4.1 Corpus distribution

As shown in table 1 based on the whole YCOE corpus, the quantitative data confirm that while conjunct clauses differ from main clauses in their stronger preference for VF, in subordinate clauses this order is still twice as frequent.

Table 1. General results for clauses with simple VPs

The tendency is similar for all the three subject types taken into account in the study (tables 2a–2c), but it is interesting to observe that conjunct clauses are rather close to main clauses when the subject is nominal (4% vs 9%), when it is pronominal the tendency for VF increases to 19 per cent, while in clauses with null subjects it soars up to 26 per cent.Footnote ³

Table 2a. General results for clauses with nominal subjects

Table 2b. General results for clauses with pronominal subjects

Table 2c. General results for clauses with null subjects

While it is true that the frequency of VF is highest with null subjects for all three clause types (see figure 1), the difference is most pronounced with conjunct clauses.Footnote ⁴

Figure 1. The proportion of VF in clauses with different subject types

All in all, the specific syntactic behaviour of conjunct clauses, placing them somewhere between ordinary main and subordinate clauses, is confirmed by the numbers. Interestingly enough, in some texts conjuncts are very close to subordinate clauses; see table 3. For instance in Bede, VF is present in 47 per cent of conjunct clauses and 54 per cent of subordinate clauses, while the Vercelli Homilies show practically no difference between the clause types, though the frequency of the VF order is generally on the low side (18% vs 19%).

Table 3. Proportion of the VF order in conjunct, main and subordinate clauses in the longest YCOE texts (clauses with simple VPs)

In most texts conjuncts are clearly between main and subordinate clauses. In some other texts, however, conjunct clauses are extremely close to main clauses, as e.g. in the Heptateuch and Cura Pastoralis (around 1–2 per cent of VF for both clause types). Thus, whatever the motivation for the use of the VF order in conjunct clauses, it cannot be universal but rather text-specific since this pattern was clearly avoided by some OE writers and translators.

The following sections present the impact of weight, lexical tendencies and the place of VF clauses in a larger context.

4.2 Weight

For Bech (Reference Bech2012), weight of the verb is one of the crucial factors promoting the use of the VF order in main and conjunct clauses, and weight in general is recognised as an important variable influencing word and constituent order in OE (Mitchell Reference Mitchell1985; Pintzuk & Taylor Reference Pintzuk, Taylor, van Kemenade and Los2006). Table 4 shows that length of the finite verb (measured in number of characters) has a very clear impact on the order of clauses regardless of clause type.

Table 4. The average length of the finite verb in all the analysed groups of clauses

It turns out that in VF main, conjunct and subordinate clauses the verb is visibly longer than in non-VF contexts, and this difference (though relatively largest in main and smallest in subordinate clauses) proves statistically significant in all three cases (independent samples T-Test, p<0.001). Thus, even though Bech's (Reference Bech2012) observation is confirmed beyond any doubt, it does not help us decide whether VF conjunct clauses are closer to VF main or to VF subordinate clauses since subordinates follow the same tendency as main clauses, placing the finite verb at the end more eagerly if the verb is relatively heavy. Examples (15)–(17) illustrate the typical clause-final placement of relatively long verb forms for all the clause types.

In short, this part of the analysis proves inconclusive since the impact of weight does not give a clear indication of the syntactic motivation for the use of the VF order in OE conjunct clauses. Weight turns out to be a universal phenomenon influencing all clause types in a similar way. Thus, it seems necessary to take a look at individual verbs and examine the collocational range of each clause pattern before any final conclusions are drawn.

4.3 Verbs attracted to the VF order

This section is based on collostructional methods used to measure the collocational range of syntactic structures, i.e. the collexeme analysis (Stefanowitsch & Gries Reference Stefanowitsch and Gries2003), which identifies lexical items attracted to and repulsed from the analysed construction in a statistically significant way, and the distinctive collexeme analysis (Gries & Stefanowitsch Reference Gries and Stefanowitsch2004), which focuses on competing structures, checking which variant is strongly preferred by which lexical element. The tests produce the so-called collostructional strength measure (CollStr), which is significant at p<0.01 if the result is 3 or higher.

When only absolute frequencies are reported, the most powerful verbal collocate of the VF conjunct clause is the verb wesan ‘to be’ (13 occurrences), closely followed by gewitan ‘to depart’ (11) and healdan ‘to hold, to keep’ (11). Nonetheless, when the data are fed into a collexeme analysis calculator (Gries Reference Gries2022), which checks this against the overall corpus frequency of the verbal lexemes, it turns out that wesan ‘to be’ is not attracted to the analysed pattern and its high frequency in the VF conjuncts is a by-product of its generally high frequency in YCOE (35,867 instances; see Cichosz et al. Reference Cichosz, Pęzik, Grabski, Karasińska, Adamczyk, Rybińska and Ostrowska2022).

