Grammatical person and the variable syntax of Old English personal pronouns

Abstract

Grammatical person and the variable syntax of Old English personal pronounsCitation for published version: Alcorn, R 2009, 'Grammatical person and the variable syntax of Old English personal pronouns ' English Language and Linguistics, vol. 13, no. 3, General rightsCopyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policyThe University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorer content complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright please contact openaccess@ed.ac.uk providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. The variable positioning of bare personal pronouns in Old English prose remains something of a mystery. In the role of prepositional object, for example, these elements are often found in positions where other prepositional object types are rarely attested. This article reports the results of an empirical study of a correlation between the variable placement of these pronouns and their specification for grammatical person. By demonstrating that this correlation defies a number of independent explanations, it is argued that person is an important aspect of the syntax of these constituents. The identification of two further correlations, one involving narrative mode and the other involving the relative positioning of preposition and verb, further demonstrates the value of quantitative methods in historical linguistics.

Irregularity of the 'ie' spellings in West Saxon English: Remarks on variation in third-person pronouns

“…e.g. Megginson 1994;Howe 1996;van Bergen 2000;Ohkado 2001;Seppӓnen 2004;Koopman 2005;Alcorn 2009Alcorn , 2014Rusten 2013;Cole 2017;and van Kemenade 2017, to name only a few). The considerable increase in research output with focus on Old English pronouns demonstrates a growing awareness of the potential of pronouns as first-order witnesses of historical change in early English, yet no work has so far focussed on spelling variation in pronouns and issues of elaboration and power.…”

Distribution of Variants of Old English by, for, between

“…(1a), the equivalent figure for object personal pronouns, e.g. (1b), is just 71.5 per cent (Alcorn : 436, Table ).…”

“… Taylor (), for example, demonstrates that special placement occurs less frequently in translations from Latin (especially in biblical translations) than in non‐translated texts, and Alcorn () shows it to be much less frequent with first‐ and second‐person pronouns in comparison to third‐person ones. …”