The Syntax of Early English (review)

The book (SoEE) provides outlines of the syntax of Old and Middle English as well as discussions of topics that make these stages of the English language noteworthy or different from other Germanic languages. The authors employ the principles and parameters approach to language change and also discuss the relevance of grammaticalization. SoEE can be used as a textbook (viii) for an undergraduate seminar or as a starting point for graduate work in the history of the English language. Students should ideally have had a course in generative syntax, however. The glosses to the examples are very helpful and so is the list of references to the example sentences.

SoEE is divided into nine chapters. The focus on the description of earlier English as well as on theoretical issues and grammar change will be clear from the chapter titles: 1. ‘Language change and grammar change’; 2. ‘An outline of Old English syntax’; 3. ‘An outline of Middle English syntax’; 4. ‘The verb-second constraint and its loss’; 5. ‘The loss of object-verb order’; 6. ‘Verb particles in Old and Middle English’; 7. ‘Changes in infinitival constructions’; 8. ‘The history of the “easy-to-please” construction’; and 9. ‘Grammaticalization and grammar change’.

Ch. 1 discusses the principles and parameters (P&P) framework, but the theory of checking used in later chapters is minimalist as in Chomsky 1995. The emphasis of the P&P framework is on the internalized grammar (I-language or competence) rather than on the actual language output (E-language or performance). On the basis of principles and parameters available through Universal Grammar (UG), a child acquires a grammar (unique to it) that enables it to produce language. Linguistic change provides insight (as pointed out by e.g. Henning Andersen 1973, Paul Kiparsky 1968, and David Lightfoot 1979, 1991) into the principles of UG as well as into the processes whereby grammars are triggered. As an example, SoEE goes through the category change of English modals. It then reviews theories concerned with grammar change, such as Lightfoot’s transparency principle, his degree 0 learnability (the trigger for language learning is the main clause), Robin Clark and Ian Roberts’s input matching (1993, emphasizing that the input is often inconclusive, in which case UG decides), and Susan Pintzuk and Anthony Kroch’s (1999) work on competing grammars. The chapter also outlines approaches that focus on language change rather than on grammar change. These approaches emphasize fuzziness, gradualness, and diffusion of change, and the loss of impersonals (mainly from David Denison 1993) is given as an example. Grammaticalization is introduced briefly, to reappear in Ch. 9.

Section 4 of Ch. 1 talks about the status of historical data. In generative linguistics, grammaticality judgments are very important, but these are obviously unavailable in historical linguistics. Other problems emerge in that texts are varied in many ways: register/genre, dialect, and time period. SoEE discusses several resources (e.g. Visser and the Helsinki Corpus), but, surprisingly, does not mention the Dictionary of Old English project which makes available all Old English texts in electronic form. Very little is said about the role of statistics and, if helpful, where to go for resources on statistical methods.

Chs. 2 (37–67) and 3 (68–103) provide descriptive surveys of Old English (OE) (800–1100) and Middle English (ME) (1100–1500) syntax. The OE data are mainly taken from Alfred and Ælfric, both from the West Saxon dialect area. The morphology of OE is discussed in general terms (e.g. rich inflections), but the reader is (rightly) referred to handbooks for actual paradigms. The principal aspects of OE syntax discussed are empty subjects, the status of case (structural or inherent/semantic), verb fronting, impersonal verbs, word order, the status of different clause types, and preposition stranding, the ‘usual suspects’ so to speak.

Here, I mention just two topics where perhaps ‘consensus is non-existent’ (37) that could have...