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On the syntax of object pronouns in Old English and Early Middle English

What it is about

The question is where object pronouns sit in the transition from Old English (OE) to Early Middle English (EME): before the finite verb, before the non-finite verb, or after it. The data are hand-coded clauses with an object pronoun: 105 OE main and 36 subordinate clauses from YCOE, and 238 main and 237 subordinate EME clauses from PPCME2 texts. Post-verbal pronouns rise from 10.9% of OE main clauses (Aux–V order) to 29.8% in EME, while pre-verbal ones fall from 49.5% to 26.9%. The Katherine Group has 70.4% post-verbal pronouns in main clauses, and the Kentish Homilies have none. The authors use information structure (topic types, focus) and prosodic heaviness. They argue that the post-verbal pronouns are mostly unmarked familiar topics, that the rise follows from the grammaticalization of the definite determiner, which makes objects heavy, and that the pattern depends on the transmission history of each text. The coding is manual and no inferential statistics are reported.

Ideas

For Mova

The chapters are 8. Word order and phrase structure and 29. Ellipsis, word order and information structure, plus 3. Pronouns. The code is en/src/lin.rs (linearization) and prag/src/frames.rs. The measure is placement accuracy against the baseline, per text type, with the shuffled-label control.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5334/gjgl.890

@article{bastiani2020syntax,
  title = {{On the syntax of object pronouns in Old English and Early Middle English}},
  author = {Bastiani, Chiara De and Hinterhölzl, Roland},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2020},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.890},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.890}
}

References

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  30. How to cite this article: De Bastiani, Chiara and Roland Hinterhölzl. 2020. On the syntax of object pronouns in Old English and Early Middle English. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 5(1): 43. 1–29. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/ gjgl.890 ↗ our card
  31. Submitted: 04 January 2019 find
  32. Accepted: 27 September 2019 find
  33. Copyright: © 2020 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. OPEN ACCESS ↗

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