Pronouns and word order in Old English : with particular reference to the indefinite pronoun man
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Pronouns and word order in Old English : with particular reference to the indefinite pronoun man
(Outstanding dissertations in linguistics)(A Routledge series)
Routledge, 2003
Available at 30 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Slightly rev. version of author's thesis (Ph.D.)
Includes bibliographical references (p. 215-230) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This is a study of the syntactic behaviour of personal pronoun subjects and the indefinite pronoun man in Old English, focusing on differences in word order as compared to full noun phrases. In generative work on Old English, noun phrases are usually divided into two categories: 'nominal' and 'pronominal'. The latter category has typically been restricted to personal pronouns, but despite striking similarities to the behaviour of nominals there were good reasons to believe that man should be grouped with personal pronouns. A full investigation was done with the aid of the Toronto Corpus, which confirmed this hypothesis. This in turn has consequences for the analysis of personal pronouns. It strongly suggests that the ordering of pronominals in Old English is subject to idiosyncratic constraints, arguing in favour of treating them as clitics and non-clitics - the so-called 'weak pronouns' - fails to solve the problem of clitic-like pronominal elements for which it is difficult to establish a host. In addition, evidence was found that certain other types of pronouns (demonstratives in particular) do not fit neatly into either the 'pronominal' or the 'nominal' category.
Moreover, the findings contribute to work on Old English clause structure. It is shown that pronominal subjects can invert with negated and/or subjunctive verb forms in main clauses with topicalisation. This settles the debate on the structural position of the topic in main clauses in favour of the higher of the two porposed positions (i.e. the specifier of CP). It also underlines the importance of keeping such verb forms separate from non-negated indicative verb forms in data work on verb placement. Furthermore, the data indicate that topicalisation is possible in Old English subclauses, in spite of claims to the contrary.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction 1.1 Aims and Structure of the thesis 1.2 Pronouns and Studies on Old English word order 1.3 On electronic resources 1.4 Some notes on data and examples 1.5 Preliminaries on theory Chapter 2: Topicalisation and (non-)inversion 2.1 Introduction 2.2 The Helsinki Corpus 2.3 Negation 2.4 Subjunctives 2.5 Cura Pastoralis and the works of AElfric 2.6 Counter-examples Chapter 3: Other aspects of word order in relation to man 3.1 The problem 3.2 Separability from the subordinator 3.3 Inversion 3.4 Preceding object pronouns 3.5 Genuinely mixed categories? Chapter 4: On the status of man and personal pronouns 4.1 Introduction 4.2 Word classes treated as clitics in analyses of Old English 4.2.1 Personal Pronouns 4.2.2 Adverbs 4.2.3 Paer 4.3 Man as clitic 4.4 Contra a weak pronoun analysis Chapter 5: Topics in Old English clause structure 5.1 Introduction 5.2 Clause structure and clitic placement 5.2.1 van Kemenade (1987) 5.2.2 Pintzuk (1991, 1996) 5.2.3 Kiparsky (1995, 1996) 5.2.4 van Kemenade (1998), Hulk and van Kemenade (1997) 5.2.5 Kroch and Taylor (1997) 5.3 Topicalisation in subordinate clauses 5.4 Inversion of pronominal subjects in clauses with topicalisation Chapter 6: Conclusion Bibliography
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