Chapter 6. The information status of late subjects in passive main clauses in Old English

2017 ◽  
pp. 103-125
Author(s):  
Gea Dreschler
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Information Status

Inversion after Clause-Initial Adverbs in Old English: The Special Status of þa, þonne, nu, and swa

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 308-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Cichosz
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Personal Pronoun ◽  
Information Status ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Syntactic Behavior ◽  
Diachronic Changes

This study is a corpus-based analysis of clause-initial adverbs and their ability to invert pronominal and nominal subjects in Old English (OE) prose. There is a limited set of adverbs, referred to as “operators” in generative studies of OE syntax, which may cause inversion of personal pronoun subjects; these are þa, þonne, nu, and swa. In this study, numerous differences between the syntactic behavior of these adverbs are revealed, showing that they should not be treated as a syntactically coherent group. The analysis is focused on various factors that have an impact on inversion rates of the adverbs: the presence of the interjection hwæt before the adverb the frequency of correlation, Latin influence on translated texts, information status of the subject, semantic differences and the extra-clausal status of the adverb, as well as diachronic changes within the OE period.

scholarly journals The Information Status of Old English Constructions with Titles and Proper Names

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 199-217
Author(s):  
Elżbieta Sielanko-Byford
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Structural Unit ◽  
Proper Names ◽  
Overwhelming Majority ◽  
Information Status ◽  
Proper Name ◽  
Preceding Discourse

The paper examines the information status of Old English structures consisting of proper names and titles. The nominal constructions under discussion fall into three categories: the Ælfred cyning type of structure, where the title appears without any determiner and follows the proper name, the Ælfred se cyning type, where the title appears with a determiner and follows the proper name, and the se cyning Ælfred type, where the title with a determiner precedes the proper name. It is demonstrated that the se cyning Ælfred construction is mainly used anaphorically: an overwhelming majority of the examples of the structure in the Old English texts examined here refer back to an entity mentioned in the preceding discourse. Moreover, most of the antecedents of the se cyning Ælfred structures appear to be local, that is they occur in the same or in the immediately preceding structural unit. It is argued that the anaphoric nature of the se cyning Ælfred constructions may be responsible for their distribution in Old English texts.

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