The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

Language change and grammar change 33a variety of verse types, but dominantly metrical and rhyming, and is in manycases more colloquial than the prose. It is therefore generally considered toyield more useful evidence than Old English poetry.1.4.2 FrequencyOf necessity, we have to rely solely on written data in historical languageresearch. As a result, one of the prime diagnostics of change is the relativefrequency of constructions undergoing change. There are someimportant methodological questions attached to this. First of all, it must benoted that frequency in no way corresponds with grammaticality in the generativeapproach. While there is every reason to assume that any constructionthat is frequent in the historical material at any stage is grammatical, there isno reason whatever to assume that an infrequent construction is less grammaticalor marginally grammatical. However, as pointed out above, changes in relativefrequency of constructions do seem to reflect change, and should, withcaution, be regarded as shifts in grammaticality. Here again it should be notedthat these shifts are to be interpreted against the background of a coherentanalysis, and can, now that this is becoming possible, be backed up by quantitativeevidence and analysed in terms of the constant rate hypothesis. Asecond methodological point attached to this is how we should go about theanalysis and role of minor patterns. An illustration is in order here: Pintzuk(1991), looking at the position of the finite verb in Old English against thebackground of Kroch’s competing grammars approach, analyses the variouspatterns in terms of shifts in (statistical) frequency. For grammaticalsignificance, she assumes a threshold level of one per cent: patterns that occurwith a frequency of one per cent or less, may be disregarded as ungrammatical.This is based on the general assumption that well-established generalizationsare violated in naturally occurring language at that percentage. However,one per cent of the total of Old English sentences amounts to a substantialnumber, which many analysts would not feel comfortable at ignoring. There isno ready answer to such dilemmas, and in practice, individual historical linguistsdeal with them according to their own tastes.1.4.3 The role ofthe theory in deciding data questionsAmong generative syntacticians working on historical Englishmaterial, it is an accepted strategy to make systematic comparisons withmodern continental West Germanic languages such as Dutch and German.This is because Old English in many respects resembles these languages more