Article published In: Diachronica
Vol. 35:2 (2018) ► pp.165–209
Articles / Aufsätze
A native origin for Present-Day English they, their, them
Published online: 12 July 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.16026.col
https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.16026.col
Abstract
It is commonly held that Present-Day English they, their, them are not descended from Old English but derive from
the Old Norse third-person plural pronouns þeir, þeira, þeim. This paper argues that the early northern English
orthographic and distributional textual evidence agrees with an internal trajectory for the ‘þ-’ type personal pronouns in the
North and indicates an origin in the Old English demonstratives þā, þāra, þām. The Northern Middle English
third-person plural pronominal system was the result of the reanalysis from demonstrative to personal pronoun that is common
cross-linguistically in Germanic and non-Germanic languages alike.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Pronoun usage in Old English
- 3.Pronoun usage in Old Northumbrian
- 3.1Preliminaries
- 3.2Old Northumbrian data
- 3.2.1Old Northumbrian nominative pronouns
- 3.2.2Old Northumbrian dative and accusative pronouns
- 3.2.3Old Northumbrian genitive pronouns
- 3.3Discussion thus far
- 4.Third-person plural pronouns in Northern Middle English
- 4.1Morphosyntactic continuity
- 4.2Phonological continuity
- 4.2.1A variationist account
- 4.2.2Northern Middle English development of OE ā
- 5.Conclusions
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
References
References (96)
Aitken, Adam J. 1977. How to pronounce Older Scots. In Adam J. Aitken, Matthew P. McDiarmid & Derick S. Thomson (eds.), Bards and makars: Scottish language and literature, Medieval and Renaissance, 1–21. Glasgow: Glasgow University Press.
Allen, Cynthia. 2008. Genitives in early English: Typology and evidence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Benskin, Michael, Margaret Laing, Vasilis Karaiskos & Keith Williamson. 2013. An electronic version of a linguistic atlas of late mediaeval English. Edinburgh: The University of Edinburgh. [URL] (September 30, 2017.)
Bergen, Linda van. 2008. Negative contraction and Old English dialects: Evidence from glosses and prose. Part 1. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 109(4). 275–312.
Bolze, Christine. 2016. Multiple glosses with present tense forms of OE beon ‘to be’ in Aldred’s gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels. In Julia Fernández-Cuesta & Sara M. Pons-Sanz (eds.), The Old English glosses to the Lindisfarne Gospels: Language, author and context, 289–300. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Bosch, Peter, Tom Rozario & Yufan Zhao. 2003. Demonstrative pronouns and personal pronouns. German der vs. er
. In Proceedings of the EACL 2003 workshop on the computational treatment of anaphora, 61–68. Budapest: EACL.
Bosch, Peter & Carla Umbach. 2007. Reference determination for demonstrative pronouns. ZAS Papers in Linguistics 481. 39–51.
Brown, Michelle P. 2003. The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society, spirituality and the scribe. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
. 1965. Altenglische Grammatik, nach der angelsächsischen Grammatik von Eduard Sievers neubearbeitet. 3rd edn. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Cole, Marcelle. 2012. The Old English origins of the Northern Subject Rule: Evidence from the Lindisfarne Gloss to the Gospels of John and Mark. In Merja Stenroos, Martti Mäkinen & Inge Særheim (eds.), Language contact and development around the North Sea, 141–168. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
. 2014. Verbal morphosyntax in Old Northumbrian and the (Northern) Subject Rule. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
. 2015. The periphrastic subjunctive in the Old English multiple glosses to the Lindisfarne Gospels. In Britt Erman, Gunnel Melchers, Philip Shaw & Peter Sundkvist (eds.), From clerks to corpora: Essays in honour of Nils-Lennart Johannesson, 71–86. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press.
. 2016. Identifying the author(s) of the Lindisfarne Gloss: Linguistic variation as a diagnostic for determining authorship. In Julia Fernández-Cuesta & Sara M. Pons-Sanz (eds.), The Old English glosses to the Lindisfarne Gospels: Language, author and context, 169–188. Berlin: de Gruyter.
. 2017a. Pronominal anaphoric strategies in the West Saxon dialect of Old English. English Language and Linguistics 21(2). 381–408.
