Stylistic Fronting in the Ormulum - Scandinavian Syntactic Phenomena in Early Middle English Texts

Abstract

This paper deals with Scandinavian influence in Early Middle English texts and especially with one syntactic phenomenon, stylistic fronting. It is claimed here that the OV/VO word order change in Early Middle English was triggered by language contact with Scandinavian (Kroch & Taylor, 1997) and that the occurrence of syntactic phenomena like stylistic fronting are taken to be evidence for the heavy impact on the English language that led to this change. The focus of the paper lies on the findings from one Early Middle English poetic text, the <em>Ormulum</em>, which shows non-syntactic as well as syntactic evidence for Scandinavian influence. It is shown that the orders that seem to reflect the fronting operation are indeed true instantiations of stylistic fronting. Moreover, in this text stylistic fronting is a phonological phenomenon, because it is used by Orm, its author, whenever the metrical pattern would otherwise be violated. Thus, it was part of Orm's grammar and he could use it for phonological reasons. The fact that the fronting operation is metrically driven supports Holmberg's (2000) analysis of stylistic fronting as a PF-operation.

Stylistic Fronting in spoken Icelandic relatives

“…There is a robust effect of frontable syllables. This result could be consistent with Trips (2003), who argues that SF is metrically driven, but more would have to be said about how fronting a one-syllable constituent satisfies metrical constraints better than other constituents. This puts some quantitative support behind the intuition that phonological or perhaps syntactic weight has an effect on SF (see e.g.…”

“…Stylistic Fronting has been extensively studied since it was first discussed in Maling (1980). Similar phenomena have been identified in Italian (Cardinaletti 2003), Faroese (Barnes 1987), Old Catalan (Fischer & Alexiadou 2001), Old Spanish (Fontana 1993), Old French (Mathieu 2006), Old English (Kroch & Taylor 1997), Middle English (Trips 2003), Old Danish and Middle Danish (Hrafnbjargarson 2004), Old Swedish (Falk 1993; Delsing 2001), and other languages. It has been studied in Icelandic more extensively than any other language.…”

“…Burton-Roberts & Poole (2006) have argued that SF exists to satisfy the verb-second constraint, which they argue to be a prosodic constraint. Trips (2003) studied SF in an Early Middle English document, the Ormulum. While there is no explication in these works of exactly what it is prosodically that conditions SF, they do express the intuition that prosody is relevant to the optionality of SF.…”

On the syntactic differences between OE dialects: evidence from the Gospels

“…14 Examples (11) and (15) from the Lindisfarne Gospels strengthen the Northumbrian provenance of the text due to the presence of the so-called 'Scandinavian stylistic fronted' constructions (Holmberg 1997;Trips 2003), syntactic constructions found in Scandinavian languages. 15 The general view considers that these relativizers are subordinating particles functionally very similar to the prototypical complementizer which introduces complement clauses.…”

Book Review: Carola Trips, From OV to VO in Early Middle English (Linguistik Aktuell 60), Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2002, pp. xiv?+?359, ISBN 1588113116.

“…The most exciting chapter, to my mind, is chapter 7, in which Trips persuasively argues that the Ormulum makes extensive use of a stylistic fronting (SF) rule like that known from ON (this follows up on two previous articles, Trips 1999Trips , 2003. Since the Ormulum is known to be a Scandinavian-influenced text (it has, for example, a high number of Scandinavian loan words; the author, Orm, even has a Scandinavian name), it is plausible that the SF construction was another symptom of ON influence, as Trips argues.…”