The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

44 The syntax of early EnglishPrepositions in Old English are typically associated with a selected case,mostly dative case, very often corresponding with a location or goal. Someprepositions select the accusative case, with connotations such as ‘extent oftime’ (e.g. o ‘until’), ‘extent of space’ (How far?, e.g. geond ‘throughout’, ymb‘around’, urh ‘through’), and some the genitive case (e.g. utan ‘outside of’).Quite a few can take more than one case, often dative and accusative. It issometimes said that the choice of case marks a semantic distinction, with thedative indicating rest and the accusative indicating motion, but this is not consistentlyobserved. The objects of prepositions could not be passivized in OldEnglish, which is another indication that prepositions assign an inherent case.We come back to this below.2.2.2 Impersonal verbsThe Old English impersonal construction and its historical fate haveattracted a good deal of attention from historical linguists of various persuasions.The term ‘impersonal’ is a rather vague one in that different scholarssubsume different things under it. Strictly speaking, it refers to constructionswhich have no nominative subject and have the verb in the default ‘agreement’form: third person singular.(13) onne ofync him æs ilcan e he ær forbærthen displeases him (D) the same (G) that he before endured‘then he regrets what he endured before’ (CP 33.225.18)Verbs such as ofyncan ‘displease, regret’ in (13), which have two arguments,denote a mental or cognitive experience in which one argument is expressed asthe animate experiencer, the other as the cause/source of the experience. Thisis why such verbs are often called psych verbs. The class of such verbs in OldEnglish includes: hreowan ‘rue’; (ge)sceamian ‘shame’; eglian ‘ail’; ofyncan‘displease’; (ge)lician ‘like’; (ge)lystan ‘desire’; langian ‘long’; (ge)lustfullian‘please’. In syntactic treatments, the two arguments are often referred to as theEXPERIENCER argument and the THEME argument. They can be realizedin the following core case configurations:(14) a. EXPERIENCER – dative THEME – nominativeb. EXPERIENCER – nominative THEME – genitivec. EXPERIENCER – dative THEME – genitive(13) is an example of type (14c), which is attested with considerably less frequencythan the two alternative types (see Fischer and van der Leek 1983,Anderson 1988, Allen 1986). (14a) and (14b) are exemplified by (15a) and(15b) respectively: