Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-tn8tq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-22T21:40:46.710Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Variation and change in Old English clause structure

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Susan Pintzuk
Susan Pintzuk
Affiliation:
University of York
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In most recent analyses of Old English syntax, the position of the finite verb is derived by different processes in main clauses (verb seconding) than in subordinate clauses (postposition, verb raising, verb projection raising). In this article, it is argued on the basis of distributional evidence that the position of the finite verb in Old English clauses reflects synchronic variation in underlying structure, INFL-medial versus infl-final, and that the syntax of main and subordinate clauses is the same. Quantitative analysis of the data shows that the frequency of infl-medial structure increases at the expense of infl-final structure during the Old English period, and that the rate of change is the same in both clause types. This result supports the structural analysis and provides further evidence for the Constant Rate Hypothesis of Kroch (1989, 1995).

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , July 1995 , pp. 229 - 260
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bately, Janet M. (ed.). (1980). The Old English Orosius. The Early English Text Society, SS, Vol. 6. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bethurum, Dorothy (ed.). (1957). The homilies of Wulfstan. Oxford: Clarendon.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hecht, Hans (ed.). ([1900] 1965). Bischofs Warferth von Worcester Ubersetzung der Dialoge Gregors des Grossen. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.Google Scholar
Klaeber, Fr. (ed.). (1950). Beowulf and the fight at Finnsburg. 3rd ed.Lexington, MA: D. C. Health.Google Scholar
Liebermann, F. (ed.). (1903). Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen. Halle, Germany: Max Niemeyer.Google Scholar
Miller, Thomas (ed.). ([1890–1898] 1959). The Old English version of Bede's Ecclesiastical history of the English people. The Early English Text Society, OS, Vols. 95, 96, 110, 111. London: Trübner. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Bruce (ed.). (1966). The Battle of Maldon and other Old English poems. New York: St. Martin's.Google Scholar
Morris, Richard (ed.). (1880). The Blickling homilies of the tenth century. The Early English Text Society, OS, Vols. 58, 63, 73. London: Trübner.Google Scholar
Plummer, Charles (ed.). (1892). Two of the Saxon Chronicles parallel. Oxford: Clarendon.Google Scholar
Skeat, Walter W. (ed.). (1881–1900). Ælfric's Lives of Saints. The Early English Text Society, Vols. 76, 82, 94, 114. London: Trübner.Google Scholar
Sweet, Henry (ed.). (1871). King Alfred's West-Saxon version of Gregory's Pastoral Care. The Early English Text Society, Vols. 45, 50. London: Trübner.Google Scholar
Thorpe, Benjamin (ed.). (1834). The Anglo-Saxon version of the story of Apollonius of Tyre. London: John and Arthur Arch.Google Scholar
Thorpe, Benjamin (ed.). ([1844] 1971). The homilies of the Anglo-Saxon church. London: Ælfric Society. New York: Johnson Reprint.Google Scholar
Vleeskruyer, Rudolf (ed.). (1953). The life of St. Chad: An Old English homily. Amsterdam: North-Holland.Google Scholar
Allen, Cynthia L. (1975). Old English modals. In Grimshaw, J. (ed.), Papers in the history and structure of English. (University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics 1.) Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 89–100.Google Scholar
Altmann, G., Buttlar, H. v., Rott, W., & Strauβ, U. (1983). A law of change in language. In Brainard, B. (ed.), Historical linguistics. Bochum, Germany: Studienverlag Dr. N. Brockmeyer. 104–115.Google Scholar
Attenborough, F. L. (ed.). (1922). The laws of the earliest English kings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bacquet, Paul. (1962). La structure de la phrase verbale à l'époque Alfrédienne. Paris: Les Belles Lettres.Google Scholar
Bailey, Charles-James. (1973). Variation and linguistic theory. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
Bately, Janet M. (1978). The compilation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 60 bc to ad 890: Vocabulary as evidence. Proceedings of the British Academy 64:93–129.Google Scholar
Bately, Janet M. (1985). The compilation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle once more. Leeds Studies in English, New Series, 16:7–26.Google Scholar
Bately, Janet M. (ed.). (1986). The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A collaborative edition. Vol. 3: MS Dumville, A. D. & Keynes, S., general editors. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.Google Scholar
