linguistic competence: being able to
write a ‘foreign’ script implies knowledge of the language it indicates
(roman was a generic script, but there were distinct ‘national’ scripts, such
as French Secretary or Spanish italic).
116
In this paper I will chart and analyse the use of script-switching and
code-switching in a corpus of about one hundred letters written by an
English merchant living in France 1603-1608. The discussion of results will
focus on the correlation of script- and code-switching and its implications,
both from a linguistic and a palaeographical perspective.
Grant-Russell, Pamela. 1998. “The influence of French on Quebec English: Motivation
for lexical borrowing and integration of loanwords”. LACUS Forum 25: 473-486.
Kendall, Judy, Manuel Portela & Glyn White (eds.). 2013. European Journal of English
Studies 17(1), special issue on Visual Text.
Machan, Tim William. 2011. “The visual pragmatics of code-switching in late Middle
English literature”. In Schendl, Herbert & Laura Wright (eds.), 303-333.
Schendl, Herbert & Laura Wright (eds.). 2011. Code-Switching in Early English.
Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter.
Sebba, Mark. 2013. “Multilingualism in written discourse. An approach to the
analysis of multilingual texts”. International Journal of Bilingualism 17(1): 97118.
A study on Old English dugan: Its potential for auxiliation
Kousuke Kaita
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
Keywords: formula, auxiliation, syntax, modality, ability
This paper will discuss what potential Old English (OE) dugan ‘to avail, be
useful’ has for becoming the modal auxiliary ‘to be able to’ in Middle
English (ME). OE dugan is sometimes found in formulaic expressions in
poems (Chadwick 1912: 78 and Cavill 1999: 144-145), as in:
(1)
Beowulf 573
þonne his ellen deah
‘when his courage is useful’
Syntactically, some occurrences of dugan show collocation with a dative
object denoting for whom the subject is useful. Dugan is one of the twelve
preterite-present verbs in OE. While half of them have developed into the
modal auxiliaries of Modern English (MnE) (e.g. OE magan ‘can’ > MnE
may), dugan fell into disuse. The OED (s.v. dow, 5), however, lists it as a
modal: “To have the strength or ability, to be able (to do something)” (the
first example: ME Cursor Mundi (a1300)).
117
My approach entails the analysis of the dative and infinitival
collocations and formulaic aspects of OE dugan in DOE Corpus. Its similarity
to the other modal auxiliaries will also be examined in some Early ME
examples. The data from OE exhibit both formulaic and non-formulaic
expressions with or without dative objects. The collocation with to-infinitive
is more frequently found in Early ME, as in (2):
(2)
St. Juliana 487 (MS. Bodley 34, Oxford)
as meiden deh to beonne
‘as it is proper for a maiden to be’
Deh in this example corresponds to ah (OE āgan, MnE ought (to)) in MS.
Royal 17A xxvii, British Museum, which means ‘as a maiden ought to be’.
The noun meiden can be nominative or dative. Another text, Cursor Mundi,
illustrates the synonymous relation between dught and moght (< OE
magan) as in:
(3)
Cursor Mundi 23771-23772
Fight he aght ai quils he dught,
And fle quen he langer ne moght
‘He ought to have always fought while he was able to, and fled
when he could no longer (fight)’
This paper will provide the following insights: (i) the subject of OE
dugan is assigned positive meanings like ‘valiant’, ‘valid’, or ‘proper’ (see
OED s.v. dow, 1-4) according to context; (ii) in Early ME, the noun in the
dative case is reanalysed as the subject noun, and has the meaning ‘to be
able (to do something)’; (iii) dugan loses to in the infinitival complement
probably through the semantic analogy with magan, which expresses
ability with the bare infinitive.
Cavill, Paul. 1999. Maxims in Old English poetry. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.
Chadwick, H. Munro. 1912 [rpt. 1967]. The Heroic Age. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
D’Ardenne, S.R.T.O., ed. 1961. Þe liflade ant te passiun of Seinte Iuliene. EETS, o.s.
248. London: Oxford University Press.
DOE Corpus = The Dictionary of Old English, Web Corpus. Available online:
<http://tapor.library.utoronto.ca/doecorpus/> (Last Access: 19/11/2013).
Klaeber, Frederick, ed. 1950. Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg. 3rd edition. Boston:
D.C. Heath and Company.
Morris, Richard, ed. 1874-1892 [rpt. 1961-1966]. Cursor Mundi. EETS, o.s. 57, 59, 62,
66, 68, 99, & 101. London: Oxford University Press.
118
OED = Oxford English Dictionary: Second Edition on CD-ROM (v. 4.0). 2009. Oxford
University Press.
Semi-communication and the lexicon: Leipzig-Jakarta lists for Old English
and Old Norse
Jonas Keller
University of Zurich
Keywords: Semi-Communication, Lexicon, Old English, Old Norse
The aim of this paper is to analyse the relationship between the lexicon and
the passive mutual under- standing between closely related languages and
to present the Leipzig-Jakarta List (LJL), compiled by the Loanword Typology
Project, as a tool of measuring mutual intelligibility. Furthermore a
comparison of two lists will be performed to test whether the vocabularies
may have allowed semi-communication.
It will first establish the role of the lexicon in semi-communication and
point to problems earlier research has encountered when compiling
samples of vocabulary in the form of word lists or text samples. In a further
step it shall be pointed out that previous attempts at creating a list of basic
vocabulary have either relied heavily on the author’s intuition or on counts
of frequency in a specified corpus. It shall be shown that neither of those
approaches are adequate, especially in a historical context.
The paper will then present Old English and Old Norse Leipzig-Jakarta
Lists. This is to illustrate the usefulness of the LJL to the research of semicommunication. The items on the lists will be compared with regard to their
phonological closeness by applying the grades of transparency
(“Durchsichtigkeit”) outlined by BRAUNMÜLLER 1995. They will be rated from
1 (completely transparent) to 6 (completely opaque) whereby the grades
are applied corresponding to the number of phonetic differences that exist
between the two forms. The first three grades are considered to allow for
mutual intelligibility while grades 3-6 are assessed as not permitting semicommunication. If a majority of items are to be considered mutually
intelligible, it can be assumed that the vocabularies might not have been a
hindrance to semi- communication.
It is expected that the study will reveal a positive result. Especially so
since it is the nature of the LJL to include a very high number of erbwörter.
It remains, however, to be seen whether the change caused by regular
119
sound change in both languages had a significant influence on mutual
understanding and, if this was the case, to what extent.
Braunmüller, Kurt (1995). “Morphologische Undurchsichtigkeit — Ein
Charakteristikum kleiner Sprachen”. In: Beiträge zur Skandinavistischen
Linguistik. Ed. by Kurt Braunmüller. Studia Nordica 1. Oslo: Novus, pp. 53–80.
Grant, Anthony P. (2010). “On using qualitative lexicostatistics to illuminate language
history. Some technical and case studies”. In: Diachronica 27.2, pp. 277–300.
McCarthy, Michael (1999). “What Constitutes a Basic Vocaublary for Spoken
Communication?” In: Studies in English Language and Literature 1, pp. 233–249.
Moulton, William G. (1988). “Mutual Intelligibility among Speakers of Early Germanic
Dialects”. In: Germania. Comparative Studies in the Old Germanic Languages and
Literatures. Ed. by Daniel G. Calder and Christy T. Craig. Wolfeboro: D. S. Brewer,
pp. 9–28.
TadmoR, Uri, Martin Haspelmath, and Bradley Tayor (2010). “Borrowability and the
notion of basic vocabulary”. In: Diachronica 27.2, pp. 226–246.
Old English ead in Anglo-Saxon given names:
A comparative approach to the Anglo-Saxon anthroponomy
Olga Khallieva Boiché
Sorbonne Paris 4, CEMA
Keywords: personal names, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, Old Russian, Old Slavic.
The Anglo-Saxon name-element ead- was the one of the most common
themes used to form dithematic personal names. The paper assesses the
reason for this abundance in anthroponyms such as Eadbald, Eadberht,
Eadred.
Bosworth and Toller give the meaning of Old English ead as ‘riches,
prosperity, happiness, bliss’. Which meaning, wealth and prosperity or
happiness and bliss, is present in the personal names? Is there any coded
message in these names?
These questions are addressed by following the model of Schramm,
according to which dithematic personal names are the expression of
poetical speech. The implication is that Germanic dithematic names were
5
originally poetic epithets, both components forming an intelligible syntagm
5
Schramm, G., Namenschatz und Dichtersprache, Studien zu den Zweigliedrigen
personennamen der Germanen, Göttingen: Vanderhoeck and Ruprecht,1957, pp. 5859.
120
that corresponded to the formulaic expression.
The paper proceeds along two axes. First, it looks for the archaic
meaning of ead by examining the Old English poetical corpus. Second, it
establishes lexical and anthroponomical parallels within continental
Germanic and other Indo-European traditions: namely Old Greek and Old
Slavic.
The paper is based on the following data:

All the poetical occurrences of ead- and its synonyms are identified
with the help of A Concordance to the Anglo-Saxon Poetic
6
Records.

Anglo-Saxon given names are drawn from the original core of
7
8
Durham Liber Vitae and from PASE database, taking into account
only persons born before 900.

Germanic onomastic data are based on the list of the persons
9
attested as living before 500, extracted from the work of Reichert.

Compilations of Slavic personal names recorded before 900 and
Russian personal names recorded before 1400 are used to
10
exemplify the Slavic material. The Greek examples are drawn
11
from A Lexicon of Greek Personal Names.
These investigations resulted not only an explanation of the origin of
ead- personal names but also an identification of an onomastic pattern,
possibly functioning on an Indo-European level.
Names formed with Germanic *aud- (etymon of OE ead-), Greek
plouto-, Slavic zir- referred to riches and abundance and were originally
used within the inferior stratum of society. Originally they should have
6
A Concordance to the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records6, ed. Bessinger, J.,Smith, Ph.,
Cornell University Press, 1978.
7
The Durham Liber vitae: London, British Library, MS Cotton Domitian A.VII: edition
and digital facsimile with introduction, codicological, prosopographicaland linguistic
commentary, and indexes, éd. David et Lynda Rollason, ElizabethBriggs, J.E. Burton,
A.I. Doyle ... [et al.], 3 vols, London: British Library,2007.
8
Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England, <http:www.pase.ac.uk>, published
18/09/2010.
9
Reichert, H., Lexikon der altgermanischen Namen, 2 vols, Verlag der
Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften: Wien, 1987.
10
Boiche Khallieva, O., IMJA and NAME: a Comparative Study of Germanic and Slavic
Given Names with their oldest manifestations among the Anglo-Saxons and the
Russians, PhD dissertation, Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2012.
11
A Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, ed. P. M. FRASER and E. MATTHEWS, 4 vols,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987-2010.
121
been monothematic and reflected the parents’ desire that their progeny
would have a prosperous life. The Heroic Age gave birth to dithematic
anthroponyms containing the ead- element (Eadric, Eadwald, Edmund
‘chief, protector of riches’), which are a later interpretation of ancient
poetical epithets describing the lord as a guardian of his people and his
land.
The unmarking markers, or variable gender
in the Old English gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels revisited
Oxana Kharlamenko
University of Paris Sorbonne
Keywords: Old English, gender, gender agreement, gender assignment,
Lindisfarne Gospels
The question of what are commonly referred to as nouns of more than one
gender has previously been discussed in several important case studies.
However, in light of the most recent linguistic theories on the subject, the
reliability of several previously accepted gender-distinctive markers must
be questioned, particularly with respect to the Old English gloss to the
Lindisfarne Gospels. The present empirical corpus-based study focuses on
sixty nouns referring to inanimate entities and assigned to several genders
in the Glossary by Cook (1894):
Table 1 : Correspondence in gender assignment in Bosworth & Toller’s Old
English Dictionary and Albert Cook’s Glossary
B&T /
Glossary
m
f
n
mn
mf
fn
mfn
mf
2
mn
12
2
7
1
1
fn
18
3
mfn
f, non-f
3
3
1
1
3
2
However, the data show that nouns of more than one gender are far less
numerous than attested in the Glossary. The reanalysis of the markedness
122
of some previously gender-sensitive markers has shown the following
results that there are only sixteen nouns which are presumably assigned to
several genders in the Lindisfarne Gospels.
My argument is that some of the previously gender-distinctive markers
had lost, as has been previously claimed by several scholars (Jones 1967,
1988, Millar 2000, 2001), their gender sensitivity at least in the glossator’s
dialect. Most of these words can in fact be assigned to one gender only, or
have no gender features that are carried by the determiners. As for those
words which seem to be assigned to several genders, their semantics is
frequently responsible for their distribution. With the chosen set of criteria
(eliminating those markers which show no gender sensitivity any longer)
applied, the gender system seems to remain more or less intact, contrary to
the ‘neutralisation theory’ suggested by Ross (1936). The anaphoric
demonstratives seem to be the only more or less reliable source as for the
noun gender, despite the accounts of the further development shown in
Curzan (2003), while the system of the internal-agreement markers
underwent drastic changes, making it more difficult to identify a noun’s
gender within the NP/DP. This leads to the conclusion that a further
reanalysis of gender agreement – and consequently of gender assignment
in Old English is required, together with a reassessment of variable-gender
nouns.
Cook, Albert S. 1894. A Glossary of the Old Northumbrian Gospels (Lindisfarne
Gospels or Durham Book). Halle: Max Niemeyer.
Corbett, Greville. 1991. Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Corbett, Greville. 2005. Agreement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Curzan, Anne. 2003. Gender Shifts in the History of English. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
von Fleischhacker, Robert. 1888. “On the Old English Nouns of More than One
Gender”. In Transactions of the Philological Society 21. London: Trübner and
CO.235—254.
Jones, Charles. 1967. “The Functional Motivation of Linguistic Change: a study in the
development of the grammatical category of gender in the late OE period”.
English studies 48. 97—111.
Jones, Charles. 1988. Grammatical Gender in English: 950 to 1250. New-York: Croom
Helm.
Kemenade van, Ans. 1987. Syntactic Case and Morphological Case in the History of
English. Dordrecht: Foris Publications.
Kitson, Peter. 1990. “On nouns of more than one gender”. English Studies 3. 185—
221.
Matasovic, Ranco. 2004. Gender in Indo-European. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag
Winter.
Millar, Robert McColl. 2000. System collapse, system rebirth, Oxford: Peter Lang.
123
Millar, Robert McColl. 2001. “After Jones: some thoughts on the final collapse of the
grammatical gender system in English”. In Jasek Fisiak (ed.). Studies in English
historical linguistics and philology. Frankfurt sur Main: Peter Lang. 293—306.
Nesset, Tore. 2006. “Gender meets the Usage-Based Model”. Lingua 116. 369—1393.
Rice, Curt. 2006. “Optimizing gender”. Lingua 116.1394—1417.
Rodina, Yulia. 2012. “A cue-based approach to the acquisition of grammatical gender
in Russian”. Journal of Child Language 39/05. 1077—1110.
Ross Alan S. C. 1936. “Sex and Gender in the Lindisfarne Gospels”. The Journal of
English and Germanic Philology 35. 321—330.
Sandström, Caroline. 2000. “The changing system of grammatical gender in the
Swedish dialects of Nyland, Finland”. In Barbara Unterbeck and Matti Rissanen
(eds.). Gender in Grammar and Cognition. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.793—806.
Schwink, Frederick W. 2004. The Third Gender. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter.
Siemund, Peter and Florian Dolberg. 2011. “From lexical to referential gender: An
analysis of gender change in Medieval English based on two historical
documents”. Folia Linguistica 45/2. 489—534.
Stenroos, Merja. 2008. “Order out of chaos? The English gender change in the
Southwest Midlands as a process of semantically based reorganization”. English
Language and Linguistics 12.3. 445—473.
Unterbeck, Barbara and Rissanen Matti (eds.). 2000. Gender in Grammar and
Cognition. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
The wickede secte of Saracenys: Lexico-semantic means of creating
religious diversity in texts from the Middle English period
Monika Kirner-Ludwig
Augsburg University
In the eyes of medieval Christians, the Saracen gradually became the
th
epitome of the MISBELIEVER and of the OTHER from as early as the 11
century. Despite the fact that the English, due to their geographical alter
orbis position and their military restraint during most of the Crusades,
hardly had any face-to-face contact with the ethnic categories of Turks,
Arabs and Saracens at all, texts from the English Middle Ages give a
surprisingly emotional and colourful picture of what English Christians
perceived as the worst enemy of (what they perceived as) the one true
faith.
Most of the conceptual, i.e. stereotypical facets about the Turks and
the Saracens seem to have been adopted from the European continent,
before they underwent further expansion as well as conceptual blending
with general features the English already bore about the category of the
MISBELIEVER. The Middle English lexico-semantic inventory in particular
124
gives a remarkable display of the deep impact such superficial ‘shared
knowledge’ passed down unquestioned had on the perception and
moulding of both the CHRISTIAN SELF and the MISBELIEVING OTHER.
My paper will focus on the conceptual categories TURK, SARACEN and,
as Middle English texts frequently put it, ‘the followers of Mahomet’s law’
on the one hand, and the semantic potentials of lexical devices used to
refer to them on the other. On the basis of references gathered in the
online editions of the Middle English Dictionary (MED) and the Oxford
English Dictionary (OED) as well as in broader contexts provided by the
Middle English Corpus of Prose and Verse (MECPV), both the frequency of
usage of respective referring expressions as well as the creativeness
involved on the word formational and semantic level will be looked into.
From a historio-pragmatic perspective it shall additionally be shown that
the selected samples present varying strategies of strengthening the image
of the Christian SELF by systematically decomposing the image of the
‘misbelieving’ OTHER by means of lexical choice.
DiPaolo Healey, Antonette, ed. 2011. Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus [DOEC;
http://www.doe.utoronto.ca/pages/pub/web-corpus.html (last accessed 13 Sept
2013)].
Horstmann, Carl, ed. 1881. Altenglische Legenden. Neue Folge. Mit Einleitung und
Anmerkungen. Heilbronn: Henninger. [Accessed via MECPV: Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan Library. 2006.]
McSparran, Frances, Paul Schaffner et al.2006. The Middle English Corpus of Prose
and Verse [MECPV; http://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/ (last accessed 13 Sept
2013)].
Metlitzki, Dorothee. 1977. The Matter of Araby in Medieval England. New Haven:
Yale University Press.
Simpson, John and Edmund Weiner, eds. 1989 (2nd ed.). The Oxford English
Dictionary. 20 Volumes. Oxford: Clarendon Press. [http://www.oed.com/ (last
accessed 13 Sept 2013)].
Tyerman, Christopher. 1988. England and the Crusades 1095-1588. Chicago/ London:
University of Chicago Press.
Scarfe Beckett, Katharine. 2003. Anglo-Saxon Perceptions of the Islamic World.
(Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 33). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Sommer, Heinrich Oskar, ed. 1889. Le Morte Darthur by Syr Thomas Malory. The
original edition of William Caxton now reprinted and edited with an introduction
and glossary. With an essay on Malory’s prose style by Andrew Lang. 3 Volumes.
London: Nutt. [Accessed via MECPV: Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan
Humanities Text Initiative. 1997. URL: http://name.umdl.umich.edu/MaloryWks2
(last accessed 10 March 2013)].
Wheatley, Henry Benjamin, ed.1899.Merlin: or the early History of King Arthur. A
prose romance (about 1450 – 1460 A.D.). 2 Volumes. (EETS OS 10, 21, 36, 112).
125
London: Trübner et al. [Accessed via MECPV: Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Humanities Text Initiative.1997.
URL: http://name.umdl.umich.edu/Merlin (last accessed 10 March 2013)].
More on the origin of passive get
Juhani Klemola
University of Tampere
Keywords: Early Modern English, passive get, grammaticalization
Most discussions on the origin of passive get place the first attestation of
the construction in the middle or late seventeenth century. Some
frequently cited first attestations are listed in (1–3):
(1)
(2)
(3)
A certain Spanish pretending Alchymist . . . got acquainted with
foure rich Spanish merchants. (1652 Gaule, Magastrom. 361)
(OED s.v. get, v.34b)
I am resolv’d to get introduced to Mrs Annabella (Powell, A Very
Good Wife, 1693. II.i p. 10 from the ARCHER Corpus)
(Gronemeyer, 1999: 29)
so you may not only save your life, but get rewarded for your
roguery (1731 Fielding, Letter Writers II.ix.20) (Jespersen, 1909–
49: IV, 108)
Some scholars (Visser 1963–73: I, 203, Denison 1993: 419) agree with the
OED and cite (1) as the first attestation of passive get, some (Denison 1998:
320, Gronemeyer 1999: 29) prefer the slightly later example in (2), while
others (Fleischer 2006: 227, Toyota 2008: 150) list all three examples in (1)
to (3), while not taking a stand on the issue of which one should considered
as the first proper attestation of the construction.
Evidence collected from the prototype version of the 400 million word
Early English Books Online (EEBO) corpus (http://corpus2.byu.edu/eebo;
not currently publicly available), covering the period of 1470s to 1690s,
clearly indicates that passive get was in use significantly earlier than
generally assumed. Example (4), from 1606, is the first unambiguous
attestation of a get passive in the EEBO corpus, with a verbal passiveparticipial complement and the agent marked with a by-phrase:
126
(4)
Plebiscitum which I call Folkemot (because this word hath beene
ancient in * our lawes) was that which the magistrate or mouth of
the Commons, vpon motion and suit, as bearing office of their
speaker and Tribune did get ratefied by the Romane Consuls and
Senators on their behalfe. (Foure bookes of offices enabling privat
persons for the speciall seruice of all good princes and policies.
Made and deuised by Barnabe Barnes, 1606; from the Early
English Books Online corpus)
In this paper, I will discuss the EEBO evidence on passive get, and argue
that the earlier than generally assumed appearance of the construction
poses a serious challenge for the theories that propose that passive get
developed from an earlier inchoative get (see, e.g. Gronemeyer 1999,
Fleischer 2006).
Denison, David. 1993. English Historical Syntax: Verbal Constructions. London:
Longman.
Denison, David. 1998. ‘Syntax.’ In Romaine, S. (ed.), The Cambridge History of the
English Language, vol. IV, 1776–1997. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
92–329.
Fleischer, Nicholas. 2006. ‘The origin of passive get.’ English Language and Linguistics
10.2: 225–252.
Gronemeyer, Claire. 1999. ‘On deriving complex polysemy: the grammaticalization of
get.’ English Language and Linguistics 3.1: 1–39.
Jespersen, Otto. 1909–49. A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles.
London and Copenhagen: Allen & Unwin and Ejnar Munksgaard. Reprinted
London, 1961.
Toyota, Junichi. 2008. Diachronic Change in the English Passive. Houndmills,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Visser, F. Th. 1963–73. An Historical Syntax of the English Language, 4 vols, Leiden:
E.J. Brill.
127
Think in Old and Middle English
Daniela Kolbe-Hanna, Frauke D’hoedt & Hubert Cuyckens
Trier University - KU Leuven
Keywords: comment clause, grammaticalization, semantic bleaching
English comment clauses, i.e. clauses expressing “speaker attitude or
stance” (Brinton 2008: 241), have been the subject of a wealth of research,
particularly relating to the grammaticalisation of the comment clause I
think (e.g., Brinton 1996: 212-254, 2008; Stenström 1995; Thompson &
Mulac 1991a,b; van Bogaert 2011). The purpose of the present paper is to
examine comment clause uses involving the verbal predicate THINK. The
comment clause function/use of I think is illustrated in examples (2) and (3),
), where think can be paraphrased as “the speaker holding an opinion,
2
judging, considering” (see OED, think v. III) and thus expresses speaker
attitude/stance towards the main proposition. While traditional wisdom
has it that this use as a comment clause presupposes semantic bleaching
(see, e.g. Brinton 2008: 49-51) of the “original, lexical” meaning ‘to hold in
the mind’, the distinction is not straightforward. Indeed, the difference
between lexical and comment clause usage of sentence-initial I think as in
(1) is discernible at the level of prosody only (see, e.g. Kaltenböck 2008,
Dehé & Wichmann 2010). Our claim is thus that think in its comment
function is not bleached to such an extent that it differs substantially in
meaning from lexical think in a matrix clause.
(1)
(2)
(3)
I think exercise is really beneficial, to anybody. (Thompson &
Mulac 1991: 313)
Exercise is, I think, really beneficial to anybody.
Exercise is really beneficial, to anybody, I think.
Moreover, considering that think in its comment function can be found
from as early as Old English (cf. (4)), it appears that the comment function
is a meaning intrinsic to think, both in initial matrix clause position (see (1)
above) and in parenthetical position (4).
(4)
Rogcer […] gaderade his folc þan cyngce to unþearfe—he þohte—
ac hit wearð heom seolfan to mycclan hearme. (OED, Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle)
‘Roger gathered his folk to the king’s detriment—he thought—but
it came to be much harm to himself’. ( stance towards the truth
128
value of the proposition: Roger thought/believed he was taking
actions to the king’s detriment, but the speaker comments that in
fact he didn’t)
Our aim is to present a detailed diachronic study of the uses of THINK
expressing speaker stance/opinion and the distribution of these comment
uses in the various possible positions in the sentence (initial, medial, final).
From the Leuven English Old to New (LEON) corpus, which comprises over
three million words from Old to Early Modern English, we have extracted all
instances of þencan (and later forms) to investigate this semantic and
syntactic development. In this way, we also hope to provide more insight to
the role of semantic bleaching in the grammaticalisation of I think.
Brinton, Laurel J. (1996) Pragmatic markers in English: Grammaticalization and
discourse function. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Brinton, Laurel J. (2008) The comment clause in English: Syntactic origins and
pragmatic development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dehé, Nicole & Anne Wichmann (2010) Sentence-initial I think (that) and I
believe (that): Prosodic evidence for use as main clause, comment clause
and discourse marker. Studies in Language 34(1): 36-74.
Kaltenböck, Gunther (2008) Prosody and function of English comment clauses.
Folia Linguistica 42 (1): 83-134.
Stenström, Anna-Brita (1994) Some remarks on comment clauses. In Bas Aarts &
Charles F. Meyer (eds.) The verb in contemporary English, 290-299.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thompson, Sandra & Anthony Mulac (1991a) A quantitative perspective on the
grammaticization of epistemic parentheticals in English. In Bernd Heine &
Elizabeth Closs Traugott (eds.) Approaches to grammaticalization. Vol 2,
313-329. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Thompson, Sandra & Anthony Mulac (1991b) The discourse conditions for the use of
the complementizer that in conversational English. Journal of Pragmatics (16):
237-251.
Van Bogaert, Julie (2011) I think and other complement-taking mental predicates: A
case of and for constructional grammaticalization. Linguistics and Philosophy
(49): 295-332.
129
Instances of phonological weight-sensitivity in Early Middle English poetry
Marta Kołos
Warsaw University
Keywords: Middle English, stress, metre, weight-sensitivity
The present paper addresses the issue of the special status manifested by
heavy syllables in Early Middle English poetry. The expected pattern of
accentuation for native vocabulary is essentially trochaic and left-strong
(Campbell 1959: 30), yet numerous non-root-initial heavy syllables appear
to receive stress in Middle English poems. A diachronic approach may
contribute to an explanation of this apparent anomaly. At the stage of Old
English, the language relied on syllabic quantity to a great extent, both for
poetic and linguistic accentuation. Hence, it is justified to postulate such
weight-sensitive constructs as the Germanic Foot (Dresher — Lahiri 1991)
as a means for explaining certain Old English phonological processes. A
continued appliance of resolution has already been observed in Poema
Morale by Fulk (2002). The question arises whether the apparent potential
of heavy syllables for attracting stress in Middle English poetry, might be a
further remnant of Old English weight sensitivity. Another issue to be
addressed is the possibly different status of heavy syllables in Early Middle
English poems as opposed to the later poetic works of the period.
In an attempt to answer the above problems, an analysis of selected
early Middle English poems is conducted. The sample is chosen basing on
the estimated date of composition as well as on the regularity of metre
(only lines with a clear metrical structure are considered). The texts include
The Ormulum, The Owl and the Nightingale and Poema Morale. Once a
database of items showing anomalies is collected, a more thorough corpus
study is conducted (based on Chadwyck-Healey’s English Poetry Full-Text
Database and the Humanities Text Initiative’s Corpus of Middle English
Prose and Verse). The results are then verified in order to estimate the
influence of external factors on the stressing patterns as well as the impact
of word-formation processes , with emphasis on the possibility of
incomplete grammaticalization of certain suffixes (Marchand 1969: 232).
Finally the data is compared to patterns of Old English accentuation and to
the anomalies attested for later Middle English.
Expected results include a degree of continuity between the status of
heavy syllables in Old English and Early Middle English poetry as well as
some reduction in the potential of such syllables for attracting poetic stress
later within the Middle English period. The impact of external influence as
130
well as that of incomplete grammaticalization is also expected to be of
some significance.
Atkins, John W.H. (ed.) 1922 The Owl and the Nightingale. Cambridge: University
Press.
Campbell, Alistair 1959 Old English grammar. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Dresher, B. Elan — Aditi Lahiri 1991 “The Germanic foot: metrical coherence in Old
English”, Linguistic Inquiry 22: 251-286.
Fulk, Robert 2002 “Early Middle English Evidence for Old English Meter: Resolution in
Poema morale”, Journal of Germanic Linguistics 14: 331-355.
Hall, Joseph (ed.) 1920 Selections from early Middle English 1130-1250. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Holt, Robert (ed.) 1878 The Ormulum with the notes and glossary of R.M. White.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Kuryłowicz, Jerzy 1976 “The linguistic foundations of meter”, Biuletyn Polskiego
Towarzystwa Językoznawczego 34: 63-73.
Marchand, Hans 1969 The categories and types of present-day English wordformation. A synchronic-diachronic approach. 2nd ed. Műnchen: C.H. Beck.
Subject-position alternations in PP-initial main clauses
Erwin R. Komen
Radboud University Nijmegen
Keywords: subject, information structure, prepositional phrases, Old
English
Main clauses in earlier English introduced by a prepositional phrase show
considerably more variation in the relative order of subject and finite verb
than other non-subject-initial main clauses. Starting with an almost 50-50
variation between SV and VS word order in Old English (OE), they end up
with a strong preference for the SV order in late Modern English. The
increase in SV order reflects the overall grammatical change in English, but
the variation in OE remains puzzling.
(1)
a. Ongemang
þisum sende Eufrosina
anne cniht,
in.the.midstof.this
sent
Euphrosyne one servant
þone þe
heo getreowost wiste. [coeuphr:93]
who that she most.faithful knew
‘Meanwhile Euphrosyne sent a servant, one whom she knew
to be very faithful.’
131
b. Æfter þisum wordum he eode on đone weg þe
after these words
he went on the
way that
himgetæht
wæs ođ đæt he becom
to.him pointed
was
until that he came
to þare ceastre
geate. [coapollo:222]
to the
city’s
gate
‘After these words, he went on the way that was pointed out
to him, until he came to the city gate.’
c. On đissere egeslican reownesse Apollonius geferan
in this
terrible
tempest
Apollonius’ companions
ealle forwurdon to deađe, [coapollo:191]
all
became
to death
‘In this terrible tempest, the companions of Apollonius all
perished.’
The SV/VS alternation in main clauses introduced by adverbials (including
PPs) has been explained as (a) reflecting a difference between subject types
(Haeberli, 2002, van Kemenade, 2000), (b) as reflecting a topic demarcation
by the verb (Hinterhölzl and van Kemenade, 2012), and (c) as depending
upon the PP-type (Komen, 2013).
Using corpus based quantitative research methods, I show that (a)
accounts for the data in the 10th and 11th centuries, but neither (a) nor (b)
can resolve the variation in early OE.
The alternative explanation (c) hinges on the argument/adjunct status
of the clause-initial PP. In order to determine the argumenthood of clauseinitial PPs, we have started lemmatizing the four historical English corpora,
since it is the combination of the preposition and the verb that largely
determine the argumenthood of the PP. In my paper, I will present the
results of testing explanation (c) by making use of the lemmatization
information in the corpora.
Haeberli, Eric. 2002. “Inflectional morphology and the loss of verb-second in English”.
Syntactic effects of morphological change. ed. by David Lightfoot, 88-106. Oxford
and New York, Oxford University Press.
Hinterhölzl, Ronald, and Ans van Kemenade. 2012. “The interaction between syntax,
information structure and prosody in word order change”. The Oxford Handbook
of the History of English. ed. by Elizabeth Closs Traugott and Terttu Nevalainen,
803-821. New York, Oxford University Press.
Komen, Erwin R. 2013. Finding focus: a study of the historical development of focus in
English. PhD dissertation, Radboud University Nijmegen
132
van Kemenade, Ans. 2000. “Jespersen’s cycle revisited: formal properties of
grammaticalization”. Diachronic syntax. ed. by Susan Pintzuk, George Tsoulas
and Anthony Warner, 51-74. Oxford, Oxford university press.
Binomials or not?
A study of double glosses in Farman’s glosses to the Rushworth Gospels
Tadashi Kotake
School of Advanced Study, University of London - Keio University, Tokyo
Keywords: binomials, Old English glosses, the Rushworth Gospels,
translation, Latin sources
In OE interlinear glosses, we find a substantial number of examples relevant
to the discussion of binomials, because a Latin expression is often glossed
with a pair of expressions, connected by “ł” (for Latin vel). Such double
glosses might be categorized as binomials, given their structure “A or B”. In
fact, paired glosses are often of the same grammatical category (e.g. Mt
12
1.23 bereþ ł kenneþ/ pariet), and occasionally alliterate (e.g. Mt 5.22 dysig
ł dole/ fatuae). In some cases, a formulaic expression may underlie a given
double gloss, when the identical pairing is found frequently in other texts
(e.g. Mt 8.33 sægdun ł cyðdon/ nuntiauerunt; cf. Koskenniemi 1968: 148).
There are certainly overlapping features between binomials and double
glosses.
However, not all double glosses can be analyzed in the framework of
binomials. This paper will analyze examples that may be regarded as
binomials in the broad context of double glossing, and consider one of the
main questions of our workshop: “to what extent binomials are present” in
a given text. The text chosen is Farman’s gloss in the Rushworth Gospels
(Oxford, Bod.L., Auct. D.2.19) for its abundant variety of double glosses.
When various functions of double glosses are examined, it will become
clear that linguistic analysis must involve palaeographical and textual
examinations. For example, it is clear, on the one hand, from the linguistic
perspective that a double gloss consisting of two different grammatical
forms of the same word cannot be regarded as a binomial (e.g. Mt 1.20
onfoh ł onfoiæ/ accipere). On the other, textual examination is necessary
when we find that Farman’s gloss not only involves the Latin text in the
Rushworth manuscript, but betrays the influence of other variant readings,
12
All the examples are from Farman’s gloss; see below.
133
which may sometimes prompt a second gloss: geotaþ ł gedoaþ/ ponunt (Mt
9.17) appears to be a good example of a binomial, but the slight semantic
difference between the two glosses may reflect Farman’s knowledge of the
more usual reading mittunt. After reviewing functions of double glosses,
Farman’s “binomial glosses” will be examined in detail. It is hoped that the
paper will contribute to discussion of the definition of binomials by
presenting a case study for one specific genre of texts and by considering
the glossator’s motivation in employing double glosses that share some
characteristics with binomials.
Koskenniemi, Inna. 1968. Repetitive Word Pairs in Old and Early Middle English Prose.
Turku: Turun Yliopisto.
Kotake, Tadashi. 2006. “Aldred’s Multiple Glosses: Is the Order Significant?”, in
Michiko Ogura (ed.) Textual and Contextual Studies in Medieval English: Towards
the Reunion of Linguistics and Philology. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. 35–50.
Kuhn, S. M. 1947. “Synonyms in the Old English Bede”, JEGP 46: 168–176.
Ross, A. S. C. 1933. “Notes on the Method of Glossing Employed in the Lindisfarne
Gospels”, Transactions of the Philological Society 1931–2: 108–119.
Ross, A. S. C. 1980. “The Multiple, Altered and Alternative Glosses of the Lindisfarne
and the Durham Ritual”, Notes and Queries 225: 489–495.
‘Reported Discourse’ in Old English:
An emerging construction?
Ulrike Krischke
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich
Keywords: reported discourse, construction grammar, clause fusion,
polyphony, mood
The present paper aims at exploring the nature of reported discourse in Old
English using the approach of Construction Grammar (Goldberg 1995). It
has been shown that Modern English has a Direct Speech Construction (cf.
Stefanowitsch 2008), which is set apart from the mono- and the ditransitive
constructions by specific characteristics on the semantic and the syntactic
level. It allows, e.g., the use of verbs other than those denoting
communication, such as (to) shriek ‘to utter a loud, shrill cry’ in [1] and
tolerates subjects in post-verbal position and objects in sentence-initial
position, as in [2].
134
(1)
(2)
Mother shrieked at the cook, ‘How can you do this, […]?’ (Martel,
Life of Pi, 412)
‘At least cover his face, […]!’ cried my mother. (ibid., 412)
Since reported discourse in the history of English has as yet not been
studied in any detail, the present paper will present the findings of a first
investigation into the history of this construction in Old English. It will
consider the general nature of reported speech/thoughts/attitudes (testing
the notion of polyphony as suggested by, e.g., Nølke 2003) and will, in a
quantitative study of selected Old English prose works, focus on the
semantics of the introductory verbs, the syntactic functions of þæt-clauses
in reported discourse (status and function of þæt and a discussion of
whether we have co-ordination, hypotaxis or sub-ordination), and the
diagnostic value of inflectional marking of mood. According to
Hopper/Traugott (2003), the grammaticalisation of OE þæt from a
demonstrative to a connective is central to the clause-fusion pathway as
illustrated in [3] and [4], the embedding of the second clause in [4] in
contrast to [3] being evidenced by the use of the subjunctive.
(3)
(4)
Þa […] gehierdun þæt þæs cyninges þegnas […] þæt se cyning
ofslęgen wæs [IND], […] (ChronA(Bately)B17.1,[0255 (755.24)]).
[…] þohte […] þæt se an ne ætburste [S BJ] […]
(ÆCHomI,5B1.1.6,[0034(219.72)]).
As Fischer (2008: 214-29) observes, the problems with this analysis include
the absence of quantitative evidence for a higher frequency of the ‘doublethat’ construction in early vs. late Old English and the general difficulty in
discerning ‘usual’ grammaticalisation features such as phonetic reduction
or semantic bleaching, since clause fusion involves the development of a
macro-construction (cf. Traugott 2008) rather than the grammaticalisation
of a lexical item. The study will also touch upon evidential strategies in Old
English other than ‘reported discourse’, e.g. the use of evidential *sculan.
Fischer, Olga. 2008. Morphosyntactic Change. Functional and Formal Perspectives.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goldberg, Adele E. 1995. Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to
Argument Structure. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Hopper, Paul J. and Elisabeth Closs Traugott. 2003 [1993]. Grammaticalization. 2nd
ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Martel, Yann. 2003 [2001]. Life of Pi. Edinburgh: Canongate.
135
Nølke, Henning. 2003. “Polyphonie linguistique et discours rapporté” in Polyphonie –
linguistique et littéraire. Documents de travail/Arbejdspapirer, no. 7.
<http://ojs.ruc.dk/index.php/poly/issue/ archive> [last access 16.10.2013]>.
Traugott, Elisabeth Closs. 2008. “Grammatikalisierung, emergente Konstruktionen
und der Begriff der ‘Neuheit’” in Anatol Stefanowitsch and Kerstin Fischer (eds.).
Konstruktionsgrammatik II. Von der Konstruktion zur Grammatik. Tübingen:
Stauffenburg, 5-32.
Binomials in Caxton’s Ovid
Elisabeth Kubaschewski
Katholische Universität Eichstätt - Ingolstadt
Keywords: William Caxton’s Ovid, Ovide moralisé en prose II, Binomials,
Formulaicity
William Caxton was one of the most influential characters in English literary
history. Besides introducing printing in England, he edited and translated
numerous texts, among them the Ovid, i.e. Ovid’s Metamorphoses
(Cambridge Magdalene College, Old Library, MS F.4.34; Cambridge
Magdalene College, Pepys Library, MS 2124). There are many publications
on William Caxton’s life and his work as a printer and editor (e.g. Blake
1991 or Deacon 1976), but there are few publications on the texts he
translated and printed. The Ovid in particular has been neglected for a long
time. Recently, however, an edition by Richard Moll has been published
and some doctoral dissertations have been written on the text, e.g., the
proem and book I as well as the French source text were edited by Diana
Rumrich (2011) and books II and III by Wolfgang Mager (forthc.). Books IV
and V are currently being dealt with by Daniela Rapf and book VI of the
Ovid and its French source have been edited by Kubaschewski (forthc.).
