Prefixes attached to adjectives/adverbs which are functionally equivalent to booster adverbs, i.e. booster prefixes, are frequent in both Present-day German and Old English. Among the Old English booster prefixes, whose inventory is here discussed in a first survey, for- is by far the most frequent, with respect to both types and tokens. In a more detailed analysis, the study investigates the Old English roots of ME forsooth(e), an emphasizer which became highly frequent at the beginning of Middle English. Forsooth is commonly considered to be a univerbated and lexicalized form of an Old English prepositional phrase for soþ ‘for truth’ (comparable to PDE indeed (< ‘in the deed’) or in fact). Yet analyses of the inventory of booster prefixes in Old English and the booster prefix for- in particular show that an alternative etymology may be suggested: Old English for soþ can also be analysed as the (endingless) accusative singular neuter of the adjective forsoþ ‘very true’.

After the fixation of English word order to SVO, adverbials have come to be the only flexible sentence constituent in unmarked sentences. So far, however, there has only been little research into the specific discourse functions of the different positions of adverbials. In an earlier study on the diachrony of English adverbial connectors (Lenker 2010), it emerged that medial instead of initial placement of connectors such as however or therefore is a relatively recent phenomenon, becoming more frequent in the Late Modern English period. In a pilot study on the discourse functions of linking and stance adverbials, the present chapter suggests that two different medial positions should be distinguished: in "post-initial position", these adverbials focus attention on the preceding elements (a frame-setting adverbial or a subject), similar to focus adverbs such as only or particularly. In the other medial positions, they function as discourse partitioners, highlighting the partition of topic and comment/focus material. This variation will here be seen as a response to the loss of verb-second in English, similar to other syntactic innovations such as unusual passives and stressed-focus clefts. * I would like to thank Peter Jitschin for his contributions to this chapter (see Jitschin 2012) and Anneli Meurman-Solin, an anonymous reviewer and the editors of this volume for their many most helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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