Subject and adjacency effects in the Old Northumbrian gloss to theLindisfarne Gospels

Abstract

The subject and adjacency effects found to condition the distribution of present verbal morphology in northern Middle English, and commonly referred to as the Northern Subject Rule (NSR), are generally regarded to be an Early Middle English development that did not condition the distribution of verbal morphology in northern varieties of Old English (Isaac 2003; Pietsch 2005; de Haas 2008; de Haas & van Kemenade 2015). Using data taken from the tenth-century interlinear gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels, this study considers variation between the present-tense markers -ð and -s in Late Old Northumbrian and discusses evidence which indicates that the subject and adjacency effects at the crux of the NSR were already operative in Old Northumbrian with different morphological material. The findings also debunk the traditional conviction that -s spread first to second-person plural contexts and only subsequently to the third-person plural and singular (Holmqvist 1922; Blakeley 1949/50; Stein 1986).

Pronominal anaphoric strategies in the West Saxon dialect of Old English

“…The results reflect pronominal referencing in late West Saxon, the southern dialect of Old English, and diatopic homogeneity should not be assumed. In Old Northumbrian personal pronouns and se -pronouns overlapped considerably in function and were used interchangeably regardless of information-structural parameters (Cole 2017). The ensuing cross-paradigmatic merger in function between personal pronouns and se -pronouns in Old Northumbrian was crucial in shaping the divergent development of the northern Middle English personal pronoun paradigm and suggests that the replacement of the OE third-person plural personal pronouns by northern ME forms in þ - can be explained from a native perspective (Cole 2017).…”

“…In Old Northumbrian personal pronouns and se -pronouns overlapped considerably in function and were used interchangeably regardless of information-structural parameters (Cole 2017). The ensuing cross-paradigmatic merger in function between personal pronouns and se -pronouns in Old Northumbrian was crucial in shaping the divergent development of the northern Middle English personal pronoun paradigm and suggests that the replacement of the OE third-person plural personal pronouns by northern ME forms in þ - can be explained from a native perspective (Cole 2017). Furthermore, the present study is a synchronic study that offers a snapshot of pronominal referencing in a particular dialect at a particular moment in the development of Old English, rather than a diachronic perspective.…”

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

“…Similarly, double glosses involving personal pronouns and se-forms reflect the overlap in 10. Studies which have demonstrated the validity of the gloss for the study of OE linguistic phenomena include Kroch & Taylor (1997) and Nagucka (1997) on word order; Nagucka (1997) and Ingham (2006) on negative concord; Nagucka (1997) on finite clause use; van Bergen (2008) on negative contraction; Cole (2012Cole ( , 2014Cole ( , 2015Cole ( , 2017b on verbal morphosyntax; Walkden (2016) on null subjects and Kotake (2006) on a number of syntactic phenomena including the subjunctive.…”