The editions by Rumrich, Mager and Kubaschewski are the basis of my
study of the use and structure of the binomials in the Ovid. Binomials or
twin-formulae are often grouped according to their word-classes, their
connecting elements, their semantic structure and, of course, the
etymology of their components. Besides this approach, I have carried out
an analysis regarding the popularity and formulaicity of certain binomials,
such as lady and quene, which alone occurs three times in book VI,
consulting the Middle English Dictionary Online.
However, the Ovid is not a direct translation of the Latin
Metamorphoses, but rather Caxton’s Middle English version of the 15thcentury French prose text Ovide moralisé en prose II. Therefore, it is also of
136
interest to examine the use of binomials in the three existent manuscripts
of the French source text and compare them to each other (MS Paris,
Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Fonds Fr. 137, MS St. Petersburg,
Rossijskaua Nacional’naja Biblioteka, F.v.XIV, London British Library, Royal
17 E. IV) as well as to the Middle English text. William Caxton’s Ovid often
seems to be a word-by-word translation, but with the binomials he acted
more freely: some of them were taken over from the Middle French source
text (e.g. lady and quene, p.334, from French dame & royne, e.g. MS Fonds
Fr. 137, f.77v), but others were introduced by Caxton himself (e.g. pyte and
domage, p.348).
My analysis aims at combining the traditional approaches of grouping
(e.g. Leisi 1947, Koskenniemi 1968, and Sauer and Mager 2011) with an
examination of the popularity and formulaicity of certain collocations and
the influence of the source text on the Ovid.
Caxton, William. [1480] 1819. Six Bookes of Metamorphoseos in whyche ben
conteyned the Fables of Ovide. Translated out of Frenche into Englysshe by
William Caxton. Printed from Manuscript in the Library of Mr Secretary Pepys. Ed.
George Hibbert. London: Roxburghe Club.
Caxton, William. [1480] 1924. Ovyde hys Booke of Metamorphose: Booke x−xv.
Translated by William Caxton. Ed. Stephen Gaselee & Herbert F.B. Brett-Smith.
Oxford: Shakespeare Head.
Caxton, William. [1480] 1968. The Metamorphoses of Ovid translated by William
Caxton 1480. Ed. George Braziller in association with Magdalene College. 2 vols.
New York/Cambridge: Jarrold.
[Facsimile-Edition of Caxton’s Ovid.]
Caxton, William. [~1460 - ~1490] 1973. Selections with an Introduction, Notes and
Glossary. Ed. Norman F. Blake. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Caxton, William. 2008. “Caxton’s Ovid, books II and III. A Critical Edition of the Second
and Third Book of Caxton’s Middle English Translation, Ovyde Metamorphose Hys
Booke (1480), together with its Middle French Source Text, the Ovyde Moralisé
en Prose II.” Ed. Wolfgang Mager. Unpublished PhD diss., University of Munich.
(forthcoming)
Caxton, William. 2011. The Middle English Text of Caxton’s Ovid: Book I. Ed. Diana
Rumrich. Heidelberg: Winter.
Caxton, William. 2013. The Booke of Ovyde Named Metamorphose. Ed. Richard J.
Moll. Oxford: Bodleian Library.
Caxton, William (forthc.). An Edition of Caxton’s Ovid: Book VI. Ed. Elisabeth
Kubaschewski.
137
The pragmatic functions of I say and I tell (you) in Early Modern English
dialogues
Daniela Landert
University of Zurich
Keywords: Early Modern
communication, dialogues
English,
pragmatic
functions,
meta-
Like any type of communication, dialogues consist of more than
propositional content. Speakers express attitudes towards what they say,
they organise turn-taking, and they use text-structuring devices, to name
just a few examples. Meta-communicative expressions are one option for
carrying out such pragmatic functions (see, for instance, Boggel 2009;
Dossena 2012; Simon-Vandenbergen and Defour 2012; Taavitsainen 2000),
and I say and I tell (you) can both be used in this way. (I) say is discussed as
a comment clause by Brinton (2008), and it has been identified as one of
the most frequent expressions for author-based stance marking metadiscourse in Early Modern English religious texts (Boggel 2009: 183).
Furthermore, both say and tell have been shown to fulfil metacommunicative functions in nineteenth-century Scottish emigrants’ letters
(Dossena 2012).
The present study investigates the use of I say and I tell (you) –
including modified variants like I would say, I can tell you – in Early Modern
English dialogues, based on the Corpus of English Dialogues (CED). The
speech-relatedness of the data makes the CED particularly suitable for a
detailed study of these two constructions, which are both closely
associated with speaking. As I will show, I say and I tell (you) can express a
range of pragmatic functions. These functions include, for instance, speech
reporting, text-structuring in question answer sequences, and expressing
emphasis. The aim of this study is to compare the two constructions with
respect to their functions and to investigate how these functions depend
on the context. In particular, I will discuss the differences in pragmatic
functions across the various text types in the CED, which include
constructed dialogues, like comedy plays and fiction, and authentic
dialogues, like trial proceedings and witness depositions. These text types
are related to speech in different ways (Culpeper and Kytö 2010). As a
consequence, text type distribution of the functions of I say and I tell (you)
will provide further insights into how these meta-communicative
expressions relate to spoken language.
138
A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760. 2006. Compiled under the supervision of
Merja Kytö (Uppsala University) and Jonathan Culpeper (Lancaster University).
Boggel, Sandra. 2008. Metadiscourse in Middle English and Early Modern English
Religious Texts. A Corpus-Based Study. English Corpus Linguistics 10. Frankfurt
am Main: Peter Lang.
Brinton, Laurel. 2008. The Comment Clause in English. Studies in English Language.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Culpeper, Jonathan and Merja Kytö. 2010. Early Modern English Dialogues: Spoken
Interaction as Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dossena, Marina. 2012. “‘I Write You These Few Lines’. Metacommunication and
Pragmatics in Nineteenth-Century Scottish Emigrants’ Letters”. In Investigations
into the Meta-Communicative Lexicon of English. A Contribution to Historical
Pragmatics, edited by Ulrich Busse and Axel Hübler, 45–63. Pragmatics & Beyond
New Series 220. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Simon-Vandenbergen, Anne-Marie, and Tine Defour. 2012. “Verbs of Answering
Revisited. A Corpus-Based Study of Their Pragmatic Development”. In
Investigations into the Meta-Communicative Lexicon of English. A Contribution to
Historical Pragmatics, edited by Ulrich Busse and Axel Hübler, 223–245.
Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 220. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Taavitsainen, Irma. 2000. “Metadiscursive Practices and the Evolution of Early English
Medical Writing 1375-1550”. In Corpora Galore: Analyses and Techniques in
Describing English, edited by John M. Kirk, 191–207. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
On Middle English she, sho: A refurbished narrative
Roger Lass & Margaret Laing
In memoriam Derek Britton
Keywords: Old English, Middle English, ‘she’, etymology
Histories of the English nominative singular third person feminine pronoun
have focussed on (a) the initial [ʃ] of Middle English she, sho and (b) the
difficulties of the [e:] vocalism. The interest of this pronoun, however,
begins in pre-Old English times and is inextricably bound up with the history
of the accusative, which by NWGmc had become identical by loss of final
nasal. This identity continues into Old English, the phonological
developments introducing, however, considerable formal variation, hīo, hīa,
hēo and hīe being attested for both nominative and accusative in different
dialects. In West Saxon, this variation enables morphosyntactic selection of
contrasting variants for each function, respectively hēo and hīe. In Mercian,
both forms are found in both functions (Campbell 1959: §703, Hogg & Fulk
2011: §5.17 (2)). The first part of our paper presents the histories, from
139
PGmc to Old English, for both nominative and accusative, created for the
Corpus of Narrative Etymologies (CoNE). CoNE interfaces with its
accompanying Corpus of Changes (CC), which describes the steps in the
historical evolution. (Later syncretism removes the hēo, hīe etc. types from
accusative function, which is taken over by the genitive/dative ‘her’ type.
For a form that bucks this trend see the related abstract by Rhona Alcorn.)
The early Middle English evidence for the feminine nominative shows
that the complexity, already present in Old English, continues in the
surviving h- forms. Later developments spawn a different complex of forms
that do begin with h-. Our source for the early Middle English data is the
LAEME Corpus of Tagged of Texts (CTT). This contains 71 texts that include
one or more variants of the nominative singular feminine e.g.: heo, he, ho,
hi, hye, ghe, ᵹho, ʒe, scæ, sco, sche. The second part of our paper starts
from the Old English forms and narrates the stages that account for all the
different variants found in the LAEME CTT (36 in all). Each narrative strand
includes the relevant phonetic, orthographic or morphological
developments as detailed in the CC, including new interpretations of four
changes. Our narrative is complementary to the richly detailed revisions in
OED3. It is much indebted to, and celebrates, Derek Britton’s 1991 paper,
but adds significant new material and differs in detail on both the initial
consonant and the vocalism. It also includes explanations for such oddities
as scha, yo and þie, þoe.
Britton, D. 1991. On Middle English she, sho: a Scots solution to an English problem.
Nowele 17: 3–51.
Campbell, A. 1959. Old English Grammar. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
CoNE = Lass, R., Alcorn, R., Laing, M. & Williamson, K. (eds.) 2013–. A Corpus of
Narrative Etymologies from Primitive Old English to Early Middle English and A
Corpus of Changes. http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/CoNE/CoNE.html. Edinburgh: ©
The University of Edinburgh.
Hogg, R.M. & Fulk, R.D. A Grammar of Old English Volume 2: Morphology. Chichester:
Wiley-Blackwell.
LAEME = A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English 1150–1325, version 3.2. 2013–
Compiled by Margaret Laing. Electronic text corpus with accompanying software
(Keith Williamson) index of sources and theoretical introduction (with Roger
Lass). http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laeme2/laeme2.html. Edinburgh: ©The
University of Edinburgh.
OED3 = OED Online: she, pron.1, n., and adj.; hoo, pron. and n.; † hi, pron.1 Accessed
October 2013.
140
Cognate object constructions in Early Modern English:
The case of Tyndale’s New Testament
Nikolaos Lavidas
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
The aim of this paper is to investigate the rise of the Cognate Object
Constructions (COCs) in Early Modern English (EModE), particularly in the
first complete English translation of the Bible from the original Greek and
Hebrew by William Tyndale (see exx. in 1a-c, 2a). According to Visser
(1963–73 [2002]: 415), the COC is a recent development in English. Our
corpus study will confirm Visser’s remarks and show that from Middle to
Early Modern English, the range of COCs was extended with activity/event
nouns (e.g., He smiled a disarming smile).
(1) a.
b.
c.
(2) a.
b.
...but iudge rightewes iudgement. (Tyndale, Jn. 7.24)
...the love wher wt thou hast loved me. (Tyndale, Jn. 17.26)
…synne a synne that is not vnto deeth. (Tyndale, 1 Jn. 5.16)
...they were marvelously glad. (Tyndale, Mt. 2.10)
...ekhárēsan
kharàn
megálēn
sphódra.
were-glad.3pl
joy.acc
big.acc
exceedingly
(Greek N. T., Mt. 2.10)
Taylor (2008) has shown for Old English translations of Latin texts that the
translation effects for biblical translations are direct and different from the
ones involved in non-biblical translations (indirect translation effects). We
will show that the distribution of COCs with activity/event nouns in the
Tyndale’s translation, other non-biblical translations and original texts of
the same period can expand Taylor’s distinction (between direct vs. indirect
translation effects) to the EModE period. For exx. (1a-c), the Greek New
Testament shows a COC, too, and the examples demonstrate a translation
effect (the hypothesis on the influence from the Luther’s German New
Testament will also be discussed). In contrast to the Greek text, Tyndale’s
New Testament does not include a COC in example (2a). We will further
examine the hypothesis that the rise of COCs with activity/event nouns is
linked to the grammaticalization of the viewpoint (progressive) aspect (be +
V-ing), which we will check with data from Tyndale’s New Testament (cf.
Nevalainen (1991) on EModE liturgical prose). Finally, we will argue that the
transfer of characteristics in the case of direct translation effects follows
the syntactic transfer in cases of L2 acquisition. The direct translation
effects mainly concern uninterpretable (syntactic) features rather than
141
interpretable features (Interpretability Hypothesis; Tsimpli 2003); a higher
frequency of COCs is observed in biblical EModE than in other texts, but the
translator also uses other strategies to avoid the transfer of features from
the foreign language.
Nevalainen, T. 1991. Motivated archaism: The use of affirmative periphrastic do in
Early Modern English liturgical prose. In D. Kastovsky (ed.), Historical English
Syntax. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 303-320.
Taylor, A. 2008. Contact effects of translation: Distinguishing two kinds of influence
in Old English. Language Variation and Change 20(2): 341-365.
Tsimpli, I.M. 2003. Interrogatives in the Greek/English interlanguage: A minimalist
account. In E. Mela-Athanasopoulou (ed.), Selected Papers on Theoretical and
Applied Linguistics. Thessaloniki: Aristotle University, 214-225.
Visser, F. Th. 1963–73. An Historical Syntax of the English Language. Vol. 1. Leiden: E.
J. Brill.
Binomials and multinomials in Early Modern English parliamentary acts
Anu Lehto
University of Helsinki
The paper explores binomials and multinomials in Early Modern English
parliamentary acts, focusing especially on the frequencies of these
constructions. Binomials and multinomials are common in legal writing, as
they increase precision, although they are also used for stylistic reasons
(Danet 1980, Kopaczyk 2009: 93). Diachronically, legal writing became more
verbose and precise during the Early Modern period (e.g. Hiltunen 1990:
58), and hence the paper sets out to study whether the use of binomials
and multinomials also increases during the period.
Binomials are defined as word pairs that are syntactically connected by
coordinators and that are semantically related in their meaning, while
multinomials consist of longer sequences of related words (Gustafsson
1984: 124; Frade 2005: 134). Further, formulaic binomials are “permanent
and fixed combinations in the language”, while unformulaic binomials “are
temporary but fill the semantic and syntactic requirements” (Gustafsson
1975, Moon 1998). In addition to surveying the overall diachronic
frequencies, the study further examines formulaic constructions by
analysing high-frequency binomials and multinomials.
The data of the study are parliamentary acts from my corpus, the
Corpus of Early Modern English Statutes (1491–1707). The category of
parliamentary acts contains approximately 180,000 words. The instances of
142
binomials are located by lexical searches for coordinators. Further, the
corpus is normalised in its spelling variation which enables a more accurate
examination of the high-frequency binomials by analysing clusters that
involve either the coordinator and or or.
The paper shows that binomials are noticeably common in the Early
Modern parliamentary acts and become diachronically more frequent,
reflecting the sociohistorical changes of the era. Most binomials and
multinomials consist of coordinated nouns but coordinated verbs are also
common. Further, formulaic binomials (such as ordered and enacted)
appear, for instance, in the enactment clause that is repeated in each act,
and other high-frequency word pairs include for example legal actors and
legal actions (shall and may). Further, some of the binomials and
multinomials remain common throughout the analysed time span, while
others are repeated only in individual acts.
Danet, Brenda 1980. Language in the legal process. Law and Society Review 14.3,
445–564.
Frade, Celina. 2005. Legal Multinomials: Recovering Possible Meanings from Vague
Tags. In Bhatia, Vijay, Jan Engberg, Maurizio Gotti and Dorothee Heller (eds.),
Vagueness in Normative Texts. Bern: Peter Lang. 133–156.
Gustafsson, Marita. 1984. The syntactic features of binomial expression in legal
English. Text 4.1–3, 123–141.
Gustafsson, Marita. 1975. Binominal Expressions in Present-Day English. A Syntactic
and Semantic Study. Turku: Annales Universitatis Turkuensis.
Hiltunen, Risto. 1990. Chapters on Legal English. Aspects Past and Present of the
Language of the Law. Jyväskylä: Gummerus.
Kopaczyk, Joanna. 2009. Multi-word Units of Meaning in 16th-century Legal Scots. In
McConchie, R. W., Alpo Honkapohja and Jukka Tyrkkö (eds.), Selected
Proceedings of the 2008 Symposium on New Approaches in English Historical
Lexis. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. 88–95.
Moon, Rosamund. 1998. Fixed expressions and idioms in English: A corpus-based
approach. London: Clarendon Press.
143
th
th
Slander, cursing and verbal aggression in 16 -/17 -century Scottish courtrecords
Magdalena Leitner
University of Glasgow
Keywords: historical impoliteness, Older Scots, court-records
Court-records offer invaluable insights into language use in early modern
conflict interactions because speech-events in everyday contexts were
recorded as legal evidence (see Kytö, Grund and Walker 2011: 1). This
paper investigates the variety of verbal offences in Scottish court-records
th
th
from the 16 /17 centuries, a period of radical social change in Scotland.
What are the pragmatic functions of injurious speech-acts in these records?
How does the historical legal context shape perceptions of verbal offences?
Early modern court-records, e.g. courtroom discourse (Cecconi 2012) or
witness depositions (Kytö, Grund and Walker 2011), have increasingly
attracted scholarly attention in historical pragmatics. Leitner’s (2013)
analysis of thou/ye in Scottish/Northern English court-records exemplifies
how Scottish data complement our knowledge of the development of
pragmatic features in English. Moreover, verbal offences such as
impoliteness/insults are widely studied in modern pragmatics (e.g.
Culpeper 2011, Mateo and Yus 2013). Insults and slander have also been
examined in historical texts (Jucker 2000, Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000);
however, the focus of historical (im)politeness research is still much more
on politeness than on impoliteness (see Culpeper and Kádár 2010, Bax and
Kádár 2011).
My case study combines Culpeper’s (2011: 23) perception-based
concept of impoliteness with data-sensitive methods from historical
(im)politeness research. It offers qualitative analyses of (in)direct
renderings of injurious speech-acts and investigates how they were
evaluated in the discourse of legal proceedings. Jucker and Taavitsainen’s
(2000: 74) “pragmatic space”, a concept derived from semantic field theory,
is used to classify verbal offences according to several dimensions, e.g.
speaker intention and response. Data are drawn from ecclesiastical and
criminal courts, i.e. the St Andrews Kirk Session Register 1559-1600
(Fleming 1889-90) and the Criminal Trials in Scotland 1488-1624 (Pitcairn
1833), to ensure a range of different case-types. Because printed editions
of historical texts are not fully reliable for linguistic research, the data are
verified against surviving manuscripts (see Kytö, Grund and Walker 2011: 78).
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The paper tests the boundaries between impoliteness and breaches of
law: How do we categorise linguistic behaviour which was punishable in the
past and today may still be perceived as a verbal offence but without legal
consequences? Because of the historical legal context I expect slander,
cursing and verbal aggression to be common in the selected texts.
Furthermore, I anticipate criminal and ecclesiastical courts to differ in their
metalinguistic labels for injurious language.
Fleming, David H. (ed.). 1889-90. Register of the Minister, Elders and Deacons of the
Christian Congregation of St. Andrews: Comprising the Proceedings of the Kirk
Session and of the Court of the Superintendent of Fife, Fothrik and Strathearn,
1559-1600. Edinburgh: Scottish History Society.
Pitcairn, Robert (ed.). 1833. Criminal Trials in Scotland from MCCCCLXXXVIII to
MDCXXIV Embracing the Entire Reigns of James IV, James V, Mary Queen of Scots
and James VI. 3 vols. CD-ROM. Burlington, Canada: TannerRitchie Publishing,
2005.
Bax, Marcel and Dániel Z. Kádár. 2011. The historical understanding of historical
(im)politeness. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 12 (1-2): 1-24.
Cecconi, Elisabetta. 2012. The Language of Defendants in the 17th-Century English
Courtroom: A Socio-Pragmatic Analysis of the Prisoners’ Interactional Role and
Representation. Bern: Peter Lang.
Culpeper, Jonathan. 2011. Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence.
Cambridge: CUP.
Culpeper, Jonathan and Dániel Z. Kádár (eds.). 2010. Historical (Im)politeness. Bern:
Peter Lang.
Jucker, Andreas H. 2000. Slanders, slurs and insults on the road to Canterbury: Forms
of verbal aggression in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. In Placing Middle English in
Context, ed. by Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen, Päivi Pahta and Matti
Rissanen (eds.), 369-389. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Jucker, Andreas H. and Irma Taavitsainen. 2000. Diachronic speech act analysis.
Insults from flyting to flaming. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1 (1): 67-95.
Kytö, Merja, Peter Grund and Terry Walker (eds.). 2011. Testifying to Language and
Life in Early Modern England. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Leitner, Magdalena. 2013. Thou and you in Late Middle Scottish and Early Modern
Northern English witness depositions. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 14 (1):
100-129.
Mateo, José and Francisco Yus. 2013. Towards a cross-cultural pragmatic taxonomy
of insults. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 1 (1): 87-114.
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Some notes on Chaucer’s metrics
Xingzhong (Charles) Li
Central Washington University
Keywords: final-e, relative stress, trochee, alternating meter, iambic
pentameter
This paper reconsiders several central aspects of the metrical structures of
Chaucer’s octosyllabic and decasyllabic lines, including (1) the debate over
the word-medial and word-final –e (Southworth 1947, 1951, 1962, 1964;
Robinson 1957; Conner 1974; Kökeritz 1978; Barber and Barber 1990,
1991), (2) elision, resolution, and extrametricality (Halle and Keyser 1965,
1971; Kiparsky 1977, 1989; Hayes 1982; Hanson 1991; Li, 1995, 2004), (3)
syllabicity of sonorants (Hascall 1969; Tarlinskaja 1976; Li 1995), (4)
absolute versus relative stress (Jespersen 1913; Cable 2008; Minkova 2009),
(5) trochees versus iambs (Jespersen 1913; Hayes 1983, 1989; Cable 2008;
Li 2008), and (6) alternating meter versus iambic pentameter (Jespersen
1913; Halle and Keyser 1966, 1971, 1999; Kiparsky 1975; Youmans 1983,
1996; Youmans and Li 2002; Cable 2002; Li 2005; Hayes, Wilson, and Shisko
2012).
Using a systematic sample (every tenth line) of Chaucer’s entire verse,
including 1,126 lines of iambic tetrameter and 3,020 lines of iambic
pentameter, this paper examines the above issues one after another in the
format of notes. Each note begins with a summary of arguments and
counterarguments concerning a particular issue that researchers have
made and then provides evidence to attest or reinterpret them in an
attempt to better understand Chaucer’s metrical structure. Results show
that overt elisions constitute a new piece of evidence in determining the
pronouncability of Chaucer’s word-medial and word-final –e’s and
prosodically contribute to Chaucer’s metrified octo- and deca-syllabic lines,
that extrametrical syllables can occur line-internally to differentiate
resolutions, that syllabicity of sonorants can be determined based on
sonorant-sonorant, fricative-sonorant, and stop-sonorant sequences, that
stress is relatively and simultaneously constrained by the dichotomy of
content and function words and by prosodic contexts, that trochees are
formed by an array of internal structures and are thus gradationally defined
by that array, and that alternating meter can be distinguished from iambic
pentameter by prosodic features of inflection, hovering stress, and other
linguistic features.
146
Barber, Charles, and Nicolas Barber. “The Versification of The Canterbury Tales: A
Computer-based Statistical Study, Part I.” Leeds Studies in English 21 (1990): 81103.
Barber, Charles. “The Versification of The Canterbury Tales: A Computer-based
Statistical Study, Part II.” Leeds Studies in English 22 (1991): 57-84.
Benson, Larry D., ed. The Riverside Chaucer. 3rd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 1987.
Benson, Larry D. A Glossarial Concordance to The Riverside Chaucer. New York:
Garland Publishing, Inc., 1993.
Cable, Thomas. “Issues for a new history of English prosody.” Studies in the History
of the English Language: A Millennial Perspective. Eds. Donka Minkova and
Robert Stockwell. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002. 125-51.
Cable, Thomas. “The Illusive Progress of Prosodical Study.” Studies in the History of
the English Language IV: Empirical and Analytical Advances in the Study of the
English Language Change. Eds. Susan M. Fitzmaurice and Donka Minkova.
Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008. 101-18.
Conner, Jack. English Prosody from Chaucer to Wyatt. The Hague: Mouton, 1974.
Halle, Morris, and S. J. Keyser. “Chaucer and the Study of Prosody.” College English
28 (1966): 187-219.
Conner, Jack, and S. J. Keyser. English Stress: Its Form, Its Growth, and Its Role in
Verse. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.
Conner, Jack, and S. J. Keyser. “On Meter in General and on Robert Frost’s Iambics in
Particular.” Linguistics: In Search of the Human Mind. Eds. Masatake Muraki
and Enoch Iwamoto. Japan: Kaitakusha. 1999. 130-53.
Hanson, Kristin. “Resolution in Modern Meters.” Diss. Stanford University, 1991.
Hascall, Dudley L. “Some Contributions to the Halle-Keyser Theory of Prosody.”
College English 30 (1969): 357-65.
Hayes, Bruce. “Extrametricality and English Stress.” Linguistic Inquiry 13 (1982): 22776.
Hayes, Bruce. “The Prosodic Hierarchy in Meter.” Phonetics and Phonology 1:
Rhythm and Meter. Eds. Paul Kiparsky and Gilbert Youmans. San Diego:
Academic Press, 1989. 201-60.
Hayes, Colin Wilson, and Anne Shisko. “Maxent Grammars for the Metrics of
Shakespeare and Milton.” Language 88.4 (2012): 691-731.
Jespersen, Otto. “Notes on Metre.” Linguistica: Selected Papers in English, French
and German. Copenhagen: Levin and Munksgaard, 1913. 249-74.
Kiparsky, Paul. Stress, Syntax, and Meter. Language 51: 576-616.
Kiparsky, Paul. “The Rhythmic Structure of English Verse.” Linguistic Inquiry 8 (1977):
189-247.
Kiparsky, Paul. “Sprung Rhythm.” Phonetics and Phonology 1: Rhythm and Meter.
Eds. Paul Kiparsky and Gilbert Youmans. San Diego: Academic Press, 1989. 30540.
Kökeritz, Helge. A Guide to Chaucer’s Pronunciation. Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1978.
Li, Xingzhong. “Chaucer’s Meters.” Diss. University of Missouri-Columbia, 1995.
147
Li, Xingzhong. “A central metrical prototype for English iambic tetrameter verse:
Evidence from Chaucer’s octosyllabic lines.” Studies in the History of the English
Language II: Unfolding Conversations. Eds. Anne Curzan and Kimberly Emmons.
Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2004. 315-41.
Li, Xingzhong. “Metrical Evidence: Did Chaucer Translate The Romaunce of the
Rose?” Studies in the History of the English Language IV: Empirical and
Analytical Advances in the Study of the English Language Change. Eds. Susan M.
Fitzmaurice and Donka Minkova. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008.
155-79.
Minkova, Donka, and Robert Stockwell. “Reading Chaucer Aloud Today: The Quality
of the Evidence.” Presented at the Conference of the International Association
of University Professors of English at Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario,
Canada, Aug. 1-7, 1992.
Minkova, Donka. “The Forms of Verse.” A Companion to Medieval English literature
and culture C.1350 – C.1500. Ed. Peter Brown. Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishing Ltd., 2009. 176-95.
Robinson, F. N., ed. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. 2nd ed. London, 1957.
Southworth, James G. “Chaucer’s Final –E in Rhyme.” PMLA 62 (1947): 910-35.
Southworth, James G. Verses of Cadence: An Introduction to the Prosody of Chaucer
and his Followers. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1951.
Southworth, James G. The Prosody of Chaucer and his Followers: Supplementary
Chapters to Verses of adence. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962.
Southworth, James G. “Chaucer’s Prosody: A Plea for a Reliable Text.” College
English 26 (1964): 173-79.
Tarlinskaja, Marina. English Verse: Theory and History. The Hague: Mouton, 1976.
Weismiller, Edward R. “Triple Threats to Duple Rhythm.” Phonetics and Phonology 1:
Rhythm and Meter. Eds. Paul Kiparsky and Gilbert Youmans, 1989. 261-90.
Youmans, Gilbert. “Generative tests for generative meter.” Language 59 (1983): 67
Youmans, Gilbert “Reconsidering Chaucer’s Prosody.” English Historical Metrics.
Eds. C. B. McCully and J. J. Anderson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996. 341-79.
Youmans, Gilbert, and Xingzhong Li. “Chaucer: Folk Poet and littérateur?” Studies in
the History of the English Language: A millennial Perspective. Eds. Donka
Minkova and Robert Stockwell. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002. 153-75.
148
Correlative constructions in earlier English: The þa … þa construction
Meta Links & Ans van Kemenade
Radboud University Nijmegen
Keywords: Old English, correlative constructions, syntax, discourse
This paper will consider in detail the structural characteristics and the
discourse semantic functions of correlative constructions in Old English. An
example of a correlative construction with temporal þa is given in (1). Van
Kemenade and Los (2006) argue that in (1) the subclause, introduced by the
conjunction þa, serves to locate the event in time/discourse, while the
second clause, introduced by the resumptive adverb þa, relates the followup event. The subclause can also be introduced by þonne or conditional gif.
(1)
þa he þa to him cwom, þa wæs he forht geworden.
then he then to him came, then was he fearful become
‘When he then came to him, he had become fearful.’
(Bede_2:9.128.17.1222)
The discourse properties of these constructions are reflected in their
correlative syntactic form in a variety of ways: 1) the use of conjunctions
and their specific combinations with resumptive adverbs; 2) the use of the
first constituent position in the main clause; and 3) the clause-internal use
of þa and þonne, which seems to play a pivotal role in explicitly correlating
the modality, truth conditions and illocution of the two clauses. We present
two hypotheses: 1) correlative constructions play an important role in
establishing temporal/conditional linking in OE discourse; and 2) þa and
þonne, which are literally adverbs but enter into grammaticalised discourse
functions, are used to “manage” the correlation of modality, truth
conditions and illocution between the two clauses.
Using a qualitative and quantitative corpus-based approach, mining the
YCOE corpus, we expect to find a correlation between several variables
accounting for the characteristics of correlative constructions in Old
English. The following features are expected to have an effect: the choice of
subordinator and combining adverb (if any), the mood of the clause,
optionality/doubling of þa/þonne as particles, negation in the main clause
or subclause, and word order. In addition, we also explore to what extent
the properties of correlative clauses are related to the division of labour
between parataxis and hypotaxis in OE.
149
Kemenade, A. v., & Los, B. (2006). Discourse adverbs and clausal syntax in Old and
Middle English. In A. v. Kemenade & B. Los (Eds.), The handbook of the history of
English (pp. 224-248). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Taylor, A., Warner, A., Pintzuk, S., & Beths, F. (2003). The York-Toronto-Helsinki
Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose. Retrieved from the Oxford Text Archive.
“Permissive” English subjects
Bettelou Los, Rosanne Hebing & Erwin Komen
University Of Edinburgh - Radboud University Nijmegen
Keywords: subjects, discourse, syntax, coreferentiality, corpora
English subjects are extremely “permissive” compared to those in related
languages such as Dutch and German. They may express almost any
semantic role, even locations as in (1), and time as in (2). Other types of
permissive subjects can be ascribed to the extensive possibilities of English
to create middles, as in (3), and to changing patterns of valency, which led
to many intransitive verbs acquiring transitive counterparts in the history of
English (4) (cf. Van Gelderen 2011).
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
The roof of the tunnel was seeping water. (Hawkins 1986: 58-61,
from Rohdenburg 1974)
2004 saw the advent of routers with turbo modes
(www.cnet.com.au/wireless/routers/)
Matching hood converts into collar (Sears & Roebuck Catalogue)
(Hundt 2007: 161)
The car nosed into the city traffic/I nosed the car onto the tracks
(Francis & Sinclair 1994: 198)
Two further observations are that (i) discourse-coherence in English is
primarily achieved by subjects, in contrast to Dutch and German, and that
(ii) subjects are affected by a difference in narrative perspective between
English and German has been reported in the literature. English speakers
tend to encode external forces like the wind in (5) as a subject:
(5)
A young man is surfing. The wind is blowing him off the board
(Carroll et al. 2004: 190)
150
German informants performing the same linguistic task do not mention the
wind at all but employ passives (He is blown off the board) with the effect
that the subject in their narratives most frequently express human
protagonists, and there is less subject referent switch (Carroll et al 2004).
Permissive subjects, then, could be a symptom of the higher functional load
of subjects in English. Subjects in a PDE narrative not only encode the
human protagonists, but also inanimate referents (discourse-linked
locations as the tunnel as in (1) and external forces like the wind in (5)).
Frequent referent switches in turn require the human protagonists to be
reactivated for the hearer/reader by proper names or other full nominals
like his father, his master’s wife, etc., which should result in decreasing
ratios of pronominal versus nominal subjects. These hypotheses are tested
using samples of the syntactically annotated Helsinki corpora enriched with
coreferential information (Komen, Hebing, van Kemenade & Los in press). It
is concluded that subject switch increases in the history of English.
Carroll, Mary, Christiane von Stutterheim, and Ralph Nuese (2004). The Language
and Thought Debate: A Psycholinguistic Approach. In: Multidisciplinary
Approaches to Language Production, ed. by Thomas Pechmann and Christopher
Habel, 183–218. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Francis, G. and J.McH. Sinclair (1994). I bet he drinks Carling Black Label: A riposte to
Owen on corpus grammar. Applied Linguistics 15: 190-200.
Gelderen, Elly van (2011). Valency changes in the history of English. Journal of
Historical Linguistics 1:1, 106-143.
Hawkins, John. (1986). A Comparative Typology of English and German. London:
Croom Helm.
Hundt, Marianne (2007). English Mediopassive Constructions: A Cognitive, CorpusBased Study of Their Origin, Spread, and Current Status. Rodopi.
Komen, Erwin, Rosanne Hebing, Ans van Kemenade & Bettelou Los (in press).
Quantifying information structure change in English. In: Information Structure
and Syntactic Change in Germanic and Romance Languages, ed. by Kristin Bech
and Kristine Gunn Eide. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins
Rohdenburg, G. (1974). Sekundäre Subjektivierungen im Englischen und Deutschen:
Vergleichende Untersuchungen zur Verb- und Adjektivsyntax. PAKSArbeitsbericht Nr. 8. Bielefeld: Cornelson-Velhagen and Klasing.
151
Finite causative complements in Middle English
Brian Lowrey
Universite De Picardie
Keywords: causatives, finite complements, argument structure
In this paper, I propose to examine a somewhat marginal but nonetheless
interesting feature of Middle English (ME) complementation: the use of
finite complements with implicative causative verbs, such as make(n) and
do(n), and especially the construction in which the complement consists of
both a noun phrase and a finite that- clause, as in the following example:
Myn heed is toty of my swynk to-nyght, / That makes me that I ga nat
aright.
‘My head is dizzy from my night’s work, which causes me to lose my
way’
Chaucer, Reeves Tale, 4253-4254
Although this construction (V+NP+that-) never becomes frequent,
examples are nevertheless found throughout the ME period, both in prose
and in poetic texts.
The existence of such examples raises a number of questions. In what
kind of contexts, first of all, does causative V+NP+that- occur in ME?
Secondly, as Los (2005) points out, finite complements tend to give way to
infinitive complements in ME. Should causative V+NP+that- therefore be
seen as a kind of relic structure inherited from OE? Finite complements
were common in OE with the non-agentive causative (ge)don, but were
always of the “simple” V+that- type, with no intervening NP, whereas
V+NP+that- was largely restricted to manipulative, non-implicative verbs
such as biddan and bebeodan (Lowrey, 2012).
I shall also consider the status of the separate NP. Could its presence be
an indication that causatives such as make(n) had begun, as Terasawa
(1985) suggests, to acquire a three-place argument structure in ME? A
comparison could be made with perception verbs, which appear in an
apparently similar construction in ME. Kopytko (1985) takes this as a sign
that perception verbs, at least, have always been 3-place predicates.
Fischer (1987) disagrees, adopting instead a “topicalisation” analysis of the
separate NP. Finally, V+NP+that- could be compared to what Warner (1982)
calls “CLAN (‘CLause And Nominal’) sentences,” in which the NP and the
clause are in a kind of appositional relationship. To what extent do these
152
hypotheses shed light on causative V+NP+that-? These are the questions
that I plan to examine in the light of data from a selection of ME prose and
poetic texts, including the works of Chaucer, Gower, and Langland, as well
as material from the Innsbruck prose corpus.
Fischer, O. 1987: ‘Some Remarks on the Analysis of Perception Verb Complements in
Middle English: a Reply’ in Kwartalnik Neofilologiczny XXXIV, pp 57-67
Kopytko, R. 1985: ‘Some Observations on the Possible Interrelationship between
Synchronic and Diachronic Data in Syntactic Analysis,’ in Kwartalnik
Neofilologiczny XXXII, pp 27-32
Los, B. 2005: The Rise of the to- Infinitive. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Lowrey, B. 2012: “Early English Causative Constructions and the Second Agent
Factor” Outposts of Historical Corpus Linguistics: From the Helsinki Corpus to a
Proliferation of Resources (Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English
10), ed. by Editors: Jukka Tyrkkö, Matti Kilpiö, Terttu Nevalainen & Matti
Rissanen. Helsinki: Research Unit for Variation, Contacts, and Change in English.
(http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/journal/volumes/10/)
Terasawa, J. 1985: “The Historical Development of the Causative Use of the Verb
Make with an Infinitive”. Studia Neophilologica 57, pp 133–143
Warner, A. 1982: Complementation in Middle English and the Methodology of
Historical Syntax. London & Canberra: Croom Helm.
Profiling stylistic change using instructional writing on horses:
The case of reader orientation
Thijs Lubbers
University of Edinburgh
Keywords: corpora, instructional prose, textual conventions, dialogic
context in writing
Fairly recently, the dialogic nature of texts has been highlighted as being
relevant in accounting for micro-changes in the history of English, and in
understanding motivations for language change (Traugott, 2010). In
addition, it has been recognized that conventions about how writers
engage their audience is subject to change, just like any other genre feature
(Taavitsainen, 2001, 2006). However, unlike variation at other levels (e.g.,
phonemic, morphological), authors have great leeway in the selection of
syntactic structures to express their content matter, which makes it difficult
to quantitatively chart changes in conventions of written style. Drawing on
a corpus of instructional prose compiled from Late Middle to Present Day
English equine manuals, the current study tries to address the above issues
153
by assessing the expression of metatextual functions, such as reader
address:
Reader is addressed directly (by you, your, etc.)
(1) It is important to check your feed and be sure that all of your
horse’s vitamin requirements are being met since vitamin
deficiencies can lead to various health problems.
(Duberstein & Johnson, 2012, How to Feed a Horse:
Understanding Basic Principles of Horse Nutrition)
Reader is addressed indirectly (using generic terms)
(2) The subject of food and feeding of horses is necessarily one of
great importance, [...] and constantly presses itself upon the
attention of the horse-owner and attendant, the rider or driver.
(Fleming, 1886, The Practical Horse Keeper)
Reader is a ‘Suppressed Addressee’ (by the use of non-finite forms with
Generic Control, or via passives)
(3) Again in his olde age, he hadde nead to be fedde with soft meate,
because his teethe perhaps will fayle him so as he shall not be
able to chawe his meate, yf it be ouer harde,
(Blundeville, 1565, The foure chiefest offices belonging to
Horsemanship)
By comparing styles and conventions of different periods in the history of
English, this pilot investigates how the information flow of a text interacts
with the expression of metatextual function. Analysing texts from the same
genre dealing with the same topics may shed light on the question whether
diachronic changes in written texts should be seen as reflecting linguistic
change, or rather as changes in (genre-specific) textual conventions.
Taavitsainen, I. (2001). Changing Conventions of Writing: The Dynamics of Genres,
Text Types, and Text Traditions. European Journal Of English Studies, 5(2), 139.
Taavitsainen, I. (2006). Audience Guidance and Learned Medical Writing in Late
Medieval English. Gotti, M., & Salager-Meyer, F. (Eds.), In: Advances in Medical
Discourse Analysis: Oral and Written Contexts. (pp. 431-456). (Linguistic
insights). New York: Peter Lang.
Traugott, E. (2010). “Dialogic contexts as motivations for syntactic change”, in Robert
A. Cloutier, Anne Marie Hamilton-Brehm, and William Kretzschmar, eds.,
Variation and Change in English Grammar and Lexicon, 11-27. Berlin: De Gruyter
Mouton.
154
The survival of Norse loans into Middle English and their infiltration of
late medieval London English
Angelika Lutz
University of Erlangen
Keywords: superstrate, substrate, Old Norse, Middle Englisg dialects
In Lutz 2012, 2013 it is argued (but challenged in Miller 2012) that the
influence of Old Norse on English is very similar to that of Old French and
that both influences are clearly superstratal. The most obvious lexical
evidence for foreign rule consists of words reflecting legal and
administrative power, which were mostly replaced by equivalents from the
French superstrate after 1066. This leads to questions with regard to the
stratal role of the far more numerous Norse loans that survived this long
period of French rule. Why and how did they survive? As part of a mixed
Germanic, i.e. Old English and Old Norse, substrate, below the French
superstrate? Or was the stratal role of Old Norse in Middle English more
complex, namely (1) with regard to the survival of Norse loans in certain
Middle English dialects and (2) with regard to the usage expansion of a
remarkable number of the loans into late medieval London English and,
eventually, into the emerging standard language? This presentation
proposes answers that are consistent both with regard to the scanty and
complex Middle English data and to the principles of comparative contact
linguistics.
Bator, Magdalena. 2010. Obsolete Scandinavian Loanwords in English. Studies in
English Medieval Language and Literature 26. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Dance, Richard. 2003. Words Derived from Old Norse in Early Middle English: Studies
in the Vocabulary of the South-West Midland Texts. Tempe, Arizona: Arizona
Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
Hansen, Bente Hyldegaard. 1984. “The historical implications of the Scandinavian
linguistic element in English: A theoretical evaluation”, North-Western European
Language Evolution 4: 53-95.
LAEME = Margaret Laing. [in preparation]. A Linguistic Atlas of Early Medieval English
1150-1325.
LALME = Angus Macintosh, M. L. Samuels & Michael Benskin. 1986. A Linguistic Atlas
of Late Medieval English. 4 vols. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press; An
Electronic Version of LALME, revised and supplemented by Michael Benskin.
Lutz, Angelika. 2012. “Norse influence on English in the light of general contact
linguistics”. English Historical Linguistics 2010: Selected Papers from the 16th
International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, Pécs, 22-27 August
2010. Ed. Irén Hegedüs & Alexandra Fodor. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 15-41.
155
Lutz, Angelika. 2013. “Language contact and prestige”. Anglia 131: 562-590.
Miller, D. Gary. 2012. External Influences on English: From its Beginnings to the
Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pons-Sanz, Sara M. 2013. The Lexical Effects of Anglo-Scandinavian Linguistic Contact
on Old English. Turnhout: Brepols.
Poussa, Patricia. 1982. “The evolution of Early Standard English: The creolization
hypothesis”. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 14: 69-85.
Thomason, Sarah Grey & Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language Contact, Creolization,
and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Winford, Donald. 2010. “Contact and borrowing”. The Handbook of Language
Contact. Ed. Raymond Hickey. Maldon: Wiley-Blackwell. 170-187.
Wright, Laura. 2012. “On variation and change in London medieval mixed-language
business documents”. Language Contact and Development around the North
Sea. Ed. Merja Stenroos, Martti Mäkinen & Inge Særheim. Amsterdam:
Benjamins. 99-115.
The pragmatic functions of code-switching
in Early Modern English school drama
Aleksi Mäkilähde
University of Turku
Keywords: pragmatics, code-switching, multilingualism, drama, Early
Modern English
During the past couple of decades, code-switching and other multilingual
practices have been analysed by historical linguists especially within the
context of the English language. Previous studies have focused particularly
on the functions of code-switching, and it has been shown that codeswitching is often connected to such aspects as identity-construction,
power-relations and the negotiation of social roles (e.g. Diller 1997/1998,
Davidson 2003, Nurmi & Pahta 2010). The present paper contributes to the
discussion by applying a novel methodological framework to a set of
previously unanalysed materials from the Early Modern English period in
order to find out why code-switching is used in the texts under scrutiny.
The materials to be analysed come from the Orationes manuscript
(Canterbury Cathedral Archives Lit. Ms E41, Canterbury Cathedral Library),
which contains drama and speeches performed by the students of the
th
King’s School, Canterbury, in the latter half of the 17 century. These texts
were composed by the headmaster of the school or by the students
themselves, and they were performed on four different occasions each
156
year: on Guy Fawkes Day, before Christmas, on Oak Apple day, and at the
beginning of Lent. Of these four the plays performed at the Christmas
breaking-up of school contain perhaps the most code-switching and are
especially fruitful as material. The present paper focuses mostly on the
Christmas plays as a subgenre of the Orationes texts.
The methodology chosen for the study can be described as a
pragmaphilological approach, which is understood here as a combination of
pragmatics and philology (but cf. Jucker 1995). The framework takes as its
point of departure Brown & Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory and
especially the concept of face. The approach outlined in the paper draws
also from several other sources in the fields of pragmatics, sociology and
linguistics (e.g. Goffman 1967, Leech 1983, Clark 1996, Itkonen 2003). By
combining material-driven and theory-driven approaches we are able to
present a coherent classification of the functions of code-switching while
taking into account the social, material and historical context of our
material.
Brown Penelope & Levinson Stephen C. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in
Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Clark Herbert H. 1996. Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Davidson Mary Catherine 2003. Code-switching and authority in late medieval
England. Neophilologus 87: 473-486.
Diller Hans-Jürgen 1997/1998. Code-switching in medieval English drama.
Comparative Drama 31 (4): 506-537.
Goffman Erving 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-face Behavior. New York:
Anchor Books.
Itkonen Esa 2003. What is Language? A Study in the Philosophy of Linguistics. Turku:
University of Turku.
Jucker Andreas H. (ed.) 1995. Historical Pragmatics: Pragmatic Developments in the
History of English. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Leech Geoffrey 1983. Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.
Nurmi Arja & Pahta Päivi 2010. Preacher, scholar, brother, friend: Social roles and
code-switching in the writings of Thomas Twining. In Pahta Päivi, Nevala Minna,
Nurmi Arja & Palander-Collin Minna (eds): Social Roles and Language Practices in
Late Modern English. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 135-162.
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Persuasion in early medicine: Ethos, pathos and logos in Early Modern
English recipes
Martti Mäkinen
Hanken School of Economics
Keywords: Early Modern medicine, recipes, persuasion, genre
This paper investigates persuasion in early science, based on the three
types of persuasion of classical rhetorics: ethos, pathos, and logos. The
material of the study are Early Modern English medical recipes produced
and printed between 1500-1700, drawn from the Corpus of Early Modern
English Medical Texts (EMEMT, 2010).
The paper sets out to chart the attestation of the persuasion types in
medical recipes in circulation in the sixteenth and seventeenth century
England. This study aims to provide a description of the types and how they
are realised in texts, categorised according to distribution in medical
genres/categories and the time of writing. The textual categories studied
include Regimens and health guides, Surgical and anatomical treatises,
Treatises on specific topics, General treatises or textbooks, and Scientific
journals. The category of Recipe collections and materia medica has been
excluded intentionally, as that category has been studied earlier (Mäkinen
2011a and b).
An earlier study on persuasion in efficacy phrases in recipe collections in
the Early Modern period has revealed that the types of persuasion vary and
change according to purpose and time of writing, and intended audience
(lay/learned). General trend throughout the period was that recipes moved
from ethos towards logos, a development that was seen both in lay and
learned texts. Pathos was almost absent in learned, and a constant in lay
texts. One possible explanation suggested for the general trend was the
paradigm change in medicine, from text-centered science to observationbased science. (Mäkinen 2011b)
It is assumed that also in this study, the contest of new medical
disciplines in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries will become an
explaining factor for the longitudinal differences observed; however, as the
current paper will study genres the main purpose of which is not to carry
recipes, there may arise other factors in addition to the changing scientific
and medical ideologies.
As mentioned, the material for the paper will be the Corpus of Early
Modern English Medical Texts (EMEMT 2010). The corpus contains c. 2
million words in 450 medical texts from 1500-1700. The exclusion of recipe
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collections and materia medica texts leaves a corpus of c. 1.6 million words
and five medical categories, all of which contain recipes or other
instructional passages for the preparation and/or administering of a
medicine or a remedy.
EMEMT = Corpus of Early Modern English Medical Texts, 2011. Taavitsainen, Irma,
Päivi Pahta, Turo Hiltunen, Ville Marttila, Maura Ratia, Carla Suhr, and Jukka
Tyrkkö (eds), with the assistance of Anu Lehto and Alpo Honkapohja. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins.
Hunt, Tony 1990. Popular Medicine in Thirteenth-Century England: Introduction and
Texts. Cambridge: Brewer.
Jones, Claire 1998. ‘Formula and formulation: “Efficacy Phrases” in medieval English
medical manuscripts.’ Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 99:2. 199-210.
Jucker, Andreas H. 1997. “Persuasion by inference: Analysis of a party political
broadcast.” In: J Blommaert and C. Bulcaen (eds.), Political Linguistics (Belgian
Journal of Linguistics), pp. 121-137.
Kinneavy, James L. 1971. A Theory of Discourse: The Aims of Discourse. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Lehto, Anu, Oinonen, Raisa and Pahta, Päivi 2010. ‘Explorations through Early
Modern English Medical Texts.’ In EMEMT.
Marttila, Ville 2011. ‘New arguments for new audiences: a corpus-based analysis of
interpersonal strategies in early modern English medical recipes.’ In Medical
Writing in Early Modern English, eds. Taavitsainen, Irma and Päivi Pahta.
Cambridge: CUP. 135-157.
Mäkinen, Martti 2011a. ‘Efficacy phrases in Early Modern English medical recipes.’ In
Medical Writing in Early Modern English, eds. Taavitsainen, Irma and Päivi Pahta.
Cambridge: CUP. 158-179.
Mäkinen, Martti 2011b. ‘Swaying the medical audience: persuasion in early English
medical instructional passages.’ Poster presented at ICAME 32, June 1-6, 2011,
University of Oslo.
Stannard, Jerry 1982. ‘Rezeptliteratur as Fachliteratur.’ In Eamon, William (ed.)
Studies on Medieval Fachliteratur. Brussels: Omirel. 59-73.
Taavitsainen, Irma 2004. ‘Genres of Secular Instruction: a linguistic history of useful
entertainment.’ Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies 29. 75-94.
Taavitsainen, Irma 2009. ‘The pragmatics of knowledge and meaning: Corpus
linguistic approaches to changing thought-styles in early modern medical
discourse.’ In Andreas H. Jucker, Daniel Schreier and Marianne Hundt (eds.)
Corpora: Pragmatics and Discourse, Papers from the 29th International
Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 29).
(Language and Computers 68.) Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 37-62.
Taavitsainen, Irma, 2001. ‘Middle English recipes: Genre characteristics, text type
features and underlying traditions of writing.’ Journal of Historical Pragmatics
2.1: 85-113.
Virtanen, Tuija and Helena Halmari 2004: ‘Persuasion across genres: Emerging
perspectives.’ In: Halmari and Virtanen (eds), Persuasion Across Genres. A
159
Linguistic Approach. Amsterdam and New York: John Benjamins. 3- 26.
Wear, Andrew, 1998. ‘The Popularization Medicine in Early Modern England.’ In
Andrew Wear, Health and Healing in Early Modern England: Studies in Social and
Intellectual History, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 17-41. First published in 1992.
Wear, Andrew, 2000. Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550-1680.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Alternative approaches on productivity for the Old English affixes
13
-isc, -cund, -ful and fulRaquel Mateo Mendaza
Universidad de La Rioja
Keywords: Productivity, word-formation, Old English, hapax legomena,
types
The aim of this presentation is to measure the productivity of four Old
English deadjectival affixes, as well as to assess the accuracy of the different
indexes on productivity used for this analysis. Since several indexes on
productivity have been proposed in the literature and there is some
controversy on the use of a dictionary-based approach and/or a corpusbased approach, this study relies on both lexicographical and textual
sources. On the lexicographical side, the lexical database of Old English
Nerthus (www.nerthusproject.com) has been checked to retrieve the
number of types for each affix. On the textual side, the Dictionary of Old
English Corpus (http://tapor.library.utoronto.ca/doecorpus) developed at
the University of Toronto serves as the main tool to gather the number of
occurrences of the words containing the affixes under investigation.
Dealing with the measures on productivity chosen for this study, three
indexes have been selected, namely, (i) the classical approach based on
type frequency, (ii) Baayen’s (1992, 1993) approaches based on hapax
legomena and dislegomena and (iii) Trips’s (2009) criteria on productivity.
After the analysis, the diachronic evolution undergone by the affixes is
presented in order to assess the accuracy of the results derived from each
index. With this background, the conclusion is reached that the suffix -isc is
more productive than -cund, whereas -ful is more productive than ful-. At
the same time, it is concluded that an index on productivity based on both
13
This research has been funded through the project FFI2011-29532.
160
hapax legomena and type counting would provide the most compatible and
accurate results in the study of productivity.
Baayen, R. H. 1992. Quantitatie Aspects of Morphological Productivity. In Booij, G. E.
and Van Marle, J. (eds), Yearbook of Morphology 1991. Dordrecht. Kluwer
Academic Publishers. 109-149.
Baayen, R. H. 1993. On Frequency, Transparency and Productivity. In Booij, G.E. and
Van Marle, J. (eds). Yearbook of Morphology 1992. Dordrecht. Kluwer Academic
Publishers. 181-208.
Trips, C. 2009. Lexical Semantics and Diachronic Morphology. The Development of hood, -dom and -ship in the History of English. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.
Near-relative contact: Causes for the development of Middle English
Robert McColl Millar
University of Aberdeen
For the last quarter of the twentieth century, the general consensus among
historical linguists was that the great changes which affected late Old
English and early Middle English had contact between Old English and Old
Norse as a central catalyst. Views on the extent of this contact’s influence
naturally differed, as a comparison of Dominigue (1977) and Thomason and
Kaufman (1988) demonstrated, but its importance was rarely questioned.
In the early years of the twenty-first century, however, a new set of
views began to make themselves felt which attributed to the influence of
Celtic speakers the great typological changes which affected late Old
English. A number of scholars (for instance, Tristram 2007) have suggested
that this ‘Celtic Old English’, in which major changes in a ‘simplifying’
direction had taken place, existed for a significant period as the dominated
variety until the breakdown in Anglo-Saxon control in the eleventh century,
when it made itself known in the new post-conquest society as ‘English’.
Peter Trudgill, whose work originally accepted the Norse contact
hypothesis (Trudgill 1986), has, in recent work on Sociolinguistic Typology
(Trudgill 2010, 2011), moved towards a qualified acceptance of the Celtic
contact hypothesis, basing this view on his understanding of how children
in comparison with adults learn second languages, the first being
represented by complexification, the second by simplification. Since the
changes through which English passed in the late Old English and early
Middle English periods involve simplification, it therefore makes sense to
see their cause in the issues which adult Celtic learners of English might
have had rather than in the near relation close contact, with a degree of
161
mutual intelligibility, between speakers – in particularly child speakers – of
Old English and Old Norse.
This paper will question the nature of simplification and
complexification, along with what we understand of the nature of
koineisation, returning to the linguistic evidence in an attempt to achieve
an informed consensus of the effects which language internal, Scandinavian
and Celtic inputs had on the development of the inherited noun phrase
system during the period.
Dominigue, Nicole Z. 1977. ‘Middle English: Another Creole?’ Journal of Creole
Studies 1: 89–100.
Higham, Nicholas (ed.) 2007. Britons in Anglo-Saxon England. Woodbridge: Boydell
and Brewer.
Thomason, Sarah Grey and Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language Contact, Creolization,
and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Tristram, Hildegard. 2007. ‘Why don’t the English speak Welsh?’ In: Higham (2007):
192–214.
Trudgill, Peter. 1986. Dialects in Contact. Oxford: Blackwell.
Trudgill, Peter. 2010. Investigations in Sociohistorical Linguistics. Stories of
Colonisation and Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Trudgill, Peter. 2011. Sociolinguistic Typology. Social Determinants of Linguistic
Complexity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
From spatial adjunct to degree modifier: On the development of the
intensifier function of out-adverbs
Belén Méndez-Naya
University of Santiago de Compostela
Keywords: intensifiers, maximizers, grammaticalization, Middle English
Intensifiers, that is, adverbs and adjectives indicating the degree or the
exact value of the quality expressed by the item they modify, have
attracted a great deal of scholarly attention since the beginning of the
twentieth century, both from a diachronic and a synchronic perspective
(see Borst 1902; Bolinger 1972 for two classic references). This interest has
been renewed in the last two decades partly due to the popularity of
grammaticalization studies, since the emergence of degree words has been
regarded as a clear case of grammaticalization (e.g. Lorenz 2002;
Nevalainen & Rissanen 2002; Méndez-Naya 2003; Vandewinkel & Davidse
2008). Common lexical sources of intensifiers are manner adverbs, which
162
are used to express the speaker’s evaluation (OE swīþe ‘strongly’;
absolutely; Fettig 1934: 60; Lorenz 2002: 149) and modal adverbs conveying
the idea of veracity (very, really; Lorenz 2002: 111-2; Heine & Kuteva 2002:
302). Another interesting but less frequent (Fettig 1934: 60) and less
explored source for intensifiers is that of spatial expressions (but cf.
Méndez-Naya 2008 for downright).
The focus of this presentation is a group of intensifiers emerging from
the spatial domain, all of them sharing the basic meaning ‘out’, namely
outly, throughout, thwertout, outright and utterly. With the exception of
outly, which is already found with a degree function in Old English, these
adverbs develop their degree reading in the Middle English period (see OED
s.vv.). My paper explores the spatial contexts in which the degree meaning
could have emerged and studies ‘out’-intensifiers both from a syntactic and
a semantic perspective, paying attention to their syntactic function and to
they types of head they modify. I show that the semantic features of ‘out’intensifiers in terms of boundedness and semantic prosody stem from the
conceptualization of ‘out’ and its metaphorical extensions: ‘out’-intensifiers
are maximizers and have a marked tendency to collocate with negative
heads. Over time, however, some of these ‘out’-intensifiers develop a
booster use (see, e.g. Paradis 1997: 81; Méndez-Naya 2012: 371 for
utterly), and spread to positive collates, a development which can be
explained individually for each specific intensifier.
The present study is qualitative rather than quantitative given the low
frequency of these intensifiers in discourse. Therefore, for my study I draw
on various data sources, among them Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of
Middle English, the Middle English Dictionary and the Oxford English
Dictionary, the Linguistic Atlas of Early Mediaeval English and the historical
thesauruses.
Bolinger, Dwight. 1972. Degree words. The Hague/Paris: Mouton.
Borst, Eugen. 1902. Die Gradadverbien im Englischen. Anglistische Forschungen 10.
Heidelberg: Carl Winters Universitätsbuchhandlung.
BT = Bosworth, Joseph & T. Northcote Toller. 1898. An Anglo-Saxon dictionary.
Oxford: Clarendon Press. Avaliable online at
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/germanic/oe_bosworthtoller_about.html
Fettig, Adolf. 1934. Die Gradadverbien im Mittelenglischen. Heidelberg: Carl Winters
Universitätsbuchhandlung.
Heine, Bernd & Tania Kuteva. 2002. World lexicon of grammaticalization. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Historical Thesaurus. Available online at http://www.oed.com/thesaurus.
Kroch, Anthony & Ann Taylor. 2000. Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English,
2nd ed. http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/PPCME2-RELEASE-3/index.html.
163
Lorenz, Gunter. 2002. “Really worthwhile or not really significant? A corpus-based
approach to the lexicalization and grammaticalisation of intensifiers in Modern
English.” In Wischer, Ilse & Gabriele Diewald (eds.) New Reflections on
grammaticalization. Amsterdam/Philadelpia: John Benjamins:
MED = Kurath, Hans et al. 1952-2001. Middle English Dictionary. Ann Arbor:
University
of
Michigan
Press.
Available
online
at
http://ets.umdl.mich.edu/m/med/
Méndez-Naya, Belén. 2003. “On intensifiers and grammaticalization: The case of
swiþe.” English Studies 84/4: 372-391.
Méndez-Naya, Belén. 2012. “A preliminary study of the history of the intensifier
utterly”. In Martín Alegre, Sara, Melissa Moyer, Elisabet Pladevall & Susagna
Tubau (eds.) At a time of crisis: English and American studies in Spain. Works
from the 35th AEDEAN Conference. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona: 368-375
Nevalainen, Terttu & Matti Rissanen. 2002. “Fairly pretty or pretty fair? On the
development and grammaticalization of English downtoners”. Language Sciences
24: 359–380.
OED = Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn. 1989. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Online version with revisions http://www.oed.com/
Paradis, Carita. 1997. Degree modifiers of adjectives in spoken British English. Lund:
Lund University Press.
Thesaurus of Old English. Available online at http://oldenglishthesaurus.arts.gla.
ac.uk/
Vandewinkel, Sigi & Kristin Davidse. 2008. “The interlocking paths of development to
emphasizer adjective pure”. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 9/ 2: 255-287.
On the history of word clipping: Aphesis, syncope, apocope
Donka Minkova
UCLA
Keywords: truncation, backclipping, foreclipping, syncope, prosody,
minimal word, onset, coda
Word clipping is a truncation process whereby a word (other than a proper
noun) develops an alternate form lacking a portion of the input. Clipping
can occur at the left edge (emony < anemony; coon < raccoon), it can be
medial (OE ancra < Latin *anchorēta ‘anchoress’; dempster < ME dēmestre
‘judge’; launder, n. < lavender, fancy < OF fantasie), or it can affect the right
edge of the word (gin < Geneva; hack < hackney). Word truncation patterns
in Present Day English have commonly been considered unpredictable
(Durkin 2009: 116), yet analyses of the modern data (Lappe 2007, Berg
2011 and references therein), including truncation in child language
164
acquisition (Demuth 1996, 2003), reveal the influence of multiple factors,
among them stress contour, number of syllables, the presence of
consonants at word-edges, and lexical class.
A striking fact about word clipping in a diachronic perspective is that
foreclipping (aphesis) peaks between 1300-1600 and then decreases quite
sharply. A search of over 700 aphetic forms in the OED (low ‘allow’, monish
‘admonish’, fy ‘defy’, gypsy ‘Egyptian’) shows that about 96% of them
appear before c. 1800. The dominant pattern is loss of an initial unstressed
syllable. On the other hand, over 75% of the words identified as ‘shortened’
(=backclipping) (info, mike, rep) have their first entries after 1800, as shown
in Fig. 1. Moreover, it has been argued (Lappe 2007: 152, 157-8) that wordclipping in PDE is blind to the prosodic status of the initial syllable.
Fig. 1: Foreclipping vs. backclipping
400
300
Aphetic
forms (OED)
200
100
0
Clipping
data (Lappe
2007:65)
The asymmetry in Fig.1, implicit, but not quantified in Marchand’s (1969:
448-50) overview, has not been addressed in the literature. The present
study has an empirical and a theoretical goal. A systematic coverage of
word-clipping in earlier English (as distinct from the PDE material in Lappe
2007, Berg 2011) will produce a new data-base, replacing and expanding
the limited collection in Slettengren (1912). The material will then be
analyzed with a view to establishing the interaction of morphological and
phonological constraints governing the selection of output forms. The
results will supply valuable information about the state of the ambient
phonology and prosody in Old and Middle English, more specifically the
history of the ONSET constraint, the rate of assimilation of the Romance
Stress Rule, and the historical role of morphological transparency in native
and loan vocabulary clippings.
165
Berg, Thomas. 2011. The clipping of common and proper nouns, Word Structure 4:1,
1-19.
Demuth, Katherine. 2003. Truncation to Subminimal Words in Early French, The
Canadian Journal of Linguistics 48 (3/4), pp. 211-241.
Durkin, Philip. 2009. The Oxford Guide to Etymology. Oxford: OUP.
Lappe, Sabine. 2007. English Prosodic Morphology
Marchand, Hans. 1969. The Categories and Types of Present-Day English WordFormation. München: Verlag C.H.Beck.
Slettengren, Emrik. 1912. Contributions to the study of aphæretic words in English.
Lund: Berlingska Boktryckeriet.
Genre analysis of Old English legal writing: Focus on wills
Lilo Moessner
RWTH Aachen University
Keywords: legal language, genre analysis, Old English wills
ESP experts agree that legal language is not a homogeneous language
variety, but that it manifests itself as a set of different genres. Genre
analysis is therefore an indispensible requirement for an accurate
description of legal language, from which successful teaching strategies can
be derived (Northcott 2013).
In Bhatia’s model (1987, 1993) the genres of legal language are defined
with the parameters medium (spoken vs written), settings (academic,
juridical, legislative), and degree of formality (frozen vs formal). Genres of
legislative settings, especially statutes, have attracted most attention by
linguists interested in modern legal English (e.g. Danet 1985, Diani 2001,
Williams 2005). Only Trosborg (1995) uses a contrastive approach in her
study of directive speech acts in statutes and contracts.
The linguistic and textual properties of Old English (OE) legal language
are described in Schwyter’s (1996) monograph and in the first chapter of
Hiltunen’s (1990) diachronic study. Hiltunen’s data are law-codes, Schwyter
contrasts a corpus of OE law-codes with a smaller corpus of “documents
containing lawsuits” (1996: 40). He establishes the following overall
linguistic differences between the two genres: law-codes prefer a forwardlooking if-then strategy and multiple indefinite reference to the offenders,
law-suits a backward-looking narrative strategy and a single definite
reference to the offenders. His study is restricted to texts concerned with
the offence of theft.
166
In this paper I will focus on wills, more specifically OE wills. So far they
have been treated extensively only from a sociohistorical perspective
(Tollerton 2011). My corpus will be compiled from edited texts, which are
accessible in various collections (e.g. Harmer 1914, Robertson 1956,
Whitelock 1930) and on the internet (http://www.esawyer.org.uk). In the
analysis of its texts on sentence, clause and phrase level special attention
will be given to the if – then pattern, type and position of adverbial clauses,
the modifiers of nominal syntagms, and to mood, tense and voice of verbal
syntagms. A pilot study on a small set of wills suggests that wills differ from
law-codes in their definite reference to the persons involved; it is expressed
by proper nouns and personal pronouns. They differ from law-suits by their
absence of narrative strategies; their verbal syntagms are either in present
tense or they are completely lacking. It is my aim in this paper to establish
wills as a separate genre of OE legal writing and to provide a starting-point
for future diachronic research of this genre.
Bhatia, Vijay K. 1993. Analysing Genre. Language Use in Professional Settings.
Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd.
Bhatia, Vijay K. 1987. “Language of the law”. Language Teaching 20/4: 227-234.
Danet, Brenda. 1985. “Legal Discourse”. In Teun A van Dijk (ed.): Handbook of
Discourse Analysis, Vol. 1. London: Academic Press, 273-291.
Diani, Giuliana. 2001. “Modality and Speech Acts in English Acts of Parliament”. In
Gotti, Maurizio and Marina Dossena (eds.): Modality in Specialized Discourse.
Bern, etc.: Peter Lang, 175-191.
Harmer, F. E. (ed. and transl.) 1914. Select English Historical Documents of the Ninth
and Tenth Centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hiltunen, Risto. 1990. Chapters on Legal English. Aspects Past and Present of the
Language of the Law. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia.
Northcott, Jill. 2013. “Legal English”. In Paltridge, Brian and Sue Starfield (eds.): The
Handbook of English for Specific Purposes. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 213-226.
Robertson, A. J. (ed. and transl.) 1956. Anglo-Saxon Charters. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Schwyter, J. R. 1996. Old English Legal Language. The Lexical Field of Theft. Odense
University Press.
Tollerton, Linda. 2011. Wills and Will-Making in Anglo-Saxon England. Woodbridge:
York Medieval Press and Boydell & Brewer Ltd.
Trosborg, Anna. 1995. “Statutes and contracts: An analysis of legal speech acts in the
English language of the law”. Journal of Pragmatics 23: 31-53.
Whitelock, D. (ed. and transl.) 1930. Anglo-Saxon Wills. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Williams, Christopher. 2005. Tradition and Change in Legal English. Verbal
Constructions in Prescriptive Texts. Bern, etc.: Peter Lang.
http://www.esawyer.org.uk
167
Constructional loss and changes in verbal argument structure: The case of
the early English impersonal construction
Ruth Möhlig-Falke
University of Heidelberg
In Old and early Middle English the impersonal construction was a
productive syntactic device that was used primarily in the expression of
middle events (after Kemmer 1993). The construction was part of the early
English system of transitivity and voice, being combined with weakly
transitive verbs (Hopper & Thompson 1980) and allowing to view a State of
Affairs from the point of view of the Affected or Goal participant. The
impersonal construction could be used with verbs belonging to different
lexical domains, such as sceamian (emotion), (ge)þyncean (cognition),
(ge)limpan (existential experience) and (ge)byrian (ownership/appropriateness), which appear in the early English data in a variety of personal and
th
impersonal syntactic uses. In the course of the 15 century the impersonal
construction became nonfunctional as a result of several grammatical
changes that gradually altered the system of transitivity and voice in Middle
English, such as the loss of lexically assigned case (Allen 1995), of verbsecond and of object-fronting as an information-structural device (Los
2009).
This paper illustrates how the different groups of impersonal verbs
compensated for this constructional loss by expanding alternative
argument structures in systematic ways, motivated by their inherent lexical
semantics and by the relationship between the participants in the
respective verbal States of Affairs (Möhlig-Falke 2012). It thus aims to show
how changes in a verb’s syntactic transitivity may tie in with general
grammatical changes and how lexicon and grammar interact in the creation
of sentence meaning.
Allen, Cynthia (1995)Case Marking and Reanalysis. Grammatical Relations from Old
to Early Modern English. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.
Hopper, Paul J. & Sandra A. Thompson (1980)”Transitivity in grammar and
discourse”.Language 56: 251-299.
Kemmer, Suzanne (1993)The Middle Voice. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Los, Bettelou (2009)”The consequences of the loss of verb-second in English:
information structure and syntax in interaction”. English Language and
Linguistics 13: 97-125.
Möhlig-Falke, Ruth (2012)The Early English Impersonal Construction. An Analysis of
Verbal and Constructional Meaning. New York: Oxford University Press.
168
On the relation between verb entrenchment and detransitivization
Britta Mondorf
Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz
Assuming with Hopper & Thompson (1980: 251) that transitivity is a graded
notion, the present paper investigates whether different degrees of
transitivity can be related to different degrees of verb entrenchment.
Recent findings on the erosion of causative bring show that this verb has
undergone systematic detransitivization during the past 400 years: fully
transitive uses of causative bring which were still possible in Early Modern
English have come to be hardly acceptable in Present-day English. (cf.
Mondorf 2010)
(1)
Early Modern English:
So that She brought the Old man to allow her fourty Shillings per
week to keep the House; (...). [Head & Kirkman. The English
Rogue, 1671]
Present-day English:
*She brought the old man to allow her ….
The only contexts in which causative bring is still acceptable in Present-day
English are those in which some degree of detransitivization takes place, i.e.
contexts which score low on transitivity parameters such as affirmation
(negation rather than affirmation), mode (irrealis rather than realis),
participants (one participant rather than two), etc.:
(2)
I just can’t bring myself to do it. [COCA]
The present paper introduces new corpus-based synchronic and diachronic
data (from the British National Corpus, the Early English Prose Fiction
Corpus, the Eighteenth Century Fiction Corpus and the Nineteenth Century
Fiction Corpus) shedding new light on the question of whether the
correlation between verb entrenchment and degree of transitivity can also
be extended to other verbs that are in the process of erosion.
Hopper, Paul J. & Thompson, Sandra A. (1980) “Transitivity in Grammar and
Discourse”. Language 56: 251-299.
Mondorf, Britta (2010) “Causative Verbs in British and American English”. Paper
Presented at the ICAME Conference, Giessen University, Germany, 26-30 May
2010.
169
Rohdenburg, Günter (1996) “Zur Einführung und Behauptung lexikalischer Einheiten
durch syntaktische Struktursignale im Englischen”. In: Weigand, E. &
Hundsnurscher, F. (eds.) Lexical Structures and Language Use, 105-117. (Beiträge
zur Dialogforschung 10). Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Reported speech verbs and semantic/pragmatic change:
Quethen, quoth, quote
Colette Moore
University of Washington
Keywords: quotative verbs,
semantic/pragmatic change
grammaticalization, presented speech,
The development and grammaticalization of Middle English quethen into
the syntactically narrowed Early Modern English form quoth exemplifies
how constructions can be grammaticalized for textual organizational
purposes (see also Noël 2007, Trousdale 2012, Traugott 2003). This study
examines how quethen grammaticalized into the quotative marker quoth,
particularly in literary dialogue, and how it filled an essential quotative role
in texts before quotation marks became widespread convention. Once
quotation marks assumed the primary role for the marking of reported
discourse, however, quoth’s pragmatic function became redundant, and it
fell out of use over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries –
as data from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and
Googlebooks show. At the same time, the verb quote was rising in
frequency. This research puts the quantitative results in context by going
on to theorize how the dual histories of the two verbs reveal the paradigm
shifts in the understanding of reported speech in English.
The words quoth and quote are often connected in the popular
imagination – quoth is often mistakenly assumed to be an older form of
quote. This folk etymological misprision makes a kind of sense, given all of
the earlier third-person verb forms ending in -th (jumpeth, speaketh). Yet
these are etymologically unrelated words, and, in fact, they represent
alternate perspectives on how to understand the act of presenting another
person’s words. The contrast between the histories and functions of quoth
and quote occurs at the interface between semantic and pragmatic change
and can help us to understand quotation both as a pragmatic inclination
and a cultural product.
170
Examining the development of quoth and quote therefore is instructive
in several ways; it engages scholarly conversations about presented speech,
the grammaticalization of constructions, and the influence of perceived
etymological connection between words.
Noël, Dirk 2007. “Diachronic construction grammar and grammaticalization theory.”
Functions of Language 14: 177-202.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs 2003. “Constructions in Grammaticalization.” The
Handbook of Historical Linguistics, Brian D Joseph and Richard D. Janda, eds.
Malden, MA: Blackwell. 624-647.
Trousdale, Graeme 2012.
“Grammaticalization, constructions, and the
grammaticalization of constructions.”
Grammaticalization and Language
Change: New Reflections. Kristin Davidse, Tine Breban, Lieselotte Brems, and
Tanja Mortelmans, (eds). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 167-198.
Spatio-temporal systems in Chaucer
Minako Nakayasu
Hamamatsu University School of Medicine
Keywords: Spatio-temporal system, Chaucer, historical pragmatics, Middle
English
The purpose of this paper is to carry out a systematic analysis of the
synchronic spatio-temporal systems in Chaucer’s language along the lines
of historical pragmatics and discourse analysis (Jucker & Taavitsainen
(2010), etc.).
In discourse, the speaker successively employs such elements as
pronouns, demonstratives, tenses, modals and adverbials. When they
decide to put situations into language, they judge how far these situations
are from their ‘here and now’, that is, proximal or distal, and realises the
relationship of space and time by these deictic elements. Although these
elements are interrelated with each other, surprisingly few studies have
been devoted to an integrative analysis of the systems of both space and
time in historical data (Traugott (1978), Nagucka (2000), etc.).
The corpus of the present study is based on the Riverside edition
(Benson 1987) and the concordance by Oizumi (1991-2012). The data
consists of both verse and prose, namely, The Canterbury Tales and A
Treatise on the Astrolabe. The direction of mapping assumed here is both
form-to-function and function-to-form (Jabobs & Jucker 1995).
171
After establishing a definition of the spatio-temporal systems, I
embarked on a quantitative analysis of how frequently the elements of
space and time are exploited by the speaker, i.e. pronouns, demonstratives,
tenses, modals and adverbials. It is shown that proximal forms are generally
employed more often in the scientific prose where the speaker explains an
astrolabe to his son.
Qualitative analysis was then conducted regarding how these elements
are interrelated with each other in both temporal and spatial domains, and
how the elements and the relations among them evolve in discourse. The
analysis highlights typical combinations and patterns of the spatio-temporal
elements in discourse. For instance, certain spatial and temporal elements
tend to combine with other grammatical elements, e.g. imperative mood,
and elements regulating discourse such as now, than and foreseide. It is
observed in what way proximal and distal elements coordinate with others,
and alternate with each other as discourse evolves. Tense use in
metadiscourse and so-called ‘historical present’ tense in past story-telling in
coordination with spatial domain give an excellent clue to dynamic
alternation of proximal and distal perspectives.
This research shows that the speaker played a significant role in
choosing spatial and temporal elements, and advances a fresh perspective
on the spatio-temporal systems in Middle English.
Benson, Larry Dean (ed.). 1987. The Riverside Chaucer. Third edition. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company.
Jacobs, Andreas & Andreas H. Jucker. 1995. “The Historical Perspective of
Pragmatics”. In: Andreas H. Jucker (ed.), Historical Pragmatics: Pragmatic
Developments in the History of English. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John
Benjamins Publishing Company: pp. 1-33.
Jucker, Andreas H. & Irma Taavitsainen (eds.). 2010. Historical Pragmatics. Berlin &
New York: De Gruyter Mouton.
Nagucka, Ruta. 2000. “The Spatial and Temporal Meanings of Before in Middle
English”. In: Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen, Päivi Pahta & Matti Rissanen
(eds.), Placing Middle English in Context. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter:
pp. 329-337.
Oizumi, Akio (ed.). 1991-2012. A Complete Concordance to the Works of Geoffrey
Chaucer. 21 volumes. Hildesheim, Zürich & New York: Georg Olms Verlag.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1978. “On the Expression of Spatio-temporal Relations in
Language”. In: Joseph H. Greenberg (ed.), Universals of Human Language,
Volume 3: Word Structure. Stanford: Stanford University Press: pp. 369-400.
172
Frequency measures and collocations in grammaticalisation
Jakob Neels
University of Leipzig
Keywords: grammaticalisation, frequency effects, relative frequencies,
collocations
In usage-based approaches to grammaticalisation, high frequency of use is
widely assumed to be not only an outcome but also a motor of
grammaticalisation, as both formal and functional changes in
grammaticalising constructions may result from cognitive processes
propelled by frequent repetition (e.g., Bybee 2003, 2006; Krug 2000, 2003;
Haiman 1994). However, corpus-based reports on the grammaticalisation
of low-frequent expressions (e.g., Hoffmann 2004; Brems 2007) as well as
on cases of grammaticalisation with delayed increases of discourse
frequency (e.g., Hundt 2001; Mair 2004) seem to call into question the
pivotal role of frequency, at least of absolute discourse frequency. This
study therefore examines possible ways of refining frequency-effect
accounts of grammaticalisation, asking what measures of frequency are
most relevant to the process. Among the frequency(-related) measures and
concepts to be discussed are conceptual frequency (Hoffmann 2004),
proportional frequency (cf., e.g., Haspelmath 2004), cotextual
entrenchment (Schmid 2010) and critical frequency (Peng 2012) — all of
which involve relative frequencies rather than merely absolute discourse
frequency. Moreover, a special focus of this study is on the role of
collocations (cf. Bybee and Torres Cacoullos 2009; Torres Cacoullos and
Walker 2011) and on how their impact on grammaticalisation can be
interpreted from a Construction Grammar perspective (e.g., Gisborne and
Patten 2011; Trousdale 2010; Traugott 2008). Collocations are, by
definition, linked to measures of relative frequency, and the individual
collocates of grammaticalising expressions deserve more attention.
Particular recurring constructs, i.e. specific (prefabricated) exemplars of a
construction, can lead and advance grammaticalisation processes, as the
general, more schematic construction instantiated by these exemplars is
incited to change in order to accommodate new uses emerging around the
exemplars. This hypothesis as well as the relevance of the above-named
frequency measures will be tested with the aid of corpus data on
grammaticalisation phenomena in English.
173
Brems, Lieselotte (2007). “The Grammaticalization of Small Size Nouns:
Reconsidering Frequency and Analogy.” Journal of English Linguistics 35.4: 293324.
Bybee, Joan (2003). “Mechanisms of Change in Grammaticization: The Role of
Frequency.” The Handbook of Historical Linguistics. Eds. Brian D. Joseph and
Richard D. Janda. Malden, MA: Blackwell. 602-623.
Bybee, Joan (2006). “From Usage to Grammar: The Mind’s Response to Repetition.”
Language 82.4: 711-733.
Bybee, Joan, and Rena Torres Cacoullos (2009). “The Role of Prefabs in
Grammaticization: How the Particular and the General Interact in Language
Change.” Formulaic Language, Vol. 1: Distribution and Historical Change. Eds.
Robert Corrigan, Edith A. Moravcsik, Hamid Ouali and Kathleen M. Wheatly.
Amsterdam: Benjamins. 187-217.
Gisborne, Nikolas, and Amanda Patten (2011). “Construction Grammar and
Grammaticalization.” The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization. Eds. Heiko
Narrog and Bernd Heine. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 92-104.
Haiman, John (1994). “Ritualization and the Development of Language.” Perspectives
on Grammaticalization. Ed. William Pagliuca. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 3-28.
Haspelmath, Martin (2004). “Explaining the Ditransitive Person-Role Constraint: A
Usage-Based Approach.” Constructions 2/2004: 1-49.
Hoffmann, Sebastian (2004). “Are Low-Frequency Complex Prepositions
Grammaticalized? On the Limits of Corpus Data — and the Importance of
Intuition.” Corpus Approaches to Grammaticalization in English. Eds. Hans
Lindquist and Christian Mair. Amsterdam:Benjamins. 171-210.
Hundt, Marianne (2001). “What Corpora Tell Us about the Grammaticalisation of
Voice in Get-Constructions.” Studies in Language 25.1: 49-88.
Krug, Manfred (2000). Emerging English Modals: A Corpus-Based Study of
Grammaticalization. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Krug, Manfred (2003). “Frequency as a Determinant in Grammatical Variation and
Change.” Determinants in Grammatical Variation in English. Eds. Günter
Rohdenburg and Britta Mondorf. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 7-67.
Mair, Christian (2004). “Corpus Linguistics and Grammaticalisation Theory: Statistics,
Frequencies, and Beyond.” Corpus Approaches to Grammaticalization in English.
Eds. Hans Lindquist and Christian
Mair. Amsterdam: Benjamin. 121-150.
Peng, Rui (2012). “Critical Frequency as an Independent Variable in
Grammaticalization.” Studies in Language 36.2: 345-381.
Schmid, Hans-Jörg (2010). “Does Frequency in Text Instantiate Entrenchment in the
Cognitive System?” Quantitative Methods in Cognitive Semantics. Eds. Dylan
Glynn and Kerstin Fischer. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 101-134.
Torres Cacoullos, Rena, and James Walker (2011). “Collocations in
Grammaticalization
and
Variation.”
The
Oxford
Handbook
of
Grammaticalization. Eds. Heiko Narrog and Bernd Heine. Oxford: Oxford
University Press. 225-238.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs (2008). “Grammaticalization, Constructions and the
Incremental Development of Language: Suggestions from the Development of
Degree Modifiers in English.” Variation, Selection, Development – Probing the
174
Evolutionary Model of Language Change. Eds. Regine Eckardt, Gerhard Jäger and
Tonjes Veenstra. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 219-250.
Trousdale, Graeme (2010). “Issues in Constructional Approaches to
Grammaticalization in English.” Grammaticalization: Current Views and Issues.
Eds. Ekaterini Stathi, Elke Gehweiler and Ekkehard König. Amsterdam:
Benjamins. 51-72.
Online collaborative corpus annotation:
Extending the Old Bailey Corpus one trial at a time
Magnus Nissel
University of Giessen
Keywords: collaboration, annotation, corpus, sociolinguistics, Late Modern
English
This paper introduces a web-based corpus collaboration system that allows
users to contribute additional trials and annotation to the Old Bailey Corpus
(OBC, Huber et. al. 2012).
The OBC is a valuable resource for researchers interested in 18th and
19th century spoken English. It consists of a subset of transcribed
Proceedings of the Old Bailey (http://www.oldbaileyonline.org), London’s
Central Criminal Court from 1720 to 1913. The core corpus contains circa 14
million words of direct speech (about 750,000 words per decade) and an
extended version with 19 million words is also available. The OBC has
detailed sociolinguistic (gender, class, age), pragmatic (role in the
courtroom), and textual annotation and can be searched online or
downloaded.
The extended OBC currently contains 489 out of 1885 available
proceedings. This means that about 54 million words of transcribed speech
could still be added. Opening the OBC for collaborative online corpus
annotation will allow the corpus to grow as users annotate individual trials
from the remaining proceedings using a simple website interface.
On average, a trial contains about 10 utterances and circa 400 words of
direct speech. This is a very manageable size for new contributions. A
streamlined interface and extensive automatic pre-annotation further
reduce the time demand on volunteer contributors. Since the editor is
tailor-made to the requirements of the OBC, contributors do not have to
deal with the complexity of generic annotation frameworks such as GATE
Teamware (Bontcheva et. al. 2013).
175
Once submitted, user-annotated trials are automatically made available
via the existing online search interface. They can also be peer-reviewed and
amended by other users. At all stages, the integration with the corpus
search engine is bidirectional. Researchers can choose to include all userannotated trials in their concordance searches, to only include reviewed
trials, or to limit their results to the traditional corpus versions. Conversely,
users can also search all pre-annotated proceedings to select suitable trials
for further annotation based on linguistic and extra-linguistic criteria.
The OBC Online Editor is currently being tested internally and will be
available to the public by summer 2014. While it was designed for the OBC,
the software could later be adapted for the use with different texts,
allowing other projects to benefit from a collaborative approach to the
annotation of a large collections of (historical) documents.
Bontcheva, K; Cunningham, H.; Roberts, I.; Roberts, A.; Tablan, V.; Aswani, N.; Gorrell,
G. 2013. Teamware: A Web-based, Collaborative Text Annotation Framework.
Language Resources and Evaluation. In Press.
Huber, M.; Nissel, M.; Maiwald, P.; Widlitzki, B. 2012. The Old Bailey Corpus. Spoken
English in the 18th and 19th centuries. www.uni-giessen.de/oldbaileycorpus
The reduced definite article th’ in the sixteenth century
and the definiteness cycle
Jerzy Nykiel
University of Silesia
Keywords: definite NP, reduced definite article, antecedent accessibility,
definiteness cycle, grammaticalization
In the twelfth century the English definite article develops a reduced
variant th’ which leans on the following noun, alternatively but much less
frequently also on an adjacent adjective which comes before the noun. As
argued by Nykiel (forthcoming: 5), the earliest known example of reduced
th’ comes from the Peterborough Chronicle:
(1)
7 begæt thare priuileges, an of alle þe lands of þabbotrice
And obtained their privileges one of all the lands of the-abbey
7
oþer of þe lands þe lien to þe circewican
and other of the lands that lie to the church-yard
(?a1160 Peterb.Chron.(LdMisc 636) an.1137)
176
Reduction of this type continues unabated in English till around the
eighteenth century. In time reduced th’ broadens the range of possible
hosts as in Middle English it only attaches to a noun or adjective beginning
with a vowel or <h>, while in Shakespeare it also appears before
consonants as illustrated by van Gelderen (2011: 214).
Due to such behavior, the ME and EME reduced variant of the ranks as
a clitic in the sense of Zwicky (1977, 1994), Spencer (1991), Anderson
(2005), and others. That is to say, the free form the has a variant th’ which
is ‘prosodically deficient’ (Anderson 2005: 13) and attaches itself to some
adjacent material. At the same time reduced th’ has been handled by e.g
Jones (1999, 2002) as an instance of Definite Article Reduction, i.e. one of
the allomorphs of the definite article. In this paper, however, I argue,
following van Gelderen (2011), that reduced th’ is part of the development
of the definiteness cycle (DP cycle).
Elsewhere (see Nykiel forthcoming), I show that in Caxton’s English,
that is in the late fifteenth century, NPs with reduced th’ tend to have
different anaphoric and referential functions than those introduced by the
full form of the definite article. The data presented there were not
conclusive, however. In this study I make use of sixteenth century data to
farther my point that th’ NPs are associated with highly accessible
antecedents and discourse topics. Ultimately, I aim to show that reduced
th’ is no longer compatible with the Determiner slot in the syntactic
structure of DP. Instead, it functions as a nominal marker which can itself
be preceded by the full form of the article.
Anderson, Stephen R. 2005. Aspects of the theory of clitics. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Jones, Mark J. 1999. The phonology of definite article reduction. Dialectal variation in
English, ed. by Clive Upton, and Katie Wales Leeds Studies in English 30: 103–21.
Jones, Mark J. 2002. The origin of Definite Article Reduction in northern English
dialects: evidence from dialect allomorphy. English Language and Linguistics 6.
325-345.
Nykiel, Jerzy. Forthcoming. The reduced definite article th’ in Caxton’s English: an
insight from the definiteness cycle. Submitted to Journal of Germanic Linguistics.
Spencer, Andrew 1991. Morphological theory. Oxford: Blackwell.
van Gelderen, Elly. 2011. The Linguistic cycle. Language change and the language
faculty. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zwicky, Arnold M. 1977. On Clitics. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club.
Zwicky, Arnold M. 1994. What is a clitic? Clitics. A comprehensive bibliography 1892–
1991, ed. by Joel A. Nevis, Brian D. Joseph, Dieter Wanner, and Arnold M.
Zwicky, xii-xx. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
177
Variations on Old English diphthongs
Toshihiro Oda
Fukuoka University
Keywords: sequential conditioning, Diphthong Rhyme Harmony, retracting
movement, phonetic drift
OE Breaking constitutes a theme frequently addressed in the historical
literature and has received a wide range of arguments (Botma and Ewen
2009, Davenport 2005, Hogg 1972, 1992, Howell 1991, Lass and Anderson
1975/2010, Stockwell 1996, 2002). The general assumptions on it are that
(a) the emergent diphthongs may or may not be equivalent to those with
the Germanic root in some regards, that (b) the second elements are in the
same height as the first ones and that (c) the derivational processes are to
be retracted, and then, to be harmonized. This paper attempts to make
further pursuit on the latter two.
Given the sequential conditioning stressed /i, e, æ/ followed by /r, l, x,
u/, the diphthongal glides are likely to share the feature that the surface
forms vary over [u, o, a]. This means that the second elements undergo the
allophonization on the basis of phonetic compatibility. The stressed vowels
preceding the singleton /x/ are, for example, shown to be [u] or [o], but not
/a/ (dohtor ‘daughter’, ruh ‘rough’). The oral posture of the /x/, relative to
that of /k, g/ and /ç/, causes the rounded vowels to concatenate with it.
The articulation on it requires that the back of the tongue make a firm
contact with soft palate and that the constriction be made stably with the
raised posture. When the /x/ follows, therefore, the diphthongal glides are
allophonized to the [u] or the [o]. The word neaht ‘night’ is involved in the
ones at issue. The second element therein shifts from the /a/ to the [o].
The phonological representation without the allophones as in the
previous research is accounted for by the Diphthong Height Harmony
(DHH), where after the /u/ was derived by way of the diphthongization, it
surfaces in the same height as that of the first element, i.e., eo, æa. This
suggestion has long been traditionally accepted in the literature. Taking a
different point of view, this paper seeks to take the assumption of the
Diphthong Rhyme Harmony (DRH). Overall, the diphthongal glides are
affected by both the first elements and the following consonants. The
allophonic formations take place by way of the retracting posture since all
of the following sounds condition the phonetic restriction on the
coooccurrences. The DHH is regarded as the assimilatory process in the
178
phonological level. By contrast, the DRH refers to the phonetic shift, where
the coarticulatory postures in each of the cases play an important role.
Davenport, Michael (2005) “Old English Breaking and Syllable Structure,” Headhood,
Elements, Specification and Contrastivity: Phonological
Papers in Honour of John Anderson, eds. by P. Carr, J. Durand and C. J. Ewen, 63-76,
Benjamins.
Hogg, Richard M. (1972) “Gemination, Breaking, and Reordering in the Synchronic
Phonology of Old English,” Lingua 28, 48-69.
Howell, Robert B. (1991) Old English Breaking and its Germanic Analogues, Tübingen:
Niemeyer
Lass, Roger and John Anderson (1975/2010) Old English Phonology, CUP.
Labov, William (1991) “The Three Dialects of English,” New Ways of Analysing Sound
Change, ed. by P. Eckert, 1-40, Academic Press.
Stockwell, Robert (1996) “Old English Short Diphthongs and the Theory of Glide
Emergence,” English Historical Linguistics 1994, ed. by D. Britton, 57-72,
Benjamins.
Exploring binomials: History, structure, motivation and function
Michiko Ogura
Keio University
Keywords: Old English, Poetry, alliteration, formula, word pairs
There are not so many books and articles which have been written on word
pairs as syntactic-stylistic patterns of binomials in Medieval English texts.
Among them Leisi (1947), Koskenniemi (1968) and Oakden (1968) are
useful as pioneer researches on this subject. Since Old English has formulaic
expressions under the regulations of alliteration, variation and poetic
dictions, many word pairs are used repeatedly. Most of them are in halfline length (e.g. Beo 72a geongum ond ealdum), but sometimes too short to
fill a half-line (e.g. GenB 507b Ic gehyrde hine þine dæd and word), or
sometimes too long to fill up the whole line (e.g. Beo 39 hildewæpnum ond
heaðowædum), combining two nouns with prepositions (e.g. Dan 313 to
Abrahame and to Isaace) and/or adjectives (e.g. ChristC 1110 þa hwitan
honda ond þa halgan fet). Some examples are more complex than a pair of
the same part of speech (e.g. GenA 2807a Sweotol is and gesene). The pairs
can be semantically repetitive (e.g. GenA 106a idel and unnyt), contrasting
(e.g. GenB 480b yfles and godes), explaining in detail (e.g. Beo 972a earm
ond eaxle), denoting one object with two words (e.g. Ex 537b þær bið fyr
179
and wyrm (that is, ‘hell’)), etc. The order of the two synonymous words is
usually established (e.g. GenA 10b wide and side), but in a few instances
changeable if the both words have alliteration (e.g. GenA 118b side and
wide). When investigation is to be made on Old English poems, therefore,
variations appositions and formulas are to be considered at the same time,
for which Paetzel (1913), Robinson (1961), Lord (1964) are old but still
useful, as well as new ones like Berger (1993). In this paper I investigate all
examples of word pairs in Old English poems and classify them semantically
(repetitive, contrastive, etc.), stylistically (exclusively poetic, less poetic,
etc.) and syntactically (noun and noun, adjective and adjective, adjective +
noun and compound, etc.).
Berger, Christiane. 1993. Altenglische Paarformeln und ihre Varianten. Münster
Monographs on English Literature 13. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Bessinger, Jr., J. B. and P. H. Smith, Jr. 1978. A Concordance to the Anglo-Saxon poetic
Records. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Koskenniemi, Inna. 1968. Repetitive Word Pairs in Old and Early Middle English Prose.
Turku: Turun Yliopisto.
Krapp, G. P. and E. V. K. Dobbie (eds.) 1931-53. The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, I-VI.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, New York: Columbia University Press.
Leisi, Ernst. 1947. Die tautologischen Wortpaare in Caxton’s “Eneydos”. New York:
Hafner.
Lord, A. B. 1964. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
Oakden, J. P. 1930, 1935. Alliterative Poetry in Middle English. rpt. 1968. Hamden, CT:
Archon Books.
Ogura, Michiko. 2004. “Variations and Diachronic Changes of Alliterative Patterns
and Alliterating Elements”, in: Michiko Ogura (ed.), Anglo-Saxon, Norse and
Celtic Studies (Project Report No. 80, Graduate School of Social Sciences and
Humanities, Chiba University), 23-49.
Paetzel, Walter. 1913. Die Variationen in der altgermanischen Alliterationspoesie.
Berlin: Mayer und Müller.
Robinson, Fred. 1961. “Variation. A Study in the Diction of Beowulf. Diss. University
of North Carolina.
Robinson, Fred. 1985. BEOWULF and the Appositive Style. Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press.
Robinson, Fred. 1994. The Editing of Old English. Oxford: Cambridge MA.
Rosier, J. L. (ed.) 1964, 1966. “Instructions for Christians”. Anglia 82: 4-22 and 84: 74.
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Lexical diffusion and neogrammarian regularity
Mieko Ogura & William S-Y. Wang
Linguistics Laboratory, Tsurumi University, Yokohama - Joint Research
Centre for Language and Human Complexity, Chinese University of Hong
Kong
Keywords: lexical diffusion, Neogrammarian regularity, 2-dimensional
dffusion, snowball effect, word frequency
After a critical survey of the Neogrammarian hypothesis, we propose a
chronological profile of lexical diffusion. We define lexical diffusion model
along two dimensions: diffusion from word to word in a single speaker,
which we call W(ord)-diffusion, and diffusion from speaker to speaker,
which we call S(peaker)-diffusion. When W-diffusion is slower than Sdiffusion, the difference is greater between words. When W-diffusion is
faster than S-diffusion, the difference is greater between speakers. Wdiffusion may proceed so fast that it is difficult to observe it. This shows
what is called the Neogrammarian regularity. The 2-dimensional diffusion
operates in phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic changes.
In this study we show that lexical diffusion is the fundamental mechanism
of language change.
Based on the development of periphrastic do and –s in the third person
singular present indicative, we show that the changes in the different
contexts begin at different times, and the later a change begins, the greater
the rate of change becomes (“snowball effect”). Within each context, high
frequency words change late in the periphrastic do, while high frequency
words change first in the third person singular present indicative. We
further discuss why some changes start in frequent words, while others in
infrequent words.
Labov (1981, 1994, 2012, 2013) considers that the chain shifts and
many of the mergers show the regularity of the sound changes and no
effect of word frequency. The lexical diffusion model assumes that in these
cases W-diffusion proceeds so fast that it is difficult to observe word
diffusion and word frequency effect within each individual, but word
diffusion can be observed while it is in progress across generations. Actually
Labov’s instrumental measurements of spontaneous speech show that the
individual vowel systems are quite different, especially along the age
dimension, and the pattern shows a continuous linear incrementation.
Santorini (1992), and Pintzuk & Taylor (2006) show that when a new
syntactic variant begins to enter the grammar, its use may be more or less
181
favored in different contexts, and it increases in frequency in every context
at the same rate over time (“Constant Rate Effect”). Fruehwald et al.
(2009) show that the Constant Rate Effect holds in phonology as well. We
assume that they show Neogrammarian regularity of change. We may
state that the faster the change proceeds within and across the contexts,
the less the difference of the rate of change becomes. We further suggest
that the stronger functional or social bias becomes, the faster word
diffusion proceeds. Our 2-dimensional diffusion model can uniformly
explain Neogrammarian regularity.
Fruehwald, Josef, et al. 2009. “Phonological Rule Change: The Constant Rate Effect”.
Paper presented at the 40th annual meeting of the North East Linguistic Society.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, November 13-15.
Labov, William. 1981. “Resolving the Neogrammarian Controversy”. Language 57,
267-308.
Labov, William. 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change, Volume 1: Internal Factors.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Labov, William. 2012. “The Role of the Lexicon in Regular Sound Change”, Paper
presented at the 41st Annual Conference of New Ways of Analyzing Variation,
Indiana University, Bloomington.
Labov, William. 2013. “One Hundred Years of Sound Change in Philadelphia: Linear
Incrementation, reversal, and reanalysis”. Language 89, 30-65.
Ogura, Mieko. 1993. “The Development of Periphrastic Do in English: A case of lexical
diffusion in syntax”. Diachronica 10: 51-85.
Ogura, Mieko. 2012. “The Timing of Language Change”. In Juan Manuel HernándezCampoy & Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre (eds.), The Handbook of Historical
Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 427-450.
Ogura, Mieko. (forthcoming). Language Evolution as a Complex Adaptive System: A
multidisciplinary approach to the history of English. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Ogura, Mieko & William S-Y. Wang. 1996. “Snowball Effect in Lexical Diffusion: The
development of -s in the third person singular present indicative in English”. In
Derek Britton (ed.), English Historical Linguistics 1994: Papers from the 8th
International Congress on English Historical Linguistics. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins, 119-141.
Ogura, Mieko & William S-Y. Wang. 1998. “Evolution Theory and Lexical Diffusion”. In
Jacek Fisiak & Marcin Krygier (eds.), Advances in English Historical Linguistics.
Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 315-344.
Ogura, Mieko & William S-Y. Wang. 2008. “Dynamic Dialectology and Social
Networks”. In Marina Dossena et al. (eds.), English Historical Linguistics 2006,
Vol. III: Geo-Historical Variation in English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John
Benjamins, 131-151.
Pintzuk, Suzan & Ann Taylor. 2006. “The Loss of OV Order in the History of English”.
In Kemenade, Ans van & Bettelou Los (eds.), The Handbook of the History of
English, Oxford: Blackwell, 249-278.
182
Santorini, Beatrice. 1993. “The Rate of Phrase Structure Change in the History of
Yiddish”. Language Variation and Change 5, 257-283.
Wang, William S-Y. 1969. “Competing Changes as a Cause of Residue”. Language 45:
9-25.
Multilingual practices in Late Modern English:
A frequency-based approach
Päivi Pahta, Arja Nurmi, Jukka Tyrkkö & Anna Petäjäniemi
University of Tampere
Keywords: Late Modern English, multilingual practices, language variation,
corpus linguistics, CLMET3
Recent research has established that multilingual practices, evidenced in
the alternating use of different languages, are characteristic of language
use in various types of English historical writings. The phenomenon, also
known as code-switching, has attracted increasing attention in historicallinguistic research (see e.g. Kopaczyk 2013, Nurmi & Pahta 2013, Pahta
2012, and studies in Schendl & Wright 2011). While several single genres
and topic domains in different periods have received attention in this body
of research, most of the focus has been on relatively small datasets. We are
still lacking a credible overview of the frequency and type of switching
practices evident on the basis of systematic corpus-based study. With the
current availability of large masses of electronic text from historical periods
of English, work on this scale is finally possible.
Our paper presents a corpus-study of multilingual practices in the Late
Modern period. The data comes from the Corpus of Late Modern English
3.0, comprising 333 texts and 34 million words, where the multilingual
passages have been identified using a range of complementary automatic
and semi-automatic techniques. The corpus has been enhanced with
sociolinguistic background information regarding the authors (e.g. gender,
social status, age, and education). We have also expanded the basic text
typological data assigned by the corpus compilers with variables such as the
suggested audience of each text (e.g. specialist vs. lay readers), and
possible triggering elements for multilingual passages, such as co-textual
references to foreign locations (e.g. novels taking place in France vs. those
confined to England). The enhanced data will allow us to present a fully
evidence-based overview of (1) the frequency of foreign-language passages
in written English in 1710–1920, (2) the variety of languages used in these
183
texts in addition to English, (3) the connections of multilingual practices and
the social variables describing the authors of each text and (4) the further
text-typological features associated with the use of multilingual practices.
Kopaczyk, Joanna (2013). Code-switching in the records of a Scottish brotherhood in
early modern Poland-Lithuania. Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 49
(3): 281-319.
Nurmi Arja & Päivi Pahta (2013). Multilingual Practices in the Language of the Law:
Evidence from the Lampeter Corpus. In Jukka Tyrkkö, Olga Timofeeva and Maria
Salenius (eds.) Ex Philologia Lux: Essays in Honour of Leena Kahlas-Tarkka.
Helsinki: Modern Language Society, 187-204.
Pahta Päivi (2012). Code-switching in English of the Middle Ages. In Terttu
Nevalainen & Elizabeth Closs Traugott (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of the History
of English. New York: Oxford University Press, 528-537.
Schendl, Herbert & Laura Wright (eds.) 2011. Code-switching in Early English.
Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
The linguistic cycle: A re-examination of Old English hwæðer ‘whether’
Victor Parra-Guinaldo
American University of Sharjah, UAE
Keywords: reanalysis, linguistic cycle, complementizer, economy principles,
question marker
The basic functions of Old English (OE) hwæðer ‘whether’ have already
been established in the literature (Visser 1963, Mitchell 1985, Traugott
1992, and others). Two main categories are typically distinguished in its
functional classification: pronoun and conjunction. In addition, its adverbial
form hwæð(e)re ‘however’ has been recognized as an associated element
(Mitchell 1985). Past classifications of OE hwæðer are in need of
considerable revision though, as they underrepresent its diverse
functionality and transitory nature and fail to address issues yet unresolved.
For example, most include what has been referred to as a question particle
under the category of conjunction, ignoring the fact that the former has a
different function and life span than the latter. As far as the evolution of
hwæðer during the OE period, the consensus is that the pronominal use is
its original one. Ukaji (1997) for example points out that this use is closest
to its etymological reference (PIE *kwo- + *-tero- > PGmc *XwaÞaraz
(*Xwe-)), that is, a pronoun and a comparative suffix that can be translated
as ‘which of the two’. But a more important, though less evident, question
184
yet to be explained is whether its use as a conjunction (complementizer
introducing a subordinate clause) predates its use as a question marker
(QM), as was claimed early on by Nusser (1913) and Andrew (1940), or if
the QM precedes the complementizer chronologically, as I claim.
Following van Gelderen’s (2004 and later) work on diachronic development,
where Economy Principles (Late Merge and Head Preference) motivate the
change of lexical heads into functional ones, I will present in this paper a
comprehensive and historically cogent classification of OE hwæðer’s
functions, which is theoretically sound, and will tackle the issue of its
chronology; I argue for a change from QM in an independent sentence to a
complementizer heading a subordinate clause, which complies with the
syntactic shift from paratactic to hypotactic we are familiar with and which
is supported by a representative number of sentences containing hwæðer
as they were drawn from the OE period of the diachronic part of the
Helsinki Corpus of English Texts (Kytö & Rissanen 1988).
Andrew, S. O. (1940). Syntax and style in Old English. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Gelderen, E. v. (2004). Grammaticalization as economy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins
Pub. Co.
Kytö, Merja & Matti Rissanen. (1988). The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts. In Ossi
Ihalainen et al. (Eds.), Corpus Linguistics: Hard and Soft, 169-79. Amsterdam:
Rodopi.
Mitchell, B. (1985). Old English grammar: Vol. 1 & 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nusser, O. (1913). Geschichte der Disjunktivkonstruktionen im Englischen.
Anglistische Forschungen, 37.
Traugott, E. C. (1992). Syntax. In Richard Hogg (Ed.), The Cambridge history of the
English language: Vol. 1. The Beginnings to 1066 (pp. 168-289). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Ukaji, M. (1997). A History of Whether. In M. Ukaji, T. Nakao, M. Kajita & S. Chiba
(Eds.), Studies in English Linguistics: A Festschrift for Akira Ota on the Occasion of
His Eightieth Birthday (pp. 1236-1261). Tokyo: Taishukan.
Visser, F. T. (1963-1973). An historical syntax of the English Language. Leiden: Brill.
Towards a theory of historical psycholinguistics:
The position of adverbial clauses in Early Modern English
Meike Pentrel
Osnabrueck University
This paper combines findings from modern psycho-/cognitive linguistics
and historical data. Based on the uniformitarian principle (cf. Lass 1997;
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Bergs 2012) this study assumes that the same cognitive strategies govern
the production and comprehension of texts today and in the past.
However, if present-day predictions are not met, this might call for an
adjustment of either the assumed cognitive strategies or the initial
assumption regarding historical text production.
In practice, I will look different types of adverbial clauses in Early
Modern English, e.g. temporal, conditional, causal. In theory, these clauses
can be placed before or after the associated main clause (e.g. Quirk et al.
1985), yet PdE studies have shown that certain sequences are preferred. A
number of cognitive processing as well as discourse strategies influencing
the order have been proposed, e.g. Adverbial Length, Iconicity of
Sequence, or Given-New (Prideaux 1989; Diessel 1996, 2005, 2008). The
strategies may oppose or override each other, often depending on the text
type.
This study is based on a 1 million-word from The Diary of Samuel Pepys
(1660-69) which can be assumed to range stylistically between conceptually
spoken and written language (cf. Koch & Oesterreicher 1985). Due to its
narrative structure a frequent use of adverbial clauses can be expected; this
outweighs problems such as that The Diary was written in shorthand. The
patterning of adverbial clauses in the Diary should meet the predictions for
such a text type made by PdE processing strategies.
This study critically evaluates the results of the empirical analysis in the
light of PdE data and supposedly universal cognitive factors. It may thus
provide a feedback loop between the historical data and contemporary
cognitive/psycholinguistic theory.
Bergs, Alexander. 2012. “The Uniformitarian Principle and the Risk of Anachronisms
in Language and Social History”. In: Blackwell Hadndbook of Historical
Sociolinguistics. Ed. By Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy, Juan Camilo CondeSilvestre, Oxford: Blackwell, 80-99.
Diessel, Holger. 1996. “Processing Factors of Pre- and Postponed Adverbial Clauses.”
In: Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic
Society: General Session and Parasession on The Role of Learnability in
Grammatical Theory, 71-82.
Diessel, Holger. 2005. “Competing Motivations for the Ordering of Main and
Adverbial Clauses.” In: Linguistics 43 (3), 449-470.
Diessel, Holger. 2008. “Iconicity of Sequence: A Corpus-Based Analysis of the
Positioning of Temporal Adverbial Clauses in English.” In: Cognitive Linguistics 19
(3), 465-490.
Koch, Peter & Wulf Oesterreicher. 1985. “Sprache der Nähe – Sprache der Distanz.
Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im Spannungsfeld von Sprachtheorie und
Sprachgeschichte”. In: Romanistisches Jahrbuch, 36. Berlin/New York: Walter de
Gruyter, 15-34.
186
Lass, Roger. 1997. Historical Linguistics and Language Change. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Prideaux, Gary D. 1989. “Text Data as Evidence for Language Processing Principles:
The Grammar of Ordered Events.” In: Language Science, Vol. 11(1), 27-42.
Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey and Jan Svartvick. 1985. A
Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. Harlow: Longman.
On multiple clausal embedding in Old English
Rodrigo Pérez Lorido
University of Oviedo
Keywords: Old English; language processing; recursiveness; clausal
embedding; relative clause extraposition.
It is a well-known fact that centre-embedded structures like (1a) below
pose special difficulties for the language processor, as they require
increased effort from short-time memory, and that they are crosslinguistically avoided by using different strategies which involve the
generation of right-branching structures like (1b):
(1)
a. The man [ the boy [ the woman saw ] heard ] left.
b. The woman saw the boy [ that heard the man [ that left ] ].
The processing problems of centre embedding become evident in OV
languages with postnominal relatives, like Old English, where the nesting of
sentences and the subsequent clustering of verbs in final position produce
very complex sequences, which are difficult to process (see the construct in
(2a) and the actual Old English rendering in (2b) for illustration):
(2)
a. *… forðan þe seo sawul [ ðe þone scyppend [ þe hi gesceop
and hire geferan ] lufað ] gesælig is.
b. … forðan þe [ seo sawul is gesælig] [ðe þone scyppend lufað ]
[ þe hi gesceop and hire geferan ]
‘because the soul is blessed that loves the God that created it and
its fellow-pilgrims’. (ÆLS I 20:169)
Authors from Colman (1988) to Ogura (2001) have discussed the role of
Relative Extraposition as a means to avoid centre-embedded structures and
its relevance as a factor in the change OV  VO in English, and more
187
recently Karlsson (2007, 2009) has analysed recursiveness in written and
spoken texts, setting the quantitative limits of clausal embedding. To date,
however, no study has addressed the full extent to which centre
embedding is allowed in Old English, the contexts for its application or the
factors which block it. This paper aims at filling that niche, taking the data
on embedded preverbal subjects and objects found in a large corpus of OE
prose and analysing them against a series of variables that include: internal
constituent structure of the elements in the complex sentences, languageparticular tolerance to verb clustering, and impact of pragmatic factors
such as topicality and focus placement.
The main conclusions to which I have come are:

Centre embedding of pre-verbal subjects and objects in Old
English was not especially constrained by the cognitive capabilites
of the OE speakers (or at least no more than it is in other modern
Germanic languages).

The more elaborate or formal texts (Cura Pastoralis, Bede)
promoted a wider use of clausal embedding than narrative and
less elaborate ones (A-S-C, Orosius).

Pragmatic factors such as topicality and the focal nature of
antecedents interacted heavily with syntactic constraints on the
structure of the elements in complex sentences.

Some of the restrictions on adjacency and clustering of verbal
forms in embedded structures that hold for modern German and
Dutch do not seem to hold for Old English.
Colman, Fran. 1988. Heavy arguments in Old English. In John M. Anderson & N.
Macleod (eds.). Edinburgh Studies in the English Language, 1. Edinburgh: John
Donald. 33-89.
Karlsson, Fred. 2007. Constraints on multiple center-embedding of clauses. Journal of
Linguistics 43/2: 365-392.
Karlsson, Fred. 2009. Origin and maintenance of clausal embedding complexity. In
Geoffrey Sampson, David Gil & Peter Trudgill (eds.). Language Complexity as an
Evolving Variable. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 192-203.
Ogura, Mieko. 2001. Perceptual factors and word order change in English. Folia
Linguistica Historica 22/1-2: 233-253.
188
On the role of frequency in the grammatical constructionalization of the
passive construction
Peter Petré
KU Leuven
Keywords: Passive construction, construction grammar, grammaticalization,
syntax, information structure
It is commonly assumed that the English passive, as a periphrastic verbal
construction, developed out of copular [BE AdjectivalParticiple]. Most
attention in timing this change has gone to the formally innovative
prepositional and recipient passives, both becoming firmly established
during the late fourteenth century, as well as the slightly later fixation of by
for the expression of the agent, which completes the passive’s equivalence
with an active transitive construction.
Toyota (2008: 124) suggests the first function of the passive, already
present in Old English, was that of backgrounding the actor, as in quasiimpersonal passives whose actor is completely indefinite:
(1)
Þara geleafan & gehwyrfednesse is sægd þæt se cyning swa wære
efnblissende.
‘In their faith and conversion (it) is said that the king was equally
rejoicing.’ (c925(a900), Bede)
As an extension to this function, the primarily foregrounding function of
topicalizing the undergoer developed in the course of Middle English. This
development is associated with the fixation of SVO, which led to topics
increasingly becoming subjects to maintain interclausal topic-continuity
(e.g. Los 2009). The passive provided a straightforward way of making
undergoers or recipients into subject-topics and started to extend its range
with formal innovation as a result.
From a constructionist perspective, the complex functionality of [BE
Participle], and its history, raises important questions. How different are
the periphrastic (topicalizing or backgrounding) and the copular
constructions really? The formal differnece between prepositional passives
and copular constructions (he is highly thought of versus *he is afraid of ‘X
is afraid of him’) suggests that at least two somewhat independent
constructions are at play.
In this paper, I draw attention to the role of relative frequencies in the
transition from an extension (in a semantic network around a prototype) to
189
a separate construction. Those few studies that provide frequency data,
such as Seoane (2006) or Toyota (2008), do not really address this issue in
detail. I provide evidence that already in early Middle English there is a
significant shift in the relative weight of the various functions of [BE
Participle], involving an increase of both backgrounding and topicalizing
functions. This may have led to a more distinct (formally or co-textually
determined) opposition between them, facilitating the eventual
emancipation of the topicalizing passive. Generally, this paper wishes to
contribute to the issue of operationalizibility of frequency in (grammatical)
constructionalization (Traugott & Trousdale 2013).
Bybee, Joan. 2003. Cognitive Processes in Grammaticalization. 6e New Psychology of
Language ed. by Michael Tomasello, vol. 2, 145–167. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates.
Toyota, Junichi. 2008. Diachronic change in the English passive (Palgrave Studies in
Language History and Language Change). Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Traugott, Elizabeth C. & Graeme Trousdale. 2013. Constructionalization and
Constructional Changes (Oxford Studies in Diachronic and Historical Linguistics
6). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Seoane, Elena. 2006. Information Structure and Word Order Change: %e Passive as
an Information-rearranging Strategy in the History of English. 6e Handbook of
the History of English ed. by Ans van Kemenade & Bettelou Los, 360–391.
Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Los, Bettelou. 2009. The consequences of the loss of verb-second in English:
Information structure and syntax in interaction. English Language and Linguistics
13(1). 97-125.
Anger, fear and amusement: The lexico-semantic field of emotions in the
Ormulum
Sara M. Pons-Sanz
University of Westminster
The Ormulum is an early Middle English work of biblical exegesis authored
by Orm, a monk originating from the East Midlands. Scholars are generally
dismissive about its literary interest. Yet, it has received much attention
from linguists, who recognise its value not only in connection with Orm’s
innovative spelling practices but also as a source of linguistic data from a
dialect which is rather poorly represented in the early stages of the English
language.
190
One of the linguistic features of the text that has received some
attention is the significant number of Norse-derived terms it records (not
surprising, given its dialectal origin). Yet, most studies only go as far as the
identification of the terms, without looking in detail at how the terms work
in the text and the particular semantic and stylistic relations that they have
with their native counterparts, when they exist (think, for example, about
Brate 1885, the main study of the Norse-derived terms in the text). There
are, however, some important exceptions to this general trend: for
example, Hille 2004 analyses the distribution of ME til (cp. OIc til) and to,
while Johannnesson 2006 explores the make-up of the lexico-semantic field
of bread in the text.
The present paper will attempt to follow in the footsteps of these works
by studying in detail Orm’s use of terms belonging to the lexico-semantic
field of emotions: e.g. ME angren ‘to make angry’, breth ‘anger’, epen ‘to
cry’, kaggerleȝc ‘love, lust’, rade ‘afraid’, skemtinge ‘amusement’, skerren
‘to terrify’, and wandreth ‘trouble, suffering’. Firstly, the evidence for their
Norse-derivation will be established; afterwards, the terms and their native
equivalents, identified on the basis of the Historical Thesaurus of English,
will be examined in their contexts in order to determine the semantic and
stylistic factors that are likely to have led Orm to chose between the native
and borrowed terms. Finally, time permitting, Orm’s use will be compared
with that of his near-contemporaries.
Brate, Erik. 1885. ‘Nordische Lehnw rter im Ormulum’, Beiträge zur Geschichte der
Deutschen Sprache und Literatur, 10: 1-80 and 580-86.
Hille, Arnold. 2004. ‘On the Distribution of the Forms to and till in the Ormulum’,
English Studies 85, 22-32.
Historical Thesaurus of English. 2013. Ed. by Christian Kay et al. (Glasgow: University
of Glasgow). Available at <http://historicalthesaurus.arts.gla.ac.uk>.
Johannesson, Nils-Lennart. 2006. ‘Bread, Crumbs and Related Matters in the
Ormulum’, Selected Proceedings of the 2005 Symposium on New Approaches in
English Historical Lexis (HEL-LEX), ed. R. W. McConchie et al. (Somerville, MA:
Cascadilla Proceedings Project), 69-82.
191
Abbreviating Lydgate: Ideographic symbols in two manuscripts of the
Troybook and The Siege of Thebes
Justyna Rogos
Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan
Keywords: Lydgate, Middle English manuscripts, abbreviations, paratext
Abbreviation symbols used in medieval manuscripts are typically
considered from either of two mutually dependent analytical perspectives:
paleographic, which focuses on the graphic representation of the
abbreviation, and linguistic, which translates the abbreviation symbol into a
meaningful alphabetic sequence. In both cases the point of reference for
examining the forms and functions of abbreviations is the immediate
context in which they appear, i.e. the abbreviated lexeme. In this paper the
manuscript page is ‘zoomed out’ to re-contextualise abbreviations as part
of the interplay between textual and paratextual (cf. Genette 1997)
components of a handwritten text. The author examines scribal
abbreviating practices in two manuscripts of Lydgate’s Troybook and The
siege of Thebes (Cambridge, Trinity College MS O. 5. 2. and London, British
Library Royal MS 18 D II) with the purpose of demonstrating how
abbreviations interact with such paratextual features as layout, script type
(and size), ornamentation or rubrication. On the basis of a comparison of
forms and functions of abbreviations in two manuscripts of the same pair of
texts it will be argued that the Middle English scribes’ decisions about
applying a given abbreviation symbol in a particular context are informed
not so much by the orthography of the manuscript text (i.e. the incidence
of a specific alphabetic sequence) as by a combination of lexical and
paratextual factors. In the former case, it is the occurrence of a specific
lexeme that triggers abbreviation, whereas in the latter abbreviations are
integrated into the broader context of what Genette (1997) subsumes
under the term ‘paratext’: titles, rubrics, mise en page or type of script. In
this approach abbreviations used by the scribes of Lydgate’s manuscripts
are not just time- and space-saving devices (cf. Petti 1977: 22), functionally
equivalent to alphabetic strings (e.g. Martin 1892; Capelli 1912; or Bischoff
1979), but, along with other non-textual devices, they shape the dynamics
of the manuscript page.
Bischoff, Bernard. 1979. Latin paleography.
Capelli, Adriano. 1912. Dizionario di abbreviature Latine et Italiani. Milan.
192
Genette, Gérard. 1997. Paratexts: thresholds of interpretation (translated by Jane E.
Levin). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Martin, Charles Trice. 1892. The record interpreter: A collection of abbreviations,
Latin words and names used in English historical manuscripts and records.
London: Reeves and Turner.
Petti, Anthony G. 1977. English literary hands from Chaucer to Dryden. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
On the differential evolution of simple and complex object constructions
in English
Günter Rohdenburg
University of Paderborn
This paper surveys the evolution of object structures in English by using the
much more conservative standard German as a background foil. It will be
shown that English has diverged from German in two diametrically opposed
ways. On the one hand, in the area of simple object constructions, English
has shown a striking trend towards transitivization, leading to the
replacement of a vast range of prepositional objects and adjuncts by direct
objects. Consider, for instance, examples like (1)-(5), whose German
translation equivalents continue to exclusively use prepositional phrases to
render the direct objects in English.
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
What bait do you fish?
She reached her hand into the bag.
He strolled the ball into the net.
They had incited a rebellion.
She had won the pools/lottery.
As a result, the functional diversity of the direct object in English has been
increased immensely.
On the other hand, in the area of more complex object structures,
English has experienced a series of major changes, resulting in the virtual
loss of several types of construction and the contraction of many others. At
the same time, most of these reductive changes have introduced a high
degree of functional specialization, unknown to German, by either
narrowing the semantic spectrum of the original syntactic frame or by
compelling the use of alternative grammatical devices.
Thus, several types of double object construction have been phased out
completely, and even the remaining prototypical domain of verbs of
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transfer and communication has been drastically restricted. For instance,
relevant examples using the verb return, which were still attested in the
19th century, are no longer possible today.
Similarly, of the many and varied external possessor constructions once
found in English only the type illustrated in (6) could be said to be still
productive. Unlike their usual German equivalents featuring an external
dative object, the productive type in English entails the sequence S-V-O.
This test reveals example (7) to be a constructional relic. In addition, even
more complex examples like (8) were abandoned long ago without leaving
a trace.
(6)
(7)
(8)
He patted me on the shoulder.
They stared me in the face.
…, hee rounds Sebastiano this answer in his eare, … (EEPF, 1635)
Finally, in what has been referred to as the Great Complement shift, the
syntactic frames S-V-O + infinitive and S-V-O + that-clause have also
become more specialized. In the latter case, in particular, several verb
classes once associated with this frame have largely dropped out of use,
and their functions have in part been taken over by specific gerundial
constructions amongst others. Crucially, however, originally available thatclauses not preceded by a direct object have mostly survived intact.
Compare, for instance, the situation in (9). Unlike German, English has thus
evolved a sharp contrast between that-clauses with or without preceding
objects.
(9)
She answered (*her mother) that she would be back by noon.
In addition to the quotations in OED2, the database used for this study
consists of a number of British and American newspapers, the BNC and a
collection of historical datasets provided by Chadwyck-Healey and the
Gutenberg project.
Hawkins, John A. (1986) A Comparative Typology of English and German: Unifying the
Contrasts. London and Sydney: Croom Helm.
Rohdenburg, Günter (1995) “On the replacement of finite complement clauses by
infinitives in English”. English Studies 76: 367-388.
Rohdenburg, Günter (forthcoming) “On the changing status of that-clauses”. In:
Hundt, Marianne (ed.) The Syntax of Late Modern English. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
194
The rise of the English language in Ireland
Patricia Ronan
Université de Lausanne
Keywords: language contact, language shift, Ireland, social factors
It is the aim of this study to trace the rise of the English language in Ireland
and to correlate this process with Schneider’s dynamic model of the
development of New Englishes (Schneider 2003).
Ireland had had a stable linguistic and socio-historical structure until the
th
arrival of the first Anglo-Norman settlers in the 12 century. By the end of
th
the 19 century, almost complete language shift to English had taken place.
In comparison with the other language shift situations described in
Schneider’s model, this process was comparatively long drawn out in
Ireland, having taken the best part of seven centuries, and it was also
completed rather haltingly. Especially during the late Medieval period the
rise of the English language experienced repeated drawbacks (Kallen 1994,
Hickey 2007). The paper relates developments in social power structures to
the progress of the language shift to English. Socio-historical data will be
evaluated and correlated with data from Middle-, Early Modern-, Late
Modern and Modern English. Data samples will be taken from historical and
contemporary corpora (Hickey 2003, Kallen and Kirk 2008). The findings will
show how the changes in socio-economic power relations between the two
languages and population groups involved may be considered a relevant
factor for the progress of language shift in Ireland.
Hickey, Raymond 2003. Corpus Presenter. Software for language analysis.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Hickey, Raymond. 2007. Irish English. History and present-day forms. Cambridge
Cambridge University Press.
Kallen, Jeffrey L. 1994. ‘English in Ireland’. In Burchfield, R. (ed.) The Cambridge
History of the English language, vol. 5. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
148-96.
Kallen, Jeffrey L and John M. Kirk. 2008. ICE-Ireland: A User’s Guide. Belfast: Cló
Ollscoil na Banríona.
Schneider, Edgar W. 2003. ‘The Dynamics of New Englishes: From Identity
Construction to Dialect Birth’, Language 79.2, 233-81.
195
It is common in several of the provincial dialects of England:
English regional material in John Russell Bartlett’s
Dictionary of Americanisms
Javier Ruano-García
University of Salamanca
Keywords: Dictionary of Americanisms, English regional sources, dialect
lexicography, Late Modern Englishes
In the Introduction to the first edition of the Dictionary of Americanisms
(1848) John Russell Bartlett explains that “In preparing this work, I have
examined all the English provincial glossaries, and the principal English
dictionaries; which it was necessary to do in order to know what words and
phrases were still provincial in England” (xxvii). Bartlett’s motivation in
undertaking his project was to give a detailed account of the words that
were peculiar to the US by the middle of the nineteenth century, including
not only those words of American origin, but also colloquialisms “used in
familiar conversation” (iv) and regional terms, since “the dialects and
provincialisms of those parts of England [...] have extended to New York,
Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Michigan” (iii). As a result, the first edition of the
Dictionary includes an important number of regionalisms that were used in
England in light of the evidence provided by a variety of sources
representative of English dialects. The second edition issued in 1859 shows
a change of policy, as it “claims to be more strictly American than the first”
(v), which becomes clear with the omission of almost 800 terms in favour of
those Bartlett referred to as pure Americanisms. This, as Crowell (1972:
240) points out, reflects Bartlett’s “new view of his task as a lexicographer
and a new definition of the term ‘Americanism’”. Similarly, the fourth
edition of 1877 built on the second of 1859 deleting a few terms, most of
which were British.
This paper examines the English regional material used in Bartlett’s
Dictionary of Americanisms. I look at the four editions of the dictionary and
focus on the evidence furnished by six of the most relevant historical
dialect glossaries and dictionaries quoted by Bartlett, namely John Ray’s A
Collection of English Words not Generally Used (1674), Grose’s A Provincial
Glossary (1787), Brockett’s Glossary of North Country Words (1825), Forby’s
The Vocabulary of East Anglia (1830), Holloway’s A General Dictionary of
Provincialisms (1838) and Halliwell’s Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial
Words (1847). The paper addresses the following questions: (1) Bartlett’s
treatment of the regional data and with which lexicographic purpose they
196
were quoted; (2) whether Bartlett relied more profusely on any of these
works and, therefore, the transatlantic link made explicit for some terms
was reliant on any specific source; and (3) how the change of policy
observed in the second and fourth editions of the dictionary may apply to
the data provided by these dialect sources. The analysis suggests the
important contribution of Forby (1830) and Halliwell (1847), and how the
first edition of the dictionary relied on some of these works to illustrate the
English distribution of words that Bartlett found in New England. Also, the
comparative study of the four editions highlights a quantitative change as
regards the words and senses taken from these English sources. The
analysis likewise shows how Bartlett on occasion preserved some English
provincial terms and their corresponding geographic labels, but omitted the
references to the English works from which they had been taken.
Bartlett, John Russell. 1848. Dictionary of Americanisms. New York: Bartlett and
Welford.
Bartlett, John Russell. 1859. Dictionary of Americanisms. 2nd ed. Boston: Little,
Brown & Co.
Bartlett, John Russell. 1877. Dictionary of Americanisms. 4th ed. Boston: Little, Brown
& Co.
Brockett, John T. 1825. A Glossary of North Country Words in Use, Newcastle upon
Tyne: Printed by T. and J. Hodgson.
Crowell, Michael G. 1972. “John Russell Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms”.
American Quarterly 24(2): 228-242.
Forby, Robert. 1830. The Vocabulary of East Anglia. 2 vols. London: J. B. Nichols and
Son.
Grose, Francis. 1787. A Provincial Glossary. London: Printed for S. Hooper.
Halliwell, James O. 1847. Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words. 2 vols. London:
John Russell Smith.
Holloway, William. 1838. A General Dictionary of Provincialisms. Lewes: Sussex Press.
Ray, John. 1674. A Collection of English Words Not Generally Used. London: Printed
by H. Bruges.
Null subjects in Old English: A case of diatopic variaton?
Kristian Rusten
University of Bergen
The question of whether Old English (OE) allowed referential null subjects is
still controversial, despite recent corpus-based investigations by Walkden
197
(2012, 2013) and Rusten (2010, 2013). Currently, three main positions are
identifiable: van Gelderen (2013) argues that OE ‘is a genuine pro drop
language, although the system is in decline’, while Rusten (2013: 977)
argues that referential null subjects are ‘more or less extinct by the time of
the extant OE texts’. Walkden (2013: 162–163) takes an intermediary
position, from which it is argued that referential null subjects in OE are
found only in Anglian or Anglian-influenced texts. On the basis of
comparatively high frequencies for referential null subjects in such texts,
Walkden argues that OE subject realisation displays diatopic variation.
This paper will present a quantitative investigation of this hypothesis. It
builds on an exhaustive, contrastive survey of null and overt referential
pronominal subjects as they occur in all 131 texts contained in the YCOE
(Taylor et al 2003) and the YCOEP (Pintzuk & Plug 2001). The results show
that the dialect-split hypothesis may be problematised: First, null subjects
are exceedingly rare in the prose genre, and many of the texts which
feature null subjects tend to be early. Secondly, while a number of Anglian
or Anglian-influenced texts do display very high frequencies for referential
null subjects (e.g. Bald’s Leechbook, Herbarium, Lacnunga, Quadrupedibus),
they are all medical handbooks. This raises the possibility that their
occurrence is restricted by text-type rather than dialect. The fact that a
number of Anglian-influenced texts which are not medical handbooks (e.g.
the Blickling Homilies, the C manuscript of Gregory’s Dialogues and the Life
of St. Chad) display frequencies between 0.3%–1%, may be taken as
support for this position, since these frequencies are equally low as those
typically found in West Saxon texts. A similar point applies for the prose–
poetry distinction, as referential null subjects are much more frequent in
the poetry than the prose.
Thus, two key problems must be solved before it is possible to conclude
that the occurrence of referential null subjects in OE is explainable as
diatopic variation: the occurrence of such subjects is highly erratic, but they
appear to cluster in (i) early texts and in (ii) particular genres. Differences in
frequency could therefore be attributable to diachronic change in progress
or style in addition to dialect.
Gelderen, Elly van. 2013. Null subjects in Old English. Linguistic Inquiry 44: 271–285.
Pintzuk, Susan & Leendert Plug. 2001. The York-Helsinki parsed corpus of Old English
poetry. http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~lang18/pcorpus.html.
Rusten, Kristian A. 2010. A study of empty referential pronominal subjects in Old
English. MPhil thesis, University of Bergen.
Rusten, Kristian A. 2013. Empty referential subjects in Old English prose. A
quantitative analysis. English Studies: A Journal of English Language and
Literature 94: 970–992.
198
Taylor, Ann, Anthony Warner, Susan Pintzuk & Frank Beths. 2003. The York-TorontoHelsinki parsed corpus of Old English prose. Online:
http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~lang22/YCOE/YcoeHome.htm.
Walkden, George L. 2012. Syntactic reconstruction and Proto-Germanic. PhD
dissertation, University of Cambridge.
Walkden, George L. 2013. Null subjects in Old English. Language Variation and
Change 25: 155–178.
Binomials in several editions of an early modern almanac
Hanna Rutkowska
Adam Mickiewicz University
Keywords: binomials, Early Modern English, early printed books, corpus
linguistics
This contribution discusses the findings of a corpus-based, comparative
case study which investigates the use of binomials in six editions of the
Kalender of Shepherdes, a comprehensive compendium of prose and verse
texts on a variety of subjects, e.g. astronomy, medicine, and religion,
published between 1506 and 1656. My study aims mainly at identifying the
word classes involved, the types of semantic relationship between the
elements of binomials, as well as the modifications introduced in binomial
expressions in particular editions. Apart from the description, I also focus
on the reasons for the editorial changes recorded in the corpus. The
phrases under analysis are often rather faithfully reproduced in the
Kalender editions. However, some modifications can also be traced, and
these seem to have been determined by a variety of factors, including the
spelling system employed in a given publishing house, the stylistic
considerations, and also by the socio-historical background, such as the
English Reformation.
The employment of binomials, i.e. two coordinated and semantically
linked lexemes (see Bhatia 1994, Kopaczyk 2009), is one of characteristic
features of formal registers in Early Modern English (Nevalainen 1999,
Adamson 1999), particularly of legal records (Bhatia 1994, Kopaczyk 2013).
The present study shows that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
binomials are also abundant in less formal writings, such as almanacs,
addressed to laymen and used on a daily basis. They comprise mainly pairs
of nouns, and less frequently verbs and adjectives, usually coordinated by
means of the conjunction and, and occasionally by or (e.g. good or bad) and
nor. As regards the semantic relationship between the coordinated
199
elements, most of them are synonyms (e.g. fortunes and destinies, bound
nor tied), or complement each other (e.g. old and feeble, might and will).
There are also numerous instances of antonyms or words associated by
contrast (e.g. body and soul, rising and descending), and occasional
examples of cause-and-effect relationships (e.g. cost and charges, gathered
and housed). The majority of the binomials found in the corpus are hapax
legomena, but there is also a number of phrases reappear many times in
the text, e.g. virtues and vices, and living and dying.
The corpus examined for the purposes of this study contains over 420
thousand words, and constitutes a database of transcriptions prepared by
the present author, and based on the facsimiles available at Early English
Books Online (EEBO, at http://wwwlib.umi.com/eebo/). The analysed
editions include those published by Pynson (1506, STC 22408), de Worde
(1528, STC 22411), Powell (1556, STC 22412), Wally (c. 1585, STC 22416.5),
Adams (1611, STC 22421), and Ibbitson (1656, Wing B713).
Adamson, Sylvia, 1999, “Literary language”, in: Roger LASS (ed.) The Cambridge
History of the English Language. Volume III: 1476-1776. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 539–653.
Bhatia, Vijai, 1994, “Cognitive structuring in legislative provisions”, in: John Gibbons
(ed.) Language and the Law. London: Longman, 136–155.
Jackson, Willem Alexander, Frederic Sutherland Ferguson & Katharine F. Pantzer
(eds.) 1976, A short-title catalogue of books printed in England, Scotland and
Ireland and of English books printed abroad, 1475-1640, Volume 2: I–Z. London:
Bibliographical Society. (STC)
Kopaczyk, Joanna, 2009, “(Multi-word) units of meaning in 16th-century legal Scots”,
in: R.W., McConchie; Jukka, Tyrkkö; Alpo, Honkapohja (eds.) Selected
Proceedings of the 2008 Symposium on New Approaches in English Historical
Lexis (Hel-Lex 2). Sommerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project, 88-95.
Kopaczyk, Joanna, 2013, The legal language of Scottish burghs. Standardization and
lexical bundles (1380-1560). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nevalainen, Terttu, 1999, “Early Modern English lexis and semantics”, in: Roger LASS
(ed.) The Cambridge History of the English Language. Volume III: 1476-1776.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 332–458.
Wing, Donald Goddard, 1982–1998, Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in
England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales and British America and of English Books
Printed in Other Countries, New York: The Modern Language Association of
America. (Wing)
200
The English imperative: From verb- to clause-level mood marker
Tanja Rütten
University of Cologne
The imperative is today understood as a sentence mood (e.g. in Quirk et al.
1985: 827, Huddleston & Pullum 2002: 853) that has its origins in an Old
English verbal mood indicating wishes, orders and commands (comp.
examples 1 and 2). While this fact is often taken for granted, our knowledge
about this astonishing change from verb- to clause-level mood marker is
rather poor. There are no studies that illustrate, let alone discuss, the
change.
(1) Lēofan men, gecnāwaþ þæt sōð is: … nderstandaþ ēac georne þæt
dēofol þās þēode nū fela gēara dwelode tō swýþe … (Wulfstan, Sermo
Lupi ad Anglos, 1014, DOEC)
(2) If a man should bid his servant goe sheare all my sheepe and mark
them: if that servant should shere all his sheep, and marke them …, and
not marke his Lambs … doth that servant fulfill his Masters command?
(Pagitt, treatise, 1645, COERP)
In my paper, I will show that the change seems to have involved the
following three steps: 1. a coalescence of imperative and subjunctive mood
in Middle English (cf. Fisher 1992: 249), which leaves the morphological
imperative indistinct from the subjunctive. 2. a tendency to drop the
subject when followed by morphological imperatives (in contrast to
subjunctives, which retain an overt subject). 3. a growing focus on
constituent order that eventually resulted in the imperative as a category of
the sentence rather than the verb.
Simple as this may seem, there are certain oddities to be considered:
For one thing, it seems that the imperative first fell together with the
subjunctive. But while the subjunctive survives as a morpho-syntactic, i.e.
predominantly verbal, mood marker, imperative mood shifted to the clause
level. So what is the precise relationship between both the imperative and
the subjunctive, and when did both go separate ways? And why?
In my paper, I will trace the change outlined above in a corpus-based
study of the imperative (verb and sentence) mood in Old, Middle, and Early
Modern English sermons. I will follow the three steps proposed above
(syncretism, constituent order, zero subject), focusing in particular on the
ways in which the imperative collides with the subjunctive in this change.
201
Fischer, Olga. 1992. “Syntax”. In: Norman Blake (ed.) The Cambridge History of the
English Language. Vol. II. Cambridge University Press. 207-408
Huddleston, Rodney and Geoffrey Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the
English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Quirk, Randolph, Jeoffrey Leech, Jan Svartvik and Sidney Greenbaum. 1985. A
Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.
COERP = Corpus of English Religious Prose. Under compilation at the University of
Cologne. Kohnen, Thomas, Tanja Rütten, Kirsten Gather, Dorothee Groeger and
Ingvilt Marcoe.
DOEC = Dictionary of Old English Corpus
The lexical field of intellect in Old and Middle English: A pilot study
Kinga Sadej-Sobolewska
University of Social Sciences, Warsaw
Keywords: intelligent, wise, Old English, Middle English, lexical field
The Historical Thesaurus of English enumerates approximately 70 synonyms
(including approx. 30 compounds) of the adjectives intelligent, clever, wise
in Old and Middle English. Such abundance of words may be indicative of
how blurred the concept of intelligence was and how many different
aspects it covered. The exceptionally large number of lexemes also
highlights the importance of the concept of intelligence and wisdom in
Medieval England.
The aim of the present paper is to analyse the Old and Middle English
synonyms of the adjectives intelligent, clever, wise with special attention
paid to the position these synonyms occupied within the field. The list of
lexemes will be compiled on the basis of The Historical Thesaurus of English
and A Thesaurus of Old English. The quantitative study of the selected texts
will indicate the central and peripheral members of the lexical field, their
most frequent collocations as well as metaphorical and metonymic
extensions. The collected linguistic data will show what notions the concept
of intelligence and wisdom encompassed in Medieval English. The paper
will also describe the semantic shifts affecting the field in question,
revealing the changes to its shape in the transition from Old to Middle
English. The analytical tools employed in my research will include
diachronic prototype semantics (Geeraerts 1997) as well as the theory of
metaphor (Lakoff 1987, Kövacses 2000). Being merely a pilot study, the
present paper constitutes an introductory analysis of a larger project
202
investigating the lexical field of KNOWLEDGE in English from a diachronic
perspective.
The conclusions concerning the present topic will be drawn on the basis
of a corpus study. The data will be selected from such electronic texts
corpora as the Chadwyck-Healey Corpus, the Innsbruck Corpus of Middle
English Prose and the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse. The
dictionaries consulted will include the Oxford English Dictionary, Bosworth
— Toller’s Anglo-Saxon Dictionary and the Dictionary of Old English.
Bosworth, Joseph & T. Northcote Toller. An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. Available at:
http://bosworth.ff.cuni.cz/.
Cameron, Angus, Ashley Crandell Amos & Antonette diPaolo Healey. 2003. Dictionary
of Old English on CD-ROM (A-G). Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval
Studies.
Chadwyck-Healey. 1992. English Poetry Full-Text Database. Cambridge: ChadwyckHealey Ltd.
Edmonds, Flora, Christian Kay, Jane Roberts & Irené Wotherspoon. 2005. A
Thesaurus of Old English. Glasgow: University of Glasgow. Available at:
http://oldenglishthesaurus.arts.gla.ac.uk/.
Geeraerts, Dirk. 1997. Diachronic Prototype Semantics: a Contribution to Historical
Lexicology. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Kay, Christian, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels & Irene Wotherspoon. 2013. The
Historical Thesaurus of English. Glasgow: University of Glasgow. Available at:
http://historicalthesaurus.arts.gla.ac.uk/.
Kövacses, Zoltan. 2000. Metaphor. A Practical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal
about the Mind. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Markus, Manfred (ed.). 2008. Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose. Full version
2.3. Innsbruck: Department of English.
McSparran, Frances (ed.). 1999. The Middle English Compendium: Middle English
Dictionary. A Hyper Bibliography of Middle English Prose and Verse. Ann Arbor:
Humanities Text Initiative University of Michigan. Available at
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mec/index.html.
Simpson, J. et al. (eds.). The Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford: Oxford
University Press. Available at http://www.oed.com.
203
Features of verbal conflict in early English debate poetry
Hanna Salmi
University of Turku
Keywords: conflict talk, debate poetry, speech turns, historical dialogue
analysis
Despite increasing interest in conflict talk, disputes are still an understudied
genre (Pagliai 2010: 63). One reason for this is the difficulty of obtaining
data on real-life conflicts—a problem which can be partially solved by using
constructed dialogue as the material of study, since “it reveals patterns of
knowledge about the workings of real [...] disputes” (Spitz 2006: 10). For
English historical linguistics, one source of such constructed literary
material is debate poetry, seldom studied from a linguistic viewpoint. In
this paper, a selection of medieval and early modern English debate poetry
is examined with a particular focus on the ways in which conflict talk is
constructed within the genre.
My approach is ‘bottom-up’, beginning with a close reading and microanalysis of the data. I will analyse the sequential organisation of each
debate: openings and closings, along with the linguistic means used to
mitigate or aggravate the dispute (e.g. “impoliteness”) and the different
types of moves used by the characters. The emphasis of the study is
qualitative rather than quantitative. The source materials range from The
Owl and the Nightingale to the early modern Saint Bernard’s Vision, and
thus from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Some of these
debates are quite rich in interactive and emotive features, while others are
rather less expressive.
This paper will shed light on the range of discursive resources that were
used for representing verbal conflict in the stylised literary form of the
debate poem; it seems reasonable to assume that these would in many
cases be the most salient and easily recognisable features of disputes,
found also in genuine face-to-face debates. The paper also explores the
variation in the degree to which these features were used in different texts.
Culpeper, Jonathan. 2011. Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence. Studies in
interactional sociolinguistics 28. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Culpeper, Jonathan, and Merja Kytö. 2010. Early Modern English Dialogues: Spoken
Interaction as Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Grimshaw, Allen D., ed. 1990. Conflict Talk: Sociolinguistic Investigations of
Arguments in Conversations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
204
Jucker, Andreas H., Gerd Fritz, and Franz Lebsanft, eds. 1999. Historical Dialogue
Analysis. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Koch, Peter, and Wulf Oesterreicher. 1985. “Sprache der Nähe - Sprache der Distanz’:
Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im Spannungsfeld von Sprachtheorie und
Sprachgeschichte. Romanistisches Jahrbuch 1985: 15-43.
Mazzon, Gabriella. 2009. Interactive Dialogue Sequences in Middle English Drama.
Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 185. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Moore, Colette. 2011. Quoting Speech in Early English. Studies in English Language.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Muntigl, Peter, and William Turnbull. 1998. Conversational structure and facework in
arguing. Journal of Pragmatics 29 (3): 225-256.
Pagliai, Valentina. 2010. Introduction: Performing disputes. Journal of Linguistic
Anthropology 20 (1): 63-71.
Spitz, Alice. 2006. Power plays — Mother-daughter disputes in contemporary plays by
women: A study in discourse analysis. PhD dissertation. Saarbrücken: Universität
des Saarlandes.
The diachronic aspects of complement variation
in two communication verbs
Mateusz Sarnecki
University of Warsaw
Keywords: complementation, statistical modelling, variation
Some English verbs of communication function syntactically as a class of
predicates which can be complemented with a prepositional phrase whose
head is followed by about or of. Examples of such verbs include speak, talk,
tell and write. Whichever of the prepositions is selected, the meanings of
the resulting phrases, e.g. write about and write of, are similar in that they
both introduce the topic of the communication event.
Still, in line with the cognitive linguistic principle of variation in form
reflecting variation in meaning, various authors have suggested that the
two prepositional heads express differing construals of the topic of
communication. In the context of speak, for example, about has been
characterized as indicating that the speaker is considering not only the
topic itself, but also its various aspects (Dirven et al. 1982: 60, 62;
Lindstromberg 2010: 207). In contrast, of can be taken to imply a more
limited perspective, with the speaker focusing exclusively on the topic
(Dirven et al. 1982: 27; Lindstromberg 2010: 207).
Such differences between the constructions with about and of have
already been subjected to corpus-driven statistical analysis (Krawczak &
205
Glynn, in press) based on contemporary synchronic data. However, it would
also be interesting to look at this variation from a diachronic perspective.
Such investigation might help to demonstrate whether the posited
semantic tendencies in the selection of the prepositional head have
remained stable over a longer course of time, and, more generally, shed
light on the historical development of the variation in question.
This study will examine prepositional complementation in two
communication verbs: speak and tell. The data, which come from the
period 1920s–2000s, will be extracted from the TIME Magazine corpus
(Davies 2007–). The relevant samples will be subjected to usage-feature
analysis (Dirven et al. 1982, Rudzka-Ostyn 1989) and annotated for various
semantic and formal features, including the abstractness and countability
of the topic, sentence polarity, and object length. These coded data will
then serve as a basis for multivariate statistical techniques (cf. e.g. Gries
1999, 2003), including multiple correspondence analysis and binary logistic
regression.
Bretones Callejas, C.M. (in press) Construals in language and thought: What shapes
what? (Amsterdam: John Benjamins)
Davies, Mark (2007–) TIME Magazine Corpus: 100 million words, 1920s–2000s.
Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/time/.
Dirven, René (1982) “Talk: linguistic action perspectivized as discourse”. In: R. Dirven,
L. Goossens, Y. Putsey & E. Vorlat (eds.), 37–84.
Dirven, René, L. Goossens, Y. Putsey & E. Vorlat (eds.), (1982) The Scene of Linguistic
Action and its Perspectivization by speak, talk, say, and tell. (Amsterdam: John
Benjamins).
Gries, Stefan T. (1999) “Particle movement: a cognitive and functional approach”,
Cognitive Linguistics 10: 105–145.
Krawczak, Karolina & Dylan Glynn (in press) “Operationalising construal. Of / about
prepositional profiling for cognitive and communicative predicates”. In: C.M.
Bretones Callejas (ed.).
Lindstromberg, Seth (2010) English Prepositions Explained. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Vorlat, Emma (1982) “Framing the scene of linguistic action by means of speak”, in R.
Dirven — L. Goossens — Y. Putsey — E. Vorlat (eds.), 9–36.
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On the time-depth and social conditioning of binomials:
The example of to have and to hold
Ursula Schaefer
TU Dresden - Universität Freiburg
Keywords: binomials, cognitive linguistics, idiomaticity, philology,
phraseology.
All in all, phraseology as an individual field of research does not rank high in
English (speaking) linguistics (cf. Norrick 2007). This is all the more
surprising as idiomatic expressions, which stand at the very core of
phraseology, are ubiquitous in English (and in other languages), and
definitions are legion. Thus, John R. Taylor defines idioms – in accordance
with many other linguists before – as “expressions which have to be
3
specifically learned” ( 2003: 223). Raymond W. Gibbs Jr., in the course of
identifying “the poetics of the mind”, emphasizes that the use of idioms
very much depends on conventions that “determine the appropriateness of
idioms in different social situations” (1994: 274). As Gibbs has to concede
that “it is not clear what motivates the development of these conventions
of usage,” he draws the conclusion that “speakers learn to use some idioms
[...] simply by forming arbitrary links between an idiom, its figurative
meaning, and a specific social situation” (1994: 275).
Taylor focusses on idioms because they “show that more general
constructions in a language may not be able to account for the full set of
3
expressions in a language” ( 2003: 262). Gibbs, in his turn, integrates
idiomatic expressions in his cognitive theory of metaphors. Despite the
diverging theoretical interests, the Taylor and Gibbs agree that the
competence to use idioms appropriately is gained outside our ‘normal’ first
linguistic acquisition.
In my paper I want to discuss whether Gibbs’ claim that speakers form
arbitrary “links between an idiom, its figurative meaning, and a specific
social situation” really holds for all idiomatic expressions. My doubts shall
be substantiated with an – admittedly – outstanding example: the verbal
binomial to have and to hold. I will follow the development of this
expression from its earliest attested occurence in Beowulf (l. 658; with no
matrimonial implications) over an early Middle English example, where it is
equivalent to the verb marry, down to its firm place in the matrimonial
vows in the Common Prayer Book.
My example specifically lends itself to closer scrutiny because, as of the
13th century, we seem to know its prevailing ‘social setting’, which
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subsequently almost entirely blocks the use in other social contexts. My
aim is not so much to prove any given theoretical postulates or research
methods right or wrong, appropriate or inappropriate, but rather to
illustrate how qualitative philological, text-oriented historical analyses may
contribute to the intreaguing field of idiomaticity, and hence: phraseology.
Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr. (1994). The Poetics of the Mind. Figurative Thought,
Language, and Understanding. Cambridge: CUP 1994.
Norrick, Neal R. (2007). “English Phraseology”. Phraseologie: Ein internationales
Handbuch der zeitgenössischen Forschung – Phraseology: An International
Handbook of Contemporary Research. Ed. Harald Burger, Dmitrij Dobrovol’skij,
Peter Kühn, and Neal R. Norrick. Vol. 2. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter 2007, 615 –
19.
Taylor, John R. (32003). Linguistic Categorization. 3rd ed. Oxford: OUP 2003.
Entrenchment in historical corpora?
Reconstructing dead authors’ minds from their usage profiles
Hans-Joerg Schmid & Anette Mantlik
Ludwig Maximilians University Munich
Background and aim: Historical corpora can provide insights into pathways
of the conventionalization of constructions. The diachronic development of
a given construction, like language change in general, is instigated and
controlled by the linguistic behaviour of language users, their E-language, a
sample of which is observed in corpora. This behaviour, however, is largely
determined by the way in which the construction is represented and
processed by individual language users (i.e. their I-language) and activated
by communicative needs in social situations. If one subscribes to a
sociopragmatically-based cognitive view of I-language in terms of degrees
and types of entrenchment what we find in historical corpora is ultimately
an effect of how a construction was entrenched in the minds of the authors
represented in the corpus and of what they were trying to get across.
While at first sight it seems patently foolhardy to regard historical Elanguage as providing evidence for historical I-language, this paper will
present and illustrate a methodology for looking inside dead authors’ minds
and reconstructing degrees of entrenchment and entrenchment processes.
Data: More than 800 instances of the N+BE+that construction (the truth
is that ..., the problem was that ...) from the period between 1384 and 1871
were collected from several corpora: the OED3 quotations database, the
Old Bailey Corpus, the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence, the
208
Paston Letters and a 15-million word corpus extracted from Project
Gutenberg. All examples were coded in terms of syntactic, lexical, semantic,
textual, pragmatic and user-related variables.
Method: Multivariate statistical techniques (cluster analysis, logistic
regression) are used to describe the distribution of the data and to model
conventional usage at given points in time taking into consideration the full
range of semantic, textual and pragmatic variables. The main point of this
analysis, however, is not to predict conventional usage of the construction
at earlier stages of English but to establish a benchmark against which data
from individual authors can be assessed in terms of entrenchment.
Results: Detailed quantitative and qualitative analyses of usage profiles
of individual authors provide surprising insights into degrees to which and
ways in which the construction was presumably entrenched in these
authors’ minds. More concretely, the data allow for a differentiation of
authors concerning chunking, schema-formation on different levels of
specificity and pragmatic associations triggering the use of the
construction.
A comparison between the Finnsburg Fragment
and the Finnsburg Episode: An information structural approach
Claudia Schneider & Roland Schuhmann
Uni Jena - SAW Leipzig
Keywords: Linguistics, Information Structure, Old English, Finnsburg
In Germanic heroic literature it is quite seldom that more than one version
of a particular story is transmitted. One of these rare cases is found in the
double transmission of the same event in the Finnsburg Fragment and the
Finnsburg Episode. Whereas the first one is a separate text (48 lines,
fragmentarily preserved because beginning and end are missing), the latter
is found within the epic poem Beowulf (l. 1068-1158). Of the 90 lines of the
Finnsburg Episode, only the first 17 lines (1068-1085a) correspond to the 48
lines of the Finnsburg Fragment regarding the content.
In literature there is not only a lot of discussion about the question how
the two versions of the story go together, but it is also debated whether
the Finnsburg Fragment is a lay (so that not much of the text would be
missing) or only a short fragment of a longer epic.
In our talk we will present an analysis of selected parts of the
corresponding lines from an information structural (IS) approach. In this
209
linguistic approach the text is analyzed with respect to how the relevant
information is packaged (Keywords: topic, focus, givenness, definiteness,
context, saliency etc.). With this analysis we may shed some light on the
following questions:
1. In which way do both texts differ from each other and how can the
differences be explained?
2. Can IS contribute to the question whether the Finnsburg Fragment is
a lay or an epic?
3. Can IS help to favor editing variants, different interpretations of
meanings, and clarify referents?
Regarding the last point, for example, with the help of the centering theory
and the saliency hierarchy, it becomes clear that the first falling warrior in
the Fragment has to be a Dane. The Frisians have not been mentioned in
the discourse for a few sentences. Hence, their saliency is low. Therefore, it
is unlikely that they are referred to by the pronoun him, which rather refers
to the Danes, whose fate in the battle has been in the foreground. Cf. the
example in the appendix.
Fry, Donald K. (ed.). 1974. The Finnsburh Fragment and Episode. London.
Fulk, Robert Dennis, and Robert E. Bjork, John D. Niles (eds.). 2008. Klaebers’s
Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg. 4th Ed. Toronto.
Götze, Michael et al. 2007. “Information structure”. In: Interdisciplinary Studies on
Information Structure 7.147-187.
Krifka, Manfred. 2007. Die Centering-Theorie (Vorlesungstexte).
online: (last access: 2 Dec 2013)
http://amor.cms.huberlin.de/~h2816i3x/Lehre/2007_VL_Text/VL_Text_2007_02
Centering.pdf.
Appendix
Finnsburg Fragment, lines 41a-43a
Hig fuhton fíf dagas, - swá hyra nán
ne féol
drihtgesíða, - ac hig ðá duru
héoldon.
Ðá gewát him wund hæleð - ...
They fought for five days - as none
ot them fell
of the army-companions - but they
held the doors.
Then a wounded warrior departed
from them - …
210
211
Part-of-speech annotation in historical corpora:
Comparative evaluation of tagger output
Gerold Schneider & Marianne Hundt
University of Zurich
Keywords: part-of-speech tagging, ARCHER corpus, Early and Late Modern
English, semi-automated, syntactic parsing
A recent version of ARCHER (A Representative Corpus of Historical English
Registers) has been part-of-speech annotated with two different tagsets,
CLAWS and Penn TreeBank (Leech et al. 1994, Marcus et al. 1993). In
addition, it has been parsed with a dependency parser (Schneider 2008).
Part-of-speech annotation typically reaches accuracy levels of between 95
and 97% in corpora of present day English. For historical data, these levels
are lower: Rayson et al. (2007) report 85% for annotated Shakespearean
English after spelling normalization.
We (semi-)automatically improve part-of-speech annotation of ARCHER
with the help of comparative tagger output evaluation. In this presentation,
we report the results of a pilot study that makes use of mappings between
CLAWS and Penn TreeBank tagging, with a focus on words where the
taggers provide a set of possible annotations. In addition, we exploit
parsing as a step to improve tagger output, namely those instances where
the parser suggests tag corrections (Sennrich, Volk & Schneider 2013) or
where we have only partially parsed sentences. The third component is to
add to the lexicon on the basis of the words that are unknown to the
taggers. We show that part-of-speech tagging accuracy of historical corpora
can be improved with limited human intervention.
Leech, Geoffrey; Roger Garside & Michael Bryant. 1994. “CLAWS4: the tagging of the
British National Corpus. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on
Computational Linguistics (COLING 94), Kyoto, Japan. 622 – 628.
Marcus, Mitch; Beatrice Santorini & Mary Ann Marcinkiewicz. 1993. “Building a Large
Annotated Corpus of English: the Penn Treebank.” Computational Linguistics
19:313-330.
Rayson, Paul; Dawn Archer; Alistair Baron; Jonathan Culpeper & Nicholas Smith.
2007. “Tagging the Bard: Evaluating the accuracy of a modern POS tagger on
Early Modern English corpora”. In Proceedings of Corpus Linguistics 2007, July
27–30, University of Birmingham, UK.
Schneider, Gerold. 2008. Hybrid Long-Distance Functional Dependency Parsing.
Doctoral Thesis, Institute of Computational Linguistics, University of Zurich.
212
Schneider, Gerold. 2012. “Adapting a parser to historical English”. Studies in
Variation, Contacts and Change in English, Volume 10: Outposts of Historical
Corpus Linguistics: From the Helsinki Corpus to a Proliferation of Resources.
Sennrich, Rico; Martin Volk & Gerold Schneider. 2013. “Exploiting Synergies Between
Open Resources for German Dependency Parsing, POS-tagging, and
Morphological Analysis”. In Proceedings of RANLP 2013, Hissar, Bulgaria.
Article choice in Early Middle English
Annina Seiler
University of Zürich
The functional shift from demonstrative determiner to definite article in
English is assigned to the Old English period (Sommerer 2011, Crisma 2011),
to the transition period between Old and Middle English (cf. Traugott 1982:
250), or to the later ME period (Philippi 1997). Even in Present-Day English,
the grammaticalization process of the article system is incomplete since
(in)definiteness is not obligatorily marked on all NPs. The development of
the definite article is closely linked to the emergence of the indefinite
article, which evolves from the numeral ān (Hopper & Martin 1987). This
paper investigates how the choice of determiner (definite article, indefinite
article, bare NP) is motivated in early Middle English texts, taking into
account semantic-pragmatic features such as definiteness, specificity, and
countability, but also the syntactic structure of the noun phrase. Based on
the data provided by the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME),
diatopic, diachronic and diastratic variation of article use is analysed. The
Early Middle English period represents one of the focal points in the
development of the article system. Hence, the study contributes to an
understanding of the triggers that determine article choice in the history of
English and it ties in with work done on other language stages (e.g. by
Sommerer 2011) as well as with studies analysing the formal side of the
development (e.g. McColl Millar 2000a). The study is part of a larger project
looking into both the definite and indefinite articles in conjunction with
related phenomena such as the development of the demonstrative that,
the differentiation of that and this as well as strong and weak adjective
declension in the Middle English period.
