This study is a corpus-based analysis of clause-initial adverbs and their ability to invert pronominal and nominal subjects in Old English (OE) prose. There is a limited set of adverbs, referred to as “operators” in generative studies of OE syntax, which may cause inversion of personal pronoun subjects; these are þa, þonne, nu, and swa. In this study, numerous differences between the syntactic behavior of these adverbs are revealed, showing that they should not be treated as a syntactically coherent group. The analysis is focused on various factors that have an impact on inversion rates of the adverbs: the presence of the interjection hwæt before the adverb the frequency of correlation, Latin influence on translated texts, information status of the subject, semantic differences and the extra-clausal status of the adverb, as well as diachronic changes within the OE period.
The Information Status of Old English Constructions with Titles and Proper Names