. 2017b. Subject and adjacency effects in the Old Northumbrian gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels. English Language and Linguistics.
. Forthcoming. A revised history for third-person plural personal pronouns in Midlands Middle English.
Collins, Beverley & Inger Margrethe Mees. 1981. The sounds of English Dutch. Leiden: Leiden University Press.
Comrie, Bernard. 2000. Pragmatic binding: Demonstratives as anaphors in Dutch. In Matthew Juge & Jeri Moxley (eds.), The twenty-third annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 50–61. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society.
Dance, Richard. 2003. Words derived from Old Norse in early Middle English: Studies in the vocabulary of the South-West Midlands Texts. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
Di Paolo Healey, Antonette, with John Price Wilkin & Xin Xiang. 2009. Dictionary of Old English corpus (DOEC). Toronto: University of Toronto. [URL] (February 20, 2017.)
Diessel, Holger. 1999. The morphosyntax of demonstratives in synchrony and diachrony. Linguistic Typology 31. 1–49.
Fischer, Olga, Ans van Kemenade, Willem Koopman & Wim van der Wurff. 2000. The syntax of early English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Förster, Max. 1941. Die spätae. deiktische Pronominalform þæge and ne. they. Anglia Beiblatt 521, 274–280.
Gelderen, Elly van. 2013. The diachrony of pronouns and demonstratives. In Terje Lohndal (ed.), In search of universal grammar: From Old Norse to Zoque, 195–218. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
. 2000. A history of English reflexive pronouns. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Gericke, Bernhard. 1934. Die Flexion des Personalpronomen der 3. Person in Spätags. Leipzig: Mayer & Müller.
Givón, Talmy. 1976. Topic, pronoun and grammatical agreement. In Charles Li (ed.), Subject and topic, 149–188. New York: Academic Press.
Gordon, Eric V. 1957. An introduction to Old Norse. Revised by Arnold R. Taylor. 2nd revised edn. Oxford: Clarendon.
Haugen, Einar. 1982. Scandinavian language structures: A comparative historical survey. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Heltveit, Trygve. 1953. Studies in English demonstrative pronouns: A contribution to the history of English morphology. Oslo: Akademisk Forlag.
Hertzenberg, Mari Johanne. 2011. Classical and Romance usages of ipse in the Vulgate. In Eirik Welo (ed.), Indo-European syntax and pragmatics: Contrastive approaches, 173–188. Oslo: University of Oslo.
Heuven, Vincent van, Loulou Edelman & Renée van Bezooijen. 2002. The pronunciation of /ei/ by male and female speakers of avant-garde Dutch. In Hans Broekhuis & Paula Fikkert (eds.), Linguistics in the Netherlands, 61–72. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Hogg, Richard. 1992. Phonology and morphology. In Richard Hogg (ed.), The Cambridge history of the English language, vol. 11: The beginnings to 1066, 67–167. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Horall, Sarah. 1978. The southern version of the Cursor Mundi, vol. 11. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press.
Hulk, Aafke & Ans van Kemenade. 1995. V2, pro-drop, functional projections and language change. In Adrian Battye & Ian Roberts (eds.), Clause structure and language change, 227–256. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ingham, Richard. 2006. On two negative concord dialects in early English. Language Variation and Change 18(3). 241–266.
Jacobi, Irene. 2009. On variation and change in diphthongs and long vowels in spoken Dutch. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University dissertation.
Janecka, Joanna & Anna Wojtys. 2011.
Of ðæm or bi him: On the scribal repertoire of Latin-English pronominal equivalents in the Lindisfarne Gospels. In Piotr P. Chruszczewski & Zdzisław Wąsik (eds.), Languages in contact 2010, 81–98. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Wyższej Szkoły Filologicznej.
Jordan, Richard. 1974. Handbook of Middle English grammar: Phonology. Translated & revised by Eugene J. Crook. The Hague: de Gruyter.
Kemenade, Ans van. 1987. Syntactic case and morphological case in the history of English. Dordrecht: Foris.
Kniezsa, Veronika. 1981. The problem of the merger of Middle English /a:/ and /ai/ in Northern English. In Michael Davenport, Erik Hansen & Hans Frede Nielsen (eds.), Current topics in English historical linguistics: Proceedings of the second international conference on English historical linguistics at Odense University 1981, 95–102. Odense: Odense University Press.
