A Review of Early English Impersonals: Evidence from Necessity Verbs

Abstract

Early English impersonals have been the subject of numerous studies, and many systems of classification have been proposed, as well as theories on their evolution into personal constructions. Jespersen's (1927) theory of reanalysis of the preposed dative experiencer into a nominative subject (from þam cynge licodon peran to the king liked pears) has been defended and rejected in roughly equal measure since it was first published. The present study will contrast Jespersen's theory with that of Allen (1995), testing both against data on necessity verbs such as þurfan, need, behove and mister. A 4.1 million-word corpus is used which includes the Helsinki Corpus plus a random selection of texts from the Dictionary of Old English Corpus, the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse, the Lampeter Corpus and the Corpus of Early English Correspondence Sampler. Findings suggest that while reanalysis does account for the evolution of some lexemes, others require the examination of linguistic features that fall outside the scope of this kind of syntactic change.