The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

Language change and grammar change 27from that of modern synchronic data. Before going into this, let us briefly considerthe role of the latter in generative syntactic research. It was noted at theoutset of this chapter that the aim of generative grammar is to arrive at acharacterization of the highly structured system of principles and parametersthat is assumed to be part of the human language capacity. Hence, generativegrammar is interested primarily in data that reflect the native speaker’sgrammatical competence, rather than actual language use, termed performance.9 Grammaticality judgements are therefore the most importantsource of data for the generative syntactician working on a contemporary language.This can be complemented by investigation into language use, which isoften based on research in data corpora of spoken and/or written language,though not many generative syntacticians do so, precisely because these do notreflect the competence of the speaker and are therefore not of primary use.Generative syntacticians are largely what Fillmore (1992) calls ‘armchair linguists’,who sit down and reflect on their grammaticality judgements, asopposed to ‘corpus linguists’, who look for data of language use in corpora ofvarious sorts.The student of historical language data from a generative perspective is facedwith a completely different situation. Grammaticality judgements, reflecting thecompetence of the onetime native speakers, are completely lacking; we haveaccess only to the products of historical written performance. 10 The textmaterial available is moreover very diverse (including various kinds of poetry,legal documents, homilies, saints’ lives, prescriptive grammars, inscriptions,translations from Latin) and contains many performance factors that are inwhole or in part hidden behind the mists of time. Another problem we are facedwith is that it is not always possible to find texts suitable for comparison for thedifferent historical periods. With respect to the history of English, we can safelysay that the texts written in Old English are mostly formal texts, written in thestandard Old English literary language, the West Saxon Schriftsprache. Invarying degrees, these texts are influenced by Latin, either directly (in the caseof glosses and translations) or indirectly (homilies, saints’ lives), or are influencedby the ancient habits and constraints of the Old Germanic alliterativefour-stress line (poetry). The language adopted in these genres is different andsometimes hard to compare with that of the Middle English texts, which comprise,for instance, a rich array of colloquial poetry, and other religious textsbeside homilies, which are very different from the Old English ones. Quite apart9For further discussion of this contrast, we refer the reader to general introductionsto generative syntax, such as Haegeman (1994) and Radford (1997).10The reader is referred to Lass (1997) for thought-provoking discussion and metadiscussionof the source material for the historical linguist.