Pronouns and Word Order in Old English, with Particular Reference to the Indefinite Pronoun man (review)

This book is a revised version of Linda van Bergen’s dissertation. Five chapters address the issue of the classification of Old English (OE) impersonal man and of OE personal pronouns. Background knowledge of generative syntax is required.

The book has two central claims: impersonal man in OE is a pronominal rather than a nominal element, and both personal pronouns and man need to be considered as clitics. B provides a detailed analysis in support of these two claims, mainly based on word order in OE as displayed in several corpora, such as the Toronto and the Penn-Helsinki corpora.

The first introductory chapter surveys the traditional literature on pronouns in OE. It also includes a detailed section on electronic resources. In Ch. 2, ‘Topicalization and (non)inversion’, B examines the lack of inversion in main clauses with a topicalized constituent. The observation is made that both negation and subjunctive mood trigger inversion. Moreover, a parallelism is drawn between subjunctive and imperative. The conclusion is reached that clauses with negation and with subjunctive mood should be excluded from consideration with respect to the issue of the status of man. Man behaves like a personal pronoun with respect to inversion.

Ch. 3, ‘Other aspects of word order in relation to man’, shows that, despite the fact that man seems to behave as a nominal in both subordinate clauses and clauses with inversion, man is no nominal, as it forms a cluster with preceding object pronouns, unlike nominal subjects under similar circumstances. Like personal pronoun subjects, man normally inverts only in specific environments: questions, clauses beginning with certain adverbs, and clauses with negated and/or subjunctive verbs.

In Ch. 4, ‘On the status of man and personal pronouns’, B proposes that man should be treated as a clitic. She shows that OE man is not a weak pronoun according to the pronoun classification proposed by Anna Cardinaletti and Michal Starke (‘The typology of structural deficiency’, Clitics in the languages of Europe, ed. by Henk van Riemsdijk, 145–233, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1999). According to B, the very existence of this weak category is undermined by the OE examples. On the basis of theory-oriented observations, B concludes that personal pronouns, including man, need to be analyzed as clitics.

In Ch. 5, ‘Topics in Old English clause structure’, B proposes that the structural position of the topic must be the specifier of CP rather than the specifier of IP, mainly based on the data on negation and subjunctive in Ch. 2.

This admirable book is very informative and provides the reader with insightful observations about the status of both personal pronouns and man in OE. It has a coherent structure, as each chapter is linked to the others in a complementary fashion. It constitutes therefore a useful reference work both for generative syntacticians and for historians of the English language.