Crisma, Paola. 2011. ‘The emergence of the definite article in English: A contactinduced change?’ In P. Sleeman & H. Perridon (eds.), The Noun Phrase in
Romance and Germanic: Structure, Variation, and Change. Amsterdam:
Benjamins. 175-192.
213
Hopper, Paul & Janice Martin. 1987. ‘Structuralism and diachrony: The development
of the indefinite article in English. In A. G. Ramat, O. Carruba & G. Bernini (eds.),
Papers from the 7th International Conference on Historical Linguistics.
Amsterdam: Benjamins. 295-304.
McColl Millar, R. 2000a. System Collapse System Rebirth. Bern: Lang.
McColl Millar, R. 2000b. ‘Some suggestions for explaining the origin and
development of the definite article in English.’ In O. Fischer, A. Rosenbach & D.
Stein (eds.), Pathways of change. Grammaticalization in English. Amsterdam:
Benjamins. 275-310.
Philippi, Julia. 1997. ‘The rise of the article in the Germanic languages.’ In A. van
Kemenade & N. Vincent (eds.), Parameters of Morphosyntactic Change.
Cambridge: CUP. 62-93.
Sommerer, Lotte. 2011. Old English se: From Demonstrative to Article. A Usage-based
Study of Nominal Determination and Category Emergence. Unpublished PhD
thesis.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1982. ‘From propositional to textual and exressive
meanings: Some semantic-pragmatic aspects of grammaticalisation. In W. P.
Lehmann & Y. Malkiel (eds.), Perspectives on Historical Linguistics. Amsterdam:
Benjamins. 245-271.
Structural features as predictors for that/zero variation in mental state
verbs (MSVs): A diachronic corpus-based multivariate analysis
Christopher Shank & Koen Plevoets
Bangor University - University of Ghent
Most of the attention following Rissanen (1991) and Finnegan and Biber’s
(1995) seminal research on the rise and predominance of the zerocomplementizer form as an object-clause link in PDE has focused on the
mental state verbs (i.e. think and know) while considerably less has been
directed at the equivalent claims and conclusions made regarding other
verbs in this domain.
(1)
(2)
Well, Suphalia, I think that/zero you cannot make a better choice;
but you will not attend. (CoHAE: 1812)
Beraldo I know that/zero there was a time when Hippolito feared
nothing but dishonour. (CoHAE: 1810)
This paper examines the diachronic development of that/zero
complementation alternation seen in ten mental state verbs (MSVs) viz.
think, suppose, believe, imagine, expect, guess, feel, know, understand and
realize. We build upon previous work and related findings/claims by
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exploring the diachrony of that/zero complementizer variation in this large
MSP set from 1640-2012. Using Wordsmith, a total of 65,000 hits (for all 10
verbs) were randomly extracted from separate parallel spoken and written
corpora: CEEC and Old Bailey Corpora (1640-1913), CMET and CLMETEV
(1640-1920), London Lund (1960-1990), ANC (1990 - 1993), COHAE (18102012), BNC spoken (1980-1993) COCAE (1994-2009) and the Alberta Unset
(2010-2010) corpus. All of matrix +complement that/zero constructions
were coded for 28 structural variables including person, tense, polarity, and
presence of modal auxiliaries, syntactic complexity, and complement clause
subjects. Statistically sufficient sample sizes (n>40) for all historical periods
were extracted and a diachronic multivariate stepwise regression analysis is
used to examine the statistical significance of 13 structural factors (as
summarized in Kaltenböck 2004 and presented in Torres Cacoullos and
Walker 2009) in regards to the selection of that/zero development in both
spoken and written genres for all ten verbs.
The results reveal varying degrees of significance for each of the 13
matrix and complement clause features, however; stronger significance and
implications are revealed when additional variables (e.g. polarity, length of
the subject, the effect of time as a variable etc.) are incorporated via a
‘weighted’ variable analysis. These findings are used to identify the
structural factors which are diachronically significant in predicting the
presence of the zero complementizer form within this set of MSVs and to
set up a discussion concerning the implications for using this type of
statistically driven diachronic approach.
Finnegan, Edward & Biber, Douglas 1995. “That and Zero complementizers in Late
Modern English: exploring Archer from 1650-1990, in Aarts, Bas; Meyer, Charles,
M. (Eds.) The verb in contemporary English. Theory and description. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Kaltenbock, Gunther. 2004. “That or no that – that is the question. On subordinator
suppression in extraposed subject clauses”, Vienna English Working Papers 13
(1): 49-68.
Rissanen, Matti (1991) On the history of that / zero in object clause links in English. In
Aijmer, K. & Altenberg, B. (eds.), English corpus linguistics: Studies in honour of
Jan Svartvik. London: Longman. 272-289.
Thompson, Sandra A. & Mulac, Anthony (1991) A quantitative perspective on the
grammaticalization of epistemic parentheticals in English. In Traugott, E. C. &
Heine, B. (eds.), Approaches to grammaticalization. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 313339.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs & Dasher, Richard B. 2002. Regularity in Semantic Change.
(Cambridge Studies in Linguistics, 96.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Torres Cacoullos, Rena & Walker, James A. (2009) On the persistence of grammar in
discourse formulas: A variationist study of that. Linguistics 47(1): 1-43.
215
Van Bogaert, Julie (2010) A constructional taxonomy of I think and related
expressions: Accounting for the variability of complement-taking mental
predicates. English Language and Linguistics 14(3): 399-427.
Diachronic aspects of shell noun constructions:
With a focus on the bottom line is (that)
Reijrou Shibasaki
Meiji University
This study is aimed to investigate one specific construction in spokenoriented discourse, i.e. the bottom line is (that) and its variant forms,
especially in the history of American English, mainly based on The Corpus of
Historical American English 1810-2009 and The Corpus of Contemporary
American English 1990-2012. Similar expressions such as the fact is (that),
the thing is (that), the point is (that), to name but a few, have one common
syntactic structure preceded by the determiner the and possibly
prenominal modifiers, whereas followed by the copula be and at times by a
non-relative that-clause. Types of nouns used in this specific construction
are called ‘shell nouns’ (Schmid 2000); the construction with these nouns is
thus called the shell noun construction.
According to The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), bottom line is
considered to have the following meanings: “orig. U.S., the last line of a
profit-and-loss account, showing the final profit (or loss); fig., the final
analysis or determining factor; the point, the crux of the argument.” The
last meaning ‘the point, the crux of the argument’, which is figuratively
derived from the semantics of profit and loss accounting, is attested in the
shell noun construction. Online Etymology Dictionary tells us that this
figurative meaning started from 1967; the earliest example of this
construction in OED traces back to 1982.
The results from the corpus surveys give support for the constructional
development of the bottom line is (that) from the 1970s to the present,
increasingly frequent in more recent years; an increase in productivity is a
key feature of the nature and development of a construction (Trousdale
2008). Furthermore, the construction began with the main clause type, i.e.
the bottom line is that-complement, whilst rendering the parenthetical
type, i.e. the bottom line is,… in the 1980s onward, i.e. a functional
expansion of main clauses as seen in the advent of the parenthetical type
(Bybee 2001). However, the bottom line is (that) cannot be viewed as fully
syntactically mobile because all the examples in the corpora are found to
216
occur just in front of the speaker’s statement, not in the clause-medial or in
the clause-final position (cf. Brinton 2008). In a nutshell, the bottom line is
(that) is specialized in front of the speaker’s statement with a variety of
interactive functions such as ‘introductory’ (Curzan 2012) and ‘anticipatory,
projecting’ (Hopper and Thompson 2008) at the initial position of talk. At
the terminal position, speakers (or writers) instead utilize another type of
shell noun constructions, i.e. that’s the bottom line, which summarizes
what is uttered in the preceding discourse. Constructions are formed and
progress in a network not in isolation, and their usage and development are
discourse-based.
Brinton, Laurel J. 2008. The comment clause in English. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Bybee, Joan. 2001. “Main clauses are innovative, subordinate clauses are
conservative.” In Complex sentences in grammar and discourse, eds. by Joan
Bybee and Michael Noonan, 1-17. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Curzan, Anne. 2012. “Revisiting the reduplicative copula with corpus-based
evidence.” In The Oxford handbook of the history of English, eds. by Terttu
Nevalainen and Elizabeth C. Traugott, 211-221. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hopper, Paul J. and Sandra A. Thompson. 2008. “Projectability and clause combining
in interaction.” In Crosslinguistic studies of clause combining, ed. by Ritva Laury,
99-123. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Online Etymology Dictionary (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php).
Schmid, Hans-Jörg. 2000. English abstract nouns as conceptual shells. Berlin: Mouton
de Gruyter.
The Oxford English Dictionary. 2009. 2nd ed. on CD-ROM Version 4.0 and online
version. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Trousdale, Greame. 2008. “Constructions in grammaticalization and lexicalization.” In
Constructional approaches to English grammar, eds. by Greame Trousdale and
Nikolas Gisborne, 33-67. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
The emergence of English reflexive verbs:
An analysis based on the Oxford English Dictionary
Peter Siemund
University of Hamburg
Present-Day English is generally assumed to possess only a handful of
lexicalized reflexive verbs (absent oneself from, pride oneself on, etc.) and
to use reflexive pronouns neither for the marking of motion middles nor
the derivation of anticausative (decausative) verbs. Such middle uses of
reflexive markers (non-argument reflexives) are widespread in other
217
European languages. Based on corpus evidence, Geniušienė (1987),
Peitsara (1997), and Siemund (2010) demonstrate that English reflexive
pronouns do occur in these functions and offer extensive lists of the verbs
involved. I here follow up the historical development of these verbs from
Middle English to Present-Day English. My analysis is based on a survey of
the relevant verb entries in the Oxford English Dictionary (222 verbs),
complemented by an examination of the OED quotation base. My study
shows that the number of reflexive verbs in English has gradually, but
steadily, increased since the emergence of complex reflexives (myself,
yourself, etc.) in Middle English. They often result from lexicalization
processes, but the data also show more regular patterns indicative of
grammatical processes. The Oxford English Dictionary proves to be a rich
and highly valuable data source for carrying out serious grammatical
analyses.
Geniušienė, Emma. 1987. The Typology of Reflexives. Berlin: Mouton.
Peitsara, Kirsti. 1997. The development of reflexive strategies in English. In Matti
Rissanen, Merja Kytö & Kirsi Heikkonen (eds.), Grammaticalization at Work.
Studies of Long-term Developments in English, 277–370. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter.
Siemund, Peter. 2010. Grammaticalization, lexicalization and intensification. English
itself as a marker of middle situation types. Linguistics 48(4), 797–836.
He luuede abstinenciam: Code-switching and language-mixing in postConquest texts
Janne Skaffari
University of Turku
Keywords: code-switching, early Middle English, multilingual practices,
post-Conquest England
In the last two decades, historical linguists have been paying increasing
attention to code-switching in texts composed and/or copied in medieval
and early modern England (for an overview of the field and a number of
papers reporting original research, see Schendl & Wright (eds.) 2011). Most
scholars have explored material produced in the late Middle English period
or thereafter, with code-switching between English and Latin or French, or
in some cases between all three languages. The practices of the earlier
periods have had much less coverage (see, however, e.g. Schendl 2005 and
the diachronic survey from ICEHL 13 subsequently published as Pahta &
218
Nurmi 2006). The paper proposed for ICEHL 18 will examine types and
patterns of code-switching and language-mixing in post-Conquest England,
up to the early thirteenth century, a period thus far overlooked in historical
code-switching research.
Code-switching is witnessed in early Middle English sources in a variety
of forms (from intrasentential single-word switches to longer units
appearing intersententially) and functions (from text-organizing to
authority-encoding). While many switching patterns may be
conventionalized and formulaic, there are also more creative insertions of
non-English words, phrases and passages into the English matrix. In the
overwhelming majority of cases, the embedded language is Latin.
Sometimes switches into Latin are cushioned by “English support” (Diller
1997-98), which raises a variety of questions about the reception and use of
multilingual texts by their readers.
The forms and functions of code-switching will be illustrated with data
collected both from the best-known texts of the period, the Ancrene Wisse
and the Peterborough Chronicle, and from material less widely researched
before, such as the Vices and Virtues dialogue. Moreover, attention will be
paid to multilingual manuscripts of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and
texts with English as the embedded language. The proposed paper will help
to place early Middle English code-switching patterns on a continuum of
multilingual practices from those already recorded in the preceding Old
English period to those observed in later texts.
Diller, Hans-Jürgen. 1997-98. Code-switching in medieval English drama. Comparative
Drama 31 (4), 506-537.
Pahta, Päivi & Arja Nurmi. 2006. Code-switching in the Helsinki Corpus: A thousand
years of multilingual practices. In Ritt et al. (eds.). Medieval English and its
Heritage: Structure, Meaning and Mechanisms of Change. Frankfurt: Peter Lang,
203-220.
Schendl, Herbert. 2005. ‘Hec sunt prata to wassingwellan’: Aspects of code-switching
in Old English charters. Historical Sociolinguistics and Sociohistorical Linguistics 5.
Schendl, Herbert & Laura Wright (eds.). 2011. Code-Switching in Early English. Berlin
& Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
219
Particle placement in nineteenth-century English: A multi-factorial study
Erik Smitterberg
Uppsala University
Keywords: Late Modern English, particle placement, multi-factorial analysis,
corpus linguistics
Transitive phrasal verbs allow two different word orders: the adverbial
particle may either precede the object, as in She put down the book, or
follow it (e.g. She put the book down). As Gries’s (2003) multi-factorial
analysis of Present-day English demonstrates, speakers’ word-order choices
in this regard are influenced by a large number of factors, such as the
length of the object and whether or not the referent of the object has been
mentioned in the preceding discourse. However, less is known about
particle placement in the Late Modern English period.
The aim of this corpus-based study is to answer two research questions:
(1)
(2)
What linguistic variables influence particle placement in
nineteenth-century English?
Do the extralinguistic parameters of time and genre influence
particle placement in a way that is independent of the linguistic
factors investigated?
Previous research (Akimoto 1999; Smitterberg 2007) indicates that the
pattern in She put the book down gained ground during the 1800s.
Moreover, Smitterberg’s (2007) monofactorial analyses demonstrate that
several linguistic factors which Gries (2003) showed are influential in
Present-day English also appear to affect particle placement in nineteenthcentury data. This paper adds to such previous findings by presenting the
results of a multi-factorial analysis that will show which of the linguistic
factors investigated have an independent effect on particle placement in
nineteenth-century English. Furthermore, the inclusion of the variables of
time and genre in the analysis will indicate whether apparent stylistic
variation and diachronic change in particle placement are independent of
the linguistic factors or whether such effects in the data are due to shifting
proportions of variants of the linguistic variables.
The data for this study are drawn from A Corpus of Nineteenth-century
English (CONCE) and the Corpus of Nineteenth-century Newspaper English
(CNNE). CONCE includes both informal, speech-related genres such as
drama comedy and formal expository prose like scientific writing; it is thus
220
a suitable source of data for a study of stylistic variation. As regards CNNE,
newspaper language has been shown to be in the forefront of important
processes of language change in Late Modern and Present-day English, such
as colloquialization and densification (see e.g. Hundt and Mair 1999; Leech
et al. 2009). It is thus hoped that the inclusion of CNNE in the study will add
significantly to the picture of linguistic variation and change in particle
placement.
Akimoto, Minoji. 1999. “Chapter 7: Collocations and Idioms in Late Modern English”.
In: Brinton, Laurel J., and Minoji Akimoto (eds.), Collocational and Idiomatic
Aspects of Composite Predicates in the History of English. Amsterdam and
Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 207–238.
CNNE = The Corpus of Nineteenth-century Newspaper English, being compiled by
Erik Smitterberg.
CONCE = A Corpus of Nineteenth-century English, compiled by Merja Kytö and Juhani
Rudanko.
Gries, Stefan Thomas. 2003. Multifactorial Analysis in Corpus Linguistics: A Study of
Particle Placement. New York and London: Continuum.
Hundt, Marianne, and Christian Mair. 1999. “ ‘Agile’ and ‘Uptight’ Genres: The
Corpus-based Approach to Language Change in Progress”. International Journal
of Corpus Linguistics 4 (2), 221–242.
Leech, Geoffrey, Marianne Hundt, Christian Mair, and Nicholas Smith. 2009. Change
in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Smitterberg, Erik. 2007. Particle Placement in Nineteenth-century English. Paper
presented at the Third Late Modern English Conference, Leiden, 30 August–1
September 2007.
Diversity between panels of the Franks Casket:
Spelling and runic paleography
Helena Sobol
University of Warsaw
Keywords: Franks Casket, Old English, runes, spelling, paleography
The Franks Casket is a whalebone box measuring 23 x 19 x 13 cm, dated to
about 700 AD by the majority view, though a persuasive dissenting view has
been expressed in Vandersall (1972). Its panels contain images of scenes
from the Judeo-Christian tradition, Germanic mythology and Roman
legend, surrounded by mainly runic (three words are in Roman letters)
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inscriptions amounting to about 59 words, predominantly in Early Old
English (five words are in Latin).
The systematic differences between the panels have been noticed by
scholars examining the Casket since the pioneering studies by Napier (1901)
and Viëtor (1901). Yet these differences have never called into question the
standard procedure of explaining the difficulties of one panel basing on the
data provided by another. The present paper aims at a re-examination of
the methodological soundness of this approach; another aim is to add to
our understanding of early Anglo-Saxon runic culture. In order to do so, the
paper looks at the panels as coherent units which were consciously
combined to create a composite whole, and not just as elements of the
same work. The approach adopted here resembles the one used in studies
of medieval anthologies, which are complex manuscripts composed of
coherent units.
When seen is this light, the panels show a large enough differentiation
of spelling and paleographical features to exclude the possibility of a single
author for the whole Casket and the texts inscribed on it. Surprisingly the
only recent scholar to study the paleographical aspects of these
inscriptions, Klein (2009), dismisses such a possibility in the face of
evidence. What is more, the content of the inscriptions also provides
evidence against the – usually assumed – knowledge of the names of the
runic characters among the early Anglo-Saxons. This in turn undermines the
widely accepted explanation provided by Ball (1974) of the cryptic runes
used on the right panel.
Ball, Christopher J.E. 1974. ‘Franks Casket: right side — again’. English Studies 55:6.
512.
Klein, Thomas. 2009. ‘Anglo-Saxon literacy and the Roman letters on the Franks
Casket’. Studia Neophilologica 81. 17–23.
Napier, Arthur Sampson. 1901. ‘Contributions to Old English literature: 2. The Franks
Casket’. in Ker, William Paton et al. (eds.). An English miscellany presented to Dr.
Furnivall in honour of his seventy-fifth birthday. Oxford: Clarendon. 362-381.
Vandersall, Amy L. 1972. ‘The date and provenance of the Franks Casket’. Gesta 11.2.
9-26.
Viëtor, Wilhelm. 1901. The Anglo-Saxon runic casket. Marburg: Elwert.
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Relations and news: Textual labels in the titles of early modern news
pamphlets
Carla Suhr
University of Turku
Keywords: titles, textual labels, pamphlets, genre
The book historian Eleanor Shevlin claims that “titles embody the potential
to illuminate not just individual works, but reading processes, authorial
composition, publishing practices, marketing trends, and generic
transformations as well” (1999: 43-44). In the past few years, linguists have
picked up on several of these aspects of titles. They have taken notice
especially of the potential of textual labels given in titles to carry genre
expectations (see Ratia 2013, Suhr 2011). At the same time, linguists have
also begun to recognize that visual features of a page can carry linguistic
meanings or aid the reading comprehension of a text (see McConchie 2013,
Suhr 2011); other studies have acknowledged the competition between
marketing trends and what Shevlin (1999: 43) calls the contractual nature
of the title (see Tyrkkö, Marttila & Suhr 2013).
As yet, linguistic studies of titles and title-pages have been based on
impressions derived from very small data sets (McConchie 2013, Ratia
2013; see Suhr 2011 for a slightly larger data set). It has been noted that
only in the latter half of the seventeenth century were textual labels
highlighted on the title-page by larger type size or different type; earlier
title-pages attracted readers primarily by their visual aspects (Suhr 2011).
This paper is a pragmatic examination of the textual labels and visual
features in the titles and title-pages of over 50 early modern popular news
pamphlets dealing with storms, monsters and the devil. The textual labels
of both primary and secondary titles will be catalogued as well as the
topical labels and textual tags such as “or” or “being” that often introduce
secondary titles. Visual highlighting of labels (or lack of it) will also be
noted. The results will be compared with those of two earlier studies (Ratia
2013, Suhr 2011), in order to verify the timing of the turn from visual to
verbal title-pages, and to gain a better understanding of how the structure
and labels of early modern news pamphlet titles reflect generic
expectations.
Genette, Gerard. 1997. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Transl. Jane E. Lewin.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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McConchie, R.W. 2013. Some reflections on Early Modern printed title-pages.
Principles and Practices for the Digital Editing and Annotation of Diachronic Data
(Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English 14) ed. by Jukka Tyrkkö &
Anneli Meurman-Solin. Helsinki: VARIENG.
http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/journal/volumes/14/mcconchie/
Ratia, Maura. 2013. Investigating genre through title-pages: Plague treatises of the
Stuart period in focus. Principles and Practices for the Digital Editing and
Annotation of Diachronic Data (Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in
English 14) ed. by Jukka Tyrkkö & Anneli Meurman-Solin. Helsinki: VARIENG.
http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/journal/volumes/14/ratia/
Shevlin, Eleanor. 1999. Shevlin, Eleanor F. 1999. “To reconcile book and title, and
make ‘em kin to one another”: The evolution of the title’s contractual functions.
Book History 2 (1): 42-77.
Suhr, Carla. 2011. Publishing for the Masses: Early Modern English Witchcraft
Pamphlets (Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique 83). Helsinki: Société
Néophilologique.
Tyrkkö, Jukka, Marttila, Ville & Suhr, Carla. 2013. The Culpeper Project: Digital editing
of title-pages. Principles and Practices for the Digital Editing and Annotation of
Diachronic Data (Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English 14) ed. by
Jukka Tyrkkö & Anneli Meurman-Solin. Helsinki: VARIENG.
http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/journal/volumes/14/tyrkko_marttila_suhr/
On MV/VM order in Old English long-line poetry
Hironori Suzuki
Daito Bunka University
Keywords: Old English poetry, word order, auxiliary, alliteration, metre
Old English poetry is generally considered to have been composed in loose
syntax. Momma (1997) argued for a much stricter prosodical syntax,
challenging the famous syntactic laws of Kuhn (1933). However, even under
Momma’s rules, there still seems to be much freedom, even apparent
randomness, in the word order of the modal auxiliary (M) and non-finite
verbs (V).
Another approach to the composition of Old English poetry is the oralformulaic theory proposed by scholars such as Magoun (1953) and Fry
(1967). A recent study along these lines is Ogura (2006), who investigates
the Meters of Boethius and concludes that they are so formulaic as to fit
the mould of Anglos-Saxon poetry. Again, within this formulaic theory, both
MV and VM orders can be found, apparently pretty randomly.
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In a paper presented at the ICEHL 12, I discussed factors affecting the
word order of M and V in Beowulf. The results indicated that alliteration
and the scope of each half-line boundary are in fact the crucial factors in
determining the MV/VM word order.
Meanwhile, some scholars, such as Getty (2002), argue that instead it is
verb forms that dictate the word order. However, the results of my recent
survey (2010) of Meters of Boethius indicate that verb forms are not a
major factor in determining word order, and that instead alliteration is a
much more important factor.
The purpose of this paper is to test my theory regarding long-line poetic
texts: i.e. the longer the line, the greater the chance of there being
alliteration. This study again suggests that, rather than verb forms exerting
much influence, it is alliteration and the scope of each half-line boundary
that are crucial in determining word order across all auxiliary types In Old
English poems, including long-line ones.
In addition, a closer examination of the instances of the VM order with
both of them alliterating suggests that the distinction between ‘major’ and
‘minor’ alliteration (‘major’ refers to alliteration of open class words;
‘minor’ to alliteration of closed class words) might be a profitable one to
make since ‘major’ alliteration seems to have more influence on word order
than ‘minor’ alliteration, which may be no more than accidental or purely
ornamental alliteration.
These findings would suggest that Old English verse syntax was subject
to stricter regulation than has so far been acknowledged.
Fry, Donald K. 1967. “Old English Formulas and Systems”. English Studies 68, 193204.
Getty, Michael. 2002. The Metre of Beowulf: A Constraint-Based Approach. Berlin and
New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Klaeber, Fr., ed. 1950. Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg. Boston: Heath.
Krapp, George P. and Elliot V. K. Dobbie, eds. 1931-1953. The Anglo-Saxon Poetic
Records, I-VI. New York: Columbia University Press.
Kuhn, Hans. 1933. “Zur Wortstellung und –betonung im Altgermanischen”. Beiträge
zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 57, 1-109.
Magoun, Jr., Francis P. 1953. “The Oral-Formulaic Character of Anglo-Saxon Narrative
Poetry”. Speculum 28, 446-467.
Momma, Haruko. 1997. The Composition of Old English Poetry. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Ogura, Michiko. 2006. “The Making of the Meters of Boethius”. Bonds of Language: A
Festschrift for Dr. Yasuaki Fujiwara on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday ed. by
Ushiro, Yuji, Satoshi Ota, Shin-ichi Tanaka, Eiji Yamada, Kazuaki Ota, Naohiro
Takizawa, and Koichi Nishida, 43-57. Tokyo: Kaitakusha.
225
Suzuki, Hironori. 2004. “On MV/VM order in Beowulf “. New Perspectives on English
Historical Linguistics: Selected Papers from 12 ICEHL, Glasgow, 21-36 August
2002 Volume 1: Syntax and Morphology ed. by Kay, Christian, Simon Horobin,
and Jeremy Smith, 195-213. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Suzuki, Hironori. 2006. “Effect of Alliteration on Constructions with Complex
Predicates in Old English Poetry”. Textual and Contextual Studies in Medieval
English ed. by Michiko Ogura, 179-192. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Suzuki, Hironori. 2010. “Metrical Influences on the AV/VA Orders in Old English
Poetry”. Aspects of the History of English Language and Literature: Selected
Papers Read at SHELL 2009, Hiroshima ed. by Osamu Imahayashi, Yoshiyuki
Nakao, and Michiko Ogura, 199-212. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Technical vocabulary and medieval text types: A semantic field approach
Louise Sylvester
University of Westminster
Keywords: vocabulary, technical, text type, semantic field, lexical hierarchy
The text base of the three-year Leverhulme-funded project, Medieval Dress
and Textile Vocabulary in Unpublished Sources (Universities of Westminster
and Manchester), allows us to focus on the vocabulary of a single semantic
field across a range of text types in order to investigate whether we can
trace the evolution of a technical lexis in this domain and how the different
text types contribute to or make use of varying degrees of technicality in
order to establish the conventions of their genres. This paper seeks to
discover in what sense we can mark vocabulary items as technical.
Distribution may be taken as a diagnostic factor: vocabulary shared across
the widest range of text types may be assumed to be both prototypical for
the semantic field, but also the most general and therefore least technical
since lexical items derive at least part of their meaning from context, a
wider range of contexts implying a wider range of senses. Another way of
addressing the question of technicality is to classify the lexis into semantic
hierarchies: in the terms of componential analysis, more components of
meaning puts a term lower in the semantic hierarchy and flags it as having a
greater specificity of sense, and thus as more technical. We can then
interrogate the various text types, comparing the number of lexical items
(adjusted for overall word counts) at different levels within the hierarchy.
th
th
For this paper four text types from the 12 -14 centuries have been
selected: wills, sumptuary laws, petitions, and romances. The vocabulary
relating to dress and textiles has been extracted from the texts and the
226
lexical items categorised as follows: shared across all four text types; two or
all three of the administrative text types, but not the literary one; the
romance and at least one other; or restricted to one. The lexis of each text
type will be classified into a semantic hierarchy in order to investigate the
relationship between text type requirements and technicality of lexis. The
notion of technicality has featured prominently in theories about linguistic
choices in late medieval British texts (see e.g. Wright 1995 and for a
different view Trotter 2011): a more precise understanding will allow us to
address questions relating to lexical choice, code choice in mixed language
texts, and the requirements and functions of text types.
Sylvester, Louise, Mark Chambers and Gale R Owen-Crocker eds. Forthcoming
Medieval Dress and Textiles: A Multilingual Anthology of Sources. Woodbridge:
Boydell and Brewer
Trotter, David 2011 ‘Language Labels, Language Change, and Lexis’. In Medieval
Multilingualism: The Francophone World and its Neighbours ed. Christopher
Kleinhenz & Keith Busby. Turnhout: Brepols, 43-61
Wright, Laura 1995 ‘A Hypothesis on the Structure of Macaronic Business Writing’. In
Medieval Dialectology ed. Jacek Fisiak. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 309-321
Typological profiling: Analyticity versus syntheticity between
Middle English and Present-Day English
Benedikt Szmrecsanyi
University of Leuven
Keywords: analytic, synthetic, typology, drift, gramar
No one interested in typological change in the history of English will
manage to avoid the terms ANALYTIC and SYNTHETIC, terminology that goes
back to August Wilhelm von Schlegel (Schlegel 1818). The textbook view is
that English is supposed to have changed from a rather synthetic language
– i.e. one that relies heavily on inflections to code grammatical information
– in Old English times into a rather analytic language that draws on word
order and function words to convey grammatical information. The
wholesale loss of nominal and verbal inflections that started towards the
end of the Old English period, so the textbook story goes, has set in motion
a long-term drift towards analyticity that is still in operation today. By way
of a reality check, we adopt terminology, concepts, and ideas developed in
quantitative morphological typology (cf. Greenberg 1960, Szmrecsanyi
2009) to empirically investigate the coding of grammatical information in
227
English diachrony. Specifically, we utilize a quantitative, language-internal
measure of OVERT GRAMMATICAL ANALYTICITY, defined as the text frequency of
free grammatical markers, and a measure of OVERT GRAMMATICAL SYNTHETICITY,
defined as the text frequency of bound grammatical markers. We
subsequently apply these measures to the Penn Parsed Corpora of
Historical English series, which covers the period between circa AD 1100 and
AD 1900, and demonstrate that this time slice does not, in fact, exhibit a
steady drift from synthetic to analytic. Rather, analyticity was on the rise
until the end of the Early Modern English period, but declined
subsequently; the reverse is true for syntheticity. That said, the historical
variability in English in all the historical periods we investigate is not
particularly dramatic. Compared to languages like Italian, German,
Bulgarian and Russian, English scores consistently low on syntheticity in all
these periods. An analysis of frequency fluctuation in individual markers
further reveals that while in the big picture, twentieth-century English is
quantitatively almost back to the analyticity-syntheticity coordinates
defining twelfth-century English, modern analyticity and syntheticity seem
qualitatively different from their Early English counterparts.
Greenberg, Joseph H. (1960). A quantitative approach to the morphological typology
of language. International Journal of American Linguistics 26, 178-194.
Schlegel, August Wilhelm von (1818). Observations sur la langue et la littérature
provençales. Paris: Librairie grecque-latine-allemande.
Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt (2009). Typological parameters of intralingual variability:
grammatical analyticity versus syntheticity in varieties of English. Language
Variation and Change 21, 319–353.
Phrasal verbs as an alternative to prefixed verbs in Middle English?
Harumi Tanabe
Seikei University
Keywords: phrasal verbs, prefixed verbs, prefixes, replacement, Ancrene
Wisse
In the making of present-day English phrasal verbs, it is well-known that a
plentiful number of OE prefixed verbs such as upstigan, and forðferan
started to disappear in late OE as newly formed verb-particle combinations
such as give up and send forth superseded them, during the normalization
of fixed word order in the ME period (Kennedy 1920, Hiltunen 1983,
Claridge 2000 etc; for a recent counter-argument, Thim 2013). In this
228
process, the separable and inseparable OE prefixes seem to have gradually
moved from the pre-verbal to the post-verbal position and become an
adverbial constituent of phrasal verbs, or may have been simply lost. As a
result, Middle English saw an ample inventory of verb-particle
combinations which acquired the seminal configuration of present-day
phrasal verbs, the constructions highly frequent and productive in the
present-day English.
Asserting that this shift is an example of drag-chain influence, Samuels
(1972: 164-5) states that the prefixes were gradually replaced not, in fact,
with simplex verbs, but from various sources: 1) adverbs like away, down,
out, up, which had been used to reinforce prefixed verbs in special
contexts; 2) fixed phrases as completive or intensives, such as hew to
pieces, burn to ashes; and 3) new verbs of both foreign and native origins.
The aim of this study is to reanalyze the empirical data and especially to
examine whether or not the occurrence of phrasal verbs resulted from the
replacement of prefixed verbs with adverbs, and if not, what the
relationship is between the prefixed verbs and phrasal verbs in ME. By
comparing the data from the MSS texts of Ancrene Wisse, the Katherine
Group, the Gospels and some other works written in various periods, we
will show that the prefixed verbs are seldom replaced with phrasal verbs
and not always with the simplex verbs but with the combination of the
same prefix and a different verb or with reduced prefixes (ie. a-, be-, y-) or
with entirely different verbs. Interestingly, this result is consistent with the
argument in Brinton (2005: 124) that the phrasal verb exhibits a direct line
of development from OE and is independent from the prefixed verbs.
Brinton, Laurel J. and Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2005. Lexicalization and Language
Change. Cambridge: CUP.
Claridge, Clauida. 2000. Multi-word Verbs in Early Modern English: A Corpus-based
Study, Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Hiltunen, Risto. 1983. The Decline of the Prefixes and the Beginnings of the English
Phrasal Verbs: The Evidence from Some Old and Early Middle English Text. Turku:
Turun Yliopisto.
Kennedy, Arthur Garfield. 1967. The Modern English Verb-Adverb Combination. New
York: AMS.
Samuels, M. L. 1972. Linguistic Evolution: with Special Reference to English.
Cambridge: CUP.
Thim, Stefan. 2013. Phrasal Verbs: the English Verb-Particle Construction and its
History, Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
229
Caxton’s use of binomials for printing or translation?
Akinobu Tani
Hyogo University of Teacher Education
This study examines the use and disuse of binomials by Caxton to explore
the possibility that he employed them for printing (specifically for
justification) rather than for translation (meaning and style). To achieve this
purpose, the present study analyses where the binomials are placed on the
folios of the Tale of Melibee in Caxton’s editions of Chaucer’s Canterbury
Tales.
Comparing the variant readings of binomials in the tale among six
manuscripts (contained in Six-text Print of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tale) and
Caxton’s first edition, Tani (2010) finds that Caxton’s edition reveals a great
divergence from six Chaucerian manuscripts in the treatment of binomials,
and suggests the possibility that Caxton employed binomials for the
purpose of printing. In her studies, Hellinga (1982, 1999) has shown that
printers had to overcome physical constraints in printing, for example, in
order to achieve justification. As a means of justification or aligning the end
of lines, binomials could have been employed in order to lengthen a line by
coordinating synonyms. On the other hand, in Caxton’s Chaucer, the
original binomials in Chaucerian manuscripts could have been decomposed,
leaving only one of the two original elements. This possibility has been
disregarded in linguistic studies such as Leisi (1947). In the case of Caxton,
who was a printer as well as a translator, due attention should be paid to
this aspect of binomials to better understand his use of binomials.
Focusing on the variant readings of binomials in Caxton’s editions
different from the ones in the six manuscripts, this study tries to
understand (1) where they are found on the folios, (2) how they are treated
by Caxton, i.e. expanded or decomposed, and (3) to what extent they are
employed for printing purposes in contrast to employing them for meaning
and style. In the discussion, Caxton’s use of binomials as translation
methods in Paris and Vienne and Reynard will also be mentioned.
Hellinga, Lotte. 1982. Caxton in Focus: Beginning of Printing in England. London:
British Library.
Hellinga, Lotte. 1999. “Printing”, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain Vol.3
1400-1557. eds Lotte Hellinga and J.B.T. Trapp. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.
65-108.
Leisi, Ernst. 1947. Die tautologische Wortpaare in Caxton’s “Eneydos.” Zurich and
New York: Hafner.
230
Tani, Akinobu. 2010. “Word Pairs in Chaucer’s Melibee and their Variant Readings,”
in Aspects of History of English Language and Literature, eds. Osamu Imahayashi,
Yoshiyuki Nakao and Michiko Ogura, 101-113. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Standardisation and the Auchinleck Manuscript
Jacob Thaisen
University of Stavanger
Keywords: Language Modelling, Standardisation, The Auchinleck MS
This paper discusses the standardising variety dubbed ‘Type II’ following
Samuels (1963). Representatives of it are Scribes 1 and 3 of Edinburgh,
National Library of Scotland, MS 19.2.1 (‘Auchinleck’), a large vernacular
miscellany produced in the London area in the first half of the fourteenth
century. Already A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English fitted these two
scribes in locations separate albeit adjacent, and in this paper I trace the
immediate exemplars from which the two scribes worked.
The spelling forms found in the immediate exemplars will always have
primed even an otherwise ‘translating’ scribe, and the resulting skew of his
usage in the direction of the exemplars is what makes it possible to trace
them. To validate my methodology, I first report on a one-way
ANOVA/Tukey’s Range Test on similarity metrics obtained with probabilistic
models trained and tested on the full text of the Auchinleck manuscript
divided up into 200-line segments. The populations distinguished by the
statistics strongly correlate with a palaeographical division by scribe,
implying that any variation observable in the spelling of a single scribe must
primarily reflect what was in the exemplars when other potential variables
are kept constant to the extent possible. I accordingly next repeat the study
twice: for the respective stints of Scribes 1 and 3. The metrics indicate that
the two scribes copied their longer texts from materials in respectively four
and three different hands.
A generation ago it was thought that the Auchinleck manuscript was the
product of scribes, translators, and versifiers working under the same roof
and therefore perhaps especially liable to develop similar usages. It is
generally accepted today, however, following Doyle and Parkes (1978) and
Shonk (1985), that the manuscript provides the earliest known English
example of ad hoc collaboration between freelancing professional scribes
working out of separate workshops. It is perhaps less immediately obvious
how this setup can have fostered or furthered standardisation of spelling.
231
When considered in combination with the nonidentical usages of Scribes 1
and 3 and the evident presence of features transferred from the exemplars,
the collected evidence underlines how early a stage Type II represents in
the development of standard English and how slow and erratic was the
course of this development (cf. Wright 2000).
New native prefixes in Middle English
Stefan Thim
University of Vienna
Keywords: word-formation, derivational morphology, analytic drift, Middle
English, language contact
Histories of English word formation tend to sketch neat unidirectional
accounts of the development of derivational affixation in the language.
Whilst Old English is justly presented as a period where native prefixation
thrives, the following periods are said to be characterised by a dramatic
decrease in native word formation, both with regard to the inventory of
native affixes and with regard to their role in forming new words. But
although these traditional accounts may to some extent be regarded as
justified, a closer look reveals a number of remarkable inconsistencies.
These are, one may presume, at least partly due to the predilection in
linguistics for teleological paths of development, with a marked consequent
neglect of historical changes that cannot be easily fitted into such a longterm picture.
The fate of the native prefixes is usually presented as sealed by the
Middle English period (cf. the standard accounts by Kastovsky 1992 and
Burnley 1992). Whilst many of the prefixes are phonologically and
semantically weakened to a considerable degree already towards the end
of the Old English period (see the discussion by Lutz 1997), the subsequent
‘depletion’ of the language of native prefixes is somehow metaphorically
regarded as connected to the influx of borrowed prefixes from French and
Latin, while more recently higher analyticity in word formation has been
attributed to Celtic influence (cf. Tristram and Bismark 2012). These are by
no means satisfactory explanations, not least since most of the borrowed
Romance prefixes can clearly be shown to belong to different functional
domains (Adamson 1999) and also because the notion of large-scale
contact-induced analytic drift in derivational morphology (cf. Haselow
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2012) is called into question by a number of counterexamples which are
rarely discussed in this context.
