Focus movement and focus interpretation in Old English

Petrova, S. A.; Speyer, Augustin

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2011.06.004

Cited by 10 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…Behaghel (1909), for instance, already notes that given information precedes new information in various Germanic languages. Similarly, the given-before-new principle (Gundel 1988) is at the heart of much of the recent research on word order variation in the West Germanic language family (see Bech 2001;van Kemenade & Los 2006;Petrova 2009Petrova , 2012Petrova & Speyer 2011;Biberauer & van Kemenade 2011;Taylor & Pintzuk 2012b;van Kemenade & Milicev 2011;Walkden 2014 among others). The hypothesis underlying work on OV/VO variation specifically is that OV is given and VO is new, but it is clear that this relation is not a straightforward one.…”

Section: Ov/vo Variation and Information Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

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On the givenness of OV word order: a (re)examination of OV/VO variation in Old English

Struik

Kemenade

2018

English Language and Linguistics

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OV/VO variation in the history of English has been a long-debated issue. Where earlier approaches were concerned with the grammatical status of the variation (see van Kemenade 1987; Pintzuk 1999 and many others), the debate has shifted more recently to explaining the variation from a pragmatic perspective (see Bech 2001; Taylor & Pintzuk 2012a), focusing on the given-before-new hypothesis (Gundel 1988) and its consequences for OV/VO. While the work by Taylor & Pintzuk (2012a) focuses specifically on the newness of VO orders, the present study is particularly concerned with the givenness of OV word order. It is hypothesized that OV orders are the result of leftward movement from VO orders, triggered by givenness. A corpus study on a database of subclauses with two verbs and a direct object, collected from the YCOE (Taylor et al.2003) corpus, and subsequent multinomial regression analysis within a generalized linear mixed model shows that OV word order is reserved for given objects, while VO objects are much more mixed in terms of information structure. We argue that these results are more in line with an analysis which derives all occurring word orders from a VO base than an analysis which proposes the opposite.

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Section: Ov/vo Variation and Information Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

“…cases which can be inferred from another closely related constituent (see Birner 2006). T&P claim that once the object can be characterized as complex, clausal or 3 Petrova & Speyer (2011), in a study on the influence of focus on OV/VO variation, do consider OAuxV orders.…”

Section: Ov/vo Variation and Information Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

On the givenness of OV word order: a (re)examination of OV/VO variation in Old English

Struik

Kemenade

2018

English Language and Linguistics

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“…Instead, in the decades since 1987, research on the history of English word order has come to realize that the distribution is probably rather due to information-structural features, placing given subjects in a clause-early position (e.g. Bech 1998, 2001, 2012; Los 2009, 2012; Petrova & Speyer 2011; Taylor & Pintzuk 2012, 2015; Komen et al 2014; and work by van Kemenade and collaborators (see references above)). Notably, however, English word order has such an unruly history that agreement has still not been reached on the matter of exactly how to account for it in syntactic terms.…”

Section: Empirical and Theoretical Issuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

English is (still) a West Germanic language

Bech¹,

Walkden²

2015

Nord J Linguist

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In their recent book,English: The Language of the Vikings, Joseph Embley Emonds and Jan Terje Faarlund attempt to make the case that from its Middle period onwards, English is a North Germanic language, descended from the Norse varieties spoken in Medieval England, rather than a West Germanic language, as traditionally assumed. In this review article we critique Emonds & Faarlund's proposal, focusing particularly on the syntactic evidence that forms the basis of their argumentation. A closer look at a number of constructions for which the authors suggest a Norse origin reveals that the situation is not as they present it: in many cases, the syntactic properties of Old and Middle English are not given careful enough consideration, and/or the chronology of the developments is not compatible with a Norse origin. Moreover, the authors do not engage with the large body of sound changes that constitute the strongest evidence for a West Germanic origin. We conclude that Emonds & Faarlund fail to make a convincing case either for a North Germanic origin or against a West Germanic origin.

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“…In this example, unlike in the previous one, the object pronoun is not presented as one of the alternatives active in discourse in opposition to other topics but is contrasted to the nonspecific indirect object after the non-finite verb. In this case, it can be hypothesized that the contrastively focused pronoun is hosted in FocP in the left periphery, as Petrova and Speyer (2011) demonstrate that contrastive focus can be realised in the OE left periphery. It is moreover interesting to note that, when object pronouns constituting C-topics are found in the position preceding the finite verb, these always follow the subject pronoun.…”

Section: Information Structural Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

On the syntax of object pronouns in Old English and Early Middle English

Bastiani

Hinterhölzl

2020

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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The paper investigates the conditions that determine the distribution of object pronouns in the period before the latter become fixed to the post-verbal position. In the transition between Old English and Early Middle English (henceforth OE and EME), object pronouns surface to the left of T, to the left of V and to the right of V. It will be shown that the distribution in the pre-T and post-V positions in OE is due to information structural and prosodic interface conditions, whereas the position at the left of V is analysed as unmarked. In EME, the pre-T position continues to be linked to topicalization, whereas the pre-V position shows a progressively less frequent distribution. The post-verbal mapping of object pronouns can still be linked to prosodic 1 and information structural (IS) mapping conditions, but the data show that the post-verbal position was on the way to being reanalysed as the unmarked position. The change will be attributed to two factors: a) the new option of de-accentuation in situ, leading pronouns to choose the non-finite verb as their phonological host, and b) the grammaticalization of the definite determiner that renders light (non-branching and left-branching) objects into right-branching, heavy objects at the end of the OE period. We will provide evidence that it is the latter factor that leads to the new option of de-accenting pronouns in situ (cf. Hinterhölzl 2017).

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Focus movement and focus interpretation in Old English

Cited by 10 publications

References 20 publications

On the givenness of OV word order: a (re)examination of OV/VO variation in Old English

On the givenness of OV word order: a (re)examination of OV/VO variation in Old English

English is (still) a West Germanic language

On the syntax of object pronouns in Old English and Early Middle English

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