The origin of the Northern Subject Rule: subject positions and verbal morphosyntax in older English (original) (raw)
Related papers
Present Indicative Plural Concord in Brittonic and Early English1
Transactions of the Philological Society, 2011
In northern Middle English and Middle Scots, a verb in the present indicative plural ends in -e (later zero) if the subject is an adjacent personal pronoun; otherwise it ends in -s. This 'northern subject rule' is generally supposed to have become established in early Middle English. Its history is undocumented, but the idea that it arose from contact with Celtic has recently gained ground. The case is here reviewed, and though still far from compelling, is found better than has previously appeared. Regardless of language contact, it is shown that the system evident in the rule is independent of the suffix in -s, and could have arisen very early in Old English. Central to the account are the origins of the reduced inflection, and the loss at syllable boundaries of Old English h (Germanic v).
A well-known example of variation in Early Modern English is found in the morphology of the third-person singular present tense indicative verb. In general terms there was a gradual shift from-th to-s (e.g., pleaseth to pleases). However, previous studies such as Kytö (1993) and Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg (2003) found that this shift was by no means uniform, varying by, for example, region, type of text, and author. More specifically, Nevalainen, Raumolin-Brunberg, and Trudgill (2001) analyzed the distribution of endings for the third-person singular present indicative verb in Early Modern East Anglian English, i.e., the variety of English used in the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk. However, for the final twenty-year period of their study (1660-1680), they only have four informants. This article analyzes the distribution of verb endings for a larger number of informants during this period, which marks the final stages of-th recession in East Anglian English, using letters written in Norfolk. The corpus based on these letters allows for a detailed analysis of linguistic and extralinguistic factors that influenced this distribution. Linguistic factors include the stem-final sound and verb-type (have, do, and say are analyzed separately). Among the extralinguistic factors analyzed are the sex of the author and addressee, the level of formality, and the author's social class. One of the informants in this study is Sir Thomas Browne. The distribution of verb endings in his correspondence makes him an outlier. His usage has led some authors to exclude his results from their analysis. The present article offers a new approach to dealing with such cases. The overall results are
This book is a revision of Carola Trips' dissertation, submitted to the University of Stuttgart in 2001. The goal of the study is to show Scandinavian influence on the syntax of English by detailed analysis of the Ormulum, a twelfth-century text written in the East Midlands. Given this goal, the title is somewhat misleading. Although Trips mentions that her hypothesis is that the shift from OV to VO in English is due to Scandinavian influence, she focuses on finding evidence of other cases of Scandinavian influence rather than the actual shift from OV to VO. Her assumption is that finding evidence of Scandinavian influence on Middle English syntax in general will prove that the shift in English from OV to VO is also due to this Scandinavian influence, but this of course may not necessarily be the case. Despite the fact that language contact plays an important role in Trips' hypothesis, the book is strikingly lacking in discussion of literature on this topic, such as , , and other works concerned with formulating general tendencies and principles of linguistic borrowing.
Verbal Inflection, Feature Inheritance, and the Loss of Null Subjects in Middle English
Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, 2014
This paper investigates how null subjects, generally termed pro in the literature, were licensed and lost historically in English, with special emphasis on the role of verbal inflectional morphology. It is revealed through a corpus search that pro was licensed as a null topic in Old English and Early Middle English but subsequently lost in Late Middle English. This coincides with the period in which English underwent a drastic typological change, going from a topic-prominent language to a subject-prominent language. In order to relate these simultaneous changes, I maintain that the loss of pro and the typological change to the language both resulted from the shift of f-features from Top(ic) to Fin(ite) within the hierarchy of fine-grained functional heads in the CP domain à la Rizzi (1997), and that this is ultimately attributable to the decline of verbal inflectional morphology for number agreement. Thus, as far as the analysis advanced in this paper is successful, the changes under discussion present an intriguing case of syntax-morphology interface in the domain of language change, where micro-level morphological attrition finally results in a large-scale typological shift of a language.
Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, 2017
In this paper we examine the relation between the loss of formal gender and Case features on simple demonstratives and the topic shifting property they manifest. The examination period spans between Old English and Early Middle English. While we argue that this loss has important discourse-pragmatic and derivational effects on demonstratives, we also employ the Strong Minimalist Hypothesis approach (Chomsky 2001) and feature valuation, as defined in Pesetsky & Torrego (2007), to display how their syntactic computation and pragmatic properties have come about. To account for the above innovations yielding the Early Middle English ϸe (‘the’), we first discuss the formal properties of the Old English demonstratives which distinguish number, gender, and Case features. This inflectional variety of forms allows the Old English demonstratives to be used independently and to show the anaphoric and discourse-linking properties of topics. Crucially, the same properties characterise also Germa...
Since Canale (1978), "head-final" structures surfacing after the Early Middle English period have generally been ascribed to the operation of a "special" rather than a productive "head-final" grammar (cf. i.a. Kroch & Taylor 2000). Biberauer & Roberts/B&R (2005) propose a different analysis in terms of which all Middle English (ME) word-order patterns are the output of a single, optionality-permitting grammar, with attested word-order changes ultimately being the consequence of loss of this optionality. Specifically, B&R propose that ME "head-final" orders reflect the continuing availability of vP-raising, alongside DP-raising, as a means of satisfying T's EPP-requirements. This paper shows how vP-raising (= DP-raising + pied-piping) can account for the occurrence of various previously unrelated "special" structures in ME, including Stylistic Fronting and Verb (Projection) Raising, and also how the loss of these orders and the corresponding rise of expletives and obligatory subject-raising can be understood as related consequences of the loss of optional vP-raising.
Syntax and Information Structure: Verb Second variation in Middle English
Investigating the variation between verb-second (V2) and non-V2 word order in declaratives in Middle English, this chapter explores how syntax and information structure interact in the word order development during this period. It compares this interaction to similar variation in wh -questions in Present-Day Norwegian. The study makes a distinction between nominal and pronominal subjects across the four subperiods of Middle English, showing how word order is determined by syntax and information structure in different contexts. It discusses the diachronic development attested in light of findings from first language acquisition.