Old and Middle English adverbs of degree in their wider West Germanic context

In Present-Day English, nearly functions as an approximator downtoner meaning ‘almost, all but, virtually,’ as do earlier variants based on the same root— nigh, nighly, near, next ( to)—though more rarely and in more restricted contexts. Nigh functions as an approximator downtoner in Old and Middle English. When near displaces nigh, nigh is retained as a downtoner with lexical adjectives expressing negative semantic prosody. Near is used as a downtoner in later Middle and Early Modern English. However, degree adjunct uses are not well attested, thus pointing to incomplete grammaticalization. During the eighteenth century, the new -ly form ( nearly) takes over the innovative downtoner function and the old form ( near) is retained in the original locative sense, with some remnant downtoner uses. Next ( to) grammaticalizes as a downtoner, but proceeds only to the degree modifier stage and involves a high degree of idiomaticization, thus suggesting incipient grammaticalization. As spatial adverbs, nigh/ near/ next ( to)/ nearly represent one of the well-known sources for the grammaticalization of degree adverbs. However, these forms seem to follow a pathway where the degree modifier use (adjective/participle modifier) precedes the degree adjunct use (verb modifier), contrary to the reverse pathway postulated for other degree adverbs.

The present study analyses four prominent adverbs of degree in Old, Middle, and Early New High German from a comparative West Germanic perspective: filu/vile/ viel ‘much, very’, harto/harte/hart ‘very, firmly’, sêro/sêre/sehr ‘very, sorely’, and gar(aw)o/gar(w)e/gar ‘wholly, very’. Based on corpus data, all four display considerable changes in their usage patterns over time. The findings support the observation that the Middle Germanic period was a time of convergence with regard to the usage of adverbs of degree (Visser 2023), since the developments in Low German largely follow those in High German. However, the geographic and textual distribution of sêro/sêre/sehr with the meaning ‘very’ in High and Low German suggests an expansion from Middle Dutch beginning around 1400. A broader implication is that usage patterns of adverbs of degree are quite borrowable in language contact situations.

This paper is concerned with the question of what adverbs in English are as a category. It argues that English adverbs are not positional variants of a single category together with adjectives but also do not constitute a separate lexical category on their own, as is commonly assumed. Instead, this paper advocates the position that adverbs can and should be assimilated with PPs and offers a comprehensive presentation of this view. In particular, it provides evidence that the morpheme -ly is not a suffix but a nominal root, which forms the basis of the analysis of adverbs as PPs. Furthermore, it shows that the PP analysis of adverbs is able to account for a variety of facts, including those that have been previously used as arguments for alternative analyses. Finally, this paper demonstrates that the PP analysis allows for a straightforward compositional semantics, using manner and degree adverbs as case studies, and provides an outlook into the cross-linguistic situation in the domain of adverbs from the perspective of their morphological structure.

In this paper, we compare two syntactic constructions involving degree adverbs in English and Québec French: the Degree Fronting (DF) construction and the Intensification at a Distance (IAD) construction. We argue that, although they display some similar properties, these similarities are superficial. We argue that, while DF can be analyzed as involving movement, IAD cannot. We propose that the quantifiers in IAD sentences are base-generated in their surface positions, and that these syntactic positions coincide with the positions that the quantifiers occupy when they are quantifying over individuals or events. Furthermore, we argue that dialectal variation in distance quantificational structures between Standard European French and Québec French is due to differences in the semantics of degree adverbs in these dialects.

ABSTRACTIn this article we use the syntax of the noun phrase to evaluate two competing hypotheses: the traditional account, that Middle English is a West Germanic language with Old English as its immediate ancestor, and Emonds and Faarlund's (2014) proposal, that Middle English is a North Germanic language, the direct descendant of Old Norse. The development of nominal syntax shows that the Middle English noun phrase can be derived only from Old English, not from Old Norse. We examine six nominal characteristics; in each case, we find in Middle English exactly the construction that one would expect given the nominal syntax of previous Old English stages. The evidence from Old Norse shows that, although some of the same constructions did develop in the same way in the attested Norse varieties, the development occurred only at a later stage, too late to have affected the syntax of Middle English.

