Motivations for particle verb word order in Middle and Early Modern English

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 489-511 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARION ELENBAAS
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
The Other ◽  
Particle Verbs ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
The One ◽  
Particle Verb

This article examines possible motivations for the choice of particle verb word order in Middle English (1100–1500) and Early Modern English (1500–1700). The word order alternation of Present-Day English particle verbs, which presents language users with a choice between verb–object–particle and verb–particle–object order, first emerged in Early Middle English (twelfth century). For Present-Day English, several studies (e.g. Gries 1999, 2003; Dehé 2002) have shown that the choice is influenced by a number of linguistic factors, such as the heaviness of the object (morphosyntactic factor) and the givenness of the object (discourse factor). This article reveals the influence of a number of morphosyntactic factors and also shows that the choice is increasingly influenced by the givenness of the object. The differences between Present-Day English on the one hand and Middle and Early Modern English on the other hand are discussed in the light of syntactic changes going on in these periods. It is argued that the developments in particle verb syntax are characterised by an increasing division of labour between the two word orders, which may also explain why both orders survive into Present-Day English.

On the inherent semantic meaning of double object Latinate verbs in English in modern and historical perspective *

2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Sówka-Pietraszewska
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Time Span ◽  
Semantic Meaning ◽  
Double Object ◽  
Object Construction ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Prepositional Object ◽  
The One

Abstract This paper shows the realization of arguments of Latinate double object verbs and an analysis of their inherent semantic meaning in the Late Middle English and early Modern English periods, hence in the time-span when they were borrowed into English. The main aim of this paper is to show that although Latinate verbs occur in a construction with what seems to be an allative preposition, not all of them lexicalize movement in the inherent meanings. In contrast, some Latinate verbs lexicalize only a caused possession. What is more, this paper shows that the caused possession Latinate verbs select a different variant of prepositional object construction than the one selected by Latinate verbs lexicalizing movement.

On interaction in herbals from Middle English to Early Modern English

2002 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-251 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martti Mäkinen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Middle English ◽  
The Other ◽  
First Person ◽  
Second Person ◽  
Intended Audience ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
The Middle Ages

The focus of this article is on interaction in Middle English and Early Modern English herbals. In the Middle Ages, herbals were mainly instructive aids for producing medicines of the plants described in the text. Later, in the Early Modern English period, the herbal genre split into two, retaining the genre called herbals and giving birth to systematic botanical texts. The interaction established in texts can be studied through the use of pronouns (involvement markers) and the use of imperatives. This study shows that the strategies employed in the Middle English period are very different from the strategies in the Early Modern English period: the use of second-person pronouns and imperatives prevails in the Middle English period, whereas the use of first-person pronouns was preferred in the Early Modern English period. In addition to this, another division, irrespective of the time of writing, is observed in the material: the first group includes handbooks and practical herbals, and the other group learned and empirical herbals. Factors which explain these differences in interaction strategies are the purposes for writing and the education of the intended audience.

scholarly journals Object-Verb in Early Modern English: Modelling Markedness

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Javier Pérez-Guerra
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Semantic Processing ◽  
Statistical Modelling ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Related Text ◽  
Constituent Order ◽  
Early English ◽  
Order Pattern

Abstract Although Verb-Object (VO) is the basic unmarked constituent order of predicates in Present-Day English, in earlier stages of the language Object-Verb (OV) is the preferred pattern in some syntactic contexts. OV predicates are significantly frequent in Old and Middle English, and are still attested up to 1550, when they “appear to dwindle away” (Moerenhout & van der Wurff 2005: 83). This study looks at OV in Early Modern English (EModE), using a corpus-based perspective and statistical modelling to explore a number of textual, syntactic, and semantic/processing variables which may account for what by that time had already become a marked, though not yet archaic, word-order pattern. The data for the study were retrieved from the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (1500–1710) and the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence (c.1410–1695), the largest electronic parsed collections of EModE texts. The findings reveal a preference for OV in speech-related text types, which are less constrained by the rules of grammar, in marked syntactic contexts, and in configurations not subject to the general linearisation principles of end-weight and given-new. Where these principles are complied with, the probability of VO increases.

