No abstract

This paper deals with Scandinavian influence in Early Middle English texts and especially with one syntactic phenomenon, stylistic fronting. It is claimed here that the OV/VO word order change in Early Middle English was triggered by language contact with Scandinavian (Kroch & Taylor, 1997) and that the occurrence of syntactic phenomena like stylistic fronting are taken to be evidence for the heavy impact on the English language that led to this change. The focus of the paper lies on the findings from one Early Middle English poetic text, the <em>Ormulum</em>, which shows non-syntactic as well as syntactic evidence for Scandinavian influence. It is shown that the orders that seem to reflect the fronting operation are indeed true instantiations of stylistic fronting. Moreover, in this text stylistic fronting is a phonological phenomenon, because it is used by Orm, its author, whenever the metrical pattern would otherwise be violated. Thus, it was part of Orm's grammar and he could use it for phonological reasons. The fact that the fronting operation is metrically driven supports Holmberg's (2000) analysis of stylistic fronting as a PF-operation.

No abstract

The fact that þa/þonne ‘then’ trigger V2 in OE is commonly accounted for by assuming that these adverbs are operators that trigger V-to-C movement. This paper presents an alternative analysis based on the observation that þa/þonne and pronouns are in complementary distribution in preverbal position. We identify this position as SpecTP, arguing that OE was a discourseconfigurational language where SpecTP was linked to the discourse anchoring of anaphoric/deictic expressions, including pronouns and temporal anaphora such as þa/þonne. Under these assumptions, V2 with these temporal adverbs results from a spec-head relationship in TP. The loss of V2 in the ME period is then attributed to the independent development of a (subject-oriented) EPP-feature in TP and the overall loss of discourse-configurationality.

An in-depth corpus study will show that the ability of -able formations to highlight other arguments of the verbal base is present from the start in Old French texts, similarly to findings for Modern French (2003). Old French formations like (par)durable, decevable or changable show that unergatives and unaccusatives can just as well serve as input to -able formations, and that the traditional distinction between transitive and intransitive types cannot account for the variety of derivatives we are already faced with in the Old French period. We also argue against the assumptions that in Old French the active meaning was clearly dominant and that in ME the free morpheme able explains the rise of the suffix -able. The semantic analysis has shown that an adequate word-formation rule should account for the event structure of the base verb rather than rely on the syntactic or semantic frame alone.