Richard Ingham

Negation and OV order in Late Middle English

Optional OV order in Later Middle English (LME) has given rise to conflicting theoretical accounts. Earlier analyses postulating movement to AgrOP or alternative base orders are found to be inadequate to deal with the occurrence of OV in nonliterary LME; in a large database of 15th century private familial correspondence, residual OV order is found to have been productive only with negated objects. Multiple subject constructions with there expletives showed the same restriction.These phenomena are accounted for by postulating overt Neg Movement (Haegeman 1995) as a permitted option in LME. In this framework, it is argued that LME showed a mixed typology having both Neg movement and a null Neg operator. LME had three ways of satisfying the NEG Criterion (Haegeman 1995): Merge not in Spec NegP, coindex [OP],... [XP(Neg)]i, and Move XP(Neg) to Spec NegP. Modern English has only the first two. The distribution in this period of negative concord with not is shown to support our analysis.

The transmission of Anglo-Norman : language history and language acquisition

This investigation contributes to issues in the study of second language transmission by considering the well-documented historical case of Anglo-Norman. Within a few generations of the establishment of this variety, its phonology diverged sharply from that of continental French, yet core syntactic distinctions continued to be reliably transmitted. The dissociation of phonology from syntax transmission is related to the age of exposure to the language in the experience of ordinary users of the language. The input provided to children acquiring language in a naturalistic communicative setting, even though one of a school institution, enabled them to acquire target-like syntactic properties of the inherited variety. In addition, it allowed change to take place along the lines of transmission by incrementation. A linguistic environment combining the ‘here-and-now’ aspects of ordinary first language acquisition with the growing cognitive complexity of an educational meta-language appears to have been adequate for this variety to be transmitted as a viable entity that encoded the public life of England for centuries.

Syntactic Change in Anglo-Norman and Continental French Chronicles: was there a ‘Middle’ Anglo-Norman?

Anglo-Norman (AN) showed a tendency to lose Old French conjugation and gender inflectional distinctions, but is thought to have largely maintained the syntax of Old French. This study considers whether in the early 14th century AN syntax continued to follow continental French (CF) by moving towards new word-order patterns, namely XSV order and subject-verb inversion after et , which were to typify Middle French. Using corpora of CF and AN historical writing, especially chronicles, it is found that AN to some extent shadowed developments found in later 13th and in 14th century CF. In both AN and CF, XSV order was widespread with time adjuncts, but avoided with place adjuncts and direct and indirect objects. This dissociation was not calqued on Old/Middle English subject-verb inversion, which showed a different dissociation, i.e. inversion of verb and nominal subjects, but not pronominal subjects; AN showed no influence of this contrast. Inversion after et was found in AN, but only with unaccusative verbs, whereas in CF by the late 13th century it was spreading to other verbs as well, having initially shown a similar limitation as in AN. It is concluded that underlying syntactic processes of change began to affect AN as well as CF, but that they were interrupted by the switch away from French in England in the later 14th century.

Investigating language change using Anglo-Norman spoken and written register data

Abstract Language change is generally considered to originate in the spoken mode before spreading to the written mode, although the latter provides all our available data for language change until recent times. While written mode representations of speech, such as fictional dialogue, can be used, their authenticity is hard to verify. This study addresses these issues by comparing the language of the Year Books, texts which attest to oral pleading in medieval courts, and include very extensive dialogue, with legal register written-mode origin texts, in the Parliament Rolls of Medieval England. Both sets of texts were written in Anglo-Norman, arose within a fairly homogenous speech community, and cover the same time period – late thirteenth century until c. 1350. It is shown that changes known to have occurred in later medieval French are instantiated at this time in the dialogic texts, but to a lesser degree or not at all in the written register texts. Features of morphology, lexical semantic extension, and discourse syntax in these sources indicate in each case that the innovation arose and spread first in the spoken origin source. Support from diachronic change is thus offered for a continuity assumption for the primacy of the spoken mode in present and past states of language.

A Derivational Approach to Negative Polarity Item Licensing in Old French

This study builds on earlier findings regarding the left periphery of Old French main clause syntax, and addresses apparent V2 violations with clause-initial ja and onques (Ingham 2005). It is shown that V2 observance or violation may be more principled than critics of the CP V2 analysis have contended. Negative clauses were not necessarily V2 contexts. In Old French, polarity licensing took place symmetrically within a licensing domain, but following a phase-based analysis. The negative polarity licenser ne licensed arguments when in vP (Zeijlstra 2004), and when raised to TP licensed time adjuncts. CP was constructed in negative clauses only when a constituent was displaced there to satisfy a Criterion (Topic, Wh-, or other). Polarity adjuncts such as ja and onques were licensed in TP, as they were not suitable expressions to satisfy criteria motivating movement to Spec CP. Their tense semantic properties are argued to support this analysis.

