The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

An outline of Old English syntax 39There are various forms of subject omission in early English too. The mostfrequently occurring one is what is often termed ‘conjoined subject deletion’.This refers to instances where the subject is omitted in a conjoined sentence,as in the second clause of (2):(2) and him comon englas to, and him enodonand him came angels to, and him served‘and angels came to him, and served him’ (ÆCHom I, 11.174.17)It should be noted that this phenomenon, though often interpreted as prodrop,has nothing to do with verbal morphology. The identification of theomitted subject is not related to verbal morphology, but established undercoreference with the higher subject englas. Discourse factors seem to be ofprime importance here, although there is also a clear syntactic restriction inthat coreference is always with the subject of the higher clause. More discussionof this phenomenon in Old English can be found in Allen (1995).Old English has a very Germanic form of subject omission, which in thetheoretical literature is often called ‘expletive pro-drop’. This refers to a varietyof impersonal contexts in which there is no nominative subject, and no insertionof a dummy subject it, as sometimes with weather verbs, as in (3), andregularly in impersonal passives, as in (4):(3) a cwom ær micel snaw & swa miclum sniwde swelce micelthen came there heavy snow and 0 so heavily snowed as if muchflys feollefleece fell‘and it snowed so heavily, as if a lot of fleece were falling’ (Alex 30.11)(4) . . . ætte fory to ungemetlice ne sie geliod æm scyldganthat therefore 0 too greatly not be let-off to-the guilty‘. . . that therefore it must not be let off too greatly to the guilty’(CP 20.149.24)More discussion of the conditions that allowed such expletive pro-drop in OldEnglish and other Germanic languages can be found in Hulk and vanKemenade (1993); van Kemenade (1997a). This type of pro-drop seems tohave been largely lost by 1500.Another syntactic phenomenon which in the theoretical literature is oftenassociated with comparatively rich verbal morphology is that of the positionof the finite verb. The putative generalization is that languages with comparativelyrich morphology have a wider range of finite verb-fronting strategiesthan those without. This argument has been made in particular with respectto changes in late Middle English and early Modern English syntax (seechapter 3 and the detailed discussion in Roberts 1993, which also providescross-linguistic evidence).