Contact-Induced Changes in the Argument Structure of Middle English Verbs on the Model of Old French

Abstract

This paper investigates contact-induced changes in the argument structure of Middle English verbs on the model of Old French. 1 We study two issues: i) to what extent did the English system retain and integrate the argument structure of verbs copied from French? ii) did the argument structure of these copied verbs influence the argument structure of native verbs? Our study is based on empirical evidence from Middle English corpora as well as a full text analysis of the Ayenbite of Inwyt and focusses on a number of verbs governing a dative in French. In the first part of the paper we define the contact situation and relate it to Johanson’s (2002) model of code copying. In the second part we comment on Allen’s (1995) study of please and some other psych verbs and corroborate her assumptions that i) semantic similarity triggered change within the set of these verbs, and ii) this change has reflexes in the syntactic realisation of the dative argument as a prepositional phrase. We propose a method to identify contact-induced change beyond the verb class originally affected. More explicitly, based on further empirical evidence, we show that the argument structure of the native verb give, a transfer of possession verb, was also affected by these changes and that these effects are stronger in texts that are directly influenced by French.

Loan Word Accommodation Biases: Markedness and Finiteness

“…Proponents of this view have argued that the small Anglo‑French speaking elite, while it existed, remained largely monolingual, even as among the larger English‑speaking population, there was only ever a small share of speakers using French, and that only as a second language. However, that view may have to be reconsidered, since more recent research has provided quantitative evidence indicative of grammatical transfer as well (Trips & Stein 2019; Ingham 2020). In that light, contact between English and French would have been stronger than traditionally believed.…”