George Walkden

Null subjects in Old English

The possibility of referential null subjects in Old English has been the subject of conflicting assertions. Hulk and van Kemenade (1995:245) stated that ?the phenomenon of referential pro-drop does not exist in Old English,? but van Gelderen (2000:137) claimed that ?Old English has pro-drop.? This paper presents a systematic quantitative investigation of referential null subjects in Old English, drawing on the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (YCOE; Taylor, Warner, Pintzuk, & Beths, 2003) and the York-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Poetry (YCOEP; Pintzuk & Plug, 2001). The results indicate substantial variation between texts. In those texts that systematically exhibit null subjects, these are much rarer in subordinate clauses, with first- and second-person null subjects also being rare. I argue that the theory of identification of null subjects by rich verbal agreement is not sufficient to explain the Old English phenomenon, and instead I develop an account based on Holmbergs (2010) analysis of partial null subject languages.

The status of hwæt in Old English

English Language and Linguistics / Volume 17 / Issue 03 / November 2013, pp 465 488 DOI: 10.1017/S1360674313000129, Published online: 21 October 2013 Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1360674313000129 How to cite this article: GEORGE WALKDEN (2013). The status of hwaet in Old English. English Language and Linguistics, 17, pp 465-488 doi:10.1017/S1360674313000129 Request Permissions : Click here

English is (still) a West Germanic language

In their recent book, English: The Language of the Vikings , Joseph Embley Emonds and Jan Terje Faarlund attempt to make the case that from its Middle period onwards, English is a North Germanic language, descended from the Norse varieties spoken in Medieval England, rather than a West Germanic language, as traditionally assumed. In this review article we critique Emonds & Faarlunds proposal, focusing particularly on the syntactic evidence that forms the basis of their argumentation. A closer look at a number of constructions for which the authors suggest a Norse origin reveals that the situation is not as they present it: in many cases, the syntactic properties of Old and Middle English are not given careful enough consideration, and/or the chronology of the developments is not compatible with a Norse origin. Moreover, the authors do not engage with the large body of sound changes that constitute the strongest evidence for a West Germanic origin. We conclude that Emonds & Faarlund fail to make a convincing case either for a North Germanic origin or against a West Germanic origin.

Null Subjects in Early Icelandic

– Germanically: the null subject properties of related early Germanic languages have become much better understood in the last decade (see Walkden 2013, Rusten 2014, and van Gelderen 2013 on Old English, Axel 2007 and Axel & Weiss 2011 on Old High German, Kinn 2013 on Old Norwegian, Hakansson 2008 on Old Swedish, Walkden 2012 on Old Saxon, Fertig 2000 and Ferraresi 2005 on Gothic, and Rosenkvist 2009 and Walkden 2012 for a comparative perspective).

On Constructing a Theory of Grammatical Change

The last few decades have seen the growth of a community of linguists who, though diverse in their beliefs and assumptions about other aspects of linguistics, nevertheless share a commitment to the construction as the basic unit of linguistic analysis. In construction grammar (henceforth CxG), as this family of approaches is known, ‘construction’ is understood – beyond its pretheoretical sense – as a conventionalized pairing of form and meaning (Booij 2010: 11; Sag 2012: 97; cf. also Goldberg 2006: 5). Varieties of CxG have been deployed in domains as diverse as sentence production (Bencini & Goldberg 2001; Bencini 2013), child language acquisition (Cameron-Faulkner et al. 2003; Diessel 2013), computational linguistics (papers in Steels 2012), and the theory of long-distance dependencies (Sag 2010). Unsurprisingly, perhaps, another of these domains is diachronic linguistics. CxG has been used in modelling grammaticalization (No€el 2007; Trousdale 2008; and much subsequent research); in addition, proponents of CxG have argued that it lends itself well to the modelling of actualization due to its conception of linguistic structure as a network of related constructions (de Smet 2012), and that it is well suited to the task of syntactic reconstruction (Barðdal & Eyþ orsson 2012). Despite this flurry of interest in historical CxG, there was until recently no book-length treatment of the implications of this grammatical architecture in diachrony, comparable in scope for instance to Lightfoot (1979) for the generative Extended Standard Theory of the time. The volume under review (henceforth T&T) is an attempt to fill this gap: the authors focus on ‘developing ways to think about the creation of and the nature of changes in constructions’ (p. 1), where a construction is understood as a pairing of form and meaning, essentially a Saussurean sign (p. 4). The work is therefore pioneering in terms of its scope and angle, a welcome attempt to provide an overarching framework for diachronic work in CxG. The authors have clearly set themselves an ambitious task. The first chapter of the book sets the stage by introducing the basic notions of CxG and its most influential variants, including the key elements that T&T themselves adopt: here the

vP-fronting with and without remnant movement

In this paper, we consider two kinds of vP-fronting constructions in English and argue that they receive quite different analyses. First, we show that English vP-preposing does not have the properties that would be expected of a movement-derived dependency. Evidence for this conclusion is adduced from the licensing conditions on its occurrence, from the availability of morphological mismatches, and from reconstruction facts. By contrast, we show that English participle preposing is a well-behaved case of vP-movement, contrasting with vP-preposing with respect to reconstruction properties in particular. We propose that the differences between the two constructions follow from the interaction of two constraints: the excluded middle constraint (EMC), which rules out derivations involving spellout of linearly intermediate copies only, and the N-only constraint, which restricts movement to occurring where the trace position would license a nominal. The EMC rules out deriving vP-fronting by true movement and instead necessitates a base-generation analysis, while the N-only constraint ensures that participle preposing is only possible in limited circumstances.

Regional variation in Jespersen’s Cycle in Early Middle English

Abstract In this paper we investigate the place of origin of the change from Jespersen’s Cycle stage II – bipartite ne + not – to stage III, not alone. We use the LAEME corpus to investigate the dialectal distribution in more detail, finding that the change must have begun in Northern and Eastern England. A strong effect of region and time period can be clearly observed, with certain linguistic factors also playing a role. We attribute the early onset of the change to contact with Scandinavian: North Germanic is known to have undergone Jespersen’s Cycle earlier in its history, and the geographical distribution of early English stage III fits neatly with the earlier boundaries of the Danelaw.

Null subjects in Middle English

This article investigates the occurrence and distribution of referential null subjects in Middle English. Whereas Modern English is the textbook example of a non-null-subject language, the case has recently been made that Old English permits null subjects to a limited extent, which raises the question of what happens in the middle period. In this article we investigate Middle English using data drawn from the Penn–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English Prose and the new Parsed Corpus of Middle English Poetry, aiming to shed light on the linguistic and extralinguistic factors conditioning the alternation between null and overt subjects. Generalized mixed-effects logistic regression and random forests are used to assess the importance of the variables included. We show that the set of factors at play is similar to that found for Old English, and we document a near-complete disappearance of the null subject option by the end of the Middle English period.