Lability and the rigidification of word order
Evidence from Early Middle English
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10293117 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Luisa García García (0000-0002-9113-7998, Universidad de Sevilla, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 61 |
| Issue | 5 |
| Pages | 1233-1258 |
| Publication date | 2023-09-26 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Linguistics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0024-3949 • E-ISSN: 1613-396X |
| Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1515/ling-2022-0036 |
| OpenAlex | W4385824107 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 35 |
This article analyzes quantitatively the effect of five linguistic features on the position of the object in Early Middle English. Four of them have long been explored in the literature: object type, object length, clause type and type of verbal cluster (±auxiliary). The fifth feature, lability, has so far been given less attention. Lability is the possibility that a given verb alternates between an unaccusative and transitive frame without morphological coding. This makes lability an instance of morphological syncretism. This study tests the hypothesis that, for disambiguation purposes, labile transitive verbs show a more consistent word order (VO in this case) than non-labile transitives. If confirmed, the hypothesis would point to a non-trivial connection between the increase of labile verbs and the move towards a fixed word order in Early Middle English. Such a connection has gone unnoticed in the existing literature, which, as far as the influence of morphological syncretism on word order is concerned, has focused almost exclusively on the effect of the loss of case marking. A total of 961 transitive clauses with labile and non-labile verbs were tagged for the above-mentioned five variables. Their effect on the choice between VO and OV is measured using statistical analysis. The conclusion is that verb lability is a significant predictor of VO in the period under scrutiny, with labile verbs thus spearheading the shift towards a stable word order pattern (VO) in English. The correlation between verb lability and word order rigidification demonstrated for Early Middle English in this article may be relevant for studies on word order from multiple perspectives: language-specific, typological, synchronic and diachronic
Affix · Combinatorics · Lability · Linguistics · Object (grammar) · Transitive relation · Verb · Word order · Chemistry · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Mathematics · Philosophy · Psychology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
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X. On the criterion that a given system of deviations from the probable in the case of a correlated system of variables is such that it can be reasonably supposed to have arisen from random sampling
The Loss of OV Order in the History of English
Verb-Object Order in Early Middle English
Old English Syntax
How Contact with French Drove Patient‐Lability in English
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Getting off the GoldVarb Standard
Internal and external forces again
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Objects and verbs in modern Icelandic and fifteenth-century English
| Highly cited | No |
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