The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

Language change and grammar change 23diffusion. Like many ideas on language change, this was first formulated forphonological change and goes back to Wang (1969). The core insight is thatany change spreads gradually over the forms to which it can potentiallyapply. 7 Such a view is also relevant for syntactic constructions that are keyedto the lexical properties of heads, such as passives, impersonals, and constructionswith predicative adjectives as discussed above.David Denison (1990) suggests that an analysis in terms of lexical diffusionis appropriate for the Old English impersonal verbs. ‘Impersonal’ is a coverterm for a class of verbs that describes a certain cognitive/mental experienceof being unvolitionally involved in a situation (for more details, see also chapters2 and 3). In the syntax, this is expressed by the lack of an agent subject.A famous and much-discussed verb is Old English lician ‘like’, which is oftenregarded as the prototypical impersonal; another example is ofhreowan ‘rue’,discussed in Anderson (1988). It is argued by Fischer and van der Leek (1983)that these verbs each systematically occur in three alternative constructionswhich derive in the syntax from one underlying construction. 8 This basicconstruction has no syntactic subject and the two NPs are a ‘source’ NP (or‘cause’, ‘theme’) usually associated with genitive case, and an ‘experiencer’associated with dative case. Fischer and van der Leek suggest that the syntacticsystem allows a NP with either of these roles to appear in subject position,where it receives structural nominative case, as in (21b) and (21c). Theexamples are from Anderson (1988).(21) a. him ofhreow æs manneshim/them (D) was-pity the man (G)‘he felt pity for the man’ (ÆCHom I, 13.192.16)b. Se mæssepreost æs mannes ofhreowthe priest (N) the man (G) was-pity‘The priest took pity on the man’ (ÆLS(Oswald) 262)c. a ofhreow am munece æs hreoflian mægenleastthen was-pity the monk (D) the leper’s weakness‘Then the leper’s weakness caused pity in the monk’(ÆCHom I, 23.336.10)The disappearance of the impersonal construction in (21a) in the course of theMiddle English period is ascribed to the loss of inherent case and to the factthat the subject position becomes obligatory in the later period. On this view,7For a very interesting application of this view to early Old English sound change, seeToon (1983).8Anderson (1988) suggests similar basic structures (subcategorization frames) forimpersonals, but distinguishes three types rather than one, which does better justiceto the differences that exist between the various semantic groups of impersonal verbs.