OE verb-initial main clauses are associated with a number of stylistic functions and they are said to co-occur with specific verb types, including verbs of saying (Mitchell 1985; Petrova 2006; Ohkado 2005). It has also been observed that the general frequency of the V-1 pattern in OE is text-specific and that the structure is exceptionally well represented in Bede (Calle-Martín & Miranda-García 2010; Ohkado 2000; Mitchell 1985). Latin influence has been suggested as a possible explanation for the high frequency of V-1 in this text, but this hypothesis has never been tested (Ohkado 2000). The aim of this study is to analyse V-1 main clauses containing verbs of saying in order to determine the motivation for the use of the pattern in OE and the possibility of foreign influence on the Bede translation. The analysis shows that OE V-1 clauses with verbs of saying are to a great extent lexically recurrent formulas used for turn-taking in conversations as well as marking transition in a story, and that their frequent use in the OE Bede is only partly influenced by the source text.

The aim of the present study is to conduct a comprehensive corpus analysis of the constituent order of main declarative clauses with the interjectionhwæt‘what’ in the clause-initial position in Old English prose texts. On the basis of his analysis of Ælfric'sLives of Saintsand Bede'sHistoria Ecclesiastica, Walkden (2013) claims that suchhwæt-clauses pattern with subordinate clauses with respect to their verb position. My study confirms Walkden's basic empirical findings thathwæt-clauses do not behave like typical main clauses as far as their constituent order is concerned. However, there are numerous differences between them and subordinate clauses introduced byhwæt, that is, free relatives and embedded questions. The analysis suggests that the conditions favoring the use of the V-final order in mainhwæt-clauses resemble the ones identified for ordinary V-final main clauses in Bech 2012. What is more, the study shows that the functional differences betweenhwæt-andhwæt þa-clauses noted in Brinton 1996 are blurred in Old English prose because of a regular variation betweenhwæt þa-S andhwæt-S-þapatterns. The data also suggest thatþainhwæt þa-clauses should rather be analyzed as an independent clause element.

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This study is a corpus-based analysis of clause-initial adverbs and their ability to invert pronominal and nominal subjects in Old English (OE) prose. There is a limited set of adverbs, referred to as “operators” in generative studies of OE syntax, which may cause inversion of personal pronoun subjects; these are þa, þonne, nu, and swa. In this study, numerous differences between the syntactic behavior of these adverbs are revealed, showing that they should not be treated as a syntactically coherent group. The analysis is focused on various factors that have an impact on inversion rates of the adverbs: the presence of the interjection hwæt before the adverb the frequency of correlation, Latin influence on translated texts, information status of the subject, semantic differences and the extra-clausal status of the adverb, as well as diachronic changes within the OE period.

This study is a corpus-based investigation of the development of English clause-initial quotative inversion, i.e. the construction in which a reporting clause with SV inversion is placed before the quoted message. The analysis makes use of various corpora of historical and contemporary English in order to document quantity and quality changes in the investigated construction in all stages of English. The study shows that the construction observed in Present Day English has developed in a continuous way since the period of Old English, although it has been a low-frequency pattern in each historical period. Moreover, the construction has developed differently in British and American English. In the former variety, the clause-initial quotative inversion is still quite rare and limited to newspapers, mostly tabloids; in the latter, it is quite widespread in magazines, where it shows an exceptionally high frequency and a growing collocational range.