Inversion after Clause-Initial Adverbs in Old English: The Special Status ofþa,þonne,nu, andswa

Abstract

This study is a corpus-based analysis of clause-initial adverbs and their ability to invert pronominal and nominal subjects in Old English (OE) prose. There is a limited set of adverbs, referred to as “operators” in generative studies of OE syntax, which may cause inversion of personal pronoun subjects; these are þa, þonne, nu, and swa. In this study, numerous differences between the syntactic behavior of these adverbs are revealed, showing that they should not be treated as a syntactically coherent group. The analysis is focused on various factors that have an impact on inversion rates of the adverbs: the presence of the interjection hwæt before the adverb the frequency of correlation, Latin influence on translated texts, information status of the subject, semantic differences and the extra-clausal status of the adverb, as well as diachronic changes within the OE period.

Old English V-initial andþa-VS main clauses

“…( The choice between XVS and XSV for nominal subjects depends on information structure; new subjects follow the XVS pattern more readily (Bech 2001: 163), but for a personal pronoun subject to appear in the XVS pattern, as in (5), the clauseinitial element must belong to a small and closed set of constituents: wh-words, the negative particle ne or one of the adverbs-operators, namely þa 'then' , þonne 'then' and, with some limitations, nu 'now' and swa 'so' (Ringe & Taylor 2014: 399;Cichosz 2017c). One generative interpretation of this syntactic peculiarity is to assume the existence of two parallel types of V2 in OE: operator fronting (V-to-C movement), where the verb moves to a higher position in the clause, triggering categorical inversion of all subject types as in (2) and ( 5), and non-operator fronting (Vto-I movement), where the verb is lower in the clause structure and its position remains sensitive to information structure, as in (4) (Ringe & Taylor 2014: 399).…”

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

“…Some speakers may have analysed such sequences as a part of the V-2 construction, which in OE involved inversion of nominal subjects and non-inversion of subject pronouns (Fischer et al 2000;Ringe & Taylor 2014), so clauses such as (64) and (65), as well as all the parenthetical reporting clauses with secgan, are consistent with it. However, reporting clauses with inverted pronominal subjects such as (66) do not pattern with OE V-2 clauses because according to the OE V-2 rule only a closed group of short adverbs, especially þa 'then' and þonne 'then', as well as the negative particle ne, could cause inversion of subject pronouns (Pintzuk 1999: 91;Cichosz 2017a It is difficult to argue that the quoted message could form a coherent group with these lexical elements (treated as 'operators' in formal accounts of OE syntax), especially given that the inversion mechanism is not consistently applied in all the texts. What is more, Bech (2001) shows that inversion after 'non-operators' is more common when nominal subjects are new; given subjects usually stay non-inverted, so the fact that 100 per cent of nominal subjects in OE reporting clauses are inverted is also quite unexpected from the point of view of the OE V-2 because the speakers referred to in reporting clauses are rarely discourse-new.…”

“…However, reporting clauses with inverted pronominal subjects such as (66) do not pattern with OE V-2 clauses because according to the OE V-2 rule only a closed group of short adverbs, especially þa ‘then’ and þonne ‘then’, as well as the negative particle ne , could cause inversion of subject pronouns (Pintzuk 1999: 91; Cichosz 2017a). …”

Negation and Verb-initial Order in Old English Main Clauses

“… 2 Some studies also include nu (Haeberli 2002; van Kemenade & Los 2009; Ringe & Taylor 2014) and swa (Ringe & Taylor 2014) in this set; see Cichosz (2017c) for a comprehensive analysis of their syntactic behavior. …”