Possessives and determiners in Old English (original) (raw)
Related papers
Why a Determiner? The Possessive + Determiner + Adjective Construction in Old English
Information Structure and Syntactic Change in the History of English, 2012
A corpus-based investigation into a construction in Old English in which a possessive and a determiner co-occur shows that when the order of these elements is Poss(essive) + Det(erminer), there is also always an adjective. This Poss Det Adj construction alternated with the determiner-less Poss Adj construction, and this paper reports some preliminary findings concerning this variation. The paper examines possible explanations in terms of purely structural features and concludes that Poss Det Adj is best analysed as a construction in which the adjective phrase has a determiner. While syntactic considerations will then explain the obligatory use of an adjective with the Poss + Det combination, we must look to aspects of information structure and discourse relations to understand the variation between Poss Det Adj and Poss Adj. The interaction of the factors controlling this variation was clearly complex and seems to have been different for individual speakers/writers. However, it is clear that the nature of the adjective played an important role, and a parallel can be drawn between the preference for the determiner with a restrictive adjective and some facts about the placement of restrictive adjectives in French and Spanish. Factors such as previous mention of the adjective in the discourse remain to be investigated. The disappearance of the Poss Det construction is essential to our understanding of the development of the determiner system in English. It is plausible that the loss of the determiner slot in the adjective phrase in Early Middle English resulted because no clear function crystalized around this determiner. A study of Poss Det Adj in those Scandinavian languages which have this combination can be expected to illuminate the use and loss of the construction in English.
The Beginning of the End: The Decline of External Possessors in Old English
The loss of the DATIVE EXTERNAL POSSESSOR (DEP) as a productive construction in English has been regarded as setting English apart from most European languages. While this claim can be disputed, the loss of this construction in English needs an explanation. Both internal and external explanations have been suggested, but we lack a solid empirical base for evaluating them. This article supplies the beginnings of the empirical foundation necessary for further discussion of this topic by presenting the results of a systematic corpus-based study of external possessors with body parts playing the role of subject or (accusative) object in Early Old English. This investigation establishes that any explanation for the eventual loss of DEPs must be compatible with the fact that the construction was already reduced at an early stage in Old English compared with Gothic and although productive, was more limited in its range and use. The DEP was not obligatory even in the situations that favored it, and it varied with the INTERNAL POSSESSOR (IP), the unmarked possessive construction. Contact with Brythonic Celtic at an early stage provides a possible explanation for this early decline.
English Language and Linguistics, 2021
Reviewed by Rodrigo Pérez Lorido , University of Oviedo This monograph is the first large-scale corpus-based diachronic study of external possession (EP) constructions in the English language. The study focuses on structures like (1), in which an NP in the dative case (dem Kind / me, the possessor), which behaves as an external argument of the clause, establishes some semantic relationship of possession with another NP in that clause (die Haare / el dedo, the possessum). This kind of structure was available in the Old and Middle English periods, but is preserved in Present-day English only in a few set phrases and expressions of the type look someone in the eye, having overall been replaced by internal possession (IP) structures containing a premodifier in the genitive case, like those in the idiomatic translations in (1a, b). (1) (a) Die Mutter wäscht dem Kind die Haare The mother washes the DAT child the hair 'The mother is washing the child's hair.' (Example from van de Velde and Lamiroy 2016: 353) (b) Lucía me vendó el dedo Lucía me 1SG.DAT bandage 1SG.PAST the finger 'Lucía bandaged my finger.' A characteristic of dative external possessors (DEP henceforth) is that they systematically display a strict affectedness condition, i.e. they are necessarily associated with beneficial or negative effects on the possessor (Haspelmath 1999: 111). From a typological-areal perspective, DEPs are considered as prototypically European, and external possession structures of this type are found in languages such as French, Spanish, German, Greek or Russian, to name a few. Allen's study seriously challenges two widely accepted hypotheses concerning the history of DEP structures in English and their demise over time: the strict connection between the disappearance of DEPs in English and the loss of the dative/accusative distinction (Ahlgren 1946), and the impact of the contact with the Celtic linguistic substratum in accelerating (or actually triggering) the change after the Germanic invasions. Allen does so in a very convincing way, combining-as is usual in her-formal linguistic analysis, thorough corpus research and absolute philological rigour. In English Language and Linguistics, page 1 of 7.
