Pronouns, prepositions and probabilities: a multivariate study of Old English word order

It is widely accepted that Old English personal pronouns often turn up in ‘special’ positions, i.e. positions in which functionally equivalent nominals rarely, if ever, appear. Leading theories of Old English syntax (e.g. van Kemenade 1987, Pintzuk 1991, 1996, Hulk & van Kemenade 1997, Kroch & Taylor 1997) account for the syntax of specially placed pronouns in different ways, but all treat special placement as a freely available option. Focusing on pronominal objects of prepositions in particular, this thesis shows, firstly, that current theories fail to account for the variety of special positions in which these pronouns appear and argues that at least three special positions must be recognised. The central concern of this thesis, however, is whether special placement is the freely available option that leading theories assume. Drawing on evidence from a number of descriptive studies of the syntax of pronominal objects of prepositions (e.g. Wende 1915, Taylor 2008, Alcorn 2009), statistical evidence is presented to show that, in a number of contexts, the probability of special placement is either too high or else too low to be plausibly ascribed to free variation. The thesis explores the linguistic basis of each of the statistically significant parameters identified, finding answers in some cases and intriguing puzzles in others

Phonotactics, graphotactics and contrast:The history of Scots dental fricative spellings

The spelling conventions for dental fricatives in Anglic languages (Scots and English) have a rich and complex history. However, the various – often competing – graphemic representations (<þ>, <ð>, <y> and <th>, among others) eventually settled on one digraph, <th>, for all contemporary varieties, irrespective of the phonemic distinction between /ð/ and /θ/. This single representation is odd among the languages’ fricatives, which tend to use contrasting graphemes (cf. <f> vs <v> and <s> vs <z>) to represent contrastive voicing, a sound pattern that emerged nearly a millennium ago. Close examinations of the scribal practices for English in the late medieval period, however, have shown that northern texts had begun to develop precisely this type of distinction for dental fricatives as well. Here /ð/ was predominantly represented by <y> and /θ/ by <th> (Jordan 1925; Benskin 1982). In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, this ‘Northern System’ collapsed, due to the northward spread of a London-based convention using exclusively <th> (Stenroos 2004). This article uses a rich body of corpus evidence for fifteenth-century Scots to show that, north of the North, the phonemic distinction was more clearly mirrored by spelling conventions than in any contemporary variety of English. Indeed, our data for Older Scots local documents (1375–1500) show a pattern where <y> progressively spreads into voiced contexts, while <th> recedes into voiceless ones. This system is traced back to the Old English positional preferences for <þ> and <ð> via subsequent changes in phonology, graphemic repertoire and letter shapes. An independent medieval Scots spelling norm is seen to emerge as part of a developing, proto-standard orthographic system, only to be cut short in the sixteenth century by top-down anglicisation processes

Charting the rise and demise of a phonotactically motivated change in Scots

Although Old English [f] and [v] are represented unambiguously in Older Scots orthography by <f> and <v> (or <u>) in initial and morpheme-internal position, in morpheme-final position <f> and <v>/<u> appear to be used interchangeably for both of these Old English sounds. As a result, there is often a mismatch between the spellings and the etymologically expected consonant. This paper explores these spellings using a substantial database of Older Scots texts, which have been grapho-phonologically parsed as part of the From Inglis to Scots (FITS) project. Three explanations are explored for this apparent mismatch: (1) it was a spelling-only change; (2) there was a near merger of /f/ and /v/ in Older Scots; (3) final [v] devoiced in (pre-)Older Scots but this has subsequently been reversed. A close analysis of the data suggests that the Old English phonotactic constraint against final voiced fricatives survived into the pre-Literary Scots period, leading to automatic devoicing of any fricative that appeared in word-final position (a version of Hypothesis 3), and this, interacting with final schwa loss, gave rise to the complex patterns of variation we see in the Older Scots data. Thus, the devoicing of [v] in final position was not just a phonetically natural sound change, but also one driven by a pre-existing phonotactic constraint in the language. This paper provides evidence for the active role of phonotactic constraints in the development of sound changes, suggesting that phonotactic constraints are not necessarily at the mercy of the changes which conflict with them, but can be involved in the direction of sound change themselves

Visualising pre-standard spelling practice:Understanding the interchange of ‹ch(t)› and ‹th(t)› in Older Scots

No abstract available