Degree adverbs in Early Modern English

Degree adverbs in Hong Kong and Singapore English : a corpus-based investigation

So odd an article in Danish: a reply to Van de Velde

Journal of the International Network for Korean Language and Culture 22-3, 393-416. This study analyzed the usage patterns of 16 intensifying degree adverbs in a Korean learner corpus across proficiency levels (Levels 1–6). The purpose of the study was to identify the distribution of degree adverb usage, examine the characteristics of written and spoken registers, and explore developmental trends by proficiency level, with the aim of proposing directions for pedagogical improvement. Sixteen degree adverbs commonly identified in previous studies were selected, and data were retrieved separately from the written and spoken subcorpora of the Korean Learner Annotated Corpus of the National Institute of Korean Language. Token frequency and sample counts were calculated and proficiency-level proportions were analyzed. The results showed that both written and spoken registers exhibited a concentration of usage on “너무,” “아주,” and “정말.” In the beginner level, “너무” and “아주” accounted for a very high proportion; in the intermediate level, the range of adverbs increased, but frequency imbalance persisted. At the advanced level, spoken data showed increased use of “되게” and “엄청” while written data showed more frequent use of “매우,” “상당히,” and “대단히.” However, low-frequency adverbs such as “몹시,” “무지,” and “무진장” were rarely used overall. The significance of this study lies in its systematic comparison of learner adverb use across spoken and written registers and proficiency levels. It has pedagogical implications and empirically confirms the mismatch between actual usage and instructional materials. However, the study is limited by its focus on only 16 adverbs and the absence of a qualitative analysis of usage contexts. (Soongsil University)

It is well known that the set of kinship terms in Middle English showed considerable influence from French. In the case of aunt and uncle, this accompanied major restructuring of the system of kinship terms, as the Old English set of four distinct terms for paternal and maternal uncles and aunts were replaced by just two terms for ‘uncle’ and ‘aunt’, regardless of whether paternal or maternal. In comparison, the words for ‘grandfather’ and ‘grandmother’ have attracted little attention, as their story has appeared simpler: Old English had words for ‘grandfather’ and ‘grandmother’, irrespective of whether paternal or maternal, and so did Middle English. The terms are also similar in structure, with native terms in which words for ‘father’ or ‘mother’ are the head and eald ‘old’ is the modifier (whether in a compound or a phrasal structure) being replaced by borrowed terms (grandsire, granddame) or hybrid terms (grandfather, grandmother) in which French grand ‘big’ is the modifier. This paper shows that behind this apparently simple story there lurk some significant complications which point to considerable disruption and instability in the terms for ‘grandfather’ and ‘grandmother’ in both Middle English and French (with interesting and perhaps significant parallels also in other West Germanic languages). Consideration of these complications also casts new light on early lexical borrowing into Middle English from Anglo-Norman.

This article contributes to continuing work on the information structural function of passivization, and how quantitative changes in the implementation of a syntactic strategy may be tied in with the acquisition or loss of comparable strategies. Seoane (2006) outlines a proposal that suggests that the passive construction is used more extensively in English than in the other Germanic languages in order to compensate for the lack of unmarked object topicalization found in languages with verb-seconding (V2). We reconsider this hypothesis from a quantitative perspective and find that, upon further examination, the claim does not hold.We compare parallel New Testament translations along two dimensions: one set across three stages of historical English, and one set across three Germanic languages. We find that the reported change in the rate of passivization between stages of English, and between English and other Germanic languages, is in fact not directly related to the presence or absence of a V2 grammar, but rather due to the availability (or absence) of different strategies of forming impersonal clauses.The current article focuses in more detail on one of the findings of an ongoing study into phenomena linked to the change in passivization in English. While the New Testament translations provide evidence that the overall rate of passivization remains stable across the history of English in one context, we find, in contrast, a significant difference in the rate of passivization between three translations of the Rule of St Benedict. These translations represent an Old English (OE) translation and two Middle English (ME) translations: one Northern, and one Southern. The data reveal a dialect distinction in ME: the Northern translation passivizes at a significantly lower rate.Unlike the New Testament, which is primarily a narrative, the Rule of St Benedict text is written as a set of instructions, and passivization is primarily a strategy for expressing clauses in which no agent can be specified. We find that where the Southern translation of the Rule of St Benedict uses a passive, the Northern translation frequently expresses the same content via an active clause with impersonal man in the subject position. While clauses with impersonal man can be found in both the Northern ME and OE translations of this text, it is wholly absent from the Southern ME translation.This reveals a dialect difference in the ME period: the Southern dialect appears to entirely lack a historically attested strategy for forming impersonal clauses. This, in turn, becomes one factor leading to a rise in the rate of passivization, as passive clauses are used to compensate for the missing strategy.

