Kristin Bech

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.

Tracing the Loss of Boundedness in the History of English: The Anaphoric Status of Initial Prepositional Phrases in Old English and Late Middle English

Thepresent paper considers the hypothesis advanced byLos (2009, 2012) that as English lost verb-second, it also changed from a typologically ‘bounded’ language to an ‘unbounded’ language. A bounded language anchors narrative sequences explicitly in time, whereas an unbounded language maintains the temporal aspect of the events implicitly. According to Los, in the bounded verbsecond language Old English, the initial, preverbal, clause position was an unmarked, dedicated position for links to the preceding discourse. After English became an SVO language, the position preceding the subject became a marked position, and it is now used for text structuring rather than discourse linking. The present paper tests this hypothesis by examining initial prepositional phrases in Old English and late Middle English from three perspectives: local anchoring, semantic category, and information structure, with a view to establishing whether initial elements show traces of this assumed shift. It will be demonstrated that for initial prepositional phrases, there is in fact a development away from a backwardpointing discourse-linking function towards a forward-pointing framesetting function, but that the trend is weaker than expected for a typological shift linked to the loss of verb-second. The paper also discusses some issues that should be considered further in order to strengthen the hypothesis, such as the prevailing uncertainty about the exact syntactic positions of Old English clause elements, the heterogeneity of Old English word order, and the ‘boundedness’ hypothesis in relation to other verb-second languages that have retainedor lost verb-second. Kristin Bech, University of Oslo E-Mail: kristin.bech@ilos.uio.no

The PROIEL treebank family: a standard for early attestations of Indo-European languages

This article describes a family of dependency treebanks of early attestations of Indo-European languages originating in the parallel treebank built by the members of the project pragmatic resources in old Indo-European languages. The treebanks all share a set of open-source software tools, including a web annotation interface, and a set of annotation schemes and guidelines developed especially for the project languages. The treebanks use an enriched dependency grammar scheme complemented by detailed morphological tags, which have proved sufficient to give detailed descriptions of these richly inflected languages, and which have been easy to adapt to new languages. We describe the tools and annotation schemes and discuss some challenges posed by the various languages that have been annotated. We also discuss problems with tokenisation, sentence division and lemmatisation, commonly encountered in ancient and mediaeval texts, and challenges associated with low levels of standardisation and ongoing morphological and syntactic change.

English Corpus Linguistics: Variation in Time, Space and Genre

As its title suggests, this book is a selection of papers that use English corpora to study language variation along three dimensions – time, place and genre. In broad terms, the book aims to bridge the gap between corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics and to increase our knowledge of the characteristics of English language. It includes eleven papers which address a variety of research questions but with the commonality of a corpus-based methodology. Some of the contributions deal with language variation in time, either by looking into historical corpora of English or by adopting the method known as diachronic comparable corpus linguistics, thus illustrating how corpora can be used to illuminate either historical or recent developments of English. Other studies investigate variation in space by comparing different varieties of English, including some of the “New Englishes” such as the South Asian varieties of English. Finally, some of the papers deal with variation in genre, by looking into the use of language for specific purposes through the inspection of medical articles, social reports and academic writing.