Grammar Competition and Word Order in a Northern Early Middle English Text

Robert Truswell

doi:10.3390/languages6020059

Abstract

The Edinburgh Royal College of Physicians manuscript of Cursor Mundi and the Northern Homilies, a northern Middle English text from the early 14th century, contains unprecedentedly high frequencies of matrix verb-third and embedded verb-second word orders with subject–verb inversion. I give a theoretical account of these word orders in terms of a grammar, the ‘CM grammar’, which differs minimally in its formal description from regular verb-second grammars, but captures these unusual word orders through addition of a second preverbal A′-projection. Despite its flexibility, the CM grammar did not spread through the English-speaking population. I discuss the theoretical consequences of this failure to spread for models of grammar competition where fitness is tied to parsing success, and discuss prospects for refining such models.

Highlights

The first is to describe matrix verb‐third and embedded verb‐second orders with subject–verb inversion in Old and Early Middle English, with special reference to the Edinburgh Cursor Mundi and Northern Homilies, a northern Middle English document written in three hands from the early–mid 14th century, in which these orders are common
The CM grammar is present throughout Old and Middle English, but visible in northern ME texts for a variety of reasons
Because OV orders are less likely to put the verb in second position, this means that there were more Old English (OE) orders, in embedded clauses, that could not be generated by the CM grammar

Summary

Introduction

The second aim of this paper is to draw out some theoretical implications of this very flexible grammar, which apparently existed in the margins of the history of English, from the perspective of approaches to syntactic change based on grammar competition (Kroch 1989; Yang 2002). These widely adopted approaches model a speaker’s grammati‐ cal competence as a distribution over multiple grammars, where the relative weights, or fitness, of the different grammars are determined on Yang’s (2002) model by their success in parsing sentences encountered during language acquisition.

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