Null subjects in Middle English

Abstract

This paper investigates the occurrence and distribution of referential null subjects in Middle English. Whereas Modern English is the textbook example of a non-null-subject language, the case has recently been made that Old English permits null subjects to a limited extent, which raises the question of what happens in the middle period. In this paper we investigate Middle English using data drawn from the Penn Parsed Corpus of Middle English Prose and the new Parsed Corpus of Middle English Poetry, aiming to shed light on the linguistic and extralinguistic factors conditioning the alternation between null and overt subjects. Generalized mixed-effects logistic regression and random forests are used to assess the importance of the variables included. We show that the set of factors at play is similar to that found for Old English, and we document a near-complete disappearance of the null subject option by the end of the Middle English period.

How theoretical is your (historical) syntax? Towards a typology of Verb-Third in Early Old High German

“…9 Axel's and Axel and Weiß's proposal of a basically syntactic trigger for null subjects in EOHG resulting from licensing of pro in the middle field via c-command relation to a higher FP responsible for agreement is groundbreaking in that it disposes of the classical idea that this phenomenon is allowed by discourse-semantic factors, notably by the presence of an identifiable antecedent in the text (see, e.g., Eggenberger 1961;Schrodt 2004). Although in other recent studies (e.g., Schlachter 2012, 161-163;Walkden 2013;Walkden and Rusten 2017) the universalizing force of this approach has been relativized, I find that the theoretical core of Axel's (2007) proposal accounts for at least the great majority of the root-clause structures exhibiting a referential null subject. For this reason, I will proceed from this assumption in the present paper.…”

Verbal Inflection, Feature Inheritance, and the Loss of Null Subjects in Middle English

“…Ancrene Riwle, in contrast, is said to be written in the standard language based on the West Midland dialect of EME (Tolkien (1929)). It can be concluded, then, that the person split pointed out by Gelderen (2000) and Walkden (2011) with respect to OE pro was still observed in EME, at least in the West Midland dialect.…”

“…The recent expansion and development of electric corpora has enabled a quantitative approach to this issue. Walkden (2011), searching the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (Taylor et al (2003)) and the York-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Poetry (Pintzuk and Plug (2001)), demonstrates that referential pronominal subjects could indeed be dropped in OE and that the distribution of pro exhibits the following three asymmetries: (i) frequency of pro varies among individual texts, (ii) pro is more frequently observed in main clauses than in subordinate clauses, and (iii) pro is predominantly interpreted as referring to third-person entities, while first-and second-person pro is rare. The last is also pointed out by Gelderen (2000), who refers to this phenomenon as person split.…”

“…Shaded cells show that the relevant files include more than two tokens of pro and that the occurrence rate exceeds 2%. Essentially following the criterion adopted by Walkden (2011), let us assume that pro was grammatically allowed in these texts. Since the shaded cells are all found in EME (M1 and M2), it can be concluded that pro ceased to be licensed by LME at the latest.…”

“…A second piece of evidence comes from the fact that in addition to referential null subjects, referential null objects are also found in EME (see Walkden (2011) Here, the last sentence is read as 'Afterward, he dips him in the blood'. We can interpret this as an instance of the object pronoun being dropped qua topic element, owing to the presence of its antecedent within the nearby context.…”