Information Structure and Word Order Change: The Passive as an Information-rearranging Strategy in the History of English

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The consequences of the loss of verb-second in English:information structure and syntax in interaction 1 B E T T E L O U L O SRadboud University Nijmegen (Received 13 February 2008; revised 10 December 2008) English syntax used to have a version of the verb-second rule, by which the finite verb moves to second position in main clauses. This rule was lost in Middle English, and this article argues that its loss had serious consequences for the information structure of the clause. In the new, rigid subject-verb-object syntax, the function of preposed constituents changed, and the function of encoding 'old' or 'given' information in a pragmatically neutral way was increasingly reserved for subjects. Pressure from information structure to repair this situation subsequently led to the rise of new passive constructions in order to satisfy the need for more subjects; the change in the informational status of preposed constituents triggered the rise of clefts. If information structure can be compromised by syntactic change in this way, this suggests that it represents a separate linguistic level outside the syntax. IntroductionEver since the work done by the Neogrammarians in the nineteenth century, we know that sound changes may disrupt morphological paradigms, with morphological regularity often being restored by the process known as 'analogy'. An example is the Latin intervocalic -s-> -r-that disrupted the paradigm of the s-stem nouns: the -s remained in nominative honos 'honour' because it was not intervocalic in that position, but changed to -r-in the rest of the paradigm: honoris, honorem, etc. Analogy then intervened by 'regularizing' the nominative honos to honor (Hock 1986: 180). Similar disruption was caused by Verner's Law, where a sound change that was conditioned by syllable stress applied exclusively to some but not to other forms in the verbal paradigm (Verner 1875). Such changes exemplify the relative autonomy of the various linguistic levels: phonological change is 'blind' to the disruption it causes to other levels. Another example is Roberts & Roussou's (2003) hypothesis that syntactic change (more especially grammaticalization) is driven by morphological loss. The situation could be summed up by Lightfoot's dictum: 'grammars practise therapy, not prophylaxis' (Lightfoot 1979: 123).The present article will argue that changes in syntax may similarly disrupt information structure (IS). Its case study will be the loss of verb-second in English, which prompted 'therapy' in early Modern English in the form of new clefts and new passive structures -even to structures that are typologically very marked. The change 1 I would like to thank Anthony Warner and two anonymous referees for their comments on earlier drafts of this article. in the syntax apparently ran its course in spite of the havoc caused at the IS level, which demonstrates that IS and syntax are just as autonomous as the phonology and morphology of the Neogrammarian examples above. Syntax and information structureInformation structure is about...

Section: The Need For More Subjectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The consequences of the loss of verb-second in English: information structure and syntax in interaction

Los¹

2009

105

“…Interestingly, they demonstrate that one of the most studied features with respect to change in the history of English, i.e. the loss of verb-second (see van Kemenade 2013: 822), does not seem to be a factor affecting the frequency with which the passive is used, as predicted by Seoane (2006). Instead, their results implicate the decline in use of the impersonal pronoun man.…”

Section: K a R E N P C O R R I G A N A N D C H R I S M O N T G O M E Rymentioning

confidence: 67%

Special issue on sense of place in the history of English

Corrigan¹,

Montgomery²

2015

This special issue is concerned with how the multidisciplinary concept ‘sense of place’ can be applied to further our understanding of ‘place’ in the history of English. In particular, the articles collected here all relate in some way to complicated processes through which individuals and the communities they are embedded within are defined in relation to others and to their socio-cultural and spatial environments (Convery et al.2012). We have brought together eight articles focusing on specific aspects of this theme using different theoretical models that offer new insights into the history of the English language from the Old English (OE) period to the twenty-first century. The findings will also be of interest to researchers in the fields of corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, English dialectology, lexicography, pragmatics, prototype theory, sociolinguistics and syntactic theory.

“…This idea raises interesting questions about the role of the passive construction in the discourse, and how the passive may be used to manipulate information structure by promoting an internal argument to subject. Seoane (2006) and Los (2009) propose that in English, the passive construction is used more extensively and in more constructions than in the other Germanic languages in order to compensate for the lack of verb-seconding (V2) word order options, which enable other means of placing topical information at the left edge. Seoane, in particular, suggests that a rise in the frequency of passives in English may be linked to the loss of unmarked topicalization as a strategy to place given information before new.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The expression of impersonals in Middle English

Light

Wallenberg

2015

This article contributes to continuing work on the information structural function of passivization, and how quantitative changes in the implementation of a syntactic strategy may be tied in with the acquisition or loss of comparable strategies. Seoane (2006) outlines a proposal that suggests that the passive construction is used more extensively in English than in the other Germanic languages in order to compensate for the lack of unmarked object topicalization found in languages with verb-seconding (V2). We reconsider this hypothesis from a quantitative perspective and find that, upon further examination, the claim does not hold.We compare parallel New Testament translations along two dimensions: one set across three stages of historical English, and one set across three Germanic languages. We find that the reported change in the rate of passivization between stages of English, and between English and other Germanic languages, is in fact not directly related to the presence or absence of a V2 grammar, but rather due to the availability (or absence) of different strategies of forming impersonal clauses.The current article focuses in more detail on one of the findings of an ongoing study into phenomena linked to the change in passivization in English. While the New Testament translations provide evidence that the overall rate of passivization remains stable across the history of English in one context, we find, in contrast, a significant difference in the rate of passivization between three translations of the Rule of St Benedict. These translations represent an Old English (OE) translation and two Middle English (ME) translations: one Northern, and one Southern. The data reveal a dialect distinction in ME: the Northern translation passivizes at a significantly lower rate.Unlike the New Testament, which is primarily a narrative, the Rule of St Benedict text is written as a set of instructions, and passivization is primarily a strategy for expressing clauses in which no agent can be specified. We find that where the Southern translation of the Rule of St Benedict uses a passive, the Northern translation frequently expresses the same content via an active clause with impersonal man in the subject position. While clauses with impersonal man can be found in both the Northern ME and OE translations of this text, it is wholly absent from the Southern ME translation.This reveals a dialect difference in the ME period: the Southern dialect appears to entirely lack a historically attested strategy for forming impersonal clauses. This, in turn, becomes one factor leading to a rise in the rate of passivization, as passive clauses are used to compensate for the missing strategy.