1. Preface 2. List of participants 3. Proceedings of the 4th ICEHL 4. 'I deny that I'm incapable of working all night': Divergence of negative structures in British and Indian English (by Aitchison, Jean) 5. Relative Which in late 18th-century usage: the Clift family correspondence (by Austin, Frances O.) 6. Lengthening of a in Tyneside English (by Beal, Joan C.) 7. The origins of periphrastic Do: Ellegard and Visser reconsidered (by Denison, David) 8. Synchronic variation and linguistic change: Evidence from british english dialects (by Ihalainen, Ossi) 9. Old English infinitival complements and West-Germanic V-raising (by Kemenade, Ans M.C. van) 10. The simplification of the Old English strong nominal paradigms (by Keyser, Samuel Jay) 11. Verb and particle combinations in old and middle English (by Koopman, Willem F.) 12. The impersonal verb in context: old English (by Lagerquist, Linnea M.) 13. The south African Chain-shift: order out of chaos? (by Lass, Roger) 14. Of Rhyme and reason: some foot-governed quantity changes in English (by Minkova, Donka) 15. Lexical variation of early modern English exclusive adverbs: Style switching or a change in progress? (by Nevalainen, Terttu) 16. Some remarks on complementation in old English (by Nagucka, Ruta) 17. The interpretation and development of form alternations conditioned across word boundaries: The case of Wife's, Wives and Wives' (by Plank, Frans) 18. A note on the voicing of initial fricatives in middle English (by Poussa, Patricia) 19. Expression of exclusiveness in old English and the development of the adverb only (by Rissanen, Matti) 20. The great Scandinavian belt (by Samuels, M.L.) 21. Discourse markers in early modern English (by Stein, Dieter) 22. Assessment of alternative explanations of the middle English phenomenon of high vowel lowering when lengthened in the open syllable (by Stockwell, Robert P.) 23. Preliminaries to the linguistic analysis of old Engllish glosses and glossaries (by Toon, Thomas E.) 24. The role of INFL in word order change (by Travis, Lisa deMena)

This paper reports the discovery of a syntactic dialect difference between northern and southern Middle English in the grammatical implementation of the so-called constraint and argues that this difference is most likely a linguistic contact effect of the Viking invasions of northern and eastern England in the eighth and ninth centuries. In the South, the Middle English V2 constraint behaves as it had in Old English; that is, as a variant of the IP-V2 type, the type found in modern Yiddish and Icelandic. In the North, however, the constraint is of the CP-V2 type, as found in modern Mainland Scandinavian and in German or Dutch. It is argued that the northern form of V2 arises as a consequence of the collapse of agreement inflection in northern Middle English, which leads to a loss of V-to-I movement, just as happened in mainland Scandinavian when agreement inflection was lost there. Once, V-to-I movement is lost, IP can no longer host the topic-verb configuration that defines the verb-second phenomenon. The collapse of agreement is further argued to result from imperfect second language learning by the Scandinavian invaders, who formed a large enough proportion of the population of the North to impose substratum effects on the northern dialect. Investigation of the available documentary evidence is shown to support dating both the collapse of endings and the appearance of CP-V2 word order to the period of the Viking invasions. It is suggested that the loss of V2 word order in English, which has made it the only Germanic language that does not respect the constraint, may have resulted from the extensive contact between northern and southern speakers that lead to the mixture of northern and southern features that characterize the language of the Midlands (and London) in the late Middle English period.

The intensifiers this/that can be traced back to the fourteenth century, when these deictic demonstratives acquired an adverbial status as a result of a grammaticalization process by means of which they became degree adverbs with the meaning of ‘to this/that extent, so much, so’ (OED s.v. this/that adv.). The present paper contributes to the study of the development of intensifiers through the grammaticalization of deictic demonstratives analyzing the use and distribution of these intensifiers with the following objectives: (a) to trace their origin and grammaticalization as degree words in English; (b) to analyze their development over time; (c) to assess their distribution across register/text types; and (d) to cast light on the lexico-semantic structure of the right-hand collocates in terms of their mode of construal. The study concludes that the deictive function of demonstratives contributed to the adoption of their degree meaning in Late Middle English. The construction disseminated in the early nineteenth century as a typical resource of spoken English and both forms have progressed to where they can impose a scalar construal on adjectives for which scale is not the default construal. The evidence comes from the Corpus of Historical American English and the Corpus of Contemporary American English.

This article seeks to identify the phonetic correspondence(s) of the digraph <cg> in Old English (OE) and Middle English (ME), assessing a range of sources: the etyma in early Germanic (Gmc) languages, the various spellings in OE and the spelling evidence in theLinguistic Atlas of Early Middle English. Almost all the textbooks on OE claim that <cg> was pronounced /dʒ/, i.e. as a phonemic affricate, in OE. Evidence is thin on the ground, and the argument rests on certain back spellings <cg> for words with etymological <d+g>, e.g.midgern<micgern>. Words with <cg> in OE go back to Gmc*g(g)j, which subsequently underwent palatalisation, and eventually assibilation and affrication. This article argues that the value [ɟj] is more likely for OE and early ME, and that such an interpretation agrees with the available spelling evidence for both OE and ME, in that there is not one <d>-type spelling in the entire historical corpus until late ME. It is also argued that the development of the voiced (pre-)affricate was later than that of its voiceless counterpart, as voiced fricative phonemes are a late, and infrequent, development in Gmc. Moreover, it is likely that the development of /dʒ/ was affected by the high number of French loans with /dʒ/ which entered the English lexicon after 1066. Thus, the English system of consonant phonemes may not have acquired /dʒ/ until the thirteenth century at the earliest.