Was Old English a V2 language? - Linguisticskroch/handouts/york-dept09.pdf · Anthony Kroch...

Anthony KrochUniversity of Pennsylvania

November 2009

Was Old English a V2 language?

Thursday, November 12, 2009

• Anthony Kroch and Ann Taylor. Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English, second edition. CD-ROM, second edition, 2000.

• Ann Taylor, Anthony Warner, Susan Pintzuk, and Frank Beths. York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose. Oxford Text Archive, first edition, 2003.

• Anthony Kroch, Beatrice Santorini, and Lauren Delfs. Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English. CD-ROM, first edition, 2004.

• Ann Taylor, Arja Nurmi, Anthony Warner, Susan Pintzuk, and Terttu Nevalainen. Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence. Oxford Text Archive, first edition, 2006.

English Data Sources


The V2 constraint in Old English:the pronoun exception

(1) Þæt hus hæfdon Romane to ðæm anum tacne geworht.

(2) Ælc yfel he mæg don.

(3) Þin agen geleafa þe hæfþ gehæledne.

(4) & seofon ærendracan he him hæfde to asend.


The V2 constraint in Old English:the exception to the exception exception

(5) Hwi sceole we oþres mannes niman?

(6) Þa ge-mette he sceaðan.

(7) Ne mihton hi næ nigne fultum æt him begitan.

(8) Hæfdon hi hiora onfangen ær Hæsten to Beamfleote come.


C'

TP

VP

vP

T'

v'

C0

T0

v0

V0

hæfdon

geworht

DP

Romane

CP

DP

!æt hus

Phrase structure of an English V2 clause according to Kroch and Taylor 1997


C'

TP

VP

vP

T'

v'

C0

T0

v0

V0

hæfdon

geworht

DP

Romane

CP

DP

!æt hus

DP

!æt hus



C'

TP

VP

vP

T'

v'

C0

T0

v0

V0

hæfdon

geworht

CP

DP

hi

DP

hi

DP

!æt hus

DP

!æt hus



Low subjects in Old English

(9) ac mycel geþolode ðurh his mildheortnes se Crist for ure þearfe.

(10) in þa tid wæs in Mercna mægðe Wulfhere cyning.


German subject positions (Haeberli 1999, 2002)

(11) Dieses Haus wird später Hans für die Familie kaufen.

(12) Dieses Haus wird er später für die Familie kaufen.

(13) *Dieses Haus wird später er für die Familie kaufen.


German subject positions (Haeberli 1999, 2002)

(11) Dieses Haus wird später Hans für die Familie kaufen.

(12) Dieses Haus wird er später für die Familie kaufen.

(13) *Dieses Haus wird später er für die Familie kaufen.

(14) Dieses Haus wird Hans später für die Familie kaufen.


C'

CP

TP

VP

vP

T'

v'

C0

T0

DPj

v0

XPi V0

XPi

DPj

Romane

hæfdon

geworht!æt hus

!æt hus

Romane

Why not verb-third sentences?


CP

XPi

!one fleam TPC0

C'

DPj

"urcytel

T0

XPi

!one fleam

T'

v0

v'

Vk0

astealde

VP

vP

DPj

"urcytel

Vk0

astealde

T0

T'

ærest

ADVP

A V3 example or an Infl-final one?


(2) and him se innoþ eac geopenode ongean and him the heart also opened again

(coælive, +ALS_[Vincent]:170.7907)

(1) þæne se geatweard let in that-one the doorkeeper let in

(cowsgosp, Jn_[WSCp]:10.3.6596)

Unambiguous V3 clauses with topicalized objects


full DP subjects pronoun subjects

V2 cases74

746

6

V3 cases20

2045

45

frequency V3.21

0.21.88

0.88

Frequency of unambiguous V3 clausesagainst all particle verb cases


(1) ac þone yfelan fæstrædan willan folneah nan wind ne mæg but the evil constant will almost no storm not may

awecggean awaken

(cocuraC,CP_[Cotton]:33.224.4.85f.)