Syntax and subtext: Diachronic variables, displacement and proximity in the verse dramas of Shakespeare and his contemporaries

In this study of serious verse drama (tragedies and history plays) by Shakespeare and his contemporaries of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods, language is seen as a resource for achieving immediacy or distance, situating the play either in a contemporary socio-political framework or else in a national-historical past. The empirical basis for this claim lies in a study of archaic versus innovative syntactic constructions. It is shown that in the early 1590s Shakespeare and his contemporaries made very frequent use of verb-second in declaratives, and tended to avoid do-support in interrogatives. In early Jacobean serious drama, however, “verb-second” had almost disappeared and do-support rose to around 50% of interrogative contexts. Whereas in the earlier period an archaic effect was created by retaining Middle English constructions that ordinary usage had by now either abandoned, or was in the process of doing so, the language of Jacobean serious drama aligned itself on the respective ambient linguistic norms. It is argued that these syntactic preferences conveyed a stylistic effect suitable for representing distance and/or alterity, either with respect to the past or to a foreign context: both perspectives involved late Elizabethan national identity concerns. Conversely, the adoption of contemporary linguistic norms in Jacobean high drama achieved an effect of proximity, facilitating “here-and-now” allusiveness to contemporary themes, especially those of court intrigue and cynical acquisitive materialism.

Lexical structure and children's syntax

Studies of the lexicon-syntax relationship in preschool children’s language have suggested that the role played by lexical structure may be weaker than in adult grammar. It has been proposed that verbs’ argument structures can be overridden by a preference for canonical sentence schemas, and by discourse pressure. It has also been claimed that children freely create unadultlike causative (*don’t fall me down) or anticausative forms (*my shorts undid) by overgeneralizing the application of lexical rules. This paper reports two experimental investigations of these issues. In

Argument Structure Preferences in Pre-School and School-Age Children*

Study of the acquisition of verb argument structure is an area that has seen considerable growth in recent years, particularly since the appearance of Pinker’s (1989) study of the acquisition of argument structure alternations (see e.g., Brinkman, 1995;Gropen et al., 1989;Gropen et al., 1991;Ingham, 1990,Ingham, 1993/4; Naigles, 1990). In this paper we wish to investigate a relatively less studied aspect of argument structure in children’s language. Although some light has been cast on constraints that underlie argument structure alternations, and the lexical representations involved in argument structure alternations that can be ascribed to children, not much is known about how argument structure typically develops in use between the pre-school and early school years, and whether certain argument structure realisations are more typical of certain stages of development than others. Our intention in this paper is to investigate this issue, focusing on a few of the better studied argument structure types, especially those involving what can loosely be called location events, in which an entity moves or is moved to another location.

Book Reviews : Language Processing and Language Acquisition. Edited by L. Frazier & J. de Villiers (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990). Pp. ix + 397. Hardback £73.00. ISBN 0-7923-0659-7

meeting place for recent syntactic theory and developmental psycholinguistics. Language Processing and Language Acquisition (henceforth LPLA) contains nine papers given at a 1989 University of Massachusetts at Amherst conference, and a further six papers commenting on them. An introduction by the editors sets out their central concerns: the role of language processing in determining the shape of the grammar that a learner acquires, ’questions concerning the analysis of an informative linguistic input the potential evidence for parameter-setting’, as the editors put it (p. 1). Wexler’s paper ’On unparsable input in language acquisition’ squarely addresses such questions. He sets out what he calls the ’general answer’ that parameter-setting theorists give to them: sentences unparsable by the child’s current grammar play a crucial role in acquisition, acting as a trigger which causes a resetting of the parameter to an adult-like value which does allow such sentences to be parsed. The problem he raises is why children

Semantic criteria and syntactic input in the acquisition of verb argument structure

Linguistic development, and particularly stage of development, is most commonly expressed with respect to the length of utterance by using Brown’s (1973) MLU measure or a variation of it (for example, Miller 1982). Not much attention, however, has been paid to how good an indication of development these measures actually provide, or how sensitive they are to the children’s general language development, or with respect to their development on specific parts of the linguistic system. This project used over 120 hours of recorded speech samples collected from nine children over the age range of about one to three-and-a-half years. A demonstration of large variations between the children’s apparent linguistic abilities at similar utterance lengths and differences between individual children’s development of particular systems indicates that utterance length is not a very good indicator of developmental level. The length of