English Historical Syntax

David Denison

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317887683
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This study brings together many of the resources needed for the exploration of English historical syntax and deals with many of the important changes in English sentence structure from Old English to present. It also features a survey of published research from both classical and modern linguistic traditions, as well as new research by the author. Provides guidance on methodology, important reference materials, and the general history of the English language.

Part I
Groundwork

Overview

Part I is one part which should not be skipped by the inexperienced reader, as it contains material which has a direct bearing on every single topic discussed in Parts II-V. Chapter 1 is an introduction to the study of the historical syntax of English, with a discussion of methodological issues and a survey of the reference works which are of central importance. Chapter 2, Background, is a brief survey of English linguistic history other than syntactic, intended to give a historical and more general linguistic context to the syntax at the core of the book. Chapter 3, Nominal Morphology, introduces some theoretical issues in the case syntax of the noun phrase and discusses the history of nominal inflection, though the details of paradigms in Old and Middle English are left for the handbooks. It is most important to have some grasp of the changes sketched in §§3.1.1-2, 3.2.1-2, and 3.3, These matters, apparently far removed from verbal syntax, are actually directly relevant.

Chapter 1
Introduction

1.1 Data collection

How should the data for historical syntax be collected? Scholars working on Present-day English syntax have relied on introspection or, increasingly, on data which can be retrieved by computer from a stored corpus. Both methods are convenient. Historical data are less easy to collect. Scholars have tended either to work through a chosen corpus of texts, or simply to borrow their examples from such great repositories of information as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (1933, 1989) or Jespersen's Modern English Grammar (1909-49) or Visser's Historical Syntax (1963-73), especially the last-named. Now Visser's work is a remarkable and quite indispensable compilation, but - probably inevitably in a one-man work of such encyclopaedic coverage - there are many examples of misquotation and misclassification. One of the aims of this book is to provide a selection of data, taken from good editions, which has been checked carefully and can be relied on as the basis for linguistic argument.¹ For this purpose I have found Visser the best secondary source of material and freely acknowledge my debt. The concordance of Venezky and Healey (1980) is also proving invaluable for research on Old English syntax.² In future the materials collected for the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts should provide a useful controlled sample, especially for comparing usage in different periods, genres, registers, and so on. Examples of my own finding do not come from a single systematic reading programme within a defined corpus. Many were noted in texts and linguistic discussions in the course of research on particular topics, others were come across merely by chance. In addition to the better-known texts of Old English and Middle English I have tried to look at non-literary texts, to counter the prevailing emphasis on literary styles of discourse, and at editions only recently published.

For certain approaches to historical syntax it is necessary to make much fuller collections of data than can be attempted in a book of this scope. Especially for Old English it is now possible to aspire to complete collections of instances of a given construction, while for variationist research it is necessary to have statistically valid samples of data. When the data come from different sources it may be desirable to minimise differences of genre, or alternatively such differences may be exploited as a reflection of sociolinguistic differences in a speech community. For these purposes a more systematic measure of text type is useful, on which see Biber and Finegan (1986).

1.2 Importance of context

Historical syntax done in isolation is prone to error. Often it is misleading to confine attention to a single sentence-fragment or even sentence because the syntax is partly determined by the wider discourse context - a point often neglected in formal linguistics. Then the stylistic differences among different kinds of text need to be taken into account. Is the work a translation from French or Latin, and if so, how close does it stick to the original? If it is verse, to what extent is the syntax modified by the verse form? If it is a work preserved in manuscript, how much scribal corruption or modification is there? If it is a work from, say, the nineteenth century, to what extent is the syntax modified by the strictures of prescriptive grammarians, and what is the relation between the written form and speech? We must also know whether a medieval work has been edited with the manuscript punctuation retained or at most slightly adapted, or whether modern ideas of sentence structure have been imposed. These and other such points can be summed up by saying that our data must always be interpreted in context: the context of the discourse, of the form and genre, of the register, of editorial procedures, and so on. That warning places an implicit constraint on all the discussions of historical syntax which follow.

The dating of citations raises another question. If we assume that most features of an author's syntax are fixed before adulthood, or even just that behaviour with respect to linguistic variables is always liable to be affected by age-grading within a population, then the birthdate of the author may be more significant than the date of publication. The use of data grouped by authors' birthdates is beginning to appear in historical studies, for example Allen (1984), Rydén and Brorström (1987), in effect taking account of one aspect of the sociolinguistic context. The point is rarely of practical relevance before the Modern English period.

1.3 Background knowledge

Readers of this book unacquainted with the general history of English ought really to use it in conjunction with one of the standard histories (see §2.6 below). In order to make the book just about self-contained, however, the following chapter contains an outline of the history of English which will give some context for the syntactic facts. Readers who know better had better skip it.

