Word Order After the Loss of the Verb-Second Constraint or the Importance of Early Modern English in the Fixation of Syntactic and Informative (Un-)Markedness

Guerra, Javier Pérez

doi:10.1080/00138380500164083

Cited by 8 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…Corpus studies report a decline in the relative frequency of object preposing that starts in ME (e.g. Speyer 2005), 9 and show that its informational function becomes more circumscribed; preposed objects are more often old information (Pérez-Guerra 2005: 357ff.). This observation is further corroborated by instances like (18) from earlier English, and their later translations: Later (lME) translations of the same passage have a cleft, showing that preposed objects were not restricted to discourse-old material before the loss of verb-second (from Ball 1991:157): Ful guod weork it was and is: þat heo wurchez in me‘A full good work it was and is that she works in me’1280–90 SLeg.…”

Section: The Loss Of Verb-second and Its Consequence For Information mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Corpus studies confirm a decline in the relative frequency of clause-initial adverbials (Breivik & Swan 1994). Unlike preposed objects, they show a decline in referentiality in that they tend to encode new information more often in PE than in eModE or lME (Pérez-Guerra 2005: 357ff.). The exact nature of the change in informational status still needs to be investigated, but some pointers can be gleaned from contrastive Dutch−English translation studies.…”

Section: The Loss Of Verb-second and Its Consequence For Information mentioning

confidence: 99%

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The consequences of the loss of verb-second in English: information structure and syntax in interaction

Los¹

2009

English Language and Linguistics

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The consequences of the loss of verb-second in English:information structure and syntax in interaction 1 B E T T E L O U L O SRadboud University Nijmegen (Received 13 February 2008; revised 10 December 2008) English syntax used to have a version of the verb-second rule, by which the finite verb moves to second position in main clauses. This rule was lost in Middle English, and this article argues that its loss had serious consequences for the information structure of the clause. In the new, rigid subject-verb-object syntax, the function of preposed constituents changed, and the function of encoding 'old' or 'given' information in a pragmatically neutral way was increasingly reserved for subjects. Pressure from information structure to repair this situation subsequently led to the rise of new passive constructions in order to satisfy the need for more subjects; the change in the informational status of preposed constituents triggered the rise of clefts. If information structure can be compromised by syntactic change in this way, this suggests that it represents a separate linguistic level outside the syntax. IntroductionEver since the work done by the Neogrammarians in the nineteenth century, we know that sound changes may disrupt morphological paradigms, with morphological regularity often being restored by the process known as 'analogy'. An example is the Latin intervocalic -s-> -r-that disrupted the paradigm of the s-stem nouns: the -s remained in nominative honos 'honour' because it was not intervocalic in that position, but changed to -r-in the rest of the paradigm: honoris, honorem, etc. Analogy then intervened by 'regularizing' the nominative honos to honor (Hock 1986: 180). Similar disruption was caused by Verner's Law, where a sound change that was conditioned by syllable stress applied exclusively to some but not to other forms in the verbal paradigm (Verner 1875). Such changes exemplify the relative autonomy of the various linguistic levels: phonological change is 'blind' to the disruption it causes to other levels. Another example is Roberts & Roussou's (2003) hypothesis that syntactic change (more especially grammaticalization) is driven by morphological loss. The situation could be summed up by Lightfoot's dictum: 'grammars practise therapy, not prophylaxis' (Lightfoot 1979: 123).The present article will argue that changes in syntax may similarly disrupt information structure (IS). Its case study will be the loss of verb-second in English, which prompted 'therapy' in early Modern English in the form of new clefts and new passive structures -even to structures that are typologically very marked. The change 1 I would like to thank Anthony Warner and two anonymous referees for their comments on earlier drafts of this article. in the syntax apparently ran its course in spite of the havoc caused at the IS level, which demonstrates that IS and syntax are just as autonomous as the phonology and morphology of the Neogrammarian examples above. Syntax and information structureInformation structure is about...

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Section: The Loss Of Verb-second and Its Consequence For Information mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Loss Of Verb-second and Its Consequence For Information mentioning

confidence: 99%

The consequences of the loss of verb-second in English: information structure and syntax in interaction

Los¹

2009

English Language and Linguistics

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“…It has been noted that Early Modern English texts violate this principle more frequently than PDE ([Meurman-Solin 2012]), and the earlier manuals are generally less strict about information flow. The other prepositional phrase, in (16b), in clause-initial position, is fine in terms of the easy flow of information (as the clause now starts off with given information) but we know from other work ([Pérez-Guerra 2005]; [Los and Dreschler 2012]) that clause-initial prepositional phrases are increasingly dispreferred as encoders of given information; links to the previous discourse are either expressed by subjects (cf. an agnate like This exercise and strict diet has given my horse such a strong stomach that...) or by clauses (cf.…”

Section: Discussion Of Dimensionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visualizing the development of prose styles in Horse Manuals from Early Modern English to Present-Day English

Lubbers¹,

Los

2020

Journal of Data Mining &Amp; Digital Humanities

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International audience This paper offers a data-driven analysis of the development of English prose styles in a single genre (instructive writing) dealing with a single topic (the correct way of feeding a horse) in 13 texts with publication dates ranging between 1565 to 2009. The texts are subjected to three investigations that offer visualizations of the findings: (i) a correspondence analysis of POS-tag trigrams; (ii) an association plot analysis; (iii) hierarchical clustering (dendrograms). As the period selected – Early Modern English to Present-Day English – does not involve any major changes in English syntax, we expect to find developments that are predominantly stylistic.

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“…There is clear quantitative evidence in Pérez-Guerra (2005), Komen et al (2014) and Dreschler (2015) for the decline of adverbial discourse-linking of the type found in OE, as outlined in the previous section, and there is a rise in "permissive subjects". We saw that literal PDE translations of OE texts improve if we express linking adverbials as subjects, which suggests that at least some of the adverbial losses are compensated for by the subject taking over the discourse-linking function.…”

Section: Tail-head Linking In Dutch and German Narrativesmentioning

confidence: 92%

Chapter 1. “Permissive” subjects and the decline of adverbial linking in the history of English

Los

2018

Studies in Language Companion Series

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Earlier work by Los & Dreschler (2012) and Komen et al. (2014) offer quantitative evidence of a decline in clause-initial adverbials as discourse linkers in the history of English, and argued that subjects have taken over much of the function of discourse-linking that was earlier performed by adverbials. The greater functional load of the subject called for more flexibility in which types of thematic roles could be expressed by subjects, and for more strategies to create subjects, like crosslinguistically rare passives. The present paper draws attention to another mechanism that facilitates "permissive subjects" in Present-Day English: causative/ergative valency alternations of the type Amazon shipped the order/the order has shipped. We present the morphosyntactic origin of the alternation, and report in more detail on the workings of discourse linking in Old English texts, explaining why "permissive" subjects were not required at that stage.

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Word Order After the Loss of the Verb-Second Constraint or the Importance of Early Modern English in the Fixation of Syntactic and Informative (Un-)Markedness

Cited by 8 publications

References 4 publications

The consequences of the loss of verb-second in English: information structure and syntax in interaction

The consequences of the loss of verb-second in English: information structure and syntax in interaction

Visualizing the development of prose styles in Horse Manuals from Early Modern English to Present-Day English

Chapter 1. “Permissive” subjects and the decline of adverbial linking in the history of English

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