It is commonly held that Present-Day English they, their, them are not descended from Old English but derive from the Old Norse third-person plural pronouns þeir, þeira, þeim. This paper argues that the early northern English orthographic and distributional textual evidence agrees with an internal trajectory for the ‘þ-’ type personal pronouns in the North and indicates an origin in the Old English demonstratives þā, þāra, þām. The Northern Middle English third-person plural pronominal system was the result of the reanalysis from demonstrative to personal pronoun that is common cross-linguistically in Germanic and non-Germanic languages alike.
Building on previous studies that have discussed pronominal referencing in Old English (Traugott 1992; van Gelderen 2013; van Kemenade & Los 2017), the present study analyses the pronominal anaphoric strategies of the West Saxon dialect of Old English based on a quantitative and qualitative study of personal and demonstrative pronoun usage across a selection of late (post c. AD 900) Old English prose text types. The historical data discussed in the present study provide important additional support for modern cognitive and psycholinguistic theory. In line with the cognitive/psycholinguistic literature on the distribution of pronouns in Modern German (Bosch & Umbach 2007), the information-structural properties of referents rather than the grammatical role of the pronoun's antecedent most accurately explain the personal pronoun vs demonstrative pronoun contrast in the West Saxon dialect of Old English. The findings also highlight how issues pertaining to style, such as the author–writer relationship, text type, subject matter and the conventionalism propagated by text tradition, influence anaphoric strategies in Old English.
The recessive nature of the subjunctive as a formal category in Old English is witnessed in the use of alternative grammatical structures other than inflectional subjunctives in contexts of non-fact modality. An increasing analytic reliance on grammatical devices signalling nonfact modality (e.g. gif 'if', sua hua 'whoever', etc.) both fostered and facilitated the occurrence of the indicative in such contexts. The modal verbs magan, *sculan and willan served as fully independent verbs in Old English, but even during the Old English period there appears to have been a 'modern' tendency to use modal constructions involving a (subjunctive) modal + infinitive construction, instead of an inflectional subjunctive, with little (or no) underlying sense of non-modal notional meaning. 1 In the Old Northumbrian (ONbr) interlinear gloss to the Latin text of the Lindisfarne Gospels (British Library, MS Cotton Nero D.iv; henceforth Li), the increasing lack of direct correspondence between contexts of non-fact modality and the subjunctive in Old English is attested in the widespread tendency for present-indicative forms in -s and -ð to supplant subjunctive forms, e.g. 7 swiðe bebead him þaette hia ne aewades ł mersades hine L et uehementer comminabatur eis ne manifestarent illum 'And he very much commanded them that they should not make him known' MkGl (Li) 3.12, or for indicative forms to alternate with subjunctive forms, which in ONbr ended in -a/-e/-o in both 1 For detailed discussion of the semantics of the Old English modal verbs see Standop
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