. 1983. <ai> and <a> in medieval northern English manuscripts. Folia Linguistica Historica 4(1). 45–53.
Kotake, Tadashi. 2006. Aldred’s multiple glosses: Is the order significant? In Michiko Ogura (ed.), Textual and contextual studies in medieval English: Towards the reunion of linguistics and philology, 35–51. Bern: Peter Lang.
Kroch, Anthony & Ann Taylor. 1997. Verb movement in Old and Middle English: Dialect variation and language contact. In Ans van Kemenade & Nigel Vincent (eds.), Parameters of morphosyntactic change, 297–325. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kroch, Anthony, Ann Taylor & Don Ringe. 2000. The Middle English verb-second constraint: A case study in language contact and language change. In Susan Herring, Pieter van Reenen & Lene Schøsler (eds.), Textual parameters in older languages, 353–391. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Kurath, Hans, Sherman M. Kuhn & Robert E. Lewis. 1952–2001. The Middle English dictionary. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. [URL] (May 22, 2016.)
Laing, Margaret. 2013. A linguistic atlas of early Middle English, 1150–1325, version 3.2. Edinburgh: The University of Edinburgh. [URL] (September 30, 2017.)
Laing, Margaret & Roger Lass. 2014. On Middle English she, sho: A refurbished narrative. Folia Linguistica Historica 35(1). 201–240.
Lass, Roger. 1992. Phonology and morphology. In Norman Blake (ed.), The Cambridge history of the English language, vol. 2: 1066–1476, 23–155. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. 1999. Phonology and morphology. In Roger Lass (ed.), The Cambridge history of the English language, vol. 3: 1478–1776, 56–186. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lass, Roger, Margaret Laing, Rhona Alcorn & Keith Williamson. 2013. A corpus of narrative etymologies from Proto-Old English to early Middle English and accompanying corpus of changes, version 1.1. Edinburgh: The University of Edinburgh. [URL] (June 15, 2016.)
Law, Danny. 2014. Language contact, inherited similarity and social difference: The story of linguistic interaction in the Maya lowlands. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Los, Bettelou & Kemenade, Ans van. 2017. Syntax and the morphology of deixis: The loss of demonstratives and paratactic clause linking. In Marco Coniglio, Eva Schlachter & Tonjes Veenstra (eds.), Demonstratives. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Luick, Karl. 1967 [1914–1940]. Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache, part 1 (1914–1921) & part 2 (1992–1940). Leipzig: Tauchnitz. Reprint, 21 vols., Stuttgart/Oxford: Tauchnitz/Blackwell. Citations refer to the Tauchnitz edition.
McIntosh, Angus, M. L. Samuels, Michael Benskin, with Margaret Laing & Keith Williamson (eds.). 1986. A linguistic atlas of late mediaeval English, vol. 31: Linguistic profiles. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press.
Moore, Samuel, Sanford B. Meech & Harold Whitehall. 1935. Middle English dialect characteristics and dialect boundaries. In Essays and studies in English and comparative literature 131. 1–60. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Moore, Samuel. 1969. Historical outlines of English sounds and inflections. Revised by Albert H. Marckwardt. Ann Arbor: George Wahr.
Morris, Richard. 1878. Cursor mundi (The cursur o the world): A Northumbrian poem of the XIVth century in four versions. London: Early English Text Society.
Morse-Gagné, Elise. 2003. Viking pronouns in England: Charting the course of THEY, THEIR, and THEM. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania dissertation.
Murray, James A. H. 1873. The dialect of the southern counties of Scotland. London: Philological Society.
Nagucka, Ruta. 1997. Glossal translation in the Lindisfarne Gospel according to Saint Matthew. Studia Anglicana Posnaniensa 311. 179–201.
Nevanlinna, Saara (ed.). 1972. The Northern Homily Cycle: The expanded version in MSS Harley 4196 and Cotton Tiberius E vii. Parts 1–4. Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki XLIII. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.
OED3. Oxford English Dictionary online. [URL] (October 30, 2017.)
Pintzuk, Susan. 1991. Phrase structures in competition: Variation and change in Old English word order. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania dissertation.
Pons-Sanz, Sara M. 2013. The lexical effects of Anglo-Scandinavian linguistic contact in Old English. Turnhout: Brepols.
Ross, Alan S. C. 1937. Studies in the accidence of the Lindisfarne Gospels (Leeds School of English Language Texts and Monographs 2). Kendal: Leeds School of English Language.
Ross, Alan S. C., Eric G. Stanley & T. Julian Brown. 1960. Some observations on the gloss and the glossator. In T. D. Kendrick, T. J. Brown, R. L. S. Bruce-Mitford, H. Roosen-Runge, A. S. C. Ross, E. G. Stanley & A. E. A. Werner (eds.), Evangeliorum Quattuor Codex Lindisfarnensis, Musei Britannici Codex Nero D.IV, vol. 21, book 21, 5–33. Olten: Graf.
Schulte, Michael. 2005. Phonological developments from Old Norse to early Modern Nordic I: West Scandinavian. In Oskar Bandle, Kurt Braunmuller, Ernst Hakon Jahr, Allan Karker, Hans-Peter Naumann & Ulf Teleman (eds.), The Nordic languages: An international handbook of the history of the North Germanic languages, vol. 21, 1081–1096. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Serjeantson, Mary Sidney. 1936. A history of foreign words in English. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Skeat, Walter W. (ed.). 1871–1887. The holy gospels in Anglo-Saxon, Northumbrian, and Old Mercian versions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stenbrenden, Gjertrud F. 2016. Long-vowel shifts in English, c. 1050–1700. Evidence from spelling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thomason, Sarah Grey & Terence Kaufman. 1988. Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Traugott, Elizabeth. 1992. Syntax. In Richard Hogg (ed.), The Cambridge history of the English language, vol. 11: The beginnings to 1066, 168–289. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Velde, Hans van de, Roeland van Hout & Marinel Gerritsen. 1997. Watch Dutch change: A real time study of variation and change in Standard Dutch pronunciation. Journal of Sociolinguistics 1(3). 361–391.
Voortman, Berber. 1994. Regionale variatie in het taalgebruik van notabelen: Een sociolinguïstisch onderzoek in Middelburg, Roermond en Zutphen. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University dissertation.
Walkden, George. 2016. Null subjects in the Lindisfarne Gospels as evidence for syntactic variation in Old English. In Julia Fernández-Cuesta & Sara M. Pons-Sanz (eds.), The Old English glosses to the Lindisfarne Gospels: Language, author and context, 239–256. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Weinreich, Uriel. 1968 [1953]. Languages in contact: Findings and problems. The Hague/Paris: Mouton.
Werner, Otmar. 1991. The incorporation of Old Norse pronouns into Middle English: Suppletion by loan. In Sture Ureland & George Broderick (eds.), Language contact in the British Isles. Proceedings of the eighth international symposium on language contact in Europe, Douglas, Isle of Man, 1988, 369–401. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.
Cited by (21)
Cited by 21 other publications
Adamczyk, Elżbieta
Allen, Cynthia L.
Dance, Richard & Sara M. Pons-Sanz
Wallis, Christine
Cole, Marcelle & Sara M. Pons-Sanz
Knooihuizen, Remco
Liu, Rongkun
Pons-Sanz, Sara M. & Louise Sylvester
Versloot, Arjen
Walkden, George, Juhani Klemola & Thomas Rainsford
Pons-Sanz, Sara M.
Roig-Marín, Amanda
ROIG-MARÍN, AMANDA
Durkin, Philip
Keller, Jonas
2020. The Leipzig-Jakarta list as a means to test Old English / Old Norse mutual intelligibility. NOWELE. North-Western European Language Evolution 73:2 ► pp. 252 ff.
Percillier, Michael
Winters, Margaret E.
van Gelderen, Elly
2019. Reflexive pronouns in the Lindisfarne glosses. NOWELE. North-Western European Language Evolution 72:2 ► pp. 220 ff.
van Gelderen, Elly
2019. The Northumbrian Old English glosses. NOWELE. North-Western European Language Evolution 72:2 ► pp. 119 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 8 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.