V3 clauses with topicalized objects ambiguous due to West Germanic verb raising


number SOVI main clauses with full noun phrase subjects

ratio of SOVI to SOIV in unambiguous verb-raising environments

rate of object topicalization in verb-final clauses

predicted number of OSIV cases due to verb-raising with topicalization

actual number of OSIV cases

20

0.7

0.2

2.8

22

Expected versus observed number of V3 clauses with topicalized objects given verb raising


0

2

4

6

8

10

12

OE (Early) OE (Late) 1151-1250 1251-1350 1351-1420 1421-1500 1501-1569 1570-1639 1639-1710

% T

opic

aliz

ed

Date

Decline of direct object topicalization in English


96 A CORPUS STUDY OF THE VORFELD

Table 4.2: Summary of Vorfeld occupation of arguments.

Vorfeld Prop est (%)

Argument yes no lo pt hi

subject 43 523 18 597 69.7 70.1 70.4direct object 3 418 20 432 13.9 14.3 14.8indirect object 38 815 3.2 4.5 6.1

Note: subject = SU, direct object = OBJ1 + OBJ1 VC, indirect object = OBJ2 + OBJ2 VC.

Table 4.3: Classification after part-of-speech and syntactic category.

Category CGN labels

nominal NP, N, VNW, MWU (when proper names)prepositional PP, VZverbal TI, OTI, AHI, INF, WW, PPARTclausal CP, WHSUB, WHQ, WHREL, REL, SVAN, SMAIN, SSUB, SV1

Note: See Appendix A for explanation of the CGN POS/Cat-labels. Conjunctions/lists of onecategory are also assigned that category. Other POS-types (notably adjectives and adverbs) wereassigned to a rest category.

other things questionnaire data. We will see in later sections that there is more to thedifference between direct and indirect objects than meets the eye, however. If we take theeffect of definiteness on Vorfeld occupation into account, the difference between directobjects and indirect objects is not as big as Table 4.2 suggests.

Subjects and objects can be a of a wide variety of categories. We can divide the dataof Table 4.2 into four main categories: nominal, prepositional, verbal and clausal. Thetranslation between CGN-tags and the four categories is given in Table 4.3. The categoriesnominal and prepositional should be self-explanatory. The difference between verbaland clausal is that clausal constituents are finite, and contain all arguments of the verb,whereas verbal constituents are non-finite or do not contain all arguments of the verb.Tables 4.4–4.6 show how each of the grammatical functions breaks down into thesecategories. Below, I will illustrate the data with some examples for each grammaticalfunction. The nominal data will considered in more detail in the section on definiteness(Section 4.3).

Subjects Vorfeld occupation of subjects per category is detailed in Table 4.4. Theproportion of subjects in the Vorfeld is high in each category, although clausal subjectsappear to have a slightly reduced chance of appearing in the Vorfeld.

96 A CORPUS STUDY OF THE VORFELD

Table 4.2: Summary of Vorfeld occupation of arguments.

Vorfeld Prop est (%)

Argument yes no lo pt hi

subject 43 523 18 597 69.7 70.1 70.4direct object 3 418 20 432 13.9 14.3 14.8indirect object 38 815 3.2 4.5 6.1

Note: subject = SU, direct object = OBJ1 + OBJ1 VC, indirect object = OBJ2 + OBJ2 VC.

Table 4.3: Classification after part-of-speech and syntactic category.

Category CGN labels

nominal NP, N, VNW, MWU (when proper names)prepositional PP, VZ

verbal TI, OTI, AHI, INF, WW, PPART

clausal CP, WHSUB, WHQ, WHREL, REL, SVAN, SMAIN, SSUB, SV1

Note: See Appendix A for explanation of the CGN POS/Cat-labels. Conjunctions/lists of onecategory are also assigned that category. Other POS-types (notably adjectives and adverbs) wereassigned to a rest category.

other things questionnaire data. We will see in later sections that there is more to thedifference between direct and indirect objects than meets the eye, however. If we take theeffect of definiteness on Vorfeld occupation into account, the difference between directobjects and indirect objects is not as big as Table 4.2 suggests.

