The Northern Subject Rule and its origins (original) (raw)
Related papers
PhD Thesis, University of Ljubljana, 2015
The history of Welsh word order has long been an issue of controversy. While some scholars have argued that Welsh underwent as many as two major word order changes between the Old and Modern periods — from verb-initial to verb-medial and back to verb-initial again — others have maintained that Welsh has always been essentially verb-initial, disregarding the apparent non-verb-initial phase in the Middle and Early Modern Welsh periods as an artificial literary aberration. At the same time, there has until recently been little empirical study of Early Modern Welsh word order. This thesis provides a systematic empirical investigation of Early Modern Welsh word order from the mid sixteenth to the mid eighteenth centuries, based on an original corpus of over 100 texts of diverse genres, registers and discourse types, including Slander case records, personal letters, drama, the Bible translations, sermons, religious treatises, catechisms and pseudo-historical works. The investigation focuses on the diachronic development of one particular verb-initial construction Absolute-initial verb (AIV) order, where a finite verb comes in absolute initial position in a positive declarative main clause (PDMC). In Middle Welsh (c.1200–c.1500), AIV order was rare in prose, which had a predominantly verb-second or medial word order in positive declarative main clauses, but common in poetry. The corpus analysis shows that AIV order starts to be used more frequently in prose texts from the second half of the sixteenth century and that the first innovative texts to show a frequent use of AIV are the 1567 and 1588 Bible translations, in particular poetic books of the Old Testament such as Psalms, Isaiah, Song of Songs, contradicting the traditional view in Welsh scholarhip that the Bible translations were a conservative bastion of non-verb-initial word order. There is evidence of a continued increase in the use of AIV order in seventeenth and eighteenth century corpus texts, however at the same time we find extreme patterns of variation in the use of AIV order throughout the two century corpus period with some prose authors showing dominant AIV order in over 50% of PDMCs, other contemporary authors almost avoiding the construction altogether, as well as various intermediate patterns of usage. We contrast the Principles and Parameters (P&P) account of this change in Welsh word order by Willis (1998), which seeks to explain the rise of AIV order in terms of a discrete and abrupt change in the grammaticality of the construction but which does not in itself seek to account for the variation in the use of the construction, with an alternative Construction Grammar (CxG) approach, where we posit a gradual mechanism of syntactic change and seek to propose an integrated syntactic and sociohistorical account of the change and variation in use of AIV order. In the Principles and Parameters approach, Middle Welsh is analysed as a V2 language, where unmarked VSO is ungrammatical in positive main clauses, and the emergence of grammatical unmarked VSO in Early Modern Welsh is attributed to the resetting of the V2 parameter, resulting in an abrupt change from a V2 grammar with ungrammatical unmarked VSO to a non-V2 grammar with grammatical unmarked VSO. In the Construction Grammar approach, AIV order is analysed as being a grammatical, but weakly motivated construction in Middle Welsh prose and the gradual increase as well as the variation in its use is analysed in terms of changing and competing motivations (both structural/syntactic and sociolinguistic/stylistic) for its use over time. We will argue that the Construction Grammar concept of motivation can be used as tool in the explanation of syntactic variation and change. In a Construction Grammar framework, it can be argued that AIV order was a well-formed construction in MW prose but a weakly-motivated one, as a system of pre-verbal fronting had come to be generalised: Subject/direct object + preverbal particle a + verb, and Adverbial phrase + preverbal particle y(d) + verb. Where, less frequently, there were finite-verb-initial constructions, the verb was usually preceded by the preverbal particle y(d), rather than occurring in absolute-initial position. In MW poetry the more frequent use of AIV order may have been motivated by specific cultural and stylistic factors (e.g. poetic tradition, metre). The increase in use of AIV order in EMnW seems at least in part to have been motivated by the gradual loss of the preverbal particle y(d): we find correlations between the frequency of use of AIV order and Adverb+Verb order – the use of Adverb+Verb order (i.e. without the particle y) appears to motivate AIV order and vice versa. The patterns of variation further suggest that AIV order appears to have been perceived as interchangeable with two other constructions: Pronominal Subject+Verb and Dummy subject+Verb, and came to be used in all the contexts where these other two constructions were used. The perceived interchangeability of AIV and these constructions seems to have provided Early Modern Welsh writers with a stylistic resource which they exploited in different ways, some choosing to generalise the construction, others to avoid it. A perceived association of AIV order with poetry may have been a motivating factor for its use for some authors, particularly in the 16th century prose translations of the Psalms, where the AIV order may have been used to evoke a poetic style in a prose text and perhaps also render more closely the verb-initial patterns in the original Hebrew poetry.