Bately, Janet M. (1988). Old English prose before and during the reign of Alfred. Anglo-Saxon England 17:93–138.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Besten, Hans den. (1977). On the interaction of root transformations and lexical deletive rules. Published in 1981 in Groninger Arbeiten Zur Germanistischen Linguistik 20:1–78. Published in 1983 in Abraham, W. (ed.), On the formal syntax of the Westgermania. (Papers from the 3rd Groningen Grammar Talks, Groningen, January 1981.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 47–131.Google Scholar
Besten, Hans den, & Edmondson, Jerold A. (1983). The verbal complex in continental West Germanic. In Abraham, W. (ed.), On the formal syntax of the Westgermania. (Papers from the 3rd Groningen Grammar Talks, Groningen, January 1981.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 155–216.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Campbell, Alistair. (1970). Verse influences in Old English prose. In Rosier, J. I. (ed.), Philological essays: Studies in Old and Middle English language and literature in honour of Herbert Dean Merritt. (Janua Linguarum, series major 37.) The Hague: Mouton. 93–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cardinaletti, Anna, & Roberts, Ian. (in press). Clause structure and X-second. In Chao, W. & Horrocks, G. (eds.), Levels, principles and processes: The structure of grammatical representations. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Chase, Colin (ed.). (1981). The dating of Beowulf. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. (1986). Barriers. (Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 13.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Evers, Arnold. (1975). The transformational cycle in Dutch and German. Doctoral dissertation, University of Utrecht. Distributed by the Indiana University Linguistics Club.Google Scholar
Evers, Arnold. (1981). Two functional principles for the rule “Move V.” Groninger Arbeiten Zur germanistischen Linguistik 19:96–110.Google Scholar
Fontana, Josep M. (1993). Phrase struture and the syntax of clitics in the history of Spanish. Doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Givón, Talmy. (1976). Topic, pronoun and grammatical agreement. In Li, C. N. (ed.), Subject and topic. New York: Academic. 149–188.Google Scholar
Greenfield, Stanley B., & Calder, Daniel G. (1986). A new critical history of Old English literature. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Haeberli, Eric. (1991). The neg criterion and negative concord. Mémoire de Licence, Université de Genève.Google Scholar
Haeberli, Eric. (1992). Some aspects of Old English word order. Master's dissertation, University College London.Google Scholar
Haeberli, Eric, & Haegeman, Liliane. (1992, 04). Word order in Old English: Evidence from negative concord. Paper presented at the Language Association of Great Britain.Google Scholar
Haegeman, Liliane. (1991, 11). Negation in West Flemish and the neg criterion. Paper presented at the Northeast Linguistic Society Meeting.Google Scholar
Haegeman, Liliane. (1994). Verb raising as verb projection raising: Some empirical problems. Linguistic Inquiry 25:509–521.Google Scholar
Haegeman, Liliane, & Riemsdijk, Henk van. (1986). Verb projection raising, scope and the typology of verb movement rules. Linguistic Inquiry 17:417–466.Google Scholar
Higgins, F. Roger. (1991, 01). The fronting of non-finite verbs in Old English. Paper presented at the Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting.Google Scholar
Higgins, F. Roger. (1992, 04). SVO order in Old English subordinate clauses. Talk at Harvard University.Google Scholar
Hiltunen, Risto. (1983). The decline of the prefixes and the beginnings of the English phrasal verb: The evidence from some Old and Early Middle English texts. Turku, Finland: Turun Yliopisto.Google Scholar
Kemenade, Ans van. (1987). Syntactic case and morphological case in the history of English. Dordrecht: Foris.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kemenade, Ans van. (in press). V2 and embedded topicalization in Old and Middle English. In van Kemenade, A. & Vincent, N. (eds.), Inflection and syntax in language change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kiparsky, Paul. (1995). Indo-European origins of Germanic syntax. In Battye, A. & Roberts, I. (eds.), Clause structure and language change. New York: Oxford University Press, 140–169.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koopman, Willem F. (1985). The syntax of verb and particle combinations in Old English. In Bennis, H. & Beukema, F. (eds.), Linguistics in the Netherlands 1985. Dordrecht: Foris, 91–99.Google Scholar
Koopman, Willem F. (1992). Old English pronouns: Some remarks. In Colman, F. (ed.), Evidence for Old English: Material and theoretical bases for reconstruction. (Edinburgh Studies in the English Language 2.) Edinburgh: John Donald. 44–87.Google Scholar
Kroch, Anthony S. (1982, 10). Grammatical theory and the quantitative study of syntactic change. Paper presented at NWAVE-XI.Google Scholar