The present paper focuses on the widely ignored observation that the
Middle English period witnesses, in fact, the rise of a number of new native
verbal prefixes, in particular down-, out-, up-. Marchand’s classic handbook
(1969) treats them as elements in verbal compounds, and so do most later
accounts of word-formation in present-day English. But such analyses are
unsatisfactory, since the phonological, morphological and semantic
properties of these elements clearly show them to be prefixes. I will discuss
the Middle English development in some detail, but, perhaps more
importantly, explore the implications of this development for our
perception of English word formation from a typological and historical point
of view.
Adamson, Sylvia. 1999. “Literary Language”. In: The Cambridge History of the English
Language III: 1476–1776, ed. Roger Lass. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 539–653.
Burnley, David. 1992. “Lexis and Semantics”. In: The Cambridge History of the English
Language II: 1066–1476, ed. Norman Blake. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 409–499.
Haselow, Alexander. 2012. “A Typological View on the History of English Derivation”.
English Studies 93. 203–226.
Kastovsky, Dieter. 1992. “Semantics and Vocabulary”. In: The Cambridge History of
the English Language I: The Beginnings to 1066, ed. Richard Hogg. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 290–408.
Lutz, Angelika. 1997. “Sound Change, Word Formation and the Lexicon: The History
of the English Prefix Verbs”. English Studies 78. 258–290.
Marchand, Hans. 1969. The Categories and Types of Present-day English Wordformation: A Synchronic-Diachronic Approach. 2nd ed., completely revised and
enlarged. München: Beck.
Tristram, Hildegard L.C. and Christina Bismark. 2012. “On the Demise of
Morphological Complexity in English and the Insular Celtic Languages: A
Research Report”. In: Communicative Spaces: Variation, Contact, and Change
(Papers in Honour of Ursula Schaefer), ed. Claudia Lange, Beatrix Weber and
Göran Wolf. Frankfurt am Main: Lang. 381–399.
Outgroup construction in early medieval England
Olga Timofeeva
University of Zürich
The aim of this paper is to investigate lexical and syntactic strategies of
outgroup construction in Anglo-Saxon elite discourse. It focuses on the
outgroups of the Viking age, from the earliest Scandinavian raids on Britain
233
in the late eighth century up to the spread of the Norman rule in the late
eleventh and the takeover of the Agenvins in the mid twelfth centuries.
Methodologically, this study brings in three innovative approaches. Firstly,
it sees Old English and Anglo-Latin written texts from this period as a
continuum of discourse practices that influence each other and change
over time (Timofeeva 2013). The genres that are taken into account here
are historical and religious writings, legislation and poetry in both
languages. Secondly, it uses Benedict Anderson’s notion of ‘imagined
communities’ (1991), understanding it as a socially and linguistically
constructed group unity, imagined by the people who associate themselves
with that unity, with an important proviso that in the Anglo-Saxon context
it is not a national but a kingship-based imagined community that is
operative. Thirdly, I bring in critical discourse studies (e.g., as summarised in
van Dijk 2008) and envisage the Anglo-Saxon texts as those commissioned
by the political elite – West Saxon kingship – and produced by the symbolic
elite – writers, chroniclers, copyists, the clergy more generally. The Viking
raids of the period provide a ‘bid for counter-power’, to which the elites
have to react both militarily and ideologically. The ideologies of the AngloSaxon elites (and the elites to come after the Norman Conquest) are then
analysed at the discourse level, concentrating on the strategies of outgroup
derogation, such as criminalisation of the Vikings in historical discourse
(chronicles), discrimination in legal discourse (law codes), and
stereotypisation in religious discourse (homilies and ecclesiastical letters).
These terms are of course applied anachronistically to medieval data,
therefore the limitations of such extensions are also addressed towards the
end of the paper.
Anderson, Benedict (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edition. London: Verso.
Timofeeva, Olga (2013) “Of ledenum bocum to engliscum gereorde: Bilingual
Communities of Practice in Anglo-Saxon England,” in Communities of Practice in
the History of English, ed. by Joanna Kopaczyk and Andreas H. Jucker, 201–224.
Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 235. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Van Dijk, Teun A. (2008) Discourse and Power. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
234
Left-dislocated noun phrases in the recent history of English:
Evolution, genre distribution and discourse functions
David Tizón-Couto
University of Vigo
Keywords: left-dislocation, Early Modern English, Late Modern English,
genre, discourse functions.
This investigation finds a significant decrease of Left Dislocated Noun
Phrases (LDNPs such as After it was dark any Ship that came to us we
engaged them) from the ME period onwards in the examples extracted
from the Penn(-Helsinki) parsed corpora of Middle English (PPCME2), Early
Modern English (PPCEME), Modern British English (PPCMBE) and the Early
English Correspondence Corpus (PCEEC). The decrease (ME: 10.7, EModE:
2.4 and LModE: 1.3 instances per 1,000 words) could be explained as a
combination of several factors such as the establishment of the syntactic
and orthographical bases of the sentence (Culpeper and Kytö 2010:168) or
prescriptivist criticism as regards words “put out of their proper order”
(Michael 1970:471).
The analysis focuses on the genre distribution and discourse functions
of the 989 LDNPs extracted from the Modern English corpora (PPCEME,
PPCMBE and PCEEC). As for the distribution across historical genres of a
word-order variant such as LD, commonly associated with spoken language
(Geluykens 1992, Prince 1997, Gregory and Michaelis 2001), the findings
suggest that the frequency of LDNPs in speech-like texts (letters and
diaries) has proven lower (n.f. 0.13) than in speech-purposed (drama and
sermons; n.f. 0.94) or in mixed (fiction and trial proceedings) and written
(biography, educational treatise, handbook, history, law, philosophy,
science and travelogue; n.f. 0.64) genres since the ME period. However,
concerning their discourse function, those LDNPs that carry out an affective
or highlighting function (in the sense of Keenan-Ochs and Schieffelin
1976:245; Geluykens 1992:95; Kim 1995:285), rather than a more neutral
discourse-organisational role (Netz et al. 2011), have been found to be
more likely in speech-like (58.2%) and speech-purposed (55.8%) genres
(only 35.2% in mixed genres and 37.5% in written genres). Additional
variables suggest that the form and function of LDNPs reflect differences
between speech-related and purely written genres. For instance, a tally of
the element which may precede LDNPs (usually a conjunction or a
complementiser) shows that 34.2% of all instances of LDNPs preceded by a
conversational item such as clause-level and (Culpeper and Kytö 2010:166)
235
is attested in letters and diaries (by far the highest percentage for any
genre). In addition, bare LDNPs (i.e. with no previous conjunction) are most
frequent in speech-purposed (70.2% in sermons and drama) and mixed
texts (67.6% in fiction and trial proceedings), while those that have a
previous marker of any kind are more likely to convey a highlighting
functional shade (44.1% of the total for affective roles) rather than a
neutral discourse-organisational function (35.8% of the total for discourseorganisational roles). These two latter findings suggest, respectively, that
LDNPs seem to have been particularly useful as deictic rhetorical devices in
written-to-be-spoken texts such as sermons and drama, and that other
conversational clause-initial markers such as and interacted more regularly
with LDNPs when the authors/speakers felt freer to innovate (i.e. in genres
with less editorial control).
Anagnostopoulou, Elena, Henk van Riemsdijk and Frans Zwarts, eds., 1997. Materials
on left dislocation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Culpeper, Jonathan and Merja Kytö. 2010. Early Modern English dialogues. Spoken
interaction as writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Geluykens, Ronald. 1992. From discourse process to grammatical construction: on left
dislocation in English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Gregory, Michelle and Laura Michaelis. 2001. Topicalization and left-dislocation: a
functional opposition revisited. Journal of Pragmatics 33: 1665-1706.
Keenan-Ochs, Elinor and Bambi Schieffelin. 1976. Foregrounding referents: a
reconsideration of left dislocation in discourse. BLS 2: 240-257.
Kim, Kyu-hyun. 1995. Wh-clefts and left-dislocation in English conversation: cases of
topicalization. In Downing, Pamela and Michael Noonan, eds., Word order in
discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 247-296.
Michael, Ian. 1970. English grammatical categories and the tradition to 1800.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Netz, Hadar, Ron Kuzar and Zohar Eviatar. 2011. A recipient-based study of the
discourse functions of marked topic constructions. Language Sciences 33.1: 154166
Prince, Ellen. 1997. On the functions of left-dislocation in English discourse. In Kamio,
Akio, ed., Directions in functional linguistics. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp.
117-144.
Traugott, Elisabeth. 2007. Old English left-dislocations: their structure and
information status. Folia Linguistica 41.3-4: 405-441.
236
On the status of *magan in Old English
Magdalena Tomaszewska
University of Warsaw
Keywords: preterite-present, *magan, Old English
The Old English verb *magan ‘to be strong, be able, may’ belongs to the socalled preterite-present class. Verbs in this very important but not
homogeneous group have developed into the contemporary English
modals, as has *magan (ModE may) or “dropped out of the language
altogether or were assimilated to another more regular class of verbs”
(Lightfoot 2009: 30).
The common feature of such verbs was that (a) in Old English they
lacked inflectional third person singular markers (like the Present-Day
English modals), and (b) their originally strong past tense forms were
replaced by new weak forms throughout the paradigm. Possibly, the
change was triggered by semantic factors (Hogg ─ Fulk 2011: 299) or was
conditioned by pragmatic reasons.
In the 1990s some evidence was presented to support the claim that
periphrastic constructions with modal auxiliaries functioned in Late Old
English (cf. Traugott 1992: 186-200, Warner 1993: 2), and that *magan
itself was used as an auxiliary in translations of the Latin subjunctive or
future indicative in the Northumbrian Gospels (Bosworth-Toller’s ASD) or
“with a verb in the infinitive understood” (OED) and elsewhere (Mitchell
1985: §1014, Visser 1963-1973: §1653). In the face of such discrepancies
between the lexical and the auxiliary use of the verb, it seems reasonable
to seek further evidence for both uses in Old English.
The aim of the paper is to analyze, on the basis of the corpus of The
Dictionary of Old English in Electronic Form A-G, the contrasting lexical and
auxiliary characteristics of *magan in Old English. The paper will discuss
morphosyntactic as well as semantic issues. The expected results are (a)
summarizing arguments in favour of the lexical and the auxiliary status of
*magan in Old English available in various studies devoted to the subject,
(b) verifying relevant arguments against the data in the corpus and
commenting on the findings, and (c) presenting new evidence as regards
the status of the verb.
The Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online. Prague: Charles University.
Available at <bosworthtoller.com>. [ASD]
Cameron, Angus et al. (2003) The Dictionary of Old English in Electronic Form A-G
237
(CD-ROM). Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, University of
Toronto.
The Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [OED]
Hogg, Richard M. & R. D. Fulk (2011) A Grammar of Old English. Vol. 2: Morphology.
Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Lightfoot, David W. (2009) “Cuing a New Grammar”. In: Ans van Kemenade &
Bettelou Los (eds.). The Handbook of the History of English (Chichester: WileyBlackwell), 24-44.
Mitchell, Bruce (1985) Old English Syntax. Vols. 1-2. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs (1992) “Syntax”. [In:] Norman Blake (ed.) The Cambridge
History of the English Language. Vol. 1. The Beginnings to 1066. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press), 168-289.
Visser, F. Th (1963-1973) An Historical Syntax of the English Language. Leiden: E. J.
Brill.
Warner, Anthony R. (1993) English Auxiliaries. Structure and History. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
th
The creation of pseudo-archaisms in the 18 Century: A linguistic study of
Thomas Chatterton’s Rowley Poems
Oliver Traxel
University of Wuerzburg
Keywords: 18
Chatterton.
th
century, archaisms, forgery, Rowley Poems, Thomas
Already during the Early Modern English period the occasional use of
archaisms was popular among some scholars. Ben Jonson acknowledged
their “Majesty” and “Authority” (Herford et al. 1947: 622), the preface to
Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender attributed “great grace” to “olde
and obsolete wordes” (Greenlaw et al. 1932-57: VII, 8), and Purists looked
back at Chaucer in order to counteract the increasing influx of loanwords.
By doing so, words or spellings could be devised that invoke the impression
of belonging to an earlier language stage even if they had never existed, for
which reason they may be called “pseudo-archaisms” (cf. Traxel 2012). The
creation of such forms can also be observed in later periods, as seen, for
example, in “Wardour-Street English” found in some historical novels
th
especially during the 19 century (cf. Wisner 2010) or in the mock language
of present-day medieval or Renaissance fairs.
Such occurrences are generally still recognisable as obvious attempts at
evoking an archaic atmosphere due to their collocation with modern
linguistic forms. However, there are also works which look as if they could
238
have been written at earlier times. These can be playful texts created for
entertainment purposes, such as Wilhelm Busch’s Max & Moritz translated
into Chaucerian-style Middle English (Görlach 1981), or plain forgeries
meant to be passed off as original compositions. This paper focuses on a
notorious case that falls into the latter category, namely poetry ascribed to
a non-existent monk named Thomas Rowley, supposed to have lived in the
th
th
15 century, which in reality was composed by 18 -century author Thomas
Chatterton (1752-1770).
Though editions of Chatterton’s Rowley Poems contain linguistic
commentaries (e.g. Skeat 1872; Taylor 1971) most studies focus on the
cultural background and significance of his works (e.g. Haywood 1986;
Kaplan 1989). The availability of these poems in electronic form has now
made
a
detailed
linguistic
investigation
feasible
(e.g.
<http://www.exclassics.com
/rowley/rwlintro.htm>; various editions at <http://www.archive.org>).
Software like Corpus Presenter (<http://www.uni-due.de/CP>) can be used
to draw up wordlists and KWIC-concordances that can be examined in
order to understand the process of creating deliberate archaisms. Particular
regard will be given to where Chatterton failed in providing authentic
Middle English forms. Some possible reasons for these misconceptions will
be suggested, which may shed light on the question of how the linguistic
th
past was perceived during the 18 century.
Görlach, Manfred (ed. and transl.) 1981 The gestes of Mak and Morris. Presented to
Hans Kurath on the occasion of his 90th birthday. Heidelberg: Winter.
Greenlaw, Edwin – Charles Grosvenor Osgood – Frederick Morgan Padelford – Ray
Heffner (eds.) 1932-57 The works of Edmund Spenser. A Variorum edition. 11
vols. Baltimore: John Hopkins Press.
Haywood, Ian 1986 The making of history. A study of the literary forgeries of James
Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton in relation to eighteenth-century ideas of
history and fiction. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Herford, Charles H. – Percy Simpson – Evelyn Simpson (eds.) 1947 Ben Jonson.
Volume VIII: The poems. The prose works. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Kaplan, Louise J. 1988 The family romance of the impostor-poet Thomas Chatterton.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Skeat, Walter W. (ed.) 1872 The poetical works of Thomas Chatterton. 2 vols. London:
Chiswick Press.
Taylor, Donald S. (ed.) 1971 Thomas Chatterton: The complete works. A bicentenary
edition. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Traxel, Oliver M. 2012 “Pseudo-archaic English: the modern perception and
interpretation of the linguistic past”, Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 47/2-3: 41-58.
239
Wisner, Linell B. 2010 Archaism or textual literalism in the historical novel. PhD
dissertation. University of Tennessee.
<http://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/860/>.
Diatopic variation of two syntactic constructions in Middle English and its
implications for language contact
Carola Trips & Achim Stein
University of Mannheim - University of Stuttgart
Keywords: language contact, Middle English, Old French, clefts, left
dislocations
Working with historical data presupposes that we take into account
different types of variation: diatopic, stylistic, and diachronic. Further types
of variation that should be considered are subject to register and the
provenance of the original texts that the ME manuscripts are based on.
Although the Middle English (ME, ca. 1150-1500) texts available for
linguistic studies are a perfect “testing ground” for investigating diatopic
variation on all levels of language, because no written standard
superimposes regional differences, surprisingly few studies have dealt with
it (see e.g. Kroch and Taylor, 1997, Kroch et al., 2000, Ingham, 2006,
Haeberli, 2010).
In two corpus-based studies on left dislocation and cleft constructions
in ME and medieval French (9th until 15th century) we investigated changes
along the diachronic dimension and addressed the question of whether
significant changes in ME times could be attributed to Old French (OF, until
1300) influence. For left dislocations we found that one type of this
construction (object left dislocation with an unmodified NP) suddenly
increased in early Middle English (M1 in the corpus: 1150-1250, Stein and
Trips, To appear):
(1)
ða fuglas þa we hie ne onweg flegdon.
these birds then we them not away drove
‘These birds, we didn’t drive them away.’
(Alex:21.11.258)
For clefts we found that the type where a subject pronoun occurs in focus
position started to appear in the periods M2 and M3 (1250-1420).
240
(2)
‘Hit was I,’ seyde Balyn, ‘that slew this knyght in my defendaunte;’
“It was I”, said B., “that slew this knight in my defense.”
(MALORY,53.1762)
The provenance of the texts seemed to be an important factor in explaining
our results (Trips and Stein, 2013).
In this paper we are going to take a look at these two phenomena from
a different angle: we will address the questions of whether there is also
diatopic variation of (the different types of) left dislocations and clefts in ME
and whether the two phenomena show changes in the diachronic
dimension. Since we are interested in the language contact scenario
between ME and OF (1150-1500), we will examine if significant findings in
the diatopic dimension can be correlated with contact-induced change. This
implies the question of whether a locus of contact-induced change can be
identified. Apart from pursuing these questions, we will also discuss
methodological issues related to working with historically annotated
corpora like the PPCME2 for ME (Kroch and Taylor, 2000) and the MCVF for
OF (Martineau, 2009). We will focus on aspects like the representativeness
of diatopic variation in these corpora and advantages (and disadvantages)
of working with these corpora instead of working with editions of full texts.
Haeberli, E. 2010. “Investigating Anglo-Norman Influence on Late Middle English
Syntax”. In The Anglo-Norman Language and Its Context, R. Ingham (ed), 143–
163. York: York Medieval Press.
Ingham, R. 2006. “The Status of French in Medieval England: Evidence from the Use
of Object Pronoun Syntax”. Vox Romanica: Annales Helvetici Explorandis Linguis
Romanicis Destinati (65): 86–107.
Kroch, A., Ann and Ringe, D. 2000. “The Middle English Verb-second Constraint: A
Case Study inLanguage Contact and Language Change”. In Textual Parameters in
Older Language, S. Herring, L. Schoesler and P. van Reenen (eds), 353–391.
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Kroch, A. and Taylor, A. 1997. “Verb movement in Old and Middle English: Dialect
variation and language contact”. In Parameters of Morphosyntactic Change, A. v.
Kemenade and N. Vincent (eds), 297–325. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Kroch, A. and Taylor, A., (eds). 2000. The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle
English, Second Edition (PPCME2). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.
Martineau, F., (ed). 2009. Le corpus MCVF. Modéliser le changement: les voies du
français. Ottawa: Université d’Ottawa.
Stein, A. and Trips, C. “Modelling language contact with diachronic crosslinguistic
data”. To appear in Firm Foundations: Quantitative Approaches to Grammar and
Grammatical Change, Y. V. Sam Feather-ston (ed), Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Trips, C. and Stein, A. 2013. “Cleft sentences in the history of French and English: a
241
case of pragmatic borrowing?” Submitted to Proceedings of Going Romance
2012.
Binomials in English novels of the Late Modern period:
Fixedness, formulaicity and style
Jukka Tyrkkö
University of Tampere
Keywords: Binomials, multinomials, legal language, Early Modern English,
corpus linguistics.
The paper explores binomials and multinomials in Early Modern English
parliamentary acts, focusing especially on the frequencies of these
constructions. Binomials and multinomials are common in legal writing, as
they increase precision, although they are also used for stylistic reasons
(Danet 1980, Kopaczyk 2009: 93). Diachronically, legal writing became more
verbose and precise during the Early Modern period (e.g. Hiltunen 1990:
58), and hence the paper sets out to study whether the use of binomials
and multinomials also increases during the period.
Binomials are defined as word pairs that are syntactically connected by
coordinators and that are semantically related in their meaning, while
multinomials consist of longer sequences of related words (Gustafsson
1984: 124; Frade 2005: 134). Further, formulaic binomials are “permanent
and fixed combinations in the language”, while unformulaic binomials “are
temporary but fill the semantic and syntactic requirements” (Gustafsson
1975, Moon 1998). In addition to surveying the overall diachronic
frequencies, the study further examines formulaic constructions by
analysing high-frequency binomials and multinomials.
The data of the study are parliamentary acts from my corpus, the
Corpus of Early Modern English Statutes (1491–1707). The category of
parliamentary acts contains approximately 180,000 words. The instances of
binomials are located by lexical searches for coordinators. Further, the
corpus is normalised in its spelling variation which enables a more accurate
examination of the high-frequency binomials by analysing clusters that
involve either the coordinator and or or.
The paper shows that binomials are noticeably common in the Early
Modern parliamentary acts and become diachronically more frequent,
reflecting the sociohistorical changes of the era. Most binomials and
multinomials consist of coordinated nouns but coordinated verbs are also
242
common. Further, formulaic binomials (such as ordered and enacted)
appear, for instance, in the enactment clause that is repeated in each act,
and other high-frequency word pairs include for example legal actors and
legal actions (shall and may). Further, some of the binomials and
multinomials remain common throughout the analysed time span, while
others are repeated only in individual acts.
Danet, Brenda 1980. Language in the legal process. Law and Society Review 14.3,
445–564.
Frade, Celina. 2005. Legal Multinomials: Recovering Possible Meanings from Vague
Tags. In Bhatia, Vijay, Jan Engberg, Maurizio Gotti and Dorothee Heller (eds.),
Vagueness in Normative Texts. Bern: Peter Lang. 133–156.
Gustafsson, Marita. 1984. The syntactic features of binomial expression in legal
English. Text 4.1–3, 123–141.
Gustafsson, Marita. 1975. Binominal Expressions in Present-Day English. A Syntactic
and Semantic Study. Turku: Annales Universitatis Turkuensis.
Hiltunen, Risto. 1990. Chapters on Legal English. Aspects Past and Present of the
Language of the Law. Jyväskylä: Gummerus.
Kopaczyk, Joanna. 2009. Multi-word Units of Meaning in 16th-century Legal Scots. In
McConchie, R. W., Alpo Honkapohja and Jukka Tyrkkö (eds.), Selected
Proceedings of the 2008 Symposium on New Approaches in English Historical
Lexis. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. 88–95.
Moon, Rosamund. 1998. Fixed expressions and idioms in English: A corpus-based
approach. London: Clarendon Press.
Psych-verbs in the history of English:
The reanalysis of argument structure
Elly van Gelderen
Arizona State University
The present paper examines alternating psych-verbs in the history of
English. It is well-known from the literature (e.g. Allen 1995) that Object
Experiencers are reanalyzed as Subject Experiencers, as between (1) and
(2).
(1)
(2)
Þa bodan
us færdon
=ObjExp
the messengers
us frightened
`The messengers frightened us.’ (OED, Ælfric Deut i. 28)
We feared the messengers.
=SuExp
243
This is not only true in English but in other Indo-European languages as
well. The paper then demonstrates (a) that Object Experiencers are
constantly renewed through external borrowing and internal change and
(b) that Subject Experiencers are reanalyzed as Agents. For instance, verbs
such as worry meant ‘to kill by strangling/compressing the throat’ in Old
and Middle English, as in (3), with an Agent and Theme and is reanalyzed as
an experiencer verb in contemporary English. Likewise, the verb thrill
meant `to pierce’, as in (4).
(3)
(4)
Harald ... threwe hym to the grounde and had wyried hym with
his hondes (OED, 1387 Trevisa tr. R. Higden Polychron. VII. 534)
& scharp lance þat thrilled Ihesu side. (OED, c1330 Mannyng
Chron.)
Examples of Experiencers reanalyzed as subjects are given in (5) and (6).
(5)
(6)
I am liking private life a lot right now. (COCA Spoken 2009)
Wall Street is fearing a bloodbath (COCA Magazine 2007)
The paper then turns to an investigation of possible factors relevant in the
change. I look at the appearance of light verbs and reflexive objects in
Middle English and ambiguous contexts (as known from Fischer & van der
Leek’s 1980 work). As a descriptive framework, I use a vP shell without
necessarily adhering to an exo-skeletal view of the lexicon-syntax
connection, as in e.g. Borer (2005). The conclusion is that, as the
morphological causative is lost, there is a restructuring of this vP. The main
emphasis, however, will be on an analysis of the data.
V2 in Middle English dialects
Ans van Kemenade
Radboud University Nijmegen
Keywords : syntax, information structure, dialect variation, word order,
middle english
It is well-known that there are two types of V2 in Middle English, one type
(type 1) in which subject-finite verb inversion is categorical and restricted
to main clauses (questions, relic negative-initial clauses, clauses introduced
by adverbs like then, thus, now), and another type (type 2) which is not
244
strictly speaking V2, but in which the position of the finite verb (second
position or later) is the result of the interplay of various factors, such as
type of first constituent, type of subject (pronominal vs. nominal), and type
of finite verb (auxiliary, unaccusative or unergative intransitive) (van
Kemenade and Westergaard 2012).
It has been established by Kroch and Taylor (1997) that in at least one
Northern Middle English text, the Northern prose Rule of St. Benet,
categorical V2 (type 1) is not restricted to the three contexts mentioned
above, and they make a case that this is due to Scandinavian influence on
the syntax of Northern English.
This paper explores the dialectal distribution of the various types of V2
contexts in Middle English, specified according to the various factors
identified above (type of first constituent, type of subject, type of finite
verb). Data are drawn from the Penn Helsinki parsed corpus of Middle
English (Kroch and Taylor 2000), supplemented by selected texts from the
LAEME corpus for early Middle English (Laing and Lass 2008), and by
selected other texts for late Middle English. I will establish ‘V2 profiles’ for
each text. The paper will then explore to what extent the observed dialectal
variation is due to syntactic (microparametric) differences between
dialects, and to what extent it can be attributed to more general pragmatic
factors.
Kemenade, Ans van and Marit Westergaard. 2012. ‘Syntax and Information
Structure: V2 Variation in Middle English’. In Information Structure in the History
of English, ed. Bettelou Los, María-José López-Couso, and Anneli Meurman-Solin,
87-119. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kroch, Anthony and Ann Taylor. 1997. ‘Verb Movement in Old and Middle English:
Dialect Variation and Language Contact’. In Parameters of Morphosyntactic
Change, ed. Ans van Kemenade and Nigel Vincent, 297–325. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Kroch, Anthony. 2000. Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English, second
edition.
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/PPCME2-RELEASE-3/index.html.
LAEME: Laing, Margaret, & Roger Lass. 2008–. A linguistic atlas of early Middle
English 1150–1325. Version 1.1. Online at
http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laeme1/laeme1.html. Edinburgh: University of
Edinburgh.
245
Old problems and new solutions in English runology: Thorn, eoh, and the
duplex runes
Theo Vennemann
University of Munich
Keywords: futhorc, Punic Thesis, thorn rune, eoh rune, duplex runes
Many problems of the shapes, sound values, and names of specific
Scandinavian and Old English runes have remained unsolved by the three
major theories of runic origins, the Greek, Etruscan, and Latin Theses. A
new theory (cf. Vennemann 2011, 2013) claims that several of the most
enigmatic properties of the Elder Futhark are solved when studied within
the Punic Thesis, i.e. the assumption that the Proto-Futhark is nothing but
the Carthaginian alphabet applied to Proto-Germanic and that deviations
from this Proto-Futhark reflect Late Punic orthographic developments. This
presentation will show how this approach carries over to the Old English
Futhorc, solving additional problems.
As an example for the explanation of the name of an Old English rune,
the name of the thorn rune, Proto-Germanic *thurnaz ‘thorn’, is derived
from the name *dalt (Hebrew daleth) ‘door’ of the Phoenician letter D. This
letter is assumed to have been adopted as a *d rune with the name *dura‘door’ translating the Phoenician name. When the sound value of D
changed into a fricative in Late Punic, the sound value of the *d rune was
adjusted so that the rune became the historical th rune – with the
consequence that the name of the rune had to be adjusted in accordance
with the acrophonic principle. The Germanic noun closest to *dura- ‘door’
but beginning with th- was *thurnaz ‘thorn’. This argument at the same
time explains why the thorn rune has the shape and the early place in the
alphabet of the Phoenician (and Greek and Latin) D.
As an example for the explanation of the form and sound value of an
Old English rune, the rune named eoh, also ih (with long i), will be analyzed.
Its form is unexplained, and concerning its sound value both vowels and
consonants have been proposed. The solution derives from the facts that
(1) the shape of the rune is that of the Late Punic letter yod, and (2) this
letter is in Late Punic regularly employed to represent the vowel i (hence ih
rune in accordance with the acrophonic principle).
The duplex runes (with their internally doubled shapes) b, g, and d are
explained as follows: They represent the strong variants (geminates in
Phoenician) of their weakened (fricated, semivocalized) Late Punic
246
counterparts (non-geminate in Phoenician) adopted into Germanic as w, u,
and th. A similar explanation will be given for the fourth duplex rune, p.
Antonsen, Elmer. 2002. Runes and Germanic linguistics, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Bammesberger, Alfred, and Gaby Waxenberger (eds.). 2006. Das fuþark und seine
einzelsprachlichen Weiterentwicklungen. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. [There e.g.
“Das Futhark und seine Weiterentwicklung in der anglo-friesischen
Überlieferung”, pp. 171–187.]
Düwel, Klaus. 2008. Runenkunde, 4th ed. (Sammlung Metzler, 72). Stuttgart: J. B.
Metzler.
Glaser, Elvira, Anna Seiler and Michelle Waldispühl (eds.), LautSchriftSprache:
Beiträge zur vergleichenden Graphematik. Zürich: Chronos.
Looijenga, Tineke. 2003. Texts and contexts of the oldest runic inscriptions (The
Northern World, 4). Leiden: Brill.
Odenstedt, Bengt. 1990. On the origin and early history of the runic script: Typology
and graphic variation in the older futhark (Acta Academiae Regiae Gustavi
Adolphi, 59). Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell.
Page, Raymond Ian. 1999. An introduction to English runes. 2nd ed. Woodbridge,
Suffolk: Boydell.
Page, Raymond Ian. 1995. Runes and Runic Inscriptions: Collected essays on AngloSaxon and Viking runes. Woodbridge: Boydell. [there e.g. “The Old English rune
eoh, īh, ‘yew-tree’”, pp. 133-144.]
Parsons, David. 1999. Recasting the runes: The reform of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc.
Uppsala: Institutionen för nordiska språk, Uppsala universitet.
Parsons, David. “History of the Anglo-Saxon and Frisian futhorc”, in: Heinrich Beck et
al. (eds.), Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde, vol. 25, 2nd ed., Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter, 564-567.
Vennemann, Theo. 2011. “Griechisch, lateinisch, etruskisch, karthagisch? Zur
Herkunft der Runen”, in: Glaser et al. (eds.) 2011: 47-81.
Vennemann, Theo. 2013. (Three articles in Sprachwissenschaft 38.)
Waxenberger, Gaby. 2013. “The perfect fit of the futhark and the imperfect
attestation of the Old English runes”, in: Glaser et al. (eds.) 2011: 83-108.
Waxenberger, Gaby. 2013. “The reflection of pre-Old English sound changes in preOld English runic inscriptions”, in: Hans Sauer and Gaby Waxenberger (eds.),
Recording English, researching English, transforming English (Studies in English
Medieval Language and Literature, 41). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
247
Reciprocal strategies in Middle English:
The development of each other or the like
Letizia Vezzosi
University of Perugia
While the grammatical expression of reciprocal (or ‘mutual’) situations in
the languages of the world has received a surprising amount of attention in
recent years (Frajzyngier and Curl199, König and Gast 2008, Nedjalkov
2007, just to mention a few ones), much less consideration has been
devoted to the historical development of its markers, with very few
exceptions almost all of them dealing exclusively with bi-partite quantifier
expressions, such as Eng. each other, It. l’un l’altro, Germ. einander, Vedic
anyonyam (Kulikov 2005 for Vedic, Hass 2007 and 2009 for English, Siegal
2012 for Hebrew, Fedden 2013 for Main).
Following the pioneering paper by Plank (1998), it has been generally
assumed that the quantificational strategy (using König and Kokutani’s
2006 terminology) develops from a distributive construction (stage I) via an
intermediate stage with the set of participants in topicalised position (stage
II) which sets up the shift from morphological (stage II) to semantic (stage
III) agreement on the verb (Corbett 2006: 155-160) and the following
reanalysis of the two separate pronouns as one unit, i.e. a bi-partite
quantifier:
Stage I two-unit pronouns:
EACH.NOM.SG
Subject
VERB.SG
Stage II two-unit pronouns:
{NP1,…NPn.NOM} VERB.SG
Topic
Stage III two-unit pronouns:
{NP1,…NPn.NOM} VERB.PL
Subject
OTHER.ACC.SG
Object
EACH.NOM.SG
Subject
OTHER.ACC.SG
Object
[EACH.ACC.SG
OTHER.ACC.SG]
Object
Fascinating and plausible as this hypothesis might be, there is very
scanty textual evidence: each other was already grammaticalized by the
end of the Middle English period (Jespersen 1927, Mustanoja 1960, van
248
Gelderen 2000) – when the two elements started to occur as prepositional
complementss – and there almost no attestations of the intermediate
stages. From Early Modern English onwards it further developed its
properties of a single unit – it occurs as a genitive marker and as a subject
of both finite and non-finite clauses and can appear in syntactic slots such
as the predicate NP following a copular verb.
But no study has so far taken into consideration the other means of
several means to express reciprocity in Middle English and conjectured that
the peculiarity of the English language among the other Indo-European
languages (i.e. each other is its prototypical reciprocal marker, while in the
other languages the bi-partite quantifier marker represents an alternative
or a reinforcement strategy to express reciprocity) could be the outcome of
a restructuring process to express the middle voice.
In my talk I would like to concentrate on the period preceding the
emergence of a grammaticalized reciprocal marker each other, when
symmetrical situation (König 2007) were expressed by different
constructions. The different linguistic devices (reflexive strategy, other
bipartite constructions, as well as reciprocal adverbial expressions) will be
analysed per se and in comparison with one another to highlight similarities
and differences. Such a semasiological investigation will allow for a
refinement of the meaning of the pattern each other and outline a possible
different line of constructualization which could overcome the difficulty of
a low-valency construction developing from a clearly transitive twoargument construction.
Fedden, S. 2013. “Reciprocal constructions in Mian”. Studies in Languages 37/1: 5893.
Frajzyngier, Z., and Curl, T. S. (eds.) 1999. Reciprocals: Forms and Functions.
Amsterdam: Benjamins
Haas, F. 2007. “The development of each other: grammaticalization, lexicalisation, or
both?”. English Language and Linguistics 11.1: 31-50.
Haas, F. 2009. Reciprocity in English: Historical Development and Synchronic
Structure. Routledge Studies in Germanic Linguistics 15. New York: Routledge
/London: Taylor & Francis.
Gelderen, E. van 2000. A history of English reflexive pronouns. Masterdam:
Benjamins.
Halevy, R. 2011. “The Grammaticalization of Bipartite Reciprocal Markers in
Hebrew”. Hebrew Studies 52: 7–18.
Haspelmath, M. 2007. “Further Remarks on Reciprocal Constructions”. In Nedjalkov
(2007). pp. 2087–2115.
Jespersen, O. 1927. A modern English grammar on historical principles. Vol. 3.
Heidelberg. Winter.
249
König, E. 2007. “Vers une nouvelle typologie des marques réfléchies”. In A. Rousseau
et al. (eds.), L’énoncé réfléchi. Rennes : Presse Universitaires de Rennes, 107130.
König, E., and Gast, V. (eds.) 2008. Reciprocals and Reflexives: Theoretical and
Typological Explorations.
Berlin. de Gruyter.
König, E., and Kokutani, S. 2006. “Towards a Typology of Reciprocal Constructions:
Focus on German and Japanese”. Linguistics 44: 271–302.
Kulikov, L. 2005. “Grammaticalization of a Reciprocal Pronoun in a Diachronic
Typological Perspective: Evidence from Vedic and Indo-European”. In J. Härma et
al. (eds.) Actes du XXIXéme Colloque International de Linguistique Fonctionelle.
Helsinki.
Mustanoja, T. 1960. A Middle English syntax: Part 1, Helsinki. [Mémoires de la société
néophilologique de Helsinki, 23]
Nedjalkov, V. P. (ed.) 2007. Reciprocal Constructions. 5 vols. Amsterdam. Benjamins.
Siegal, E.A.B.-A. 2012. “Diachronic Syntactic Studies in Hebrew Pronominal Reciprocal
Consructions”. In C. L. Miller-Naudé and Z. Zevit (eds.) Diachrony in Biblical
Hebrew. Winona Lanke Indiana. Eisenbrauns.
Null subjects in Middle English
George Walkden
University of Manchester
There has been a great deal of interest in null subjects in Old English in
recent years (cf. Rusten 2010, 2013; van Gelderen 2013; Coppess & Pires
2013; Walkden 2013). Less explored is the early Middle English period.
It is by now safely established that empty referential subjects were a
native possibility in Old English. Factors that have been shown to influence
expression vs. non-expression of the subject pronoun in Old English include
person (Berndt 1956, van Gelderen 2000, Rusten 2010, Walkden 2013),
clause type (Pogatscher 1901, Walkden 2013, Coppess & Pires 2013), mood
(Coppess & Pires 2013), date of text (Rusten 2013), and text type (Rusten
2013). In addition, it has been suggested that dialect may have a role to
play, with Anglian texts favouring omission (Walkden 2013).
This paper will investigate the situation in Middle English, drawing on
the PPCME2 (Kroch & Taylor 2000) and LAEME (Laing & Lass 2008) corpora.
Regression analysis will be performed in order to assess the significance of
the above variables as predictors.
Preliminary research on the PPCME2 (Percival 2012) suggests a
significant effect of date: of the forty texts in the corpus, all nine texts with
more than 1% null subjects are dated 1275 or earlier, while fifteen of the
250
sixteen texts with no null subjects at all are dated to 1350 or later (the
exception being the Ormulum). Table 1 presents the figures.
Table 1: Texts with over 1% null subject clauses, by date
Text
Null subjects
Total
Date
Hali Meidhad (cmhali.m1)
20 (3.9%)
511
c1225
St. Juliana (cmjulia.m1)
17 (3.0%)
568
c1225
St. Katherine (cmkathe.m1)
16 (2.9%)
544
c1225
St. Margaret (cmmarga.m1)
17 (2.7%)
639
c1225
Sawles Warde (cmsawles.m1)
3 (1.0%)
276
c1225
Trinity Homilies (cmtrinit.mx1)
77 (2.5%)
3074
a1225
Ancrene Riwle 1 (cmancriw-1.m1)
52 (1.5%)
3558
c1230
Ancrene Riwle 2 (cmancriw-2.m1)
26 (2.2%)
1163
c1230
Kentish Sermons (cmkentse.m2)
10 (4.3%)
231
1275
There is also suggestive evidence for a dialectal split: Table 1 includes the
five texts of the Katherine Group and the Ancrene Riwle, composed in the
West Midlands AB dialect. The evidence from the Kentish Sermons is
interesting: though this text has the highest proportion of null subjects of
all the Middle English texts, there is no evidence for null subjects in the
(scanty) Kentish Old English data. However, the influence of literal
translation may also be at work here; more careful analysis is needed to
tell.
Berndt, Rolf. 1956. Form und Funktion des Verbums im nördlichen Spätaltenglischen.
Halle: Max Niemeyer.
Coppess, Emily, & Acrisio Pires. 2013. The residue of syntactic change: partial prodrop in Old English. Paper presented at the Diachronic Syntax Workshop, LSA
Summer Institute, Ann Arbor, June 2013.
Kroch, Anthony, & Ann Taylor. 2000. Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English,
second edition.
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/PPCME2-RELEASE-3/index.html
251
Laing, Margaret, & Roger Lass. 2008. A linguistic atlas of Early Middle English.
http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laeme1/laeme1.html
Percival, Laura. 2012. Null subjects in Middle English. Ms., University of Manchester.
Pogatscher, Alois. 1901. Unausgedrücktes Subjekt im Altenglischen. Anglia 23, 261–
301.
Rusten, Kristian. 2010. A study of empty referential pronominal subjects in Old
English. M.Phil. dissertation, University of Bergen.
Rusten, Kristian. 2013. Empty referential subjects in Old English prose and poetry.
Paper presented at ICHL 21, Oslo, August 2013.
van Gelderen, Elly. 2013. Null subjects in Old English. Linguistic Inquiry 44, 271–285.
