Construction In Old English Research Articles

Are There Serial Verb Constructions in Old English? A New Perspective on the Changes in Verbal Complementation

This article discusses the existence of serial verb constructions in Old English and explores the complementation of aspectual and control verbs as well as other related constructions. The discussion of the Old English data finds remarkable differences with respect to the syntactic configurations of Present-Day English that are described as serial by Roberts (2010). Although the range of serial constructions is more restrictive in Old English, at least with aspectual verbs, the analysis of verbal complementation from the perspective of serialisation allows us to bring other convergent constructions to the discussion, including configurations with linked infinitives and participles in predicative constructions and configurations with pre-modals and the causative verb dōn ‘to do’.

Updating Old English Dative–Genitives: A Diachronic Construction Grammar Account

This article conducts a corpus linguistics analysis of the dative–genitive subconstruction within the broader context of Old English double object complementation. The ditransitive construction in Old English has traditionally been perceived as a network of alternating subconstructions, including dat-acc, acc-dat, acc-gen, dat-gen, and acc-acc, as the most productive variants. Recent literature has primarily focused on dat-accs and acc-dats because they are the most productive patterns across the history of English, giving also rise to the current ditransitive construction. However, the less productive case frames have received considerably less recent attention. This work, part of an ongoing investigation aimed at creating an OE dat-gen database, builds upon Visser’s list, verified and implemented by findings obtained from a search conducted in the Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus. We obtain 88 verb types and 443 tokens, incorporating 19 new verb types and 260 tokens into the database. More significantly, we offer a detailed description of the conceptual domains and verb classes associated with OE dat-gens, which display a semantics characterized by the presence or absence of actual transfer, as well as transitions from literal to metaphorical transfer, with speech verbs playing a significant role.

What Did(n’t) Happen to English?: A Re-evaluation of Some Contact Explanations in Early English

McWhorter (2002) argued that contact with Norse caused simplifications in English grammar that set English apart from other Germanic languages. This paper focuses on one of the losses McWhorter attributed to the linguistic impact of the Scandinavian invasions, External Possessors. An investigation of electronic Old and Early Middle English corpora reveals that the construction was already on the decline in the Old English period, and that Norse contact cannot explain the Early Middle English data. There is no support for the view that the loss of the construction spread from the Scandinavianized areas southwards. The facts are consistent with the view that while Celtic influence did not cause the loss of the construction in Old English, Celtic speakers shifting to English may have played a role in triggering the initial decline of the construction. Study of non-standard variants of other Germanic languages is needed to increase our understanding of the history of External Possessor constructions in those languages.

Impersonal and reflexive uses of Middle English psych verbs under contact influence with Old French

AbstractThis article discusses the relation between impersonal constructions and the reflexive use of psych verbs of theadmire-type (Levin 1993) copied from Old French to Middle English. The outset of the study is an observation made by van der Gaaf (1904) which was commented on by Fischer (1992) concerning the reflexive use of verbs likeremembren(Old Frenchremembrer) in the course of the development of impersonal constructions to personal constructions. My aim is to answer the following questions: First, was the reflexive use of verbs copied from Old French new to the Middle English system? Second, what is the syntactic and semantic relation between ME impersonal and OF reflexive constructions? I will first examine the reflexive construction in Old English and Old French to answer the first question. I will then deal with the second question taking a closer look at both constructions in Middle English. Supported by lexicon-based and corpus-based small-scale studies of the psych verbremembrenI will provide an analysis of the syntactic and semantic properties of the verb in both constructions and show that what they have in common is an intransitive structure where the subject is anexperiencer, and middle semantics. I will finally address possible effects of language contact through translations, before I conclude.

Negators in Contrastive Constructions in Old English

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this article is to find out the factors that explain the variation among the different negators in contrastive constructions, X (and) not Y and not X but Y, in Old English prose and glosses. An attempt is also made to answer the question why such structures are used, and why they are more common in some texts than in others. The data consists of a select corpus. The results indicate that in early West Saxon the negators in such constructions are mainly nalles and næs, while the negator na occurs less frequently. The exclusive use of the negator na by Ælfric simplifies the system of negators in late West Saxon. Contrastive constructions are mainly employed as rhetorical means for emphasis. They are favoured in texts that are intended to influence people. The results suggest that the variation is partly idiolectal and genre-based, and partly diachronic.

