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In:Information Structure and Syntactic Change in Germanic and Romance Languages
Edited by Kristin Bech and Kristine Gunn Eide
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 213] 2014
► pp. 81–110

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Quantifying information structure change in English

 | Radboud University Nijmegen
 | Radboud University Nijmegen
 | Radboud University Nijmegen
ORCiD logo with link | University of Edinburgh
Published online: 7 May 2014
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.213.04kom
The verb-second constraint in Old and Middle English made available a special clause-initial position that could host more than just the subject. Los (2009) suggests that this position served a discourse-linking function, expressed by, for instance, an adverbial. This allowed the subject to be reserved for human “protagonists”. It stands to reason that the loss of verb-second in the fifteenth century entailed a decrease in the prevalence of discourse-linking clause-initial adverbials. The subject took over the discourse-linking function, thus extending its functional load. This article tests four hypotheses concerning the changing functional load of the English subject. Our corpus consists of syntactically-parsed texts that have been enriched with referential information, allowing us to quantify the changes affecting the subject.
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2018. “Permissive” subjects and the decline of adverbial linking in the history of English. In Explorations in English historical syntax [Studies in Language Companion Series, 198], ► pp. 23 ff. DOI logo
Dreschler, Gea
2017. Chapter 6. The information status of late subjects in passive main clauses in Old English. In Word Order Change in Acquisition and Language Contact [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 243], ► pp. 103 ff. DOI logo
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