1.4 Sources of information

Rydén (1979, 1984) gives a convenient survey of what needs doing in English historical syntax, different approaches to doing it, and major sources of information.

1.4.1 Data and analysis

Apart from editions of the texts themselves, the most important source is Visser (1963-73), already mentioned in §1.1 above, a work focusing on the verb and so having little to say on the syntax of the noun phrase (NP), for example. Nevertheless almost everything else is covered, and with copious exemplification, somewhere or other in this four-volume work, and it is worth spending some time on the contents pages to get a feel for its organisation. For Old English the work of Mitchell (1985) is an essential source book. Like Visser it is essentially descriptive, based on a traditional parts-of-speech terminology, and comprehensive in its survey of secondary material. Unlike Visser it covers nearly everything (only word order is treated less than fully) and is exceptionally accurate in detail. For Middle English there is Mustanoja (1960), a less detailed, traditional work notable for its judiciousness and clarity. Although ostensibly only 'Part I', Parts of Speech, it contains much useful information on syntax generally. These reference works will soon be supplemented by the more manageable and modern survey chapters in The Cambridge History of the English Language (CHEL): Traugott (1992) on Old English and Fischer (1992a) on Middle English, and later Rissanen (in prep.) on early Modern English and Denison (in prep.) on late Modern English. Overall surveys aimed at students include Traugott (1972), a clear account of the main lines of development within a coherent generative framework, and Schibsbye (1972-7), a descriptive treatment of all facets of the history of English, whose syntax sections are generously exemplified but not as overwhelming as Visser's.

Individual grammars and readers give more concise information. For Old English the best on syntax written in English are Mitchell and Robinson (1992) and Quirk and Wrenn (1957). For Middle English Mossé (1952) and Burrow and Turville-Petre (1992) give a simple overview, while Bennett and Smithers (1968) goes into considerable detail on certain specific points. A survey of early Modern English syntax is included in Görlach (1991), and Barber (1976) is very informative.

The great historical dictionaries of English provide a lot of information on aspects of syntax which can be related to particular lexemes. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) covers the whole historical period but concentrates on Middle English and later. The search program available with the computer-readable version on CD-ROM should open up new possibilities for research.³ The Michigan Middle English Dictionary (MED) has far more detail on Middle English and at the time of writing had covered the letters A to S. For Old English there will be a very full picture in the Toronto Dictionary of Old English {DOE), but it has only just begun publication with the letters D and C and will take some years to work back to A and then forwards through the rest of the alphabet. Meanwhile there is 'Bosworth-Toller' (Toller 1898, 1921), where you must turn first to the Supplement for the letters A-G because of the unreliability of early parts of the Dictionary, but first to the Dictionary for H-Y, and in both cases crosscheck afterwards with the other volume. Despite its cumbersomeness and citation from obsolete editions the work remains useful and surprisingly comprehensive. Clark Hall (1960) is handier and also provides a useful index to the Old English material in OED, but unlike the other, large dictionaries mentioned so far it has no illustrative quotations.

1.4.2 Bibliography

Visser (1963-73) provides a comprehensive bibliography for each topic that he covers, but given the date of publication these include hardly anything from the generative school apart from some early studies of Present-day English syntax. Reasonably up-to-date bibliographies can be compiled from the classified annual lists in the Bibliographie Linguistischer Literatur, the Bibliographic Linguistique/Linguistic Bibliography, the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature, and - with the shortest time-lag - Old English Newsletter; from the critical surveys in Year's Work in English Studies; or by selective use of the Arts and Humanities Citation Index and Modern Language Association Bibliography. Of particular interest to students of English historical syntax are the bibliographies of Kennedy (1927), covering all kinds of work on English language up to 1922, and Fisiak (1987), for selective coverage of historical studies to 1983. Two complementary bibliographies provide more specialised coverage: Scheurweghs and Vorlat (1963-79) list Modern English syntax and morphology work up to 1960, while Tajima (1988) covers Old and Middle English language studies up to 1985. To the latter we must now add Mitchell (1990, and planned supplements), whose comprehensive listings of works on Old English syntax are very helpful, as too his clearing away of now-outdated scholarship. The cavalier dismissal of much 'modern linguistic' work may not accord with the interests of readers of this book, however.

1.4.3 Theory and methodology

Syntactic theory is a big industry, and new general introductions are brought out quite frequently....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• PART I: GROUNDWORK
• PART II: WORD ORDER
• PART III: SUBJECT AND VERB PHRASE
• PART IV: COMPLEX COMPLEMENTATION
• PART V: AUXILIARIES
• PART VI: BIBLIOGRAPHY AND INDEXES
• Glossary of technical terms
• Secondary sources (references) (indexed)
• Primary sources (texts) (indexed)
• Index of verbs in examples
• General index