Table 5 shows that the verbs strongly attracted to the analysed structure (gewitan ‘to depart’, gegan ‘to go, to happen’, asendan ‘to send’, afaran ‘to depart’, adrifan ‘to drive, to expel’) are indeed dynamic and punctual, and many of them are verbs of movement. The most frequent collocate, wesan, is actually repulsed from the construction with the CollStr measure of 2.02, which is significant at p<0.05.

Table 5. The verbs most strongly attracted to the VF conjunct clause

In the case of VF main clauses, the numbers are of course much lower given the rarity of the structure, but the strongest collocate is cuman ‘to come’ (7 occurrences), closely followed by gewitan ‘to depart’ (5), which is an interesting overlap with VF conjuncts.

The collexeme analysis (presented in table 6) confirms the strong association between gewitan ‘to depart’ and the VF order, observed for both main and conjunct clauses and illustrated with (18)–(19). Other strong collocates of VF in main clauses are ateon ‘to draw out’, cuman ‘to come’, mætan ‘to have a dream’ and afeormian ‘to cleanse’.

The verbs are also mostly dynamic and punctual, so the lexemes attested in both main and conjunct VF clauses follow the tendency described in Bech (Reference Bech2012). Subordinate clauses, however, diverge from this pattern, showing no clear semantic limitation as to the verbal collocates appearing in the VF structure.

Table 6. The verbs most strongly attracted to the VF main clause

Table 7 shows that these are both very dynamic and punctual verbs such as underfon ‘to receive’, becuman ‘to become, to happen’, onfon ‘to take’ or cuman ‘to come’ and stative and durative verbs such as habban ‘to have’, lufian ‘to love’ or even wesan ‘to be’, with the latter group illustrated by (20)–(21).

Such examples are much more difficult to find in main and conjunct VF clauses, though a careful comparisonFootnote ⁶ of a larger group of verbs attracted to each of the three clause types revealed numerous overlaps illustrated in figure 2.

Table 7. The verbs most strongly attracted to the VF subordinate clause

Figure 2. Overlaps in the verbs attracted to the VF pattern (see Appendix for a translated version)

When a larger number of verbs is taken into account, the tendency described by Bech (Reference Bech2012) becomes less clear since the shared collocates of conjunct and subordinate VF clauses include lufian ‘to love’ and libban ‘to live’, while main and subordinate clauses both attract habban ‘to have’, but it is true that all the verbs illustrated in the graph are predominantly non-stative and non-durative. What is more, despite numerous shared verbal lexemes, wesan remains a specific collocate of the VF subordinate clause, repulsed from the VF conjunct and main clauses.

Nonetheless, the picture is not complete yet. So far, we have only looked at VF structures, but there is another test which may shed more light on the situation, i.e. the distinctive collexeme analysis, which compares the frequency of lexemes between competing structures, checking which of them are preferred by either variant. In this case, the test allows us to model the competition between VF and non-VF order in particular clause types, as illustrated by tables 8a–8c (the rows where VF is the preferred variant are shown in bold to make the results clearer).

Table 8a. Results of the distinctive collexeme analysis for conjunct clauses (20 most significant results)

Table 8b. Results of the distinctive collexeme analysis for main clauses (10 most significant results)

Table 8c. Results of the distinctive collexeme analysis for subordinate clauses (20 most significant results)

One basic observation to be made on the basis of the data is that while punctual non-durative verbs are not consistent in their preferences (e.g. cweþan ‘to say’ prefers the non-VF order, while geendian ‘to end’ selects VF), the VF pattern is almost never preferred by stative durative verbs regardless of clause type. In order to highlight the striking lexical similarities between the clause types, tables 9 and 10 group the verbs which most significantly prefer one variant over the other.

Table 9. Verbs preferring the VF over the non-VF order in particular clause types

Table 10. Verbs preferring the non-VF over the VF order in particular clause types

It is quite striking that in all the three clause types punctual and dynamic verbs show the strongest preference for the VF order, while stative and durative verbs such as wesan ‘to be’, beon ‘to be’ and habban ‘to have’ belong to the strongest collocates of non-VF. Interestingly, despite the general attraction of wesan to the VF subordinate clause, when the choice is limited to VF and non-VF, the lexeme shows definite preference for the latter. Thus, the lexical distance between main, conjunct and subordinate VF clauses is largely diminished: they all seem to favour punctual and dynamic verbs and clearly disprefer statives.

