On the position of adjectives in Middle English

Abstract

The position of adjectives, and especially that of postnominal adjectives, in Middle English is compared to the adjective situation for Old English. Recently, Fischer (2000, 2001, followed to some extent by Haumann {2003}. has propo.scd that in Old English there is a difference in meaning between certain types of preposed and postposed adjectives, which is related to a number ofparameters such as definiteness vs indefinitenessoftheNP, weak vs strong forms of the adjective, and given vs new information. This article will investigate to what extent the same or similar parameters still hold in Middle English, a period in which postposed adjective position began to decline due to, among other things, the loss of the strong vs weak distinction in adjectives, the rise of a new determiner system and the gradual fixation of word order on boih a phrasal and a clausal level. Special attention will be paid to the postnominal and + adjective construction, which is here argued, pace Haumann for Old English, to be similar to postnominal adjectives without ami.

Tracing The Development Of AnOld Old Story: Intensificatory Repetition In English

“…Only two examples of intensificatory repetition (1.7 tokens/million words) are found in the PPCME2 corpus. This may not be altogether surprising if we bear in mind that previous literature dates the development of two‐adjective string patterns in English to the late ME period (Fischer ). Both tokens convey degree intensification and are attested in early religious written texts (M1; 1150‐1250; see (21) and (22) below).…”

“…Moving from present to past, the Middle English period (ME) was taken as the starting point of the diachronic investigation, as this is the period when complex premodifying NP strings (i.e. two or more adjectives) begin to be operative in English (see Fischer ; ; Fischer and Van der Wurff ). Although of course any data from previous periods of the language is by default written, care was taken to include compilations featuring text‐types associated with ‘speech‐oriented’ environments (e.g., private letters, drama, witness depositions and trials; Culpeper & Kytö 2010: 17ff; Jucker and Taavitsainen : 23; Lutzky : 5).…”

The lexical semantics of adjectives: more than just scales

“…There is substantial syntactic work in this area. In addition to work cited in section 4.1, this includes Crisma (1993), Alexiadou (2001), Bouchard (2002), Larson & Marušič (2004), Teodorescu (2006), Valois (2007), Vander Klok (2009), Aljović (2010), Centeno-Pulido (2010), and Kim (to appear), and historically-oriented work including Fischer (2006) and Haumann (2010). Semantic or semantically-oriented work that takes adjective-position observations as a starting point includes Truswell (2004Truswell ( , 2005, Champollion (2006), Katz (2007), and Morzycki (2008) The presence of the additional morpheme de is required to approximate the effect of the direct modification attempted in (164b).…”

Adnominal adjectives in Old English

“…The fact that they do not exhibit the same grammaticality not only poses an insurmountable problem for N-raising analysis (unless we want to claim that N-raising obliterates 'definiteness clashes'), but also casts doubt on the assumption that adnominal adjectives all have the same status. 7 Crucially, the N-raising analysis not only fails to account for the availability of partial N-raising (13), the non-recursiveness of postnominal adjectives (14), certain contrasts in acceptability (15) and (16), and the (non)induction of 'definiteness clashes' (20) and (21), but also for the fact that prenominal and postnominal adjectives display systematic interpretive differences, which is indicative of a systematic difference in status (see, among others, Bolinger 1967;Sadler & Arnold 1994;Stavrou 1996;Larson 1998;Fischer 2000Fischer , 2001Fischer , 2006Cinque 2007;Larson & Marušič 2004;Larson & Takahashi 2004).…”