Kroch, Anthony S. (1989). Reflexes of grammar in patterns of language change. Language Variation and Change 1:199–244.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kroch, Anthony S. (1995). Morphosyntactic variation. In Beals, K., Denton, J., Knippen, B., Melnar, L., Suzuki, H., & Zeinfeld, E. (eds.), Proceedings of the thirtieth annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society, Vol. 2. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. 180–201.Google Scholar
Kroch, Anthony S. & Santorini, Beatrice. (1991). The derived constituent structure of the West Germanic verb-raising construction. In Freidin, R. (ed.), Principles and parameters in comparative grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 269–338.Google Scholar
Kroch, Anthony S., & Taylor, Ann. (1994, 03). Remarks on the XV/VX alternation in Early Middle English. Paper presented at the Third Diachronic Generative Syntax Workshop.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Bruce. (1964). Syntax and word order in the Peterborough Chronicle 1122–1154. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 65:113–144.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Bruce. (1985). Old English syntax. Oxford: Clarendon.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mitchell, Bruce, & Robinson, Fred C. (1982). A guide to Old English. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Osgood, Charles & Sebeok, Thomas. (1954). Psycholinguistics: A survey of theory and research problems. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 49:1–203.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pintzuk, Susan. (1991). Phrase structures in competition: Variation and change in Old English word order. Doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Pintzuk, Susan. (1993). Verb seconding in Old English: Verb movement to infl. The Linguistic Review 10:5–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pintzuk, Susan. (1995, 08). Postposition in Old English. Paper presented at the Twelfth International Conference on Historical Linguistics.Google Scholar
Pintzuk, Susan. (in press-a). Cliticization in Old English. In Halpern, A. L. & Zwicky, A. (eds.), Second position clitics and related phenomena. Stanford, CA: CSLI.Google Scholar
Pintzuk, Susan. (in press-b). Old English verb-complement word order and the change from OV to VO. In York research papers in linguistics. York: University of York, Department of Language and Linguistic Science.Google Scholar
Pollock, Jean-Yves. (1989). Verb movement, universal grammar, and the structure of IP. Linguistic Inquiry 20:365–424.Google Scholar
Santorini, Beatrice. (1989). The generalization of the verb-second constraint in the history of Yiddish. Doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Santorini, Beatrice. (1992). Variation and change in Yiddish subordinate clause word order. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 10:595–640.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Santorini, Beatrice. (1993). The rate of phrase structure change in the history of Yiddish. Language Variation and Change 5:257–283.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, Ann. (1994). The change from SOV to SVO in Ancient Greek. Language Variation and Change 6:1–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tomaselli, Alessandra. (1995). Cases of verb third in Old High German. In Battye, A. & Roberts, I. (eds.), Clause structure and language change. New York: Oxford University Press. 345–369.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. (1972). A history of English syntax. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.Google Scholar
Vikner, Sten. (1994). Finite verb movement in Scandinavian embedded clauses. In Lightfoot, D. & Hornstein, N. (eds.), Verb movement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 117–147.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Warner, Anthony R. (1993). English auxiliaries: Structure and history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weinreich, Uriel, Labov, William, & Herzog, Marvin I. (1968). A theory of language change. In Lehmann, W. P. & Malkiel, Y. (eds.), Directions for historical linguistics. Austin: University of Texas Press. 97–195.Google Scholar
Whitelock, Dorothy (ed.). (1961). The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A revised translation. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Yerkes, David. (1982). Syntax and style in Old English: A comparison of the two versions of Warferth's Translation of Gregory's Dialogues. Binghampton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies.Google Scholar
Yerkes, David. (1986). The translation of Gregory's Dialogues and its revision: Textual history, provenance, authorship. In Szarmach, P. E. (ed.), Studies in earlier Old English prose. Albany:SUNY Press. 335–343.Google Scholar