The Status of Passive Constructions in Old English

AbstractIn Old English, passive‐type constructions involving a copula and a passive participle could be used to express both events and states. Two different types of copula are found in these constructions: weorðan, meaning ‘become’, and wesan and beon, meaning ‘be’. There has been some dispute as to how the meaning of these copulas relates to the meaning of the construction as a whole, in both its eventive and its stative uses, and whether any of these constructions was grammaticalized in the sense that its meaning was non‐compositional. We propose a semantic model that represents these constructions compositionally and test it against a selected corpus of Old English texts in order to address two questions: whether the data provide evidence of non‐compositional meaning that would suggest grammaticalization, and whether other factors are also responsible for the choice of copula. Our analysis suggests that the attested Old English passives are fully compatible with a compositional analysis; we also discuss additional semantic factors that may be responsible for the lower frequency of passives with weorðan.

The Old Englishto-dative construction

In Present-day English (PDE), theto-dative construction refers to clauses likeJohn sold/offered/mentioned/gave the books to Mary, in which a ditransitive verb takes a Recipient that is expressed as ato-Prepositional Phrase (to-PP). This study examines theto-dative construction in Old English (OE). I show, first of all, that this construction was not rare in OE, in contrast to what has been suggested in the literature. Second, I report on two corpus studies in which I examined the ordering behaviour of the NP and theto-PP. The results of the first study suggest that the same ordering tendencies already existed in OE as in PDE: both the NP-to-PP and theto-PP-NP orders were grammatical, but the NP-to-PP was the most frequently used one. However, in OE, theto-PP-NP was more common than in PDE, where its use is heavily restricted. My second corpus study is informed by the multifactorial approach to the English dative alternation and uses a mixed-effects logistic regression analysis to evaluate the effects of various linguistic (verbal semantics, pronominality, animacy, definiteness, number, person and length) and extra-linguistic variables (translation status, time of completion/manuscript) on the ordering of NP andto-PP. The main finding is that, generally speaking, the same factors that motivate the dative alternation in PDE were involved in OE as well. No evidence was found for the influence of verbal semantics nor of the extra-linguistic variables. Finally, I argue against the view thattowas semantically reanalysed from a Goal to a Recipient marker from OE to ME. Building on evidence that the Recipient use oftowas already embryonically present in OE, I make the case that this semantic change was far more gradual than traditionally assumed.

On the Possessive-Demonstrative Construction in Old English

This paper aims to analyse the Possive-Demonstrative construction in Ole English under the minimalist perspective and examines its implications on the development of the definite article. Instead of Chomskys (2000, 2001) idea of Move, its driving force is attributed to a uF in the moving element. The possessive in the construction is assumed to carry the uF [αstrong] associated with strong declension and undergo movement to go beyond the scope of the definite D. The distal demonstrative, on the other hand, suffers the loss of deictic and anaphoric properties and reduces to a head selecting an adjective complement. Its deficiency is implemented as the absence of the uF [αstrong]. In terms of grammaticalization, the weakening of the distal demonstrative testifies the transition stage before the completion of its shift into the definite article in Early Middle English.

Ne+ infinitive constructions in Old English

The occurrence of the Old English negative particlene‘not’ preceding a bare infinitive rather than a finite verb is a largely neglected or overlooked phenomenon. It is attested in constructions withuton‘let's’ and in conjoined clauses with omission of the finite verb (Mitchell 1985). This article discusses evidence gathered mainly from theYork–Toronto–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose, showing that it is a phenomenon that needs to be taken seriously in descriptions and analyses of Old English. It is argued that the factor shared by the two constructions is the lack of an available finite verb forneto attach to. It is also found that the use ofnefor the purpose of negative concord appears to be more variable with infinitives than it is with finite verbs. Whether attachment ofneto a non-finite verb in the absence of a finite one is restricted to bare infinitives is difficult to determine because of the limited evidence relating to other non-finite forms, but there are some indications that use ofnemay have been possible with present participles. Finally, some implications that thene+ infinitive pattern has for the formal analysis of Old English are discussed.

‘Gehyrdon ge þæt gecweden wæs’ – A Corpus-based Approach to Verb-initial Constructions in Old English

As in other Germanic languages, Old English non-dependent clauses are usually verb-second. Even though considerably less common, verb-initial constructions are also witnessed in Old English prose. This study is therefore devoted to these non-dependent verb-initial constructions in Old English in order to: a) determine the statistics of the construction across some Old English prose compositions; b) examine the kind of verbs favoured in these positions; and c) analyse the contexts in which this construction is likely to occur. The approach stems from Ohkado's study of these clause-types in the first series of Ælfric's Catholic Homilies, stating that their function may ultimately depend on authorial preferences. In our case, the source of evidence has been extracted from a selection of The Toronto Complete Corpus of Old English. Accordingly, complete pieces have been investigated to conclude whether the use of V1 is consistent in Old English prose or, on the contrary, it is a matter of the writer's idiolect.

