Grammar Competition and Word Order in a Northern Early Middle English Text

The Edinburgh Royal College of Physicians manuscript of Cursor Mundi and the Northern Homilies, a northern Middle English text from the early 14th century, contains unprecedentedly high frequencies of matrix verb-third and embedded verb-second word orders with subject–verb inversion. I give a theoretical account of these word orders in terms of a grammar, the ‘CM grammar’, which differs minimally in its formal description from regular verb-second grammars, but captures these unusual word orders through addition of a second preverbal A′-projection. Despite its flexibility, the CM grammar did not spread through the English-speaking population. I discuss the theoretical consequences of this failure to spread for models of grammar competition where fitness is tied to parsing success, and discuss prospects for refining such models.

Aspect as an indicator of a clausal size in Involuntary State Constructions in BCS

Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) has a productive ‘involuntary state construction (ISC) with a modal interpretation. There is an ongoing debate concerning the syntactic complexity of this construction. According to one account – the “mono-clausal analysis”, ISCs have only one (overt) lexical verb, and the modal interpretation stems from the imperfective operator (Rivero and Milojević-Sheppard 2003,Rivero 2009, Tsedryk 2016). There is also a “bi-clausal account” which argues in favor of a covert matrix verb of involuntary disposition feel-like, which takes a clausal ModP complement, giving the modal interpretation (Marušič & Žaucer 2005 [henceforth M&Ž]). In this paper, I provide additional evidence in favor of the bi-clausal approach and in so doing, account for a previously unresolved aspectual restriction on the construction, namely that it is ungrammatical with a perfective lexical verb. The main claim is that the unavailability of perfective in the ISC is due to selectional properties of covert feel-like, which results in the violation of requirements on perfective.

The subjunctive in adverbial clauses

This chapter explores the frequency development of the subjunctive and its competitors, namely indicatives and modal constructions, in the adverbial clauses of a corpus covering the periods Old English (OE), Middle English (ME), and Early Modern English (EModE). It also describes the influence of the parameters text category, adverbial clause type, and matrix verb on the realisation of the verbal syntagm of adverbial clauses. The corpus analysis shows that subjunctive frequency is surpassed by indicative frequency already in OE, whereas it keeps its ground against modal constructions until EModE. The biggest shares of subjunctives are found in the text categories STA (legislative texts) and IS (secular instruction texts), in clauses of condition and concession, and in matrix clauses with verbal syntagms realised by subjunctives and imperatives.

The subjunctive in noun clauses

This chapter explores the frequency development of the subjunctive and its competitors, namely indicatives and modal constructions, in noun clauses in a corpus covering the historical periods Old English (OE), Middle English (ME), and Early Modern English (EModE). Furthermore, it discusses the influence of the parameters date of composition, text category, prose vs poetry, noun clause function, matrix verb, and noun clause type on their distribution in the individual periods. The corpus analysis of about 2.3 thousand noun clauses attests a more or less steady frequency decrease of the subjunctive from the OE period onwards. Text category STA with legislative texts, subjunctive verbal syntagms in the matrix clause, and the clause type that-clause are identified as the factors which contributed most to the preservation of the subjunctive.

Same Root, Different Categories: Encoding Direction in Chinese

The complexity of the directional construction in Chinese involves the following factors: (a) it can take a single directional item as the predicate; (b) two directional items can co-occur to serve as the predicate; (c) one or two directional items can be attached to a matrix verb in a single clause; (d) the positions of the directional item can vary if more than one directional item is involved. I propose that the leading factor behind this complexity is that a single Root in Chinese can take different categories when merged in different syntactic positions. Therefore, the same directional item may in fact be the phonological form of a verb, a preposition, a part of a single preposition, or even a spatial aspectual marker in different directional constructions. This account is then placed within the context of parametric studies of motion event constructions, showing that two new dimensions can be added: the special property of Roots in a language and the existence of the spatial aspect in at least some languages.

Action and agency in complex sentences from present-day Romanian

Starting from Alanen’s remark that “actions (exercises of capacities) are found throughout the natural world; and so is agency” (2018, 2), the present paper aims at describing the influence of these two fundamental concepts – action and agency – on the structure of Romanian complex sentences. More precisely, I am interested in providing evidence of a linguistic phenomenon that has received far less attention in the literature, i.e. the semantic restrictions imposed by the matrix verb over the embedded adverbial clause. As concerns the methodology, both qualitative and quantitative analyses will be conducted on an extensive online Romanian corpus (CoRoLa), and will be based on the semantic typologies of the verb included in some of the reference Romanian grammars (GALR 2008, 326; GBLR 2010, 279). One of the most important results of the analysis was the phenomenon of agentivity

A different perspective on embedded Verb Second

This chapter compares embedded verb movement phenomena in English with embedded Verb Second clauses in German and Swedish. Close examination of the syntactic—but more particularly the semantic and pragmatic—properties of these phenomena reveals striking similarities, and the claim is made that these phenomena exhibit independent illocutionary force in the sense that the perspective holder for the embedded proposition or question is disambiguated—a departure from the claim that embedded verb movement structures are asserted (cf. Julien 2015 and Chapter 11 of this volume). It is proposed, following recent innovations in speech act syntax (Wiltschko and Heim 2016; Woods 2016) that these structures are dependent, as the ‘embedded’ clause contains less structure than full a root clause, yet is still structurally larger than a typical embedded clause. However, they are not selected and are instead in an apposition relation with a (usually covert) nominal complement to the matrix verb.

Main and embedded clausal asymmetry in the history of English

In this paper, I sketch the CP layer in main and embedded clauses in the history of English. The Modern English main clause is not as easily expandable as the Old English one, but the reverse is true in the subordinate clause, where Modern English has a more flexible embedded CP than Old English. I focus on the developments of the embedded CP. It has been claimed that Old English lacks an embedded split CP and therefore lacks embedded V2 and a host of other embedded root phenomena. I show this to be true for complements to both assertive and non-assertive verbs. In contrast, the Modern English matrix verb has an effect on the strength of the C-position. Assertive verbs in Modern English allow main clause phenomena in subordinate clauses whereas non-assertives typically do not. The main point of the paper is to chronicle the changes that ‘stretch’ the embedded clause and the changing role of main verbs. It is descriptive rather than explanatory, e.g., in terms of changes in phase-head status.

L3 Sentence Processing: Language-Specific or Phenomenon-Sensitive?

The article investigates non-native sentence processing and examines the existing scholarly approaches to L2 processing with a population of L3 learners of English, whose native language is Russian. In a self-paced reading experiment, native speakers of Russian and English, as well as (low) intermediate L3 learners of English, read ambiguous relative clauses (RC) and decided on their attachment interpretation: high attachment (HA) or low attachment (LA). In the two-by-two design, linguistic decision-making was prompted by lexical semantic cues vs. a structural change caused by a certain type of matrix verb. The results show that whenever a matrix verb caused a change of syntactic modification, which entailed HA, both native and non-native speakers abandoned the default English-like LA and chose HA. Lexical semantic cues did not have any significant effect in RC attachment resolution. The study provides experimental evidence in favor of the similarity of native and non-native processing strategies. Both native speakers and L3 learners of English apply structural processing strategies and show similar sensitivity to a linguistic prompt that shapes RC resolution. Native and non-native processing is found to be prediction-based; structure building is performed in a top-down manner.