Walkden, George. 2013. Null subjects in Old English. Language Variation & Change
25, 155–178.
Third-person present singular verb inflection in Early Modern English:
New evidence from speech-related texts
Terry Walker
Mid-Sweden University
Keywords: Language change, third-person present singular verb inflection,
depositions, speech-related texts, Early Modern English
Regional dialect, genre and time are key variables when examining
language use and language change. This paper presents a quantitative
study of third-person present singular verb inflection, primarily -S and -TH,
taking these three extra-linguistic variables into account. Previous research
has shown that the -S ending spread from Northern England, replacing -TH
in Standard English across the Early Modern English period, first in speechrelated genres such as personal letters, and later in the more formal genres
(cf. Holmqvist 1922). In the light of this, where does a genre comprising
texts that are both formal legal records and speech-related fit into this
general picture? This paper aims to answer this question, offering evidence
from the genre of depositions: oral testimonies pertaining to a criminal,
civil or ecclesiastical court case taken down in writing by a scribe.
Depositions are particularly suitable for study as the genre represents a
variety of regions of England, and gives access to the language of ordinary
men and women, mediated through the scribe. The data is taken from An
Electronic Text Edition of Depositions 1560–1760 (ETED) a computersearchable edition of transcribed manuscript material from a variety of
regions in England. The findings show that during the period 1560–1760,
the North showed an early preference for -S when compared with the other
252
regions, but it was London that led the change from -TH to -S in the
depositions, with the East and West lagging behind. One explanation for
the resistance of the East to -S might be that it was in competition with the
zero inflection. The depositions genre resembles secular treatises (cf.
Kohnen 2011) and similar formal genres in being slow to adopt -S,
compared to genres such as letters (cf. Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg
2003). The earlier speech events rendered by the scribe as direct speech
showed a clear preference for -S, but these stretches of text are in the
minority in ETED. What this result suggests is that the text rendered as
direct speech in depositions is freer from scribal intervention than other
parts of the deposition texts, and thus may more accurately reflect the
language of the original speech event.
ETED = An Electronic Text Edition of Depositions 1560–1760 (ETED). 2011. Edited by
Merja Kytö, Peter J. Grund and Terry Walker. Available on the CD accompanying
Merja Kytö, Peter J. Grund and Terry Walker (2011).
Holmqvist, Erik. 1922. On the History of the English Present Inflections, Particularly th and -s. Heidelberg: Carl Winter.
Kohnen, Thomas. 2011. Religious language in 17th-century England: Progressive or
archaic? In Joachim Frenk and Lena Steveker (eds.), Anglistentag 2010
Saarbrücken: Proceedings (Proceedings of the Conference of the German
Association of University Teachers of English 32), Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag
Trier, 279–287.
Kytö, Merja, Peter J. Grund and Terry Walker. 2011. Testifying to Language and Life
in Early Modern England. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Nevalainen, Terttu and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg. 2003. Historical Linguistics:
Language Change in Tudor and Stuart England. London: Pearson Education.
Conservatism and innovation in Anglo-Saxon scribal practice
Christine Wallis
University of Sheffield
Keywords: Old English, Manuscript Studies, Old English Prose, Scribal
Practice
The text of the Old English Bede (OEB) which appears in Cambridge, Corpus
Christi College 41 (‘B’) has been studied chiefly for the way its West-Saxon
dialect departs from the Mercian text of older OEB manuscripts, such as
Oxford, Bodleian Tanner 10 (‘T’). Grant (1989) focuses on the novelty of B’s
West-Saxon language, while Wallis (2013) suggests that its first scribe was a
253
‘translator’, replacing exemplar forms with ones from his own repertoire as
he wrote. Rowley (2004) advocates viewing B as a West-Saxon artefact,
and not as a sub-standard version of the Mercian original.
This paper proposes a new approach to B’s text, based on a study of the
scribal behaviour evident in the four main surviving OEB manuscripts. An
examination of the linguistic forms in these four manuscripts enables the
creation of an OEB-specific textual continuum, whereby ‘conservative’
(often Mercian or older) and ‘innovative’ (West-Saxon or late) scribal
features can be identified in the context of the OEB manuscripts. As a
result of this comparative scribal viewpoint, it is possible to place B’s
textual features on the conservative-innovative continuum, identifying not
only the first scribe’s innovative dialectal forms, but also the relict features
he retained from the exemplar. For example, doubled vowels occur in
certain words in older manuscripts such as T, and although B’s first scribe
often writes single vowels, occasional relicts with doubled vowels remain.
The scribe’s behaviour is then categorised according to the classification
used by Benskin and Laing (1981) in their compilation of the Linguistic Atlas
of Late Mediaeval English. Finally, the paper proposes some conclusions
about the age and status of B’s exemplar, based on the scribal decisions
evident in its text. B was apparently copied from a manuscript which was
conservative in terms of the OEB, and in addition was partially illegible.
These factors influenced the shape of B’s text in spite of its first scribe’s
translating behaviour.
Benskin, Michael and Margaret Laing. 1981. ‘Translations and Mischsprachen in
Middle English Manuscripts.’ So Meny People Longages and Tonges: Philological
Essays in Scots and Medieval English Presented to Angus McIntosh, eds. M.
Benskin and M. L. Samuels. Edinburgh: Benskin and Samuels. 55-106.
Grant, Raymond J. S. 1989. The B Text of the Old English Bede: A Linguistic
Commentary. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Rowley, Sharon M. 2004. ‘Nostalgia and the Rhetoric of Lack: The Missing Exemplar
for Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Manuscript 41.’ Old English Literature in
its Manuscript Context, ed. Joyce Tally Lionarons. Morgantown: West Virginia
University Press.
Wallis, Christine. 2013. The Old English Bede: Transmission and Textual History in
Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts. Unpublished PhD, University of Sheffield.
254
On the competition of two intensifiers: ME full and very
Jerzy Welna
University of Warsaw
Keywords: full, grammaticalization, intensifier, semantic change, very
The native English adjective full (OE full < PGmc *full-az) ‘full’ and the
French loan adjective verrai ‘very’ both became grammaticalized and
developed intensifier functions in different periods of mediaeval English, cf.
constructions like OE/ME ful gōde and ME very good. Of the two, only very
has survived, although its original lexical meaning ‘true’ is still found in
peripheral usage; cf. phrases like the very man, the very truth, etc. The
adjective ful(l) ‘complete’, which developed the function of the intensifier
as early as Old English, remained for some time in rivalry with the
loanword, eventually losing the competition (cf. my earlier study of 2000).
The following examples illustrate the two historical functions of full and
very:
The adjectives (a) full (< Gmc) and (b) verrai (< French) (lexical function)
modifying nouns:
(a) Sele þonne cælic fulne to drincanne (Sax. Leechd. II. 268) [‘full
chalice’];
(b) He was a verray, parfit gentil knyght (Chaucer, CT, GP 72) [‘true …
knight’].
The same words in the function of intensifiers (grammaticalized)
modifying adjectives or adverbs:
(a) (…) þa men (…) ne maʒon ful eaþe locian onʒean sunnan.
(Boethius xxxviii, §5) [‘very easily’];
(b) But for he was verray repauntant he was exciled for þe fey.
(Trevisa Higden (Rolls) V. 329) [‘very contrite’].
Focusing on the rivalry of these two intensifiers in Middle English, the
present contribution exploits the evidence from the Innsbruck Corpus of
Middle English Prose (Markus 2008) in order to explain the regional and
temporal conditioning of the competition, in particular:
(a)
the loss of the intensifier function by full, and its survival in the
adjectival function;
255
(b)
the acquisition by very of the intensifier function combined with
the loss of the status of an adjective, except in peripheral usage.
It is evident that the processes (a) and (b) were in close correlation,
although a question to be solved concerns the initiation of the change, i.e.
whether the declining use of full as an intensifier caused the
grammaticalization of verrai or whether a reverse process took place, which
resembles the well-known controversy on “push” and “drag chains”
operating in phonological change. The process also had a syntactic
dimension since in contemporary standard usage full modifies nouns,
whereas very stands before adjectives and adverbs. Special attention is
given to cases when full and very coincide in the same text, having the
same function of intensifiers. The semantic and quantitative analysis will be
based on data from around one hundred selected Middle English prose
texts (ca. 4,000,000 words) from the Innsbruck Corpus. Other sources like
the Oxford English Dctionary or Middle English Dictionary online are also
consulted.
As regards the theoretical framework of grammaticalization in English,
reference is made, among others, to the studies by Fischer ― Rosenbach
(2000) and Brems ― Hoffmann (2012).
Bergs, Alexander ― Laurel J. Brinton (eds.) (2012) English Historical Linguistics. An
International Handbook. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
Brems, Lieselotte ― Sebastian Hoffmann (2012) “New perspectives, theories and
methods: grammaticalization”. In: A. Bergs ― L.J. Brinton (eds.), 1558-1576.
Fischer, Olga ― Anette Rosenbach (2000) “Introduction”. In: Olga Fischer ― Anette
Rosenbach ― Dieter Stein (eds.), 1-137.
Fischer, Olga ― Anette Rosenbach ― Dieter Stein (eds.) (2000) Pathways of Change.
Grammaticalization in English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Markus, Manfred (2008) Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose. Innsbruck:
University of Innsbruck.
Wełna, Jerzy (2000) “Grammaticalization in Early English”. Studia Anglica
Posnaniensia 35: 43-51.
256
The interaction of stress and final -e
in Gower’s and Chaucer’s Romance nouns
Gyöngyi Werthmüller
Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest
Keywords: phonology, stress, metre, ME, final -e
This paper intends to shed more light on two ME phonological phenomena
(whose interaction, without finer details, was pointed out by e.g. Cable
1998: 41): (1) variable stress in disyllables (mostly Romance nouns); and (2)
the retention or dropping of final -e. I compare the stress patterns of two
contemporaries, Chaucer (CANTERBURY TALES) and Gower (CONFESSIO AMANTIS).
In agreement with Minkova (1997 and 2000), I argue that Chaucer’s stress
pattern was essentially Germanic, and that line-final and line-medial
occurrences must be considered separately. Robinson’s (1971: 109–131)
view that the stress in such words is on the first syllable even line-finally,
will be dismissed.
My focus is shifted towards Gower, as his phonology and metre are
vastly under-researched.
1) Overall, Chaucer’s phonology is more Germanic than that of Gower.
Gower has more end-stressed instances, and he virtually never drops final e-s, except, as a rule, before a word-initial vowel (elision). Cf.
X
/
X
/
0
|And cer|teinly |ther na|ture wol |nat wer|che| (CT. D 1461) –
pron. [ná:tyur]
X /
X
|Of whos |natu|rë this |I fin|de| (CONFESSIO II 414) – pron.
[natyú:re]
2) Some words ending in inherited (etymological) -e appear almost
exclusively line-finally in both of them. Line-medially, too, they are endstressed.
corage
Chaucer
Gower
Line-final:
17 = 77%
53 = 91%
Line-medial:
5 = 23 %
5 = 9%
3) A word without an etymological -e (like resoun) is more likely to be frontstressed than a word with one (figure). The data (line-final and first-foot
examples ignored):
resoun
Chaucer
Gower
Front-stress:
15 = 100%
130 = 83%
pron. [ré:zun]
End-stress:
0 = 0%
26 = 17 %
pron. [rezú:n]
257
TOTAL:
15 = 100%
156 = 100%
figure
Chaucer
Gower
Front-stress:
3 = 40%
4 = 27%
pron. [fígyur]
End-stress:
2 = 60%
11 = 73 %
pron. [figyú:r]
TOTAL:
5 = 100%
15 = 100%
4) The textual occurrence of instances is unevenly distributed, suggestive of
the poet’s (current) state of language. The 26 end-stressed (French-like)
instances of resóun, for instance, appear in clusters in Gower’s CONFESSIO.
List of occurrences (loci forming an agglomeration underlined):
Prologue. 488
Book I. 775 1051
Book II. -----Book III. 1159 1163 1177 1601 2428
Book IV. 205 543
Book V. 124 1413 2580 5161 7388 7706
Book VI. 549 961 1237 2416
Book VII. 488 517 4936
Book VIII. 2236 2836 2862
This research will be extended to Chaucer, and to Langland’s PIERS PLOWMAN.
Cable, Thomas. 1998. Metrical similarities between Gower and certain sixteenthcentury poets. In: Robert F. Yeager (ed.). Re-visioning Gower. Ashville, NC:
Pegasus. 39-48.
Furnivall, Frederick J. (ed.) 2006. The Hengwrt MS of Chaucer’s Canterbury tales. Ann
Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Library, London: Published for the
Chaucer
Society
by
N.
Trübner, 1868-1879.
Available
online:
http://name.umdl.umich.edu/AGZ8233.0001.001. Last accessed: 05.12.2013.
Minkova, Donka. 1997. Constraint ranking in Middle English stress-shifting. English
Language and Linguistics 1: 135-175.
Minkova, Donka. 2000. Middle English prosodic innovations and their testability in
verse. In: Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen, Päivi Pahta and Matti Rissanen
(eds.). Placing Middle English in context. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 431–461.
Peck, Russell A. (ed.) 2000. John Gower: Confessio Amantis. Kalamazoo, Michigan:
Medieval Institute Publications. Available online: http://d.lib.rochester.edu
/teams/text-online. Last accessed: 04.12.2013.
Robinson, Ian. 1971. Chaucer’s prosody: a study of the Middle English verse tradition.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
258
Word order variation in Late Middle English:
Information structure, dialects and sociolinguistic factors
Marit Westergaard & Tamás Eitler
University of Tromsø – ELTE
During the Old English period (OE), the variation in verb second (V2) word
order was generally stable, with V2 in non-subject-initial declaratives
mainly appearing with NP subjects and non-V2 with pronouns. This has
been analyzed as a so-called IP-V2 grammar (e.g. Kroch & Taylor 2007) or
one in which word order is the result of information structure (IS) factors
(e.g. Bech 2001, Westergaard 2009). It is well known that the V2 variation
in the Middle English (ME) period was more extensive: While in early ME,
the relative word order of subject and verb was very similar to what it was
in OE, the word order at the end of the ME period was relatively close to
Present-day English in this respect (i.e. a Non-V2 grammar).
The late ME period also saw a certain rise of V2 in some linguistic
contexts, e.g. with auxiliaries and unaccusative verbs (Warner 2007, van
Kemenade & Westergaard 2012). Furthermore, northern dialects as well as
East Anglian displayed a grammar where V2 was a syntactic requirement
(referred to as CP-V2), due to influence from Scandinavian languages in
these areas. Thus, there was considerable synchronic variation at this time,
with different V2 grammars existing side by side. This word order variation
has been analyzed as the result of dialect differences and sociolinguistic
factors, e.g. Eitler (2006).
The present paper discusses V2 variation in late ME by providing a close
investigation of four texts written around 1350-1400. The texts were all
produced by the same author, Geoffrey Chaucer, and show considerable
variation in V2. Our investigation takes into account both IS factors as well
dialectal differences/social factors such as the intended readership of the
written texts, i.e. a local, regional or national audience. We show that both
types of factors are important to understand this intra-speaker variation at
this crucial time in the history of the English language.
Bech, Kristin. 2001. Word Order Patterns in Old and Middle English: A Syntactic and
Pragmatic Study. Doctoral dissertation, University of Bergen.
Eitler, Tamás. 2006. Some sociolectal, dialectal and communicative aspects of word
order variation in late Middle English. Doctoral dissertation, Eötvös Loránd
University.
Kemenade, Ans van & Marit Westergaard. 2012. ‘Syntax and information structure:
Verb-second variation in Middle English.’ In Anneli MeurmanSolin, María José
López-Couso & Bettelou Los (eds.) Information Structure and Syntactic Change in
259
the History of English (Oxford Studies in the History of English 2), 87-118. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Kroch, Anthony & Ann Taylor. 1997. ‘Verb Movement in Old and Middle English:
Dialect variation and language contact.’ Parameters of Morphosyntactic Change
ed. by Ans van Kemenade & Nigel Vincent, 297–325. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Warner, Anthony. 2007. ‘Parameters of variation between verb-subject and subjectverb order in late Middle English.’ English Language and Linguistics 11.1,
81−112.
Westergaard, Marit. 2009. ‘The Development of Word Order in Old and Middle
English: The Role of Information Structure and First Language Acquisition.’
Diachronica 26.1, 65-102.
A diachronic investigation of evidentiality and genre variation in English
Richard J. Whitt
The University of Nottingham
Evidentiality--the linguistic encoding of a speaker or writer’s evidence for a
proposition--has gained prominence in linguistics since the early 1980s. As a
social phenomenon, evidential markers play a key role in establishing a
speaker’s credibility both within the discourse context and the larger
discourse community. Although most studies on evidentiality have focused
on languages in which speaker evidence is encoded in verbal morphology
(Aikhenvald 2004), investigations into evidential markers in English are not
lacking, but most of these studies focus on genre-specific contexts of
modern-day usage (Chafe 1986; Hyland 2005; Bednarek 2006).
Some attention has been paid to the development of evidential
markers in the history of English (Gisborne & Holmes 2007; Whitt 2010),
particularly within grammaticalization studies (Brinton 1996; Traugott
1997), as well as in diachronically-oriented studies on the connection
between discourse context and marking of information source
(Taavitsainen 2001; Busse 2012; Grund 2012). Even so, these studies have
focused either on a small number of markers or on a single genre, thus
leaving several issues unaddressed: varying uses of the same evidential
marker in diverse discourse contexts (genres); changing uses of evidential
markers within a single genre and among different genres in the history of
English;
and
possible
connections
between
processes
of
grammaticalization, subjectification, and genre-specific uses of evidential
markers.
260
This paper provides a first step in addressing these issues in the
historical study of evidential markers and their evolution in English.
Focusing on verbal (promise, threaten, seem, see, hear) and adverbial
(supposedly, apparently) realizations of evidentiality, I will examine the
influence of the larger discourse context on the use of evidential markers
from the Early Modern period onwards, and see whether particular types of
evidentiality (direct vs. indirect, perceptual vs. inferential) are more
frequent in certain genres, and social contexts, than others (legal vs.
literary, scientific vs. religious, etc.). As this is a first-step in finding
correlations between genre and the evolution of evidential markers, data
will be drawn from general historical corpora such as Helsinki and ARCHER.
Since evidentiality is a highly subjective phenomenon because it rests solely
in the speaker’s or writer’s point-of-view, it is predicted that the genres
that display more overt presence of speaker or writer (e.g. the use of firstperson pronouns) will exhibit a higher degree of evidential phenomena
than those genres touted as more objective and distant from any one
individual’s perspective. Likewise, as generic styles change over time, so will
the nature of evidential marking.
Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2004. Evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bednarek, Monika. 2006. “Epistemological Positioning and Evidentiality in English
News Discourse: A Text-Driven Approach”. Text and Talk 26.6: 635-660.
Brinton, Laurel J. 1996. Pragmatic Markers in English: Grammaticalization and
Discourse Functions. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter.
Busse, Beatrix. 2012. “Historical Text Analysis: Underlying Parameters and
Methodological Procedures”. In Methods in Contemporary Linguistics. Eds.
Andrea Ender, Adrian Leemann, and Bernhard Wächli. Berlin/New York: de
Gruyter, 285-308.
Chafe, Wallace. 1986. “Evidentiality in English Conversation and Academic Writing”.
In Evidentiality: The Linguistic Coding of Epistemology. Eds. Wallace Chafe and
Johanna Nichols. Norwood: NJ: Ablex Publishing Corp., 261-272.
Gisborne, Nikolas and Jasper Holmes. 2007. “A History of English Evidential Verbs of
Appearance”. English Language and Linguistics 11.1: 1-29.
Grund, Peter J. 2012. “The Nature of Knowledge: Evidence and Evidentiality in the
Witness Depositions from the Salem Witch Trials”. American Speech 87.1: 7-38.
Hyland, Ken. 2005. Metadiscourse: Exploring Interaction in Writing. London:
Continuum.
Taavitsainen, Irma. 2001. “Evidentiality and Scientific Thought-Styles: English Medical
Writing in Late Middle English and Early Modern English”. In Modality in
Specialized Texts: Selected Papers of the 1st CERLIS Conference. Eds. Maurizio
Gotti and Marina Dossena. Bern: Peter Lang, 21-52.
261
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1997. “Subjectification and the Development of Epistemic
Meaning: The Case of promise and threaten”. In Modality in Germanic
Languages: Historical and Comparative Perspectives. Eds. Toril Swan and Olaf
Jansen Westvik. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 185-210.
Whitt, Richard J. 2010. Evidentiality and Perception Verbs in English and German.
Oxford/Bern: Peter Lang.
th
th
Reporting clauses in 18 and 19 century English:
A diachronic study of past tense I said and historic present I says
Bianca Widlitzki
Justus Liebig University Giessen
Keywords: corpus linguistics, Late Modern English
This paper investigates the use of I says and I said as reporting clauses in
spoken English in the 18th and 19th centuries. In contemporary English, I
says frequently serves as an alternative to I said in conversations narrating
past time events (cf. Carter & McCarthy 2006: 823). The same can be
observed in this example from 1807:
(1)
I spoke to him, I says halloo, what are you about there? (OBC,
t18070114-74)
While current usage has been discussed within larger analyses of spoken
language (e.g. Rühlemann 2007), little attention has been paid to I says in
earlier stages of English. The present study therefore makes the historical
development its focus and approaches the subject from a qualitative and
quantitative corpus linguistic perspective.
The Old Bailey Corpus, spanning the years 1720-1913, (OBC,
http://www.uni-giessen.de/oldbaileycorpus), was chosen for the
investigation of this conversational phenomenon. It is based on the
Proceedings of the Old Bailey (http://www.oldbaileyonline.org), London’s
central criminal court, whose verbatim passages are a reasonably close
representation of spoken interaction in the courtroom. The corpus contains
14 million words and offers detailed mark-up for sociolinguistic (sex, social
class, age), pragmatic (role in court) and textual variables (the shorthand
scribe, printer and publisher of individual Proceedings).
A first analysis of the more than 14,000 reporting clauses with a firstperson subject pronoun and either says or said shows that said is the more
262
frequent variant, accounting for about 90% of the tokens. This picture is
complicated by the highly uneven distribution of its alternative says: while
th
it is found in about 24% of all possible contexts in the 18 century, this
th
proportion drops to less than 1% in the 19 century. Considering the
widespread use of the form in contemporary spoken English, this is
surprising.
It is possible that these results are at least partly due to changing
editorial practices rather than drastic changes in usage. Therefore, the
possible influence of scribes, printers and publishers of the Proceedings will
subsequently be investigated. Additionally, the OBC results will be
compared to data from the CLMET (Corpus of Late Modern English Texts,
Diller et al. 2011), a more balanced corpus containing material from 17101920, in order to locate them within a broader context. This will also permit
a discussion across different text types and highlight the importance of this
factor for studies of the (spoken) language of the past.
Carter Ronald; McCarthy, Michael (2006). Cambridge Grammar of English: A
Comprehensive Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Diller, Hans-Jürgen; De Smet, Hendrik; Tyrkkö, Jukka (2011). The Corpus of Late
Modern English Texts, version 3.0. <https://perswww.kuleuven.be/~u0044428/
clmet3_0.htm> [27 November 2013].
Rühlemann, Christoph (2007). Conversation in context: a corpus-driven approach.
London: Continuum.
More cutting than the sword: Verbal irony and ‘civilizing trends’ of power
in medieval Englishes
Graham Williams
University of Sheffield
Keywords: verbal irony, court culture, ethnopragmatics, (im)politeness,
early Middle English
In The Origins of Courtliness (1985), Jaeger argues that the performance of
power in the Middle Ages underwent significant linguistic-pragmatic
change within peacetime programs led by ‘courtier bishops’ (e.g. Otto of
Bamberg) - men of learning sought after by rulers who expected them to
promote more ‘civilizing trends’ at their early European courts. Central to
this project were ‘wit, eloquence, and the mastering of impulse, not
weapons’, wherein the mastery of verbal irony, or facetia, in particular was
becoming ‘the rule at court’ (Jaeger 1985: 39 and 165). And while evidence
263
for the Anglo-Saxon court is thinner than for some of its European
contemporaries, there is textual evidence that verbal irony had currency in
Old and Early Middle English; and in this vein, I will argue that practices of
discourse may provide links for otherwise obscure cultural connections.
More specifically, evidence for verbal irony - seen from an ethnographic
perspective - is significant for our understanding of OE communication, and
it serves to forward the most recent research on OE pragmatics and
politeness, which discusses the influences of warlike Germanic values
sublimated vis-à-vis Christian ethos (e.g. caritas), but has yet to connect
with the courtliness that becomes so important for later Middle English
(see Jucker 2012). Discussing extracts from Old and Early Middle English
texts (including Beowulf and The Owl and the Nightingale), this paper
argues for a richer, more complex view of medieval pragmatics, and also
speaks to the possible origins of the now-ubiquitous discourses of verbal
irony, sarcasm and mock (im)politeness in English.
Jaeger, C. Stephen. The Origins of Courtliness ~ Civilizing Trends and the Formation of
Courtly Ideals ~ 939-1210 (Philadelphia, 1985).
Jucker, Andreas H. ‘Changes in politeness cultures’, in Terttu Nevalainen and
Elizabeth Closs Traugott (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the History of English
(New York, 2012), 422-33.
Grammar change as semantic change
Margaret E. Winters
Wayne State University, Detroit
The present proposal is part of a larger project on the meaningfulness of
grammar. Langacker (1987:2) states that “[g]rammar (or syntax) does not
constitute an autonomous formal level of representations. Instead,
grammar is symbolic in nature, consisting in the conventional symbolization
of semantic structure.” This view of the nature of syntax has long been
taken for granted as one of the basic tenets of Cognitive Semantics. It has,
further, been demonstrated numerous times for specific structures, among
them, in the literature of English linguistics, Heyvaert and Cuycken’s
analysis of the difference between finite and gerundive complementation
(2010) and Dancygier and Sweetser’s (2005) work on hypotheticals.
What has not been widely considered, to the best of my knowledge, is
to what degree this view of syntax reflects an absolute fact about the
nature of grammar. Is the notion of grammar as symbolic of meaning
264
universal to all constructions in all languages at all times? Alternatively, is it
a strong tendency which can, therefore, be widely studied with the
understanding, however, that there exist certain kinds of exceptions? If the
latter case, it would follow that there are areas of syntax and morphology
which are indeed automatic, solely structural.
The synchronic possibilities sketched above (of an absolute or relative
universal) are reflected in a diachronic question: is all syntactic change
semantic or is semantic only part of the time? In the latter case, what
might be the determiners of how change is motivated, as a semantic
development or a structural one.
The present paper will explore these questions. The discussion will be
based on case studies from the history of English, it will attempt to identify
principled ways to determine the absolute or relative semanticity of
language change and, if relative, the determining factors in semantic or
structural explanations for change.
Dancygier, Barbara and Eve Sweetser. 2005. Mental Spaces in Grammar. Cambridge
University Press.
Heyvaert Liesbet
and Hubert Cuyckens. 2010. “Finite and gerundive
complementation in Modern and Present-day English: Semantics, variation and
change” in Winters, Tissari, and Allan, eds., Diachronic Cognitive Semantics, pp.
132-159.. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Langacker, Ronald W. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. vol. 1. Stanford
University Press.
Tracing an obsolete preterite-present verb: The fates of OE *dugan
Anna Wojtyś
Univerisity of Warsaw
Keywords: preterite-present verbs, demise, *dugan/deah, synonyms,
impersonal constructions
While numerous studies (e.g. Lightfoot 1979 and 2009, Warner 1993,
Fischer 2003, a.o.) discuss the evolution of those preterite-presents which
have survived as modal verbs, little attention is paid to those lost. Following
my earlier study on the loss of unnan (forthcoming), the present paper
focuses on another non-surviving preterite-present verb, i.e. *dugan/deah
‘avail, be of use’. Although the verb exhibited a low frequency (only ca. 110
occurrences registered by DOE), it continued in use throughout Old and
Middle English and “became obsolete by maybe the end of the ME period”
265
(Denison 1993: 296). The exception is some northern dialects and Scottish
English, where it still functions as dow ‘to be able, to be willing’ (cf., e.g.,
Scottish National Dictionary).
The paper attempts to account for the disappearance of *dugan from
English taking under consideration both language internal and external
factors. First of all, all the uses of *dugan in Old English are examined to
identify its main and peripheral meanings as well as the contexts of use.
The results show that the verb is chiefly attested in medical writings
(Leechdoms) in the sense ‘be effective’, typically with reference to various
rd
medicines. The prevailing form is that of the 3 person singular present,
often found in impersonal constructions. The data obtained from Middle
English texts collected in the Innsbruck Corpus, LAEME, CMEPV and MEMT
show that although *dugan developed the new meaning of ‘being fit or
proper’ and a modal sense, ‘have ability’, each century witnessed its
decreasing frequency. The plausible causes of its demise examined in the
study include semantic bleaching, loss of impersonal constructions from
English and the presence of the closest synonyms of *dugan, such as mæg,
framian/fremian, helpan or avail, which might have been responsible for
the displacement of the verb in medical texts, the main source of its
attestation.
Campbell, Alistair (1959) Old English Grammar. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Denison, David (1993) English Historical Syntax: Verbal Constructions. London and
New York: Longman.
DiPaolo Healey, Antonette, Joan Holland, Ian McDougall & Peter Mielke (2000) The
Dictionary of Old English Corpus in Electronic Form. Toronto: DOE Project 2000.
Fischer, Olga (2003) “The development of the modals in English: Radical versus
gradual changes”. In: David Hart (ed.) English Modality in Context. (Linguistic
Insights. Studies in Language and Communication 11). (Bern: Peter Lang), 17-32.
Laing, Margaret (ed.) (2008-) A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, 1150-1325.
[http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laeme1/laeme1.html]. Edinburgh: The University
of Edinburgh.
Lightfoot, David (1979) Principles of Diachronic Syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Lightfoot, David (2009) “Cuing a New Grammar.” In: Ans van Kemenade & Bettelou
Los (eds.) The Handbook of the History of English. (Malden, MA and Oxford:
Blackwell), 24–44.
Markus, Manfred (1999) Innsbruck Computer Archive of Machine-Readable English
Texts (ICAMET). CD-ROM version. University of Innsbruck.
McSparran, Frances. The Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse.
[http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/m/mec/] Ann Arbor: Humanities Text Initiative
University of Michigan.
Mitchell, Bruce (1985) Old English Syntax. Vols. 1-2. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
266
Ringe, Don (2006) From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Scottish National Dictionary [available online at http://www.dsl.ac.uk/index.html]
Sievers, Eduard (1903) An Old English Grammar. 3rd ed. Boston: Ginn and Company.
Taavitsainen, Irma, Päivi Pahta & Martti Mäkinen (2005) Middle English Medical
Texts. CD-ROM. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs (1972) A History of English Syntax. A Transformational
Approach to the History of English Sentence Structure. New York: Holt, Rinehart,
and Winston.
Warner, A. (1993) English Auxiliaries. Structure and History. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Movability of dative-marked objects of transitive adjectives
in Old English
Tomohiro Yanagi
Chubu University
Keywords: transitive adjectives, movability of objects, inherent Case,
structural Case
In Old English some adjectives, unlike their corresponding ones of presentday English, could take nominal objects without recourse to any
preposition. This class of adjectives is called ‘transitive adjectives’ in the
literature (cf. Maling 1983 and van Kemenade 1987). The objects were
marked with genitive or dative Case. Two examples of dative-marked
objects are given in (1).
(1)
a. Witodlice þa arleasan beoð heora yfelum weorcum gelice.
‘Verily the wicked shall be like their own evil deeds.’
(ÆLS
[Christmas] 215.170)
b. þæt oðer wæs lic anre leon hiwe
‘the second was like a Lion’s form’
(ÆLS [Mark] 180.3314)
In (1a) the dative-marked object heora yfelum weorcum ‘their evil deeds’
precedes the adjective gelice ‘like’, whereas in (1b) the dative object anre
leon hiwe ‘a Lion’s form’ follows the adjective lic ‘like’. This paper, focusing
in particular on dative-marked objects taken by transitive adjectives like the
ones in (1), investigates syntactic properties of those objects in adjectival
constructions, in comparison with objects of transitive verbs. Through a
study of the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose
267
(Taylor et al. 2003), I will identify syntactic similarities and differences
between objects of transitive verbs and adjectives.
Transitive verbs and adjectives show the same word order patterns.
Just like the examples of adjectives in (1), accusative-marked objects can
either precede or follow their governing verbs in transitive verb
constructions. In addition, objects of both kinds of predicate can be
topicalized. An example of an adjective is given in (2).
(2)
Þysum weorce wæs sum oþer gelic
‘Another work was like this one
(ÆLS [Martin] 474.6265)
The two kinds of predicate, however, exhibit a different behavior with
respect to the so-called Object Shift (cf. Holmberg 1986 and Thráinsson
2001). Objects of transitive verbs can move across adverbs when the finite
verbs overtly moves out of their base-generated positions, which is often
called ‘Holmberg’s Generalization’ (Holmberg 1986). On the other hand,
objects of transitive adjectives can hardly move across adverbs. This is
because adjectives cannot be raised overtly and does not satisfy
Holmberg’s Generalization. I will argue that the similarities and differences
can be attributed to layers of clause structure where transitive verbs and
adjectives are used—objects of transitive adjectives are hierarchically
embedded ‘more deeply’—and Case assignment mechanism—objects of
transitive verbs are structurally Case-marked while those of transitive
adjectives are inherently Case-marked.
Holmberg, Anders (1986) Word Order and Syntactic Features in Scandinavian
Languages and English, PhD Dissertation, University of Stockholm.
Kemenade, Ans van (1987) Syntactic Case and Morphological Case in the History of
English, Dordrecht, Foris.
Maling, Joan (1983) “Transitive Adjectives: A Case of Categorial Reanalysis,” in
Linguistic Categories: Auxiliaries and Related Puzzles, Vol. 1, edited by F. Heny
and B. Richards, 253-289, Dordrecht, Reidel.
Taylor, Ann, Anthony Warner, Susan Pintzuk, and Frank Beths (2003) The YorkToronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose. University of York.
Thráinsson, Höskuldur (2001) “Object Shift and Scrambling,” in The Handbook of
Contemporary Syntactic Theory, edited by M. Baltin and C. Collins, 148–202,
Malden, MA, Blackwell.
268
On privative verbs and the double object construction in Middle English
Eva Zehentner
University of Vienna
Keywords: ditransitive construction, dative alternation,
dispossession, Middle English, syntax-semantics interface
verbs
of
The present paper discusses the possible causes of the steady decrease of
privative verbs such as binimen, (bi)rēven, or robben (see example (1)) used
in the double object construction (DOC) during the Middle English period
(cf. Barðdal 2007; Colleman & De Clerck 2011; Mitchell 1985; Visser 1984).
(1)
(c1230(?a1200) Ancr.) Ouertrust reaueð godd his rihte dom & his
rihtwisnesse ‘Presumption robs God of his righteous judgment
and his justice’.
More precisely, the paper addresses the question whether there is a
correlation, or even a causal relationship, between the disappearance of
DOC clauses with this class of verbs and the rise of the dative alternation,
i.e. the possibility of ditransitive verbs to be paraphrased by a prepositional
pattern with to (or for):
(2)
(a1470 Malory) They gaff the godis [...] to theire knyghtes ‘They
gave the goods to their knights’.
It will be argued that it was mainly through the appearance of this
paraphrase that the semantics of the ditransitive construction became
increasingly associated with a basic ‘give’ situation involving the successful
transfer of a patient to a recipient (Goldberg 1995: 31-33). As a
consequence, uses at the periphery of this core meaning involving e.g.
verbs of dispossession (Colleman & De Clerck 2011: 204), were
marginalised and eventually ousted from the DOC pattern. This in turn led
to the increasing use of readily available alternative patterns, as shown in
example (3):
(3)
(c1405 (c1390) Chaucer Pars.) whan a womman steleth hir body
from hir housbonde ‘when a woman steals her body away from
her husband’.
269
These patterns were characterised by prepositional phrases with from (or
of) denoting the deprivée (or theme), and were able to propagate
themselves with great success due to a number of reasons. First, the
development catered to the general trend of moving from more synthetic
to more analytic patterns. Second, the development reinforced tendencies
and distinctions which were already present in Old English, but of which
some were blurred when morphological case marking was eroded (Allen
1995: 28-29; Visser 1984: 611, 632-633) – e.g. the availability of nonprototypical case frames such as ACCDeprivée GENTheme for privative verbs as
well as the presence of the more explicit prepositional paraphrases
involving from (Colleman & De Clerck 2011: 201).
Methodologically, this paper is based on a quantitative corpus study of
the relevant instances of privative verbs as well as to-/for-DOCs in the
Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English (PPCME2).
It will be demonstrated that the results not only confirm a strong
correlation and suggest a causal relationship between the two phenomena
in question, but that their investigation will enable us to draw more general
conclusions on argument structure and the syntax-semantics interface.
Allen, Cynthia L. 1995. Case marking and reanalysis: grammatical relations from Old
to Early Modern English. Oxford: OUP.
Barðdal, Jóhanna. 2007. The semantic and lexical range of the ditransitive
construction in the history of (North) Germanic. Functions of Language 14(1), 930.
Colleman, Timothy & Bernard De Clerck. 2011. Constructional semantics on the
move: on semantic specialization in the English double object construction.
Cognitive Linguistics 22(1), 183-209.
Goldberg, Adele E. 1995. A construction grammar approach to argument structure.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mitchell, Bruce. 1985. Old English syntax. Vol.1: Concord, the parts of speech, and the
sentence. Oxford: Clarendon.
Visser, Fredericus Th. 1964 [1984]. An historical syntax of the English language.
Leiden: Brill
.
270
Calamities and counterfactuals: A historical view of polarity reversal
Debra Ziegeler
Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3
Keywords: proximative adverbs, counterfactuality, polarity reversal
The past literature on the semantics of proximative adverbs in English, such
as almost, has been replete with argument over the precise definitions of
the inferences of negation that accompany the meanings of proximity
expressed by such adverbs. In suggesting, for example, that John almost fell
it is understood that he did not fall, and yet the negation is not part of the
meaning of the adverb. Such inferences have been classed as either
semantic entailments (e.g. Sevi 1998, Hitzeman 1992, Horn 2002, 2011,
Pons Bordería and Schwenter 2005, and Amaral 2007), or pragmatic
implicatures (e.g. Sadock 1981, Atlas 1984, 2005, and Ziegeler 2000, 2010).
Further research has revealed a large number of languages in which the
meanings of negation are no longer implicit in the context, but are
expressed overtly as a form of pleonastic negation (e.g. Wierzbicka 1986,
Kuteva 1998, Pons Bordería and Schwenter 2005, and Amaral 2007).
Schwenter 2002 and Pons Bordería and Schwenter 2005 have claimed the
presence of such expletive negation as evidence for an entailment analysis
of almost, following Horn’s (2002) analysis of the adverb as an unasserted
entailment. In the present paper, the adverb is considered as expressing
pragmatic counterfactual meaning rather than negative entailments.
The questions that arose from these earlier studies were first, whether
English has ever had a history of expletive negation accompanying the use
of almost, and second, why a language encodes expletive negation if the
negative inferences are so strong as to be labelled entailments. An initial
search of the use of almost from 1710-1925 in the CLMET(EV) Corpus
revealed that the representation of bare preterite verb complements
(those most likely to yield counterfactual meanings) was infrequent, but in
such cases, the complement referred to an event which was highly
undesirable, and often, hyperbolic. The evidence therefore supported
claims made earlier by Akatsuka and Strauss (2000) that counterfactuals are
used most often to express the avoidance of unfavourable events. A
comparison of the use of a synonymous adverb, nearly, using the same
corpora, yielded even more interesting results: that the development of
counterfactual meaning was a recent phenomenon, and that the
complement meaning has completely reversed its polarity from proximityto-P to proximity-to-not-P over a period of less than 300 years. The present
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paper investigates the reasons for such an orientation switch in the adverbs
almost and nearly, taking into account the predominance of complements
referring to calamitous events in the Late Modern English period, and using
limited data selected from the CLMET(EV) corpus. Factors accounted for
within the corpus search include the presence of other possible markers of
counterfactuality also referring to adversative situations.
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