scholarly journals A native origin for Present-Day English they, their, them

Diachronica ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcelle Cole
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Personal Pronoun ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
Textual Evidence ◽  
The North ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Pronominal System ◽  
Germanic Languages

Abstract It is commonly held that Present-Day English they, their, them are not descended from Old English but derive from the Old Norse third-person plural pronouns þeir, þeira, þeim. This paper argues that the early northern English orthographic and distributional textual evidence agrees with an internal trajectory for the ‘þ-’ type personal pronouns in the North and indicates an origin in the Old English demonstratives þā, þāra, þām. The Northern Middle English third-person plural pronominal system was the result of the reanalysis from demonstrative to personal pronoun that is common cross-linguistically in Germanic and non-Germanic languages alike.

Reflexive pronouns in the Lindisfarne glosses

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 220-244
Author(s):  
Elly van Gelderen
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
Null Subject ◽  
The Third ◽  
Reflexive Pronouns ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Lindisfarne Gospels ◽  
Pronominal System ◽  
The Third Person

Abstract Old English uses personal pronouns, demonstratives, and limited null subject for reference to previously mentioned nouns. It uses personal pronouns reflexively and pronouns modified by ‘self’ identical in form with an intensive. This use of a pronoun modified by self has been attributed to British Celtic influence. Other changes in the pronominal system have been attributed to Scandinavian influence, e.g. the introduction of the third person plural pronoun they. This paper looks at the use of the specially marked reflexives in the glosses to the Lindisfarne Gospels, a northern text where both British Celtic and Scandinavian influence may be relevant. It provides lists of all of the self-marked forms and shows, for instance, that Matthew and Mark have reflexives based on an accusative/dative pronoun followed by self and they don’t have this form as an intensifier. British Celtic of this period has an intensifier but has no special reflexives and has lost case endings, so the Lindisfarne language is unlike British Celtic. Luke and John have intensives and reflexives, with ‘self’ modifying case-marked pronouns, again unlike British Celtic. In addition to contributing to the debate on external origins, the paper adds to the authorship debate by comparing the use of reflexives in the different gospels.

Pronominally headed relative clauses in early English

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
CYNTHIA L. ALLEN
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Simple Explanation ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Demonstrative Pronouns ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Early English

Present-day English is unlike Old English in not using singular demonstrative pronouns with anaphoric reference to human beings. This article adds to the contributions of Cole (2017) and Los & van Kemenade (2018) in our understanding of the factors determining the choice between personal and demonstrative pronouns in Old English by documenting the hitherto unexamined use of these pronouns as heads of relative clauses. It also traces how the singular demonstrative pronouns referring to humans retreated as heads of relative clauses in Early Middle English. A corpus-based study shows that third-person personal pronouns were unusual as heads of relative clauses in Old English and normally referred to specific individuals, while demonstratives were the pronouns of choice for generic reference but could also refer to specific individuals. The increased use of personal pronouns for generic reference is well underway in Early Middle English. While the retreat of the singular demonstrative pronouns to refer to humans in Early Middle English seems to have some connection with the reduced marking of feature distinctions in that period, a simple explanation in terms of loss of gender is untenable.

scholarly journals Prescriptive infinitives in the modern North Germanic languages: An ancient phenomenon in child-directed speech

2016 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 231-276
Author(s):  
Janne Bondi Johannessen
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Child Language ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Very Old ◽  
The North ◽  
Very Young Children ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Syntactic Properties ◽  
Germanic Languages

The prescriptive infinitive can be found in the North Germanic languages, is very old, and yet is largely unnoticed and undescribed. It is used in a very limited pragmatic context of a pleasant atmosphere by adults towards very young children, or towards pets or (more rarely) adults. It has a set of syntactic properties that distinguishes it from the imperative: Negation is pre-verbal, subjects are pre-verbal, subjects are third person and are only expressed by lexical DPs, not personal pronouns. It can be found in modern child language corpora, but probably originated beforead500. The paper is largely descriptive, but some theoretical solutions to the puzzles of this construction are proposed.

Het verlies van een persoonlijk voornaamwoord* : Waarom hun straks geen hun meer zeggen

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 355-362
Author(s):  
Helen de Hoop
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Direct Object ◽  
Personal Pronoun ◽  
Dutch Society ◽  
Possessive Pronoun ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
Third Person

Abstract The loss of a personal pronoun. Why they will not be saying hun anymoreThe personal pronoun hun ‘them’ meets a lot of criticism in Dutch society, not just from language purists, but from language users in general. This can be attributed to a strong mistrust of the pronoun, given that it is well-known for violating no less than two prescriptive rules, one of which prohibits its use as a subject, and the other its use as a direct object or complement of a preposition. This has resulted in a tendency to avoid the use of this personal pronoun across the board. Despite the fact that hun ‘them’ as a personal pronoun has the advantage of exclusively referring to animate or even human individuals, I argue that it is fighting a losing battle with the other personal pronouns that are used to express third person plural. I conclude that it will withdraw from the competition in order to commit itself entirely to its function as a possessive pronoun ‘their’, in which capacity it is unique.

scholarly journals The Rise of Standard I (< Me Ich): A Contribution to the Study of Functional Change in English

2014 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 29-41
Author(s):  
Jerzy Wełna
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Functional Change ◽  
Short Vowel ◽  
First Person ◽  
Personal Pronoun ◽  
Norman Conquest ◽  
Capital Letter ◽  
English Prose ◽  
Germanic Languages