Subjects and objects can be a of a wide variety of categories. We can divide the dataof Table 4.2 into four main categories: nominal, prepositional, verbal and clausal. Thetranslation between CGN-tags and the four categories is given in Table 4.3. The categoriesnominal and prepositional should be self-explanatory. The difference between verbaland clausal is that clausal constituents are finite, and contain all arguments of the verb,whereas verbal constituents are non-finite or do not contain all arguments of the verb.Tables 4.4–4.6 show how each of the grammatical functions breaks down into thesecategories. Below, I will illustrate the data with some examples for each grammaticalfunction. The nominal data will considered in more detail in the section on definiteness(Section 4.3).

Subjects Vorfeld occupation of subjects per category is detailed in Table 4.4. Theproportion of subjects in the Vorfeld is high in each category, although clausal subjectsappear to have a slightly reduced chance of appearing in the Vorfeld.

Frequency of direct object topicalization in modern spoken Dutch (Bouma 2008)


Evolution of PP preposing in English

0

10

20

30

40

50

OE (Early) OE (Late) 1151-1250 1251-1350 1351-1420 1421-1500 1501-1569 1570-1639 1639-1710

% P

repo

sed

Date


0

15

30

45

60

75

90

OE (Early) OE (Late) 1151-1250 1251-1350 1351-1420 1421-1500 1501-1569 1570-1639 1639-1710

% P

repo

sed

Date

Evolution of adverb fronting in English

locative adverbs

temporal adverbs


The history of topicalization in English (Speyer 2008)

• Why does topicalization decline in Middle English but not disappear? If the change a parametric one, it should go to completion. Otherwise, topicalization, a clear case of stylistic variation might be expected to be stable in frequency over time.

• This question has answer in the specific interactionbetween parametric settings and stylistic variation in the history of English.


0

5

10

15

OE (Early) OE (Late) 1151-1250 1251-1350 1351-1420 1421-1500 1501-1569 1570-1639 1639-1710

% V

2

Date

Decline of direct object topicalizationby subject type

full DP subjects

pronoun subjects


Correlation between frequencies of object topicalizationand of V2 in Middle English texts (Wallenberg 2007)

edvern

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

0 5 10 15 20 25

% Full DP Topicalization

% V

2


Subject type in sentences with topicalized objects

Subject type in sentences with in situ objects

personal pronoun demonstrative pronoun full noun phrase181 2 1790.5% 1% 8.5 %

personal pronoun demonstrative pronoun full noun phrase140 20 14246.4 6.6 47.0

Distribution of subject types in a corpusof topicalized and non-topicalized

sentences in natural speech


Clash avoidance

• The type of topicalization that declines:

(1) The nèwspaper Jóhn read; the nòvel Máry did.

• The type of topicalization that doesn’t:

(2) The nèwspaper I réad; the nòvel I dídn’t.

(Compare: The nèwspaper read Jóhn.)


Translating German topicalized arguments intoEnglish in three modern German novels

[by Böll, Dürrenmatt and Grass]

Topicalized to topicalized:

G: Mahlkes Haupt bedeckte dieser Hut besonders peinlich.E: On Mahlke’s head this hat made a particularly painful impression.

Topicalized to non-topicalized:

G: Zu den sechs kamen noch drei weitere.E: Three others joined these six in the afternoon.


2nd accent on the German

subjectaccent elsewhere

topicalization in the English translation

00

3131

no topicalization in the English

2525

100100

Accent placement and topicalization frequencies in translating German topicalized arguments into English


Finis


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