Middle to Modern Welsh relative clauses feature two binary formal oppositions of complementizer selection and gap realization that have typically been taken to be in some sort of parallel distribution, in such a way that a single independent variable (traditionally, constituent structure 'depth') can account for the realization of both. It is demonstrated that the two formal variables cross-cut one another distributionally, in such a way that no one single independent variable can account for both sets. This paper shows that the first set of complementizer selection in many construction types, particularly relativization on notional 'possessors', behaves in a manner that resembles case-marking as well as construction-type marking, so that relativization on objects of prepositions in possessive constructions coding possessors behaves in a manner systematically different from either objects of true locative prepositions or objects of prepositions that mark 'experiencers'. Although complementizer selection and gap realization are not correlated distributionally, complementizer selection in possessive clauses enters into correlation with other variables of morpho-syntactic form, including PP NP word order, that are also diagnostic of clauses coding notional 'possession'. It is argued that only a construction-based or 'coding view' of syntax can take account of these data.
Gradual Change and Continual variation: The History of a Verb-Initial Construction in Welsh
Synchrony and Diachrony. A Dynamic Interface., edited by Anna Giacalone Ramat, Caterina Mauri and Piera Molinelli [Studies in Language Companion Series 133] 2013, 2013
This article contrasts two different analyses – a diachronic Construction Grammar (CxG) approach and the Principles & Principles approach of Willis (1998) – of the development of a verb-initial construction, Absolute-initial verb (AIV) order, in Early Modern Welsh. The P&P approach attributes the rise of AIV order in Early Modern Welsh to an abrupt and discrete change in the grammaticality of V1 following the resetting of the V2 parameter. We argue, on the basis of a detailed corpus study of the period c.1550-c.1750, that the historical data shows a gradual increase as well as significant sociolinguistic variation in the frequency of use of AIV order. We further argue that a diachronic Construction Grammar approach can better account for gradual syntactic change and syntactic variation, since, unlike P&P approaches, it does not seek to model gradual historical data in terms of discrete grammars and grammatical categories, but has a gradient conception of grammaticality and grammatical categories and can thus propose gradual mechanisms of change and integrate sociolinguistic variation directly in grammatical description.
Reconstructing the rise of V2 in Welsh
Verb-second orders are only found in the Middle Welsh period: Old and Modern Welsh mainly exhibit verb-initial patterns. In this paper I show how these V2 orders developed by carefully reconstructing their syntactic history from earlier patterns with hanging topics and focussed cleft constructions in Old Welsh and related Celtic languages. I provide a syntactic reconstruction of the V2 structures with preverbal functional particles a and y. These C-particles played a pivotal role in relative clauses as well and can be traced back to pronominal elements in Proto-British, the predecessor of Welsh, Breton and Cornish (cf. Schrijver 1997). I argue that these relative particles in the C-head are the result of Spec-to-Head reanalysis of pronominal phrases and that a similar reanalysis of the adverbial phrase *ed ‘thus’ yielded CVSO orders. During the next stage, the relative clauses in clefts were reanalysed as matrix clauses with V2 order and a process of rebracketing integrated hanging and dislocated topics followed by CVSO into the matrix CP with V2 order as well. These developments resulted in the extension of IS functions for the sentence-initial constituents (beyond original contrastive focus) and a generalised Edge Feature on the C-head.
Clausal coordination and the loss of verb-second in Welsh
This paper focuses on verb-second main clauses in Middle Welsh and their interaction with co-ordination. It argues that the only empirically-adequate analysis of Middle Welsh coordination patterns requires that the conjuncts be analysed as full CP-clauses. Apparent gaps in those clauses require the postulation of an empty category. Two candidates for such a category are considered, pro and an empty operator. The former analysis is rejected because the empty category fails to obey the licensing conditions on pro in Middle Welsh. A discourse-licensed empty operator on the other hand provides a good account of the environments in which these gaps are found. Cross-linguistic and internal diachronic evidence show that such an analysis of Middle Welsh as having an empty operator in coordinate structures fits well with a typology of such structures according to which languages may adopt and move historically between a highly restrictive ‘syntactic’ system of coordination and a much less restrictive ‘pragmatic’ one.
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).