Abstract In its post-Norman Conquest development the Old English first person personal pronoun ic underwent transformations which, following the loss of the consonant, finally yielded the contemporary capitalised form I, contrasting with other Germanic languages, which retain a velar sound in the corresponding pronoun. The rather complex change of ich to I involves a loss of the final velar/palatal consonant, lengthening of the original short vowel, and capitalisation of the pronoun. It is argued here that the use of the capital letter was a consequence of vowel lengthening subsequent to the loss of the consonant. This seems to be confirmed by the observation that forms retaining a consonant are extremely rarely capitalised. The data adduced in the present paper will help verify as precisely as possible the distribution of the forms of that pronoun in Middle English dialects in order to determine to what extent the changes were functionally interdependent. The evidence comes from the Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose.

English in the ‘transition period’: the sources of contact-induced change

Contact ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert McColl Millar
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Transition Period ◽  
Old Norse ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
The North ◽  
Celtic Languages ◽  
Germanic Languages

Perhaps the central chapter of Contact, we focus here on the rapid and radical changes English passed through in relation to inflectional morphology (in particular but not exclusively in the noun phrase) in the later Old English and early Middle English periods. Comparison is made to other Germanic languages; the concept of drift is introduced. Theories for why these changes occurred and why the changes took place where, when and how they did are considered, with particular focus on earlier contact explanations. Recent proposals that bilingualism with Celtic languages was the primary impetus for the changes are critiqued. It is suggested that, while Celtic influence should not be dismissed, it is contact between Old English and Old Norse in the North of England which acted as catalyst. This contact is seen as a koine whose origin is markedly similar to that postulated for modern new dialects.

Blame the Barbarians

2021 ◽  
pp. 39-82
Author(s):  
Arika Okrent ◽  
Sean O’Neill
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Old English ◽  
North Sea ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
The North ◽  
The People ◽  
Latin Language ◽  
The North Sea ◽  
Germanic Languages ◽  
Over Time

This chapter tells the story of how English got to be the weird way it is, which begins with the Germanic languages and the barbarians who spoke them. During the 5th century, an assortment of them poured across the North Sea, from what is today Denmark, the Netherlands, and Northern Germany, and conquered most of England. After about a century of the Germanic tribes taking over and settling in, the Romans returned. This time it was not soldiers but missionaries who arrived. The monks who came to convert the island to Christianity brought their Latin language with them, and they also brought the Latin alphabet. They set about translating religious texts into the language of the people they encountered, a language that by this time had coalesced into something that was Old English. However, there is another group of barbarians to blame: the Vikings. Their language was similar enough to Old English that they could communicate with the Anglo-Saxons without too much difficulty, and over time their own way of speaking mixed into the surrounding language, leaving vocabulary and expressions behind that do not quite fit the rest of the pattern at the old Germanic layer.

New Light on Early Middle English Borrowing from Anglo-Norman: Investigating Kinship Terms in grand‑

2019 ◽  
Vol 137 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-277
Author(s):  
Philip Durkin
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Considerable Influence ◽  
Lexical Borrowing ◽  
West Germanic ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
Germanic Languages

Abstract It is well known that the set of kinship terms in Middle English showed considerable influence from French. In the case of aunt and uncle, this accompanied major restructuring of the system of kinship terms, as the Old English set of four distinct terms for paternal and maternal uncles and aunts were replaced by just two terms for ‘uncle’ and ‘aunt’, regardless of whether paternal or maternal. In comparison, the words for ‘grandfather’ and ‘grandmother’ have attracted little attention, as their story has appeared simpler: Old English had words for ‘grandfather’ and ‘grandmother’, irrespective of whether paternal or maternal, and so did Middle English. The terms are also similar in structure, with native terms in which words for ‘father’ or ‘mother’ are the head and eald ‘old’ is the modifier (whether in a compound or a phrasal structure) being replaced by borrowed terms (grandsire, granddame) or hybrid terms (grandfather, grandmother) in which French grand ‘big’ is the modifier. This paper shows that behind this apparently simple story there lurk some significant complications which point to considerable disruption and instability in the terms for ‘grandfather’ and ‘grandmother’ in both Middle English and French (with interesting and perhaps significant parallels also in other West Germanic languages). Consideration of these complications also casts new light on early lexical borrowing into Middle English from Anglo-Norman.

Agreement and discourse: from cohesion to coherence

1994 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis Cornish
Keyword(s):  
Personal Pronoun ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Advanced Learners ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Widespread View

AbstractThe article argues that, contrary to a widespread view (e.g. Haiman, 1985; Palmer, 1984), agreement in those languages which exhibit it is not a purely redundant, semantically empty and grammatically predictable phenomenon, but performs several important functions at the level of discourse.Taking French as the example language, I will argue (section 2.1) that agreement signals the function-argument interpretation to be assigned to pairs of expressions of various kinds; and second, that it may also code anaphorically the high-focus status of particular discourse referents (section 2.2). Section 3 compares certain written errors in agreement marking made by advanced learners of French, with certain other interpretative errors in their reading of French articles - errors based on agreement relations and leading to the mis-assignment of reference to an agreement target or personal pronoun. Finally, section 4 argues that third person personal pronouns should be treated differently from the (essentially predicative) agreement targets discussed in sections 2 and 3, claiming that they do not participate in agreement stricto sensu.

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