‘<i>Gehyrdon ge þæt gecweden wæs</i>’ – A Corpus-based Approach to Verb-initial Constructions in Old English

Martín, Javier Calle; Miranda-García, Antonio

doi:10.1080/00393271003795202

Cited by 26 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Moreover, seien outnumbers quethen in the construction, though as a generally frequent verb it does not show a clear preference for parenthetical use. In this period, the difference 20 V-1 declarative clauses are relatively rare in OE prose (Allen 1995: 34;Calle-Martín & Miranda-García 2010;Mitchell 1985: §3930). In Cichosz (2017c) it is reported that there are only c. 900 V-1 clauses in the YCOE corpus, which means that including or excluding clauses with quotative inversion such as (64) or (66) may have a significant influence on the analysis.…”

Section: The Development Of the Parenthetical Reporting Constructionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A similar view is expressed by Bech in the context of OE syntax: ‘It is therefore not obvious that the syntax of constructions containing direct speech has the integrated structure that enables syntactic-typological reasoning; it is closer to a text structure containing a sequence of two main clauses’ (Bech 2017: 12). Therefore, scholars working on OE usually regard clauses such as (13) as instances of the rare V-1 order (which is said to be particularly well attested in clauses with verbs of saying) (Calle-Martín & Miranda-García 2010; Mitchell 1985: §3930) and not as examples of V-2. …”

Section: Reporting Clauses and Quotative Inversionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Parenthetical reporting clauses in the history of English: the development of quotative inversion

Cichosz¹

2018

English Language and Linguistics

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This study is a corpus-based diachronic analysis of English reporting parentheticals, i.e. clauses introducing direct speech, placed after or in the middle of the reported message. The aim of the investigation is to trace the development of the construction throughout the history of English, establishing the main factors influencing the choice between VS and SV patterns (i.e. with and without quotative inversion respectively), showing how various reporting verbs were increasingly attracted to the construction, and demonstrating the gradual morphological reduction of the main reporting verbs: quoth and say. The study is based on syntactically annotated corpora of Old, Middle, Early Modern and Late Modern English, and uses other corpora to illustrate more recent changes. The study reveals that reporting clauses do not show regular quotative inversion with all subject types until the Early Modern English period and links this development to the emergence of the comment clause with say. It is also claimed that quotative inversion is not directly derived from the V-2 rule and that parenthetical reporting clauses have functioned as a separate construction since the Old English period.

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Section: The Development Of the Parenthetical Reporting Constructionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Reporting Clauses and Quotative Inversionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Parenthetical reporting clauses in the history of English: the development of quotative inversion

Cichosz¹

2018

English Language and Linguistics

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“…Ohkado (2004) produces a list of pragmatic functions of V-1 clauses from Ælfric's Catholic Homilies I: they mark transition from action to action, they summarise the discussion, they introduce a new character, they mark a type or sentence which is in contrast to the preceding one(s), and they open a new story/paragraph. Calle-Martín & Miranda-García (2010) note that certain verb types (especially speaking and motion verbs) are particularly compatible with marking transition in discourse, and this is the reason why they co-occur with V-1 most often.…”

Section: Functions Of V-1 Clauses In Oementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Mitchell (1985: §3932) observes (after Quirk & Wrenn 1955) that the V-1 order is especially frequent in some of the OE poetry and Bede's Historia ecclesiastica ; Calle-Martín & Miranda-García (2010) point to Bede, Orosius and Ælfric's Letters as the texts which follow this pattern most frequently. Ohkado (2000: 272) states that in Bede the structure is not only exceptionally frequent but also used in contexts which rarely co-occur with V-1 in other OE texts (this conclusion is confirmed by Aastrup 2015).…”

Section: Functions Of V-1 Clauses In Oementioning

confidence: 99%

“… 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).…”

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Old English verbs of saying and verb-initial order

Cichosz¹

2016

English Language and Linguistics

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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.

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Old English V-initial andþa-VS main clauses

Cichosz

2022

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This study is a corpus-based constructionist analysis of Old English (OE) constituent order, focusing on verb-initial declaratives and þa-VS main clauses. The main objective of the investigation is to determine the degree of the formal and functional similarity of both patterns in order to establish whether they functioned as two independent constructions (in Construction Grammar terms), with their relation based on functional contrast. The other possibility taken into consideration in the analysis is that the two patterns should rather be treated as variants of the same construction, as suggested in some previous, non-constructionist studies of the topic, which would make it possible to analyse them as allostructions. The study shows that on the general level of the language network, the two clause types are surprisingly different in many respects: their form is less similar than previously assumed, they have drastically different corpus distributions, they show different collocational preferences and perform different discourse functions. Nevertheless, on the lower level of the network, the two constructions show some overlaps in the presentational, narrative and reporting function. At the same time, however, there is a deep functional difference between texts authored by Ælfric and other OE prose records.

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‘Gehyrdon ge þæt gecweden wæs’ – A Corpus-based Approach to Verb-initial Constructions in Old English

Cited by 26 publications

References 12 publications

Parenthetical reporting clauses in the history of English: the development of quotative inversion

Parenthetical reporting clauses in the history of English: the development of quotative inversion

Old English verbs of saying and verb-initial order

Old English V-initial andþa-VS main clauses

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