The subjunctive in main clauses

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-57
Author(s):  
Lilo Moessner
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Weak Type ◽  
The Other ◽  
Strong Type ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Continuous Frequency ◽  
Root Modality

This chapter deals with the frequency development of the subjunctive and its competitors as well as with their distribution across text categories in main clauses in the periods Old English (OE), Middle English (ME), and Early Modern English (EModE). The results of the analysis of these parameters are interpreted as a change from a preferred weak type of root modality in OE to a strong type in ME, which is reversed in EModE. A more or less continuous frequency decrease of subjunctives from OE until late ME contrasts with a frequency rise of modal contructions and imperatives. Yet the frequency rise of imperatives is reversed in ME. The subjunctive is the preferred realisation of the verbal syntagms in text category STA (legislative texts) in all periods. The other text categories with big shares of relevant verbal syntagms have changing preferences of their realisations.

scholarly journals What particle verbs have to do with grammatical aspect in early child English

2003 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 119-131
Author(s):  
Liane Jeschull
Keyword(s):  
First Language ◽  
The Other ◽  
Early Child ◽  
Lexical Aspect ◽  
Grammatical Aspect ◽  
Particle Verbs ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Initial Stage ◽  
The One ◽  
Particle Verb

The current study investigates the relation between aspect and particle verbs in the acquisition of English. Its purpose is to determine whether children associate telicity, as argued in previous studies, or rather perfectivity, which entails completion of a telic situation, with their early particle verb use. The study analyzes naturalistic data of four monolingual children between 1;6 and 3;8 from CHILDES acquiring English as their first language. On the one hand, it finds that children use both –ed and irregular perfective morphology with simplex verbs before particle verbs. They further use imperfective before perfective morphology with particle verbs. These findings suggest that there is no correlation between telic particle verbs and perfective morphology, as would have been predicted on an account which claims that lexical aspect of predicates guides the acquisition of grammatical aspect (Olsen & Weinberg 1999). On the other hand, the study finds that the children’s particle verbs denote telic situations from early on, but not half of them were used to refer to situations that are also completed. This finding questions analyses which claim that, at an initial stage, children will only interpret predicates as telic if they refer to situations that are at the same time completed. Completion information is not necessary for children in order to use particle verbs correctly for telic situations, as would have been predicted on an extended account along the lines of Wagner (2001). As a conclusion, it is suggested that the divergent findings result from a difference in methodology. While restrictions of perfective and imperfective morphology to particular classes of lexical aspect pertain to the production of grammatical aspect morphology, perfective and imperfective viewpoints on situations pertain to the level of interpretation of telic and atelic situations.  

"Stands Scotland Where it did?": Re-locating and Dis-locating the Scottish Play on Scottish Film

2009 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 33-49
Author(s):  
Alfredo Michel Mondenessi
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Identities ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Black Legend ◽  
The One

Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a problematic fiction of 11th century Scotland constructed from the viewpoint of an early modern English playwright, chiefly through his reading of a black legend that developed over 400 years of violent re-arrangement of national powers and cultural and political identities in Great Britain. Given the questionable but common expectations of “realism” that cinema often invites, films of the play purporting to be "faithful to the original" have attempted to locate — or more significantly and accurately, to re-locate — Shakespeare’s fiction in "authentic" settings. A version of the "Scottish play" making such a claim was filmed by director Jeremy Freeston in Scotland in 1996. Using contrasting perspectives, on the one hand this paper explores how, when viewed merely from a "theoretical/filmic" approach, Freeston’s Macbeth may very likely be found "foul", while on the other, if approached from a broader, "cultural", stand, it turns out rather "fair".

Bastard Feudalism and the Framing of Thirteenth-Century England

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Coss
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Great Work ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

In the introduction to his great work of 2005, Framing the Early Middle Ages, Chris Wickham urged not only the necessity of carefully framing our studies at the outset but also the importance of closely defining the words and concepts that we employ, the avoidance ‘cultural sollipsism’ wherever possible and the need to pay particular attention to continuities and discontinuities. Chris has, of course, followed these precepts on a vast scale. My aim in this chapter is a modest one. I aim to review the framing of thirteenth-century England in terms of two only of Chris’s themes: the aristocracy and the state—and even then primarily in terms of the relationship between the two. By the thirteenth century I mean a long thirteenth century stretching from the period of the Angevin reforms of the later twelfth century on the one hand to the early to mid-fourteenth on the other; the reasons for taking this span will, I hope, become clearer during the course of the chapter, but few would doubt that it has a validity.

Bodily Adornment and Modification in Byzantium

2021 ◽  
pp. 98-116
Author(s):  
Alicia Walker
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Church And State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Material Sources ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Byzantine Church ◽  
The One ◽  
And Control

Focusing on Early and Middle Byzantine (fourth-to-twelfth-century) objects, images, and texts, this essay explores the tension between, on the one hand, efforts of the Byzantine church and state to discourage and control bodily adornment and modification and, on the other hand, the extensive evidence of widespread and immoderate engagement with these practices. The enhancement and manipulation of Byzantine bodies is considered as both a real and a metaphoric phenomenon. Evidence culled from secular and sacred, written and material sources demonstrates the importance of bodily adornment and modification to our understanding of Byzantine material and visual culture.

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