The decline of local anchoring
A quantitative investigation
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21695403 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Bettelou Los (0000-0003-4231-0560, Language Science (South Korea)), Gea Dreschler (0000-0002-4723-0597, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Ans Van Kemenade (0000-0003-3209-8316, Radboud University Nijmegen), Erwin R Komen (0000-0002-6928-1045, Radboud University Nijmegen), Stefano Coretta (0000-0001-9627-5532, Language Science (South Korea)) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 345-372 |
| Publication date | 2023-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | English Language and Linguistics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1360-6743 • E-ISSN: 1469-4379 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s1360674323000047 |
| OpenAlex | W4365142589 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 45 |
This article presents a quantitative study of the referential status of PPs in clause-initial position in the history of English. Earlier work (Los 2009; Dreschler 2015) proposed that main-clause-initial PPs in Old English primarily function as ‘local anchors’, linking a new clause to the immediately preceding discourse. As this function was an integral part of the verb-second (V2) constraint, the decline of local anchors was attributed to the loss of V2 in the fifteenth century, so that only the contrasting and frame-setting functions of these PPs remain in PDE. This article tests these hypotheses in the syntactically parsed corpora of OE, ME, EModE and LModE texts, using the Pentaset-categories ( New , Inert , Assumed , Inferred or Identity ; Komen 2011), based on Prince's categories (Prince 1981). The finding is that Identity clause-initial PPs decline steeply from early ME onwards, which means the decline pre-dates the loss of V2. A likely trigger is the loss of the OE paradigm of demonstrative, which functioned as standalone demonstrative pronouns as well as demonstrative determiners, and the loss of gender marking more generally. From EModE onwards, main-clause-initial PPs that still link to the preceding discourse do so much more indirectly, by an Inferred link
Aesthetics · Demonstrative · Dependent clause · Determiner · Fifteenth · Linguistics · Noun · Verb · Computer Science · History · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Mathematics · Philosophy · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation · Artificial Intelligence
Syntactic Case and Morphological Case in the History of English
Longman grammar of spoken and written English
Topicalization and Stress Clash Avoidance in the History of English
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language
Pronominally headed relative clauses in early English
Grammatical Change. Origins, Nature, Outcomes
Notes on transitivity and theme in English
Word Order After the Loss of the Verb-Second Constraint or the Importance of Early Modern English in the Fixation of Syntactic and Informative (Un-)Markedness
Basic notions of information structure
Differences in the use of deictic expressions in English and German texts
From V1 to V2 in West Germanic
A discourse-constructional approach to the emergence of discourse markers in English
Cognitive Status and the Form of Referring Expressions in Discourse
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |