Syntactic Change OE>ME Flashcards
How does the article develop?
Demonstrative se/sēo/þæt/þā develops definite article functions over the OE period and splits in Middle English into definite article þe and distal demonstrative þat.
Numeral ān splits into numeral one and indefinite article an ( >a(n)) in Middle English.
Changes to the genitive.
-es stops behaving like a case ending.
Genitives are fixed to prenominal position.
group (phrasal genitives where ending is only on last word) develop and split genitives disappear.
OE genitive has lots of functions but in ME it is limited to possessives. After all these changes we have a phrasal clitic which attaches to the right edge of the NP and marks possessives. This change also occurs in Norwegian, Danish & Swedish (phrasals as well).
Also a related possessive construction in ME: the separated genitive (also called his-genitive and periphrastic genitive). E.g. Alfritha, Þe duke his douʒter of Devenschire (Alfritha, the duke of Devonshire’s daughter). Has parallels in Norwegian, German, Dutch & Afrikaans. Because in dialects with h-dropping, the separated genitive and the s-genitive might actually be homophonous, some analyse group genitives and then the phrasal clitic as resulting from a reanalysis of the his-genitive. However, this would mean differing explanations for the possessive phrasal affix in English and Scandinavian - not satisfactory. Also there is a reverse proposal that the separated genitive is a reanalysis of -es.
genitive phrases lost ground to prepositional phrases with of in Middle English (due to the loss of inflections and perhaps French influence*) before recovering somewhat afterwards. *But this change also happens in Scandinavian, Faroese, Dutch, dialects of German.
How do relative clauses change?
Old English marked relative clauses with þe, with forms of se, or a combination of the two.
Both of these potentially merge in Middle English as þe
However, generally replaced by the neuter nominative‐accusative of se, þat.
Wh-relatives appear but aren’t widespread until EModE. Wh-relatives appear first with case marked forms whom, whose, who. Their origin is probably because of ambiguity between questions (in indirect questions) and indefinite pronouns: ‘she wanted to know who did this’ or from free relatives (‘anyone who’).
Auxiliary system:
Changes to Tense
Future tense develops from *sculan ‘must’ (obligation>future), willan ‘want’ (volition>future).
‘Be going to’ future develops from Late Middle English onwards.
^ All three cases involve conventionalisation of inference (inferred meaning becomes a standard meaning of that verb) and semantic bleaching. (“Related to broadening is bleaching, where the semantic content of a word becomes reduced as the grammatical content increases, for instance in the development of intensifiers such as awfully, terribly, horribly (e.g. awfully late, awfully big, awfully small) or pretty (pretty good, pretty bad . . .).” (Philip Durkin, The Oxford Guide to Etymology. Oxford University Press, 2009))
Auxiliary System:
Changes to Aspect
Modern English progressive (be speaking) develops:
2 Proposed sources:
Old English has a construction bēon/wesan + present participle ‐ende – once we have the merger of the present participle ‐ende and verbal noun/gerund -ung, this fits.
another possibility suggested for this is that the progressive construction developed from a construction with the verbal noun/gerund (Old English *bēon on huntunge > ME be on hunting > be a-hunting > be hunting). Celtic substrate influence may be involved, since Brythonic has a similar construction (to be+verbal noun) – but the direction of influence is debated.
PDE perfect (have spoken) developed in OE and then became more frequent.
May have expanded in response to the loss of perfective ge-
Originally transitive verbs appeared with habban and intransitive with wesan/beon, but have spreads in ME.
Perhaps due to ON influence
Perhaps as a result of the ambiguity for some verbs between perfect and passive e.g return. She was returned.
Auxiliary System: Changes to mood (not modal status)
Subjunctive collapses, in part due to phonological change, and is replaced by periphrastic modal verb constructions: mōten bēon instead of expected bēo alone.
Modal verbs acquire new epistemic meanings. First the evidential meaning of sculan (shall, should), but must and will develop theirs later. (the fruit must be delicious the tree is so beautiful, this will be your luggage i suppose).
