Pronominally headed relative clauses in early English

Abstract

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.

The decline of local anchoring: a quantitative investigation

“…A considerable body of work over the last decade or so has shown that word order in Old English (OE) is more flexible than in later stages of the language and is partly determined by information structure. Information structure explains both some of the variation in object placement in OE (Taylor & Pintzuk 2012a, 2012b, 2014Struik & van Kemenade 2020, 2022 and subject placement (Bech 2001;Hinterhölzl & Petrova 2010; van Kemenade, Milićev & Baayen 2008;van Kemenade & Milićev 2012). Information structure is also a key factor in scenarios for word order change after the OE period; specifically, Los (2009) argues that the loss of V2, which resulted in a subject-initial grammar, compromised information structure to such an extent that new structures emerged and others increased in frequency to compensate for the loss: stressed-focus it-clefts and cross-linguistically rare passives.…”