Ans Van Kemenade

Radboud University | RU

OV/VO variation in the history of English has been a long debated issue. Where earlier approaches were concerned with the grammatical status of the variation (cf. van Kemenade 1987, Pintzuk 1999 and many others), the debate has shifted to explaining the variation from a pragmatic perspective more recently (cf. Bech 2001, Taylor & Pintzuk 2012a), fo...

Abstract This article presents a case study on the shifting interaction between clause structure, information structure and discourse organisation in the history of English, as evidenced by the development from Old to Middle English of what we will call discourse particles: discourse-cohesive devices grammaticalised from adverbs. These include the...

This article presents a quantitative study of the referential status of PPs in clause-initial position in the history of English. Earlier work (Los 2009; Dreschler 2015) proposed that main-clause-initial PPs in Old English primarily function as 'local anchors', linking a new clause to the immediately preceding discourse. As this function was an int...

We present a novel account of the development and loss of one type of V2 word order over the Middle and early Modern English periods, based on a fine-grained corpus study which shows that multiple factors are at play, in interaction between syntax, information structure and prosody. We focus on finite verb movement to the highest functional head in...

This chapter presents a corpus-based study of the history of then as a discourse marker in English. It will be shown that the pragmatic use of then and its status as a discourse particle was more or less stable throughout the history of English, even though its syntax changed profoundly. The precursor of then in Old English occurs on a large scale...

This article reexamines the evidence for OV and VO variation and the loss of OV order in historical English, and presents a novel and unified analysis of Old and Middle English word order based on a uniform VO grammar, with leftward scrambling of specific types of objects. This analysis provides an insightful framework for a precise analysis of how...

This study reports on EFL teachers’ self-reported teaching practices aimed at stimulating students’ language awareness. It investigates whether, and to what extent, awareness-raising practices are currently implemented in EFL secondary education in the Netherlands, how these practices can be characterised, and how awareness-raising practices can be...

Oxford Bibliographies Online; Annotated bibliography

Topicalization in Old English and Old French is a poorly studied field. This chapter aims to identify and compare their different strategies for topicalization. We find that both Old English and Old French have evidence for high and low topics, which we argue are Hanging Topics and Left Dislocated Topics. In the case of Old English, we find evidenc...

This volume offers a range of synchronic and diachronic case studies in comparative Germanic and Romance morphosyntax. These two language families, spoken by over a billion people today, have been of central importance throughout the development linguistics, yet many significant questions about the relationship between the two families remain. Foll...

This paper is published as: Struik, Tara and Ans van Kemenade. 2022. Information structure and OV word order in Old and Middle English: a phase-based approach. The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 25(1). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10828-022-09131-1 This article reexamines the evidence for OV and VO variation and the loss of OV order in hi...

This squib revisits the case for preposition stranding (P-stranding) in Old English as it was argued in the hot debate on wh-movement in the 1980s. It looks at more recent literature on the relevant issues, finding that P-stranding in Old English warrants an analysis in terms of wh-movement, which should allow for movement of a zero prepositional o...

This study presents an in-depth inquiry into teachers’ beliefs about a language awareness approach to secondary school foreign language education. The study aims to deepen our insight into (the differences in) teachers’ beliefs about language awareness and facilitate the discussion about including language awareness in foreign language curricula. T...

This paper investigates the affinities between V2 in Old English, the Spec,CP position, and the deictic þ/s-system (demonstratives se/s¯eo/þæt as well as an etymologically related set of time, place and manner adverbs þa ‘then’, þonne ‘then’, þær ‘there’, þus ‘thus’, swa ‘so’, swylc ‘such’). The interrelations between V2 syntax and an articulated d...

Cambridge Core - Research Methods in Linguistics - edited by Robert J. Podesva

We built an agent-based model (ABM) to simulate historical language change, and tested it by means of a case study on word order change in English. Our modeling approach assumes that complex patterns in population-level language change can be understood in terms of many small changes, resulting from interactions between individual agents of di�eren...

A construction very widely used in Old English and Old Germanic more broadly are correlatives introduced by an adverbial or conditional subclause, as in When you've done your homework, ( then ) you can come back (Old English: ‘…, then can you come back’). Correlatives originate from a paratactic clause structure, making use of resumptive adverbs su...

Marcelle Cole presents an interesting study of pronominal reference in Old English, nicely supplementing work available in the literature which shows, in brief, that in contexts with more than one possible referent, clause-initial nominative personal pronouns dominantly continue the topic (subject) of the previous clause, whereas clause-initial se...

Commentary on: Emonds, Joseph Embley and Jan Terje Faarlund. 2014. English: The Language of the Vikings. Palacky Universty Press.

This paper presents new evidence for the early history of the Northern Subject Rule in the form of an exhaustive corpus study of plural present-tense indicative verb forms in Northern and Northern Midlands early Middle English, analysed in relation to their syntactic context, including subject type and subject-verb adjacency. We show that variation...

Verb particles (e.g. up, out, off, down, away) are a well-known and well studied feature of English and of Germanic languages in general. Nevertheless, the functional and categorial status of English verb particles remains debated, and, especially in the diachronic literature on OV/VO word-order change, this question is typically avoided entirely....

Research Methods in Linguistics - edited by Robert J. Podesva January 2014

The study of the history of the English language has a long and rich tradition, starting with a range of editions of important Old and Middle English texts in the middle of the 19th century, many of which are still available as reprints from the early English Text Society (see Text Editions). The linguistic study of the history of English took off...

environment in which we can most readily abstract away from the well-known asymmetries between root vs. nonroot clauses in Old English. We formulate the conditions that elements should satisfy to license their appearance in the topic part of the clause, as well as the discourse effects that they thus produce. While the topic part of the clause may...