The Double Object Constructions in Old English

The Double Object Constructions in Old English

The Absolute Participle Construction in Old English: Ælfric's Exploitation of the Latinate Syntax in his Vernacular Prose

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements This article is based on a paper read at the 79th General Meeting of the English Literary Society of Japan held at Keio University, Tokyo, on 20 May 2007. I would like to thank the audiences at the presentation for their helpful comments. My special thanks go to Dr Hiroshi Ogawa for his invaluable suggestions and comments on earlier drafts of this article. Additional informationNotes on contributorsKiriko SatoKiriko Sato is at the Department of English, Kumamoto Gakuen University, Japan.

Lexical Classes and the Conative Construction in Old English

Lexical Classes and the Conative Construction in Old English This paper is concerned with the description of the event structure and the meaning components that motivate the realization of the conative construction within some canonical Old English verb classes. In the same line as the latest proposals framed within the Lexical Constructional Model, this kind of description is intended to evidence the essential role of semantic features that are not necessarily realized in the syntax and thus help elucidate and comprehend lexical-constructional processes. Besides, this work seeks to establish adequate criteria to identify the conative construction and provides insights into the distribution of diathetic alternations associated to the conative construction in Old English.

The resultative construction in Old English: Towards a semantic network of verb classes

The resultative construction in Old English: Towards a semantic network of verb classes

Case Frames of the Old English ImpersonalConstruction: Conceptual Semantic Analysis

The impersonal or psyc-predicate construction in Old English (=OE) poses a special challenge for most case theories in generative linguistics. In the OE impersonal construction, the experiencer argument is marked by dative, accusative, or nominative, whereas the theme is marked by nominative, genitive, or accusative, or by a PP. The combinations of possible cases for experiencer and theme are not random, bringing about daunting complexity for possible and impossible case frames. In this paper, I develop a conceptual semantic case theory (a la Jackendoff 1990, 1997, 2002; Yip, Ma-ling, and Jackendoff 1987) to provide a unified account for the complicated case frames of the OE impersonal construction. In the conceptual semantic case theory, syntax and semantics have their own independent case assignment principles. For impersonal verbs in OE, I propose that UG leave an option of determining either syntactic or semantic case to lexical items. This proposal opens a new window for the OE impersonal construction, in that it naturally explains both possible and impossible case frames of the construction. (Hankuk University of Foreign Studies)

On the Structure and Function of V1 Constructions in Old English

On the Structure and Function of V1 Constructions in Old English

The postnominal and adjective construction in Old English I am indebted to Jennifer R. Austin, David Denison, and two anonymous English Language and Linguistics reviewers for detailed and helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

It is argued in this article that the postnominal ‘ and adjective’ construction in Old English (e.g. Sodfsstne man & unscyldigne (LAW2,40.45) ‘righteous person and guiltless’ and psas fullan ofnes & psas peostran (BEDE,13.430.4) ‘that full furnace and that dark’) should be not analyzed as an instance of ambilateral adjective placement, but as an instance of DP coordination with an empty nominal element, pro , in the second conjunct. As a consequence, the adjective contained in the postnominal ‘ and adjective’ construction is analyzed as an attributive adjective in prenominal, i.e. pre- pro position.

Synchronic syntax in historical perspective

Since evaluative criteria such as economy, intuition, and function are subjective devices for syntactic evaluation, the ‘historical principle’ should be explicitly employed as an objective criterion. This principle allows a syntactician to make his analysis as consistent with historical facts as possible. The application of this principle and its effect are illustrated with English sentences that have developed from the impersonal construction in Old English.

Some Notes on Word Order in Old and Middle English

Previous articleNext article No AccessNotes and DocumentsSome Notes on Word Order in Old and Middle EnglishFred WestFred West Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 71, Number 1Aug., 1973 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/390442 Views: 13Total views on this site Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1973 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Javier Calle-Martín, Antonio Miranda-García ‘ Gehyrdon ge þæt gecweden wæs ’ – A Corpus-based Approach to Verb-initial Constructions in Old English, Studia Neophilologica 82, no.11 (Jun 2010): 49–57.https://doi.org/10.1080/00393271003795202 References, ().https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110820980.299

A Technical Construction in Old English

A Technical Construction in Old English