Old English and Old Norwegian noun phrases with two attributive adjectives

Abstract

The topic of this paper is Old English and Old Norwegian noun phrases containing two attributive adjectives. An overview of the frequency of various word order constellations will be given, before we zoom in on one of them, namely the construction Adjective -Adjective -Noun, i.e. noun phrases in which two prenominal adjectives occur next to each other without a coordinating conjunction. Old English and Old Norwegian will be compared with respect to which adjectives occur in this position. The paper also includes an intermezzo, during which we investigate what happens to adjective position when a text is translated from present-day English into Old English.The very model of a modern linguist.

Three Types of Old English Adjectival Postposition: A Corpus-Based Construction Grammar Approach

“…While the two patterns involving multiple adjectives (ANCA and ANA) are indeed similar on the count of denoting individual-level properties, examples (20) and (21) show that both adjectives used in either case operate on rather different levels of description. In (20), in Bech’s (2017:14) words, the two adjectives “separately describe the noun,” while in (21) “one adjective has scope over the other,” meaning that the reference is to “powerful heathen men,” not to “men who are heathen and powerful.” Bech (2017) notices that the type in (21), where the adjectives are hierarchically ordered, is attested in the AAN pattern, which is, on the other hand, “dispreferred for noun phrases with two descriptive adjectives,” and these, in turn, would likely require a conjunction (Bech 2017:16). While the author focuses on the AAN pattern and herself admits that other types of adjectival modification would need to be examined, her intuitions seem to be somewhat borne out by (20) and (21).…”

“…But at the same time, treating ANA and ANCA on a par on grounds that both decidedly prefer individual-level adjectives (and even that would have to allow for a number of exceptions) would fail to do justice to what was likely a more complex linguistic situation. Bech (2017:17) aptly concludes her brief analysis of OE (and Old Norwegian) adjectival patterns by saying that “we would not expect syntactically variable languages like Old English and Old Norwegian to be completely consistent.” Acknowledging the distinct character of ANA and ANCA provides a more fine-grained description than grouping these two together would.…”

“…Finally, for the AAN and ANA patterns, in line with Bech (2017), the following elements, which the corpus annotators classified as adjectives, were excluded: agen ‘own,’ ilca ‘same,’ oðer ‘other,’ self ‘same,’ swilc ‘such.’ Bech (2017:12) remarks that “their degree of ‘adjectivity’ can be discussed,” they can be “categorized as peripheral, non-descriptive, determiner-like adjectives, and they easily combine with descriptive adjectives.” However, for the and -type pattern, with the conjunction suggesting that two separate qualities are discussed and the modifiers do not combine in a hierarchy and work descriptively, examples such as (11) were counted.…”

“…The postnominal adjectives in the ANA pattern are not only regularly individual-level (see Table 2), but they often form up a hierarchical structure together with the prenominal adjectives (see Table 4). Based on this tendency, the meaning of the ANA schema could be ‘the adjectives describe the noun hierarchically.’ In a sense, then, ANA seems to be functionally closest to AAN, which Bech (2017:15) has discovered to specialize in describing hierarchical relations. Table 6 below compares the two patterns.…”

“…Table 6 below compares the two patterns. Similarly to Bech (2017), I excluded pairs involving non-prototypical adjectives from the AAN pattern (see section 2). Among the remaining pairs of purely descriptive adjectives, hierarchical modification turned out to be dominant, and the difference between the two patterns on the count of hierarchical versus separate description is not statistically significant (chi-square = 1.253, p = .2204).…”