This article explores the role of information structure (IS), syntax, and prosody in accounting for word order variation and change in the history of the English language. First discussing the theoretical problems involved in the study of the interaction between these components of grammar, it goes on to embed changes in the history of English in a...

This handbook takes stock of recent advances in the history of English, the most studied language in the field of diachronic linguistics. Not only does ample and invaluable data exist due to English’s status as a global language, but the availability of large electronic corpora has also allowed historical linguists to analyze more of this data than...

This chapter discusses the importance of discourse, particularly information structure, for the history of English syntax, and presents an overview the type of diachronic investigations that have been done in this field. It presents a number of case studies that demonstrate how the flexible positions in Old English (OE) for subjects and objects wer...

Particle verbs (combinations of two words but lexical units) are a notorious problem in linguistics. Is a particle verb like look up one word or two? It has its own entry in dictionaries, as if it is one word, but look and up can be split up in a sentence: we can say He looked the information up and He looked up the information. But why can't we sa...

Investigating the variation between verb-second (V2) and non-V2 word order in declaratives in Middle English, this chapter explores how syntax and information structure interact in the word order development during this period. It compares this interaction to similar variation in wh -questions in Present-Day Norwegian. The study makes a distinction...

More than twenty years of research has been devoted to the nature of Verb Second (V2) in early English and its loss in the transition from Middle English (ME) to early Modern English (EModE). Yet there has been no sufficient explanation for why and how V2 was lost in clauses introduced by a non-subject first constituent other than a wh- phrase or a...

The aim of this paper is to integrate Information Structure/IS-related insights of past work on the subject system of Old English with a particular formal account of word-order variation and change in earlier English that did not take IS considerations into account. We offer a first detailed formal account of how the IS-sensitive Old English subjec...

This chapter compares the historical development of modal verbs in Dutch and English. Modals in present-day Dutch may be non-finite, and may appear under other auxiliaries in long verb clusters. This is an Early Modern Dutch innovation, resulting from a change in mood morphology combined with the rise of the IPP-effect. © individual chapters their...

In this article, I trace some of the some of the core issues and recent developments in formal approaches to syntactic change, with some special attention on how the development from the Principles and Parameters (P&P) approach to the Minimalist framework has had an impact on issues in syntactic change. The primary forum for work on syntactic chang...

The study of linguistic variation has shifted towards quantitative analysis over the last decades, as can be seen in both sociolinguistics and historical linguistics. What is the added value of a quantitative analysis? Its value is shown on the basis of some concrete research examples where a so-called linguistic variable is analysed by including i...

The study of linguistic variation has shifted towards quantitative analysis over the last decades, as can be seen in both sociolinguistics and historical linguistics. What is the added value of a quantitative analysis? Its value is shown on the basis of some concrete research examples where a so-called linguistic variable is analysed by including i...

The notion ‘preverb’ is a traditional descriptive notion in Indo-European linguistics. It refers to morphemes that appear in front of a verb, and which form a close semantic unit with that verb. In many cases, the morpheme that functions as a preverb can also function without a preverbal context, often as an adverb or an adposition. Most linguists...

This paper charts the historical development of two sets of verbal prefixes in the West-Germanic languages, which appear to show a large degree of functional equivalence, although they have rather different morphosyntactic properties. The first set is inseparable, as found in the Dutch verbs verbranden ‘burn’, beschrijven ‘describe’, ontmoeten ‘mee...

This book is a guide to the development of English syntax between the Old and Modern periods. Beginning with an overview of the main features of early English syntax, it gives a unified account of the grammatical changes occurring in the language during this period. Written by four leading experts in English historical syntax, the book demonstrates...

Historical syntax occupies a pivotal position within the larger field of research into the nature, use, and acquisition of language. It is responsive to theoretical advances in linguistic theory, language acquisition, and theories of language use, as well as to less adjacent fields such as statistical techniques and evolutionary biology. Linguistic...

The articles in this special issue are all broadly concerned with various aspects of the rise of grammatical items and functional categories and represent a variety of theoretical approaches to the analysis of the nature of such items. They arise out of a workshop held at the XIIIth International Conference on Historical Linguistics at Düsseldorf i...

Cynthia L. Allen,Case marking and reanalysis: grammatical relations from Old to early Modern English. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Pp. xviii+509. - - Volume 34 Issue 1 - Ans van Kemenade

This short paper forms part of work in progress on the nature of verbal positions and negation in early English. In van Kemenade (1987), it is claimed that Old English (OE) is an asymmetric V2 language in the sense that main clauses have a fronted position for the finite verb (Vf) preceded by a topic, whereas embedded clauses lack this verb frontin...

The relation between changes in (inflectional) morphology and consequences thereof in the syntax has been a perennial issue in historical linguistics. The relation between the loss of in-flections and the fixing word order on the one hand, and widely attested instances of change such that content words grammaticalise to morphological elements on th...

The Principles-and-Parameters approach to linguistic theory has triggered an enormous amount of work in comparative syntax over the last decade or so. A natural consequence of the growth in synchronic comparative work has been a renewed interest in questions of diachronic syntax, and this collection testifies to that trend. These papers focus on qu...

Les auteurs veulent montrer comment la Theorie du liage et du gouvernement peut rendre compte d'un grand nombre de phenomenes dans plusieurs langues germaniques et romanes, modernes et anciennes d'un point de vue diachronique et synchronique