Subject Positions and Information-Structural Diversification in the History of English

Biberauer, Theresa; Kemenade, Ans van

doi:10.5565/rev/catjl.32

Cited by 27 publications

(20 citation statements)

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“…Though her Ph.D. dissertation was an important contribution to the study of historical English syntax when it appeared, much research has taken place in the almost thirty years since, including by van Kemenade herself (see e.g. van Kemenade 2009;Biberauer & van Kemenade 2011;van Kemenade & Milićev 2012;van Kemenade & Westergaard 2012). The syntactic models have been refined, and we now have a much better understanding of the facts due to the large electronic corpora that have been made available.…”

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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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confidence: 99%

English is (still) a West Germanic language

Bech¹,

Walkden²

2015

Nord J Linguist

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“…discussion of English in Biberauer & van Kemenade 2011). the examples in (15) all involve unaccusatives where the subject could a priori be argued to occur in situ in V',DP, we should note that the Adverb+Subject order is found with both rhematic (15b,c) and, crucially, thematic (15a,c') subjects which can confidently be argued to lexicalize the intermediate SpecvP position, if not SpecFocP or SpecTopP positions within Belletti's (2004; lower left periphery. In this respect, the embedded temporal clause in (15c) proves particularly revealing since it exemplifies a case of 'Germanic' inversion involving an auxiliary structure with coepio 'begin' + infinitive.…”

Section: V1 Structures and Subject Positionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Late Latin Verb Second: The Sentential Word Order of the “Itinerarium Egeriae”

Ledgeway

2017

catjl

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In this article we undertake a systematic study of the Itinerarium Egeriae, one of the best known late Latin texts, to determine the proper characterization of the word order of the text and to consider in particular whether the Itinerarium Egeriae can legitimately be considered to present a verb-second (V2) grammar on the par with the well-studied grammars of medieval Romance. The results, based on detailed quantitative and qualitative analyses of the text and, where relevant, appropriate comparisons with medieval Romance, confirm the innovative nature of the syntax of the Itinerarium Egeriae whose word order patterns are shown to follow an asymmetric V2 constraint. The article therefore offers valuable original evidence for the often claimed, but hitherto unproven, hypothesis that the V2 syntax of medieval Romance represents the continuation of a parametric setting already well established in the grammar of late Latin. En aquest article duem a terme un estudi sistemàtic de l'Itinerarium Egeriae, un dels textos del llatí tardà més ben coneguts, per tal de determinar la caracterització adequada de l'ordre de mots del text i veure, en particular, si l'Itinerarium Egeriae es pot considerar legítimament que presenta una gramàtica de verb segon (V2) de manera semblant a les gramàtiques ben estudiades del romànic medieval. Els resultats, basats en detallades anàlisis quantitatives i qualitatives del text i, on és pertinent, en comparacions adequades amb el romànic medieval, confirmen la naturalesa innovadora de la sintaxi de l'Itinerarium Egeriae, els patrons d'ordre de mots de la qual es demostra que segueixen una restricció asimètrica de V2. L'article, per tant, ofereix evidència original i valuosa a favor de la hipòtesi sovint proposada però fins ara no demostrada que la sintaxi V2 del romànic medieval representa la continuació d'una fixació paramètrica ja ben establerta en la gramàtica del llatí tardà.Paraules clau: Verb segon (V2); llatí tardà; ordre de paraules; perifèria esquerra; romànic medieval; Tobler-Mussafia * I thank two anonymous reviewers and Jim Adams, Paola Benincà, Theresa Biberauer, Federica Cognola and Nigel Vincent for their valuable comments and observations on a previous version of this article.

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“…In main clauses the verb could be first, third, or later under certain circumstances, likely information-structurally conditioned: see e.g. Pintzuk (1993Pintzuk ( , 1999, Koopman (1995Koopman ( , 1997Koopman ( , 1998, Roberts (1996), Bech (1998Bech ( , 2001, Haeberli (1999aHaeberli ( , 1999bHaeberli ( , 2002, Biberauer & van Kemenade (2011), Bech & Salvesen (this volume),…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Object position and Heavy NP Shift in Old Saxon and beyond

Walkden¹

2014

Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today

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This paper investigates the position of'heavy' nominal objects in Old Saxon and other Germanic languages. A new empirical study of Old Saxon is carried out and regression analysis performed, with information status, grammatical weight and case all serving as predictors. On the theoretical side it is argued that an analysis in terms of movement to specifier positions in a low left periphery goes some of the way towards capturing the observed facts, but still suffers from certain problems. 1. Introduction 1The factors conditioning the alternation between object-verb (OV) and verb-object (VO) orders in Old English (OE) have been the subject of a lot of attention in recent years (see Pintzuk 2002Pintzuk , 2005 and the references given there; Biberauer & Roberts 2005 Wallenberg 2009, to appear; Taylor & Pintzuk 2010, to appear). Initial investigation of the data revealed that information structure seemed to play a role in conditioning the alternation, leading naturally to the simple hypothesis that objects are postverbal iff they are new information (cf. e.g. Roberts 1997:412). Taylor and Pintzuk (2010, to appear), however, show that this hypothesis is false for OE, and that the mapping from surface constituent order to information structure must therefore be more complex than previously assumed; furthermore, they show that grammatical weight -how 'long' or 'heavy' the object is -plays a role. In this paper I investigate Benjamins, 2014. -(Linguistik aktuell ; 213). -S. 313-340. -ISBN 978-90-272-5596-9 https://dx.doi.org/10.1075/la.213.12wal 314 whether Old Saxon (OS), the closest attested contemporary relative of OE, patterns with OE in these respects -a question that is interesting not only for its own sake but also for the light it may shed on the diachrony of the West Germanic languages. The paper is split into two key segments. Firstly, after laying out the theoretical background in Section 2 and methodology in Section 3, I present new data drawn from the OS Helimzd, and discuss their relevance for analyses of the OV/VO alternation, in Section 4. The results indicate that with respect to the information structure and weight of objects OS can indeed be said to pattern with OE. Section 5 broadens the focu s to processes of'rightward movement'/Heavy NP Shift (HNPS) in Germanic as a whole, and deals with the question of how to analyse these. The starting point is the analysis presented by Wallenberg (2009, to appear), in which HNPS is viewed as a diachronically stable phenomenon involving movement of the object to SpecFocusP at the clausal left periphery followed by remnant movement ofTP to a higher SpecTopicP. While the analysis is attractive in unifying 'rightward movement' cross-linguistically with leftward movement, within a uniformly head-initial approach to phrase structure d la Kayne (1994) and restrictive clausal cartography following Rizzi (1997), I present i a number of empirical problems, which lead me to propose a slightly different alternative; my account maintains the assumptions of head-initia...

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Subject Positions and Information-Structural Diversification in the History of English

Cited by 27 publications

References 83 publications

English is (still) a West Germanic language

English is (still) a West Germanic language

Late Latin Verb Second: The Sentential Word Order of the “Itinerarium Egeriae”

Object position and Heavy NP Shift in Old Saxon and beyond

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