Pronominal anaphoric strategies in the West Saxon dialect of Old English

Cole, Marcelle

doi:10.1017/s136067431700020x

Cited by 5 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…More recently, Los & van Kemenade (2018) offer further observations about similarities between OE and Dutch and German and some quantitative support (from a single text) for some hitherto impressionistic observations about this use of demonstrative pronouns. Cole (2017) adds to our understanding of the factors determining the use of the two types of pronoun in OE, presenting statistics from a larger number of texts. She convincingly demonstrates that the most important determinant of which type of pronoun is used involves information structure, rather than grammatical relation, which has been suggested as decisive by some observers.…”

Section: Simple Clausesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As is often noted, it is frequently difficult to determine whether a se-demonstrative should be treated as an anaphoric pronoun or a relative pronoun; see Mitchell (1985 for an extensive discussion. ( 5) is one of the examples Cole (2017) gives to illustrate the problem:…”

Section: Independent Pronoun or Relative Pronoun?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…(2) & hie þaet wundredon þe þaet gesawon and they that wondered that that saw 'and they who saw that wondered at that' (coverhom,LS_17.2_[MartinVerc_18]:241.2387) Cole (2017) compares OE se-demonstratives and personal pronouns in anaphoric functions, but excludes 'indefinite relative clauses involving se forms' in which the pronoun has an indefinite or generic reference, since she was looking specifically at the textual antecedents for the two types of pronouns (Cole 2017: 386). Her study therefore did not cover demonstrative-headed relative constructions, whether left-dislocated like (1) or integrated into the clause like (3):…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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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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Section: Simple Clausesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Independent Pronoun or Relative Pronoun?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Pronominally headed relative clauses in early English

Allen¹

2021

English Language and Linguistics

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“…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.…”

Section: Remarks On Samples From the Anglo-saxon Chroniclementioning

confidence: 99%

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

Condorelli¹

2019

SELIM

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Orthographic consistency was rarely maintained in most Old English varieties, because the language system was relatively new and spelling norms took time to develop.While full standardisation is never expected in Old English, the understanding of factors underlying patterns of regularity and irregularity are paramount for a full grasp of issues pertaining to authorship, textuality and other linguistic and non-linguistic levels of analysis. These notes explore spelling irregularity in material from West Saxon dialects, bringing comparative examples of variation in spelling between early West Saxon (eWS) <ie> and late West Saxon (lWS) <y>. West Saxon generally stands up for its emphasis on some degree of orthographic standardisation and yet appears to display interesting patterns of variation. The focus of my notes will be on particular instances of spelling inconsistencies, with special attention to a specific category of words where <ie> appears to vary more frequently, namely third-person pronouns. For my exploratory analysis, various witnesses of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (i.e. examples of eWS and lWS texts) were compared. The data was collected from different sections of an orthography-friendly edition of four different manuscripts, MSA (Bately 1986), MSB (Taylor 1983), MSC (O’Brien O’Keefe 2001) and MSD (Cubbin 1996), and compared with digital copies of the original manuscripts. The latter part of these notes points to some of the factors which could explain the features detected, with an exhortation for future researchers to build on some of the ideas proposed and explore new territory.Keywords: Old English; spelling; pronouns; variation; early West Saxon; late West Saxon

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“…and they have with them corrupt angel mankind's enemy and se haefð andweald on… nom.sg has power over… "They have with them a corrupt angel, the enemy of mankind, and he has power over…" (AECHom II,38,283.113, from Traugott 1992: 171) There is nevertheless a degree of indeterminacy involved in explaining the exact nature of pronoun distribution in OE (cf. Mitchell 1985: § §320-321; van Gelderen 2013: 203;Cole 2017a). The differing discourse functions are a tendency rather than a hard and fast rule; se-pronouns do not necessarily pick up new topics like demonstrative anaphors do in Modern Dutch and German.…”

Section: Pronoun Usage In Old Englishmentioning

confidence: 99%

A native origin for Present-Day Englishthey, their, them

Cole

2018

DIA

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It is commonly held that Present-Day English they, their, them are not descended from Old English but derive from the Old Norse third-person plural pronouns þeir, þeira, þeim. This paper argues that the early northern English orthographic and distributional textual evidence agrees with an internal trajectory for the ‘þ-’ type personal pronouns in the North and indicates an origin in the Old English demonstratives þā, þāra, þām. The Northern Middle English third-person plural pronominal system was the result of the reanalysis from demonstrative to personal pronoun that is common cross-linguistically in Germanic and non-Germanic languages alike.

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Pronominal anaphoric strategies in the West Saxon dialect of Old English

Cited by 5 publications

References 34 publications

Pronominally headed relative clauses in early English

Pronominally headed relative clauses in early English

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

A native origin for Present-Day Englishthey, their, them

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