Verb–Obiect Order In Old English: Variation as Grammatical Competition

Pintzuk, Susan

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199250691.003.0016

Cited by 62 publications

(45 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Main clauses will not feature further in this paper, but see Walkden (2012: Chapter 3; to appear) for discussion. The relative position of verb and object in the lower portion of the clausal hierarchyas evidenced most usually by subordinate clauses -has also engendered substantial discussion: see Pintzuk (1999Pintzuk ( , 2002Pintzuk ( , 2005, Roberts (1997) Haeberli & Pintzuk (2012). This is the problem that the present paper will be concerned with.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 91%

“…The 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 2005Wallenberg 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.…”

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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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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 91%

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confidence: 99%

Object position and Heavy NP Shift in Old Saxon and beyond

Walkden¹

2014

Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today

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“…Pintzuk (2002)). The question is what generative grammar, which is concerned with innate knowledge of native speakers, can say about this gradual change.…”

Section: Gradualnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: Functional Categories, Directionality, and Gradualness in Syntactic Change

Nishiyama

2010

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“…Different options for a structure in the language (such as OV and VO word order) are available to the learner during acquisition (among others, Clark & Roberts, 1993;Dresher, 1999;Fodor, 1998aFodor, , 1998bLightfoot, 1999;Niyogi & Berwick, 1997, 1995Yang, 2003) and may continue to be accessed probabilistically, even after acquisition is complete (Bock & Kroch, 1989;Kroch & Taylor, 1997;Pintzuk, 2002;Yang, 2003). 2.…”

Section: The Model the Acquisition Model And Old English Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This view has also been proposed in the historical linguistics literature to explain variation in the adult grammar of languages such as Old English (Bock & Kroch, 1989;Kroch & Taylor, 1997;Pintzuk, 2002). Language learning consists of choosing the correct probabilistic weighting for competing grammatical rules (Yang, 2000(Yang, , 2003.…”

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Input Filtering in Syntactic Acquisition: Answers From Language Change Modeling

Pearl

Weinberg

2007

Language Learning and Development

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We use historical change to explore whether children filter their input for language learning. Although others (e.g., Rohde & Plaut, 1999) have proposed filtering based on string length, we explore two types of filters that assume richer linguistic structure. One presupposes that linguistic utterances are structurally highly ambiguous and focuses learning on unambiguous data (Dresher, 1999;Fodor, 1998b;Lightfoot, 1999). The second claims that children learn only from matrix clauses (Lightfoot, 1991), defining simplicity in a structural manner. We assume that certain language changes occur via mismatches during acquisition. This allows us to use patterns of change to demonstrate that filtering restrictions are necessary to model language learning. Viewing language change as a result of mismatches during learning thus constrains the learning algorithm itself.Scientists have attributed asymmetries between typical adult and child knowledge of language to filtering of the input data. For instance, Morgan (1986) claimed that children, perhaps because of general cognitive restrictions on the complexity of data that they can handle, might restrict attention to simple subparts of utterances. Elman (1993) and others have suggested that this constraint might be motivated by architectural considerations of the underlying language analyzer, modeled as a simple recurrent network-but see Rohde and Plaut (1999) for simulations that cast this assertion into doubt.A ubiquitous property of natural language is its rampant structural ambiguity. Particular strings can be analyzed in multiple ways given all of the grammatical LANGUAGE LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT, 3(1), 43-72 Copyright © 2007, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Correspondence should be addressed to Lisa Pearl, Linguistics Department, 1401 Marie Mount Hall, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742. E-mail: llsp@umd.edu, weinberg@ umiacs.umd.edu options available cross-linguistically. The wrong analysis of such a string can lead the child to include a rule in the underlying grammar that is wrong for the language as a whole. Subsequent revision of the underlying grammar to exclude this rule can then be costly, so this is a serious concern.Dresher (1999), Lightfoot (1991), and Fodor (1998b have proposed learning strategies that bias children away from these potentially misleading cases, using a structurally based definition of simplicity to filter the data. Unfortunately, it is nearly impossible to test any filtering proposal in a natural setting. For logistical and ethical reasons, one cannot simply expose a child to an unnaturally restricted dataset during the critical period of language learning to observe the effect of that restriction on the normal course of language acquisition.Modeling language change, however, can offer a graceful solution to this predicament if we assume that certain types of change result from a misalignment of the child's hypothesis and an adult's analysis of the same data (Lightfoot, 1991(Lightfoot, , 1999. Language change models incorpor...

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Verb–Obiect Order In Old English: Variation as Grammatical Competition

Cited by 62 publications

References 28 publications

Object position and Heavy NP Shift in Old Saxon and beyond

Object position and Heavy NP Shift in Old Saxon and beyond

Introduction: Functional Categories, Directionality, and Gradualness in Syntactic Change

Input Filtering in Syntactic Acquisition: Answers From Language Change Modeling

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