Working Papers in Linguistics, 2002
The aim of this paper is twofold, as most linguistic work. From the empirical point of view it wants to contribute a description of the syntax of possessive adjectives and their pronominal counterparts in Old Italian to the more general ItalAnt project for a comprehensive ...
The development of [] strengthened'possessive pronouns in English
Language Sciences, 2002
This paper investigates the developments of 'strengthened' possessives such as hers and hern (earlier her) through a fresh examination of a substantial number of Middle English texts. These forms are first found in North Midlands and West Midlands texts of the thirteenth century, with the later-n forms of Southeastern dialects representing dative case rather than true 'strengthened' possessives. While the-s forms developed in rather different ways, both resulted in a processing advantage, as they signal to the hearer that no head NP is following. It is suggested that considerations of language processing have the potential to give more coherence to the traditional concept of 'analogy'.
Possessives in indefinite nominal phrases: A comparison between Italo-Romance and Daco-Romance 1
Moderna Språk 2020:3, 2020
Southern Italian dialects exhibit a peculiar morphosyntactic device in licensing possessives in non-definite noun phrases, i.e. the insertion of the functional element de followed by the definite article. This strategy shows striking similarities with the functional element A(-) employed in Romanian to introduce a possessive or a noun phrase marked as a genitive when it is not linearly preceded by a noun phrase marked as definite. This paper proves that an identical syntactic structure is detectable in both groups of varieties which stems from the definiteness requirements of the genitive.
The position of the genitive in Old English prose: Intertextual differences and the role of Latin
Folia Linguistica Historica, 2020
The present article is a systematic, large-scale corpus study of the varying position of the Old English adnominal genitive. Particular focus is put on intertextual variation and the potential influence of Latin, which is analysed alongside such intra-linguistic factors as syntactic weight and the animacy of the referent. The model of logistic regression adopted helps address a key issue in studies on genitive placement, namely, if and how multiple variables exert combined impact on the choice of the variant. The paper highlights the importance of a bottom-to-top approach in studies of older English syntax, as global tendencies turn out to be the corollary of significantly different contributions on the level of individual texts, whose translation status (original composition or translation) is also of importance to the variation studied.
On the dual nature of the ‘possessive’ marker in Modern English
1997
This paper shows, after Watkins (1967) and Tremblay (1989, 1991), that the possessive phrase of This is John's does not necessarily include an elliptical Possessee. This ambiguity is argued to arise from the dual nature of the possessive marker, which may either be inflectional or derivational in Modern English. In the first case, it may be analysed as a functional head, as proposed by Abney (1987) and Kayne (1993, 1994); in the second case, it operates in the lexicon, deriving possessive adjectives which exhibit complementary morphological and semantic properties in adnominal and predicate positions.
We present a cross-constructional approach to the history of the dative alternation and the genitive alternation in Late Modern English (AD 1650 to AD 1990), drawing on richly annotated datasets and modern statistical modeling techniques. We follow sociolinguistic theory and the recent literature on gradient grammatical constraints in assuming that syntactic variation and change is probabilistic rather than categorical in nature. In this spirit, we show that historical dative and genitive variability exhibits some theoretically interesting common traits, such as the fact that the effect of more or less animate recipients in dative constructions and more or less animate possessors in genitive constructions appears to vary in parallel. This we interpret against the cultural backdrop of, for example, overall distributional changes in animacy categories, and we offer that distributional fluctuations such as these can trigger changes in probabilistic grammars in the long term.