All in all, the analysis shows that the lexical preferences of verbs observed in VF main, conjunct and subordinate clauses are strikingly similar, which means that collocational range is not a factor that may help us determine whether the OE VF conjunct clauses are closer to main or subordinate clauses following the same order.

4.4 Place in discourse and syntactic priming

So far, the factors taken into account in the analysis have failed to answer the basic research question of this study, i.e. whether the VF order is used in conjunct clauses in a way similar to main or subordinate clauses. The last variable which was expected to provide some hints as to the syntactic status of VF conjuncts was discourse function, which was supposed to be similar for VF main and conjunct clauses (Bech Reference Bech2012). Such a detailed analysis of function required a more qualitative approach. For this purpose, I have extracted samples of VF and non-VF conjunct and main clauses from each text where the proportion of the VF order in conjunct clauses was higher than 15 per cent (see table 3): Bede's History, Catholic Homilies I and II, Blickling Homilies, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle E, Orosius and Vercelli Homilies. The samples were supposed to consist of 10 clauses from 4 clause types (conjunct VF, conjunct non-VF, main VF and main non-VF), i.e. 40 clauses per text, but this approach turned out to have its limitations in the case of VF main clauses since most of the texts showed fewer instances of the pattern, so the overall number of VF main clauses taken into account in the qualitative analysis is 42 instead of the expected 70 (see tables 12 and 14).

Since the basis of this investigation is Bech's (Reference Bech2012) observation that VF conjunct and non-conjunct main clauses function in a similar way in OE discourse, the same methodology was followed in this study, with the analysis based on the Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (Asher & Lascarides Reference Asher and Lascarides2003; Asher & Vieu Reference Asher and Vieu2005). Accordingly, the analysed clauses were categorised as representing coordinating or subordinating discourse relations. In the former case, the clause belongs to the main line of narrative, pushing the story forward. In the latter, it is placed in a substructure of the text, presenting background, providing additional information, comments or explanations. Even though Bech (Reference Bech2012: 81–2) admits that there is no straightforward relation between word order and discourse structure in OE, her study shows that VF clauses rarely represent subordinating relations: their basic function is to continue and develop the main storyline.

As shown in tables 11 and 12, the analysis confirms both Bech's (Reference Bech2012) findings and her reservations: while VF conjunct and main clauses are indeed used to introduce events from the main line of narration, they are hardly exceptional in this respect since this is the main function of the great majority of all clauses taken into account in the analysis.

Table 11. Discourse function of VF and non-VF conjunct clauses

Table 12. Discourse function of VF and non-VF main clauses

Therefore, even though there is a functional similarity between VF conjunct and non-conjunct main clauses, it is not a convincing discriminator since it transpires that in some texts or text types (especially clearly narrative texts such as chronicles, as admitted by Bech Reference Bech2012: 81), subordinating discourse relations are underrepresented and the main storyline is developed by a number of different constituent order patterns.

Nonetheless, while the initial aim of this qualitative investigation was to inspect the discourse function of VF clauses, what I noticed quite quickly looking at the clauses in larger context was a striking tendency of VF structures to accumulate in one passage. Example (22) is representative of the phenomenon, with all clause-final finite verbs highlighted.

This huge stacking of VF clauses in certain fragments of various prose texts suggests syntactic priming as a possible mechanism strengthening the use of the VF order in the investigated group of clauses.

Priming is a well-known phenomenon according to which speakers tend to repeat syntactic structures that they have recently heard or produced, and it has been convincingly supported with experimental evidence (Hilpert Reference Hilpert2019: 146). In other words, if syntactic alternatives exist, the speaker's choice is affected by the structure they have used or heard before (Reitter et al. Reference Reitter, Keller and Moore2011) since ‘the more frequently a node or relation is activated, the more readily it may become activated in the future’ (Traugott & Trousdale Reference Traugott and Trousdale2013: 54–5). In order to check if the VF order could have been primed by a preceding VF clause, I have looked at all the clauses (regardless of type, i.e. including subordinates) directly preceding the sampled clauses, and did the same for the control group of non-VF clauses to check if any interesting differences surface. Only clauses placed immediately before the investigated clause were taken into account, though of course priming effects may be more long lasting (Reitter et al. Reference Reitter, Keller and Moore2011).

