Analogy, reanalysis and exaptation in Early Middle English: the emergence of a new inflectional system

Baechler, Raffaela

doi:10.1017/s1360674318000333

Cited by 3 publications

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References 5 publications

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“…The loss of gender has usually been looked at in terms of deviations from the OE system, but along with Jones, more recent studies such asBaechler's (2019) investigation of the Lambeth Homilies show that the situation was not simply chaotic. More case studies of the new systems in EME texts are needed.27 In fact, se had become a form nearly restricted to the pronominal heads of relative clauses.…”

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Pronominally headed relative clauses in early English

Allen¹

2021

English Language and Linguistics

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Present-day English is unlike Old English in not using singular demonstrative pronouns with anaphoric reference to human beings. This article adds to the contributions of Cole (2017) and Los & van Kemenade (2018) in our understanding of the factors determining the choice between personal and demonstrative pronouns in Old English by documenting the hitherto unexamined use of these pronouns as heads of relative clauses. It also traces how the singular demonstrative pronouns referring to humans retreated as heads of relative clauses in Early Middle English. A corpus-based study shows that third-person personal pronouns were unusual as heads of relative clauses in Old English and normally referred to specific individuals, while demonstratives were the pronouns of choice for generic reference but could also refer to specific individuals. The increased use of personal pronouns for generic reference is well underway in Early Middle English. While the retreat of the singular demonstrative pronouns to refer to humans in Early Middle English seems to have some connection with the reduced marking of feature distinctions in that period, a simple explanation in terms of loss of gender is untenable.

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Pronominally headed relative clauses in early English

Allen¹

2021

English Language and Linguistics

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Deflexion

Allen

2023

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Morphology

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Deflexion is the loss of inflectional categories. While phonological change has been traditionally assumed to be the main cause of deflexion as affixes ‘wear away’, more recent work has pointed to the importance of language contact as another important factor in the simplification of inflectional systems. This entry gives an overview of what is known about how deflexion proceeds and presents some examples of the effects on other parts of the grammar of a language that have been treated as arising from deflexion. The role that deflexion has played in producing inflectional systems that typologists have identified as being rare is explored. In historical studies within traditional grammar, the inflection found in some stages of languages undergoing deflexion is treated as confused, but some case studies have indicated that the differences with respect to an earlier stage of the language reflect a reorganization of inflectional systems rather than confusion. A large portion of the entry is devoted to the idea that the loss of grammatical categories serves as a trigger for various syntactic changes, such as fixed word order resulting from the loss of case in English and pro‐drop becoming no longer possible in languages when they lose verbal inflectional categories. Closer scrutiny of the stages of the languages where links between deflexion and syntactic change have been proposed show that any such links are not simple, and additional detailed case studies of individual languages are needed to understand the exact nature of such links. The entry ends by looking at the role deflexion has played in the ongoing debate about the unidirectionality of grammaticalization.

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The impersonal construction in the texts of Updated Old English

Čermák

2021

Studies in Language Companion Series

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Analogy, reanalysis and exaptation in Early Middle English: the emergence of a new inflectional system

Cited by 3 publications

References 5 publications

Pronominally headed relative clauses in early English

Pronominally headed relative clauses in early English

Deflexion

The impersonal construction in the texts of Updated Old English

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