Verb Movement in Old and Middle English: Dialect Variation And
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Verb Movement in Old and Middle English Dialect Variation and Language Contact AnthonyKroch Ann Taylor kro chchangelingupennedu ataylorbabellingup ennedu Department of Linguistics Universityof Pennsylvania Williams Hall Philadelphia PA c A Kro ch and A Taylor Introduction Our goal in this pap er is to show that the northern and southern dialects of Middle English dier signicantly in their verbmovement syntax In particular we will give evidence that these dialects An earlier version of this pap er was presentedattheInternational Conference on Historical Linguistics at UCLA in August and app eared in the UniversityofPennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics volume The work rep orted here was supp orted by a researchgrant from the NSF BNS with supplementary supp ort from the UniversityofPennsylvania ResearchFoundation and the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science Wewould esp ecially like to thank Donald Ringe for numerous helpful suggestions and for help in the interpretation of various Old English and Latin do cuments We are also indebted to Robin Clark Caroline Heyco ck Jack Ho eksema Sabine Iatridou Ans van Kemenade Susan Pintzuk Bernhard Rohrbacher Beatrice Santorini and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on various asp ects of this pap er Wehave not in every case b een able to do justice to their observations and suggestions but they have materially improved the work The dialect divisions of Middle English are complex and controversial Divisions based on phonology recognize three to ve ma jor dialect areas In this pap er however we will b e concerned only to show that there was at least one northern dialect and one southern dialect with the characteristics that we describ e Roughlythetwo syntactic dialects at issue were found in the North and in the Northeast Midlands on the one hand and the South and Southwest Midlands on the other Within these areas further distinctions can b e made that are b eyond the scop e of this pap er exemplify a recently discovered typological distinction within the Germanic language family in the landing sites of verb movement Several studies have indicated that the verbsecond V constraintcharacteristic of the Germanic languages involves movement to either of two dierent p ositions dep ending on the language investigated In the b etter known languages German Dutch and Mainland Scandinavian verbsecond word order results from movement of the tensed verb to the COMP C p osition and concomitantmovement of some maximal pro jection to the sp ecier of CP In other Germanic languages Yiddish and Icelandic howeverVword order can reect movement of the tensed verb to a lower p osition In studies using the phrase structure of Chomsky Diesing Santorini Pintzuk Under current a that p osition is lNFL I assumptions where the INFL pro jection has b een decomp osed into a varying number of functional pro jections with simpler feature content the verb in this second type of language seems to move to the highest pro jection b elowC As there is no consensus on the lab el or precise character of this pro jection we will distinguish the twotyp es of languages terminologically as CPV versus IPV languages with the understanding that IP here stands for the highest pro jection b elow C whatever that maybe In section wewill give reason to b elieve that a splitINFL analysis is in fact useful in understanding the character of Middle English V but for most of this pap er we will for the sake of simplicity assume a unitary I The dierence in the p osition to which the verb moves in dierent languages leads to subtle but clearly observable dierences in the shap e and distribution of verbsecond clauses Most strikingly while all V languages exhibit verbsecond word order in main clauses the two subtypes dier in the availability of this word order in sub ordinate clauses The CPV languages allow verbsecond order only in those embedded clauses that in some wayhave the structure of matrix clauses either b ecause the complementizer p osition is empty or b ecause there is an additional com plementizer p osition embedded b elow the one that introduces the sub ordinate clause the socalled CPrecursion structure discussed in de Haan and Weerman and Iatridou and Kro ch Vikner calls the IPV languages generalized verbsecond languages b ecause the two he considers Yiddish and Icelandic are said to exhibit V word order in all types of main and sub ordinate clauses rather than in the more limited set of environments where it is found in German Dutch and Mainland Scandinavian This terminology has the advantage of theoretical neutrality but as we shall see it is inaccurate IPV languages do not allowVword order as freely in sub ordinate clauses as in main clauses see also Kemenade this volume As the cited authors show instances of these exceptional sub ordinate clauses are largely conned to the complements of bridge verbs The IPV languages on the other hand showV word order in a broad range of sub ordinate clauses Diesing Santorini Rognvaldsson and Thrainsson Pintzuk has recently shown that the verb in Old English V clauses surfaces in the I p osition and despite the empirical diculties p ointed out by Kemenade this volume we will supp ort her conclusion We will further see that the southern dialect of Middle English preserves the V syntax of Old English despite having b ecome unlike Old English overwhelmingly INFLmedial and VO in basic word order see also Kemenade In striking contrast to the southern dialect however the northern dialect of Middle English app ears to have developed the verbmovementsyntax of a standard CPV language and hence to b e similar in its syntax to the mo dern Mainland Scandinavian languages In the following pages after a brief discussion of the historical context of dialect dierentiation b etween North and South in Old and Middle English we will lay out the complex V syntax of Old English With this background we will pro ceed to describ e the syntax of V in the southern and northern dialects of Middle English resp ectively and will show that V clauses in the two dialects dier in the landing site of the verb Given the strong and wellknown linguistic inuence of Scandinavian on northern Middle English we are immediately led to ask whether the CPV character of northern Middle English could reect contact with Scandinavian Wegive evidence in supp ort of this p ossibility and suggest what the nature of the contact eect mighthavebeen The so ciolinguistic background Although we are here not primarily concerned with the historical and so ciolinguistic dynamic that established the Middle English dialects the so ciolinguistic history of p opulation contact and diu sion which underlie them is a matter of considerable interest and it sheds lightonwhy the dialect dierence wehave uncovered should exist Sp ecicallywe will see that the northern dialect of English most likely b ecame a CPV language under the extensivecontact it had with medieval Scandinavian contact that resulted from the Danish and Norwegian p opulation inux into the north of England during the late Old English p erio d In the course of its history English has b een more heavily inuenced by Scandinavian than byany other language The only comparable inuence was the eect of French and Latin on the literary and learned vocabulary but these lan guages inuenced English grammar hardly at all The strength of Scandinavian inuence resulted from the large numbers of Norwegians and Danes who settled in England in the three centuries b efore the Norman Conquest Stenton Geip el The Viking seafarers that harassed the British Isles from the th to the th centuries came at rst to plunder but eventually stayed p er manentlyFor long p erio ds in the th and th centuries the Danes or Norwegians ruled extensive kingdoms in England and place name evidence indicates that the p opulation of several shires was predominantly Scandinavian Darby Ekwall Geip el Since the rst settlers were soldiers of the Danish armies that plundered the English coastline there must have b een a great deal of intermarriage and intimate language mixture but there were also substantial numbers of immigrants who came later after areas of foreign control were established Among these were substantial numbers of women as well as men Stenton In the northwest of England the ma jor fo cus of Norwegian settlement the settlerinvaders came from already established Norse settlements in Ireland and may often have come as families Moreover in that region the densityof AngloSaxon settlementwas low and the newcomers necessarily formed a ma jority of the p opulation in many places Ekwall The linguistic eect of this combination of p opulation movement and p opulation mixture was extensive comparable in some ways to the pidginizationcreoli zation phenomena of more recent centuries though not as extreme see however Thomason and Kaufman for a more conservative assessment It is well known that many originally Scandinavian vocabulary items were b orrowed into northern English for example Scandinavian egg for Old English and general West Germanic ey Scandinavian sister for Old English swuster and so forth Most signicantly for our purp oses several of the b orrowings from Scandinavian were of closed class items which functioned mainly as morphosyntactic signals of grammatical relations For example the third p erson plural pronoun they was b orrowed into northern English from Scandinavian and spread over time into other dialects MorseGagne and the references cited there Similarly