As shown in table 13, the difference between VF and non-VF clauses in the proportion of preceding VF clausesFootnote ⁷ is quite striking in most of the analysed texts. Only the Vercelli Homilies do not follow this tendency, but let us recall that in this text the frequency of both conjuncts and subordinates following the VF order is relatively low (see table 3), which means that priming could not have played an important role in this text because the number of VF trigger clauses is limited. Regardless of this exception, for the whole dataset shown in table 13 (N=140) the Fisher exact test confirms that the difference between VF and non-VF conjuncts with respect to the proportion of preceding VF clauses is highly significant (p< 0.00001).Footnote ⁸ What the analysis shows is that a VF conjunct clause is more likely to be preceded by a VF clause (of any type) than a non-VF clause, and (23)–(26) are relevant examples of the phenomenon. The clause in bold is one of the sampled clauses; the preceding clause-final verb is underlined.

Table 13. The order of clauses directly preceding VF and non-VF conjunct

A similar tendency can be observed for main clauses shown in table 14 (and again with the Vercelli Homilies as the only exception), and the difference between VF and non-VF main clauses in this respect is confirmed by the Fisher exact test (p< 0.00001).Footnote ⁹

Table 14. The order of clauses directly preceding VF and non-VF main clauses

Examples (27)–(29) illustrate the phenomenon.

In general, priming is in line with Pintzuk (Reference Pintzuk1999: 224), who observed that VF conjuncts are more frequent when the first of the conjoined clauses is VF as well, but the present interpretation goes even further, suggesting no type restriction on the preceding VF clause. Considering the difference in the proportion of VF clauses between main and conjunct clauses, it is not enough for the second conjunct to repeat the order of the first main clause since we do not have enough VF main clauses to trigger such a high number of VF conjunct clauses. If we assume (as I do in this study) that subordinates could also be triggers and that the clauses did not have to be syntactically linked (i.e. it is enough to have any VF structure preceding the conjunct), the quantitative data make more sense, especially since the impact of preceding clauses could also be strengthened by transfer from Latin, where the VF order was the default option in most texts.Footnote ¹⁰

Naturally, the question is why syntactic priming is more readily applied to conjunct than to main clauses. If the phenomenon operated without any restrictions, we should expect a similar proportion of VF in both clause types. Here, Zimmermann's (Reference Zimmermann2017) analysis may be a useful starting point. If the VF order is ‘the subordinate order’ related to the presence of a subordinating conjunction (complementiser) at the beginning of the clause, perhaps the priming effect is lexically limited, i.e. a lexical element in the form of a conjunction enables the order to be activated more readily. If there is no conjunction, a VF clause would mostly fail to trigger a VF structure in the following clause, hence the low number of VF non-conjunct main clauses. Since and and ac, as coordinating conjunctions, are in a sense functionally similar to subordinating conjunctions (i.e. both are used to link clauses), they could have been used or perceived by OE speakers as a viable replacement and thus also (indirectly) associated with ‘the subordinate order’. This would be in line with Zimmermann's (Reference Zimmermann2017) double interpretation of and and ac, which could sometimes be located in C just like subordinators. This could have happened only if speakers of OE could treat both subordinating and coordinating conjunctions as functionally related items. The potential interchangeability of coordinating and subordinating conjunctions could have been strengthened by the fact that coordinating conjunctions may also link subordinate clauses, both in contemporary (30) and Old English (31).

Such examples, especially if there is no overt subject is the second conjunct, would usually be interpreted as examples of VP coordination rather than clause coordination, but an alternative analysis is also an option (Huddleston & Pullum et al. Reference Huddleston and Pullum2002: 1348–9). Therefore, it is possible to see some analogy between examples such as (31) (with the VF conjunct subordinate clause shown in bold) and VF main conjunct clauses discussed in this article, represented by (32).

Whether or not either of the clause-initial conjunctions may or should be interpreted as a complementiser in C is a question that I will leave open, but the surface similarity between conjunct main and conjunct subordinate clauses is quite clear. This, in turn, could enable speakers to form a simple generalisation, associating the VF order with a clause of any type starting with a conjunction (subordinating or coordinating). Such and- or ac-subordinates could perhaps function as a bridging context, facilitating the transfer of the generally subordinate VF order to main conjunct clauses via conjunct subordinate clauses. As a result, a conjunct clause is better suited for a clause-final placement of the finite verb than a regular main clause, where no lexical element could enable such a generalisation.Footnote ¹¹ Variables such as weight, verb type or type of discourse relation could make the use of the pattern more probable, but they are not the actual reasons for it, functioning rather as additional factors.