Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-13T04:32:18.949Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Constituent Order of Hwæt-Clauses in Old English Prose

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2018

Anna Cichosz
Anna Cichosz*
Affiliation:
University of Łódź
*
Institute of English Studies, University of Łódź, ul. Pomorska 171/173 90–236, Łódź, Poland [an.cichosz@gmail.com]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The aim of the present study is to conduct a comprehensive corpus analysis of the constituent order of main declarative clauses with the interjection hwæt ‘what’ in the clause-initial position in Old English prose texts. On the basis of his analysis of Ælfric's Lives of Saints and Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica, Walkden (2013) claims that such hwæt-clauses pattern with subordinate clauses with respect to their verb position. My study confirms Walkden's basic empirical findings that hwæt-clauses do not behave like typical main clauses as far as their constituent order is concerned. However, there are numerous differences between them and subordinate clauses introduced by hwæt, that is, free relatives and embedded questions. The analysis suggests that the conditions favoring the use of the V-final order in main hwæt-clauses resemble the ones identified for ordinary V-final main clauses in Bech 2012. What is more, the study shows that the functional differences between hwæt- and hwæt þa-clauses noted in Brinton 1996 are blurred in Old English prose because of a regular variation between hwæt þa-S and hwæt-S-þa patterns. The data also suggest that þa in hwæt þa-clauses should rather be analyzed as an independent clause element.

Keywords

hwæthwæt þaOld EnglishinterjectionsV-final main clauses
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Germanic Linguistics , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , March 2018 , pp. 1 - 42
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Germanic Linguistics 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Bech, Kristin. 2001. Word order patterns in Old and Middle English: A syntactic and pragmatic study. Bergen, Norway: University of Bergen dissertation.Google Scholar
Bech, Kristin. 2012. Word order, information structure, and discourse relations: A study of Old and Middle English verb-final clauses. Meurman-Solin, Lopez-Couso, & Los 2012, 66–86.Google Scholar
Bech, Kristin. 2017. Old truths, new corpora: Revisiting the word order of conjunct clauses in Old English. English Language and Linguistics 21. 1–25 (published online on February 18, 2016).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brinton, Laurel J. 1996. Pragmatic markers in English. Grammaticalization and discourse functions. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cichosz, Anna, Gaszewski, Jerzy, & Pęzik, Piotr. 2016. Element order in Old English and Old High German translations. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fischer, Olga, van Kemenade, Ans, Koopman, Willem, & van der Wurff, Wim. 2000. The syntax of early English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Haeberli, Eric. 2002. Observations on the loss of verb second in the history of English. Studies in comparative Germanic syntax, ed. by Zwart, C. Jan-Wouter & Abraham, Werner, 245–272. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hiltunen, Risto. 2006. “Eala, geferan and gode wyrhtan”: On interjections in Old English. Inside Old English. Essays in honour of Bruce Mitchell, ed. by Walmsley, John, 91–116. Oxford: Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kemenade, Ans van, & Westergaard, Marit. 2012. Syntax and information structure: Verb-second variation in Middle English. Meurman-Solin, Lopez-Couso, & Los 2012, 87–118.Google Scholar
Kroch, Anthony, & Taylor, Ann. 1997. Verb movement in Old and Middle English: Dialect variation and language contact. Parameters of morphosyntactic change, ed. by van Kemenade, Ans & Vincent, Nigel, 297–325. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Los, Bettelou. 2015. A historical syntax of English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meurman-Solin, Anneli, Lopez-Couso, Maria Jose, & Los, Bettelou (eds.). 2012. Information structure and syntactic change in the history of English. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mitchell, Bruce. 1985. Old English syntax. Oxford: Clarendon Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pintzuk, Susan. 1999. Phrase structures in competition: Variation and change in Old English word order. New York, NY: Garland.Google Scholar
Pintzuk, Susan, & Haeberli, Eric. 2008. Structural variation in Old English root clauses. Language Variation and Change 20. 367–407.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, & Wrenn, C. L.. 1957. An Old English grammar. London: Methuen.Google Scholar
Randall, Beth, Kroch, Antony, & Taylor, Ann. 2005–2013. CorpusSearch 2. Available online at http://corpussearch.sourceforge.net/CS.html, accessed on January 2, 2015.Google Scholar
Ringe, Don, & Taylor, Ann. 2014. The development of Old English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sauer, Hans. 2009. How the Anglo-Saxons expressed their emotions with the help of interjections. Brno Studies in English 35. 167–183.Google Scholar
Stockwell, Robert P., & Minkova, Donka. 1987. Verb phrase conjunction in Old English. Selected papers from the Eighth International Conference on Historical Linguistics, ed. by Henning Andersen, 499–516. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, Ann, Warner, Anthony, Pintzuk, Susan, & Beths, Frank. 2003. The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (YCOE). Department of Linguistics, University of York. Oxford Text Archive. Available online at http://www-users.york.ac.uk/∼lang22/YcoeHome1.htm, accessed on January 2, 2015.Google Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth. 1972. A history of English syntax. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.Google Scholar
Walkden, George. 2013. The status of hwæt in Old English. English Language and Linguistics 17. 465–488.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wårvik, Brita. 2011. Connective or “disconnective” discourse marker? Old English þa, multifunctionality and narrative structuring. Connectives in synchrony and diachrony in European languages (Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English 8), ed. by Anneli Meurman-Solin & Ursula Lenker. Helsinki: VARIENG. Available at http://www.helsinki.fi/ varieng/series/volumes/08/warvik/.Google Scholar