How are PDE modals differentiated from lexical verbs
Lack full range of morphological forms (pres 3sg, present participles, past participles)
Can’t appear as infinitives
Can’t be used as imperatives
Can’t be used as subjunctives
Undergo subject-verb inversion in questions and are negated with not.
There are two accounts for the development of modals as a separate syntactic category. What is Lightfoot’s 1979 account?
OE and ME modals were not a distinct category.
They became isolated from other verbs by losing their ability to take a direct object and losing the transparent relationship between their present and past forms.
They became even more isolated as the only preterite-present verbs.
Resisted the spread of the to-infiniticee
As a result reanalysed as a separate class at the end of the ME period leading to a series of further changes (loss of bare infitives, present participles, multiple modal constructions).
This account proposes that there is one moment when they are all reanalysed, proposes that this moment is due to precious changes, is focused on language acquisition
What is an alternative to Lightfoot’s account?
Modals were already a distinct class (the non-attestation of their infinitives is not a historical accident).
All of the changes are closely interrelated.
The history of each modal is different.
This account proposes no watershed moment, and so the existence of the class ‘modal verb’ has to be allowed to be fuzzy.
Auxiliary systems:
changes to voice
Old English formed the passive with bēon/wesan/weorðan + past participle, with the latter option dying out in Middle English (presumably weorðan had become synonymous with bēon at this point).
in Middle English, it becomes possible to form passives on indirect objects and prepositional objects (She was given a book and This subject has been written about become possible); this development was probably linked to the loss of case.
Auxiliary Systems:
The rise of do-support
OE has causative do (make), anticipative do (do) and substitute do (have already said verb).
All of these have been suggested as the origin of Modern English do‐support: causative do presents semantic difficulties, while the other two present syntactic difficulties
the rise of do-support has been interpreted as reflecting a major change in English syntax: the loss of verb‐raising (from V to T), eliminating fronting of lexical verbs in questions , negation and across adverbs.
What causes the decline in variety of argument frames for experiencer-source verbs?
The standard story is that the loss of case morphology and the fixing of word order as SVO leads to a reanalysis of dative experiencers as nominative.
Contact with French may have played a part since French loans (e.g please) resisted incorporation into the system.
Changes to Word Order
normally Old English is analysed as underlyingly SOV (the verb is base generated in final position) with fronting of the finite verb (to C) and fronting of a topic (to Spec,CP).
The underlying SOV order surfaces wherever this rule does not apply: in subordinate clauses (where the complementiser blocks the movement of the verb, because it is already occupying C).
The frequency of inversion in main clauses decreases in Middle English until around 1700, when the modern pattern is reached. (apart from occasional inversion for stylistic reasons).
Language contact with Old Norse or with French and dialect contact (involving different treatments of pronominal clitics) have been suggested as causes of the loss of V2 (Kroch & Taylor 1997)
though it’s worth noting that Old Norse, Old French, and other dialects of ME are all V2 languages, so it’s not as simple as loss of V2 spreading directly from a contact variety.
Also loss of inflection as a cause.
For the occasional OE sentences which are hard to analyse as SOV, either additional movement rules are posited or it is argued that VO and OV grammars were in competition.
What is the generative model for language change?
references in essay
Some internal (e.g phonological change) or external (e.g language contact) leads to language input data being altered. Children take this data and reanalyse system as something different to original system based on what the data suggests.
A generative perspective on the key change to OE word order.
(references in essay)
V2 word order was V-T-C movement of verb when Spec CP was filled, but underlyingly SOV (head-final VPs) evidenced in subordinate clauses. If Spec CP was actually the subject (moved from spec TP) there was SURFACE SVO (potentially leading to the reanalysis).
Reanalysed as SVO (also potentially due to headedness harmony with other phrases such as PP CP).
Then V2 movement lost. V-T movement remains when there is no auxiliary but not to C.
