Old Northumbrian verbal morphosyntax and the (Northern) subject rule / Marcelle Cole, Leiden University.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cole, Marcelle, author.

Series:

NOWELE Supplement Series ; Volume 25

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English language--Old English, ca. 450-1100--Dialects--Northumbria (Kingdom).

English language.

English language--England--Northumberland--Syntax.

English language--Social aspects--England--Northumberland.

Northumbria (England : Region)--Languages.

Northumbria (England : Region).

Northumberland (England)--Languages.

Northumberland (England).

Northumbria (Kingdom).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (304 pages) : illustrations.

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Amsterdam, Netherlands ; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania : John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2014.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

This volume provides both a quantitative statistical and qualitative analysis of Late Northumbrian verbal morphosyntax as recorded in the Old English interlinear gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels. It focuses in particular on the attestation of the subject type and adjacency constraints that characterise the so-called Northern Subject Rule concord system. The study presents new evidence which challenges the traditional Early Middle English dating attributed to the emergence of subject-type concord in the North of England and demonstrates that the syntactic configuration of the Northern Subject Rule was already a feature of Old English. By setting the Northumbrian developments within a broad framework of diachronic and diatopic variation, in which manifestations of subject-type concord are explored in a wide range of varieties of English, the author argues that a concord system based on subject type rather than person/number features is in fact a far less local and more universal tendency in English than previously believed.

Contents:

Old Northumbrian Verbal Morphosyntax and the (Northern) Subject Rule

Editorial page

Title page

LCC data

Dedication page

Table of contents

Acknowledgements

List of figures

List of tables

Abbreviations

Chapter 1. Introduction

Chapter 2. Old Northumbrian

2.1 Old Northumbrian textual sources

2.2 The authorship of the Lindisfarne glosses

2.2.1 Palaeographical evidence

2.2.2 Linguistic evidence

2.3 The language of the Lindisfarne glosses

2.4 The sociolinguistic situation

2.5 Present tense markings in Old Northumbrian

2.6 Accounting for the origin of the -s ending

2.6.1 Phonological and phonetic factors

2.6.2 Analogical levelling

2.6.3 Scandinavian influence

2.7 Summary

Chapter 3. A diachronic overview of the (Northern) Subject Rule

3.1 The Subject Rule in the North of England and Scotland

3.1.1 Northern Middle English and Middle Scots

3.1.2 Northern Early Modern English to Present-Day English

3.2 The Subject Rule outside the North

3.2.1 Early Modern London English

3.2.2 Southwestern varieties of English

3.2.3 Irish English

3.3 The Subject Rule beyond the British Isles

3.3.1 North American varieties

3.3.2 African American Vernacular English

3.4 The Subject Rule and the verb be

3.4.1 Processes of was/were-levelling in Present-Day English

3.4.2 Levelling and subject effects in other Germanic languages

3.5 Summary

Chapter 4. A variationist study of -s/-ð present-tense markings in Late Old Northumbrian

4.1 Data and methodology

4.1.1 Methodological preliminaries

4.1.2 Data collection and coding

4.1.3 Explanatory variables

4.1.4 Methods

4.2 Grammatical person, subject type, number, person and adjacency effects

4.2.1 Overview of Old English subject types

4.2.2 Grammatical person effects.

4.2.3 Subject type, person and number effects

4.2.4 The distribution of subject effects in Lindisfarne and its implications

4.2.5 Adjacency and word order effects

4.2.6 Summary

4.3 Phonological conditioning factors

4.3.1 Following phonological environment

4.3.2 Inflectional vowel weakening and syncope

4.3.3 Preceding phonological environment

4.3.4 Results for phonological environment

4.3.5 Summary

4.4 Priming effects

4.4.1 Morphosyntactic priming

4.4.2 Priming effect of Latin verbal inflection

4.4.3 Summary

4.5 Lexical conditioning and lexical frequency effects

4.5.1 Measuring token frequency

4.5.2 Results

4.5.3 Summary

4.6 Discussion

Chapter 5. Reduced verbal morphology in late Old Northumbrian

5.1 Reduced inflection in Old English dialects

5.2 Reduced present tense inflection in the Lindisfarne gloss

5.2.1 Present-indicative interrogative forms

5.2.2 Imperative forms

5.2.3 Present indicative forms

5.2.4 Summary

5.3 The historical source of present-indicative -e/-Ø

5.3.1 Subjunctive verbal morphology

5.3.2 Preterite-present verbal morphology

5.3.3 Preterite verbal morphology

5.4 Summary

Chapter 6. Explaining subject and adjacency effects

6.1 Internal change

6.1.1 Benskin (2011)

6.1.2 Börjars &amp

Chapman (1998)

6.1.3 De Haas (2011)

6.1.4 Pietsch (2005)

6.1.5 Discussion

6.2 Language contact

6.2.1 Celtic substratum influence

6.2.2 Discussion

Chapter 7. Conclusions

References

Appendix A

Statistical models: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John (N = 3053)

Statistical models: Mark, Luke and John (N = 2016)

Appendix B

Appendix C

Appendix D

Appendix E

Appendix F

Appendix G

Index.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (ebrary, viewed July 17, 2014).

ISBN:

9789027269911

9027269912

OCLC:

882609183