Social Networks and Historical Sociolinguistics: Studies in Morphosyntactic Variation in the Paston Letters (1421-1503) 9783110923223, 9783110183108

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Social Networks and Historical Sociolinguistics

w DE

G

Topics in English Linguistics 51

Editors

Elizabeth Closs Traugott Bernd Kortmann

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

Social Networks and Historical Sociolinguistics Studies in Morphosyntactic Variation in the Paston Letters (1421-1503)

by

Alexander Bergs

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague) is a Division of Walter de Gruyter G m b H & Co. KG, Berlin.

© Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

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Data

Bergs, Alexander. Social networks and historical sociolinguistics : studies in morphosyntactic variation in the Paston letters, 1421 — 1503 / by Alexander Bergs. p. cm. — (Topics in English linguistics ; 51) Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN 3-11-018310-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Sociolinguistics - England. 2. Historical linguistics - England. 3. English language - Middle English, 1100-1500 - Grammar, Historical. 4. English language - Middle English, 11001500 - Variation. 5. Paston letters. I. Title. II. Series. P40.45.G7B47 2005 306.44'0942'0902-dc22 2004029509

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ISBN 3-11-018310-2 © Copyright 2005 by Walter de Gruyter G m b H & Co. KG, 10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin. Printed in Germany.

Proem

The grown man will find it easier to think the thoughts of the school-boy than to think the thoughts of the baby. And yet the doctrine that our remote forefathers being simple folk had simple law dies hard. Too often we allow ourselves to suppose that, could we but get back to the beginning, we should find that all was intelligible and should then be able to watch the process whereby simple ideas were smothered under subtleties and technicalities. But it is not so. Simplicity is the outcome of technical subtlety; it is the goal not the starting point. As we go backwards the familiar outlines become blurred; the ideas become fluid, and instead of the simple we find the indefinite. But difficult though our task may be, we must turn to it. Frederic William Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond. Cambridge University Press, 1897 History, even personal history, has its problems. Leopold von Ranke blithely advises us to write history 'wie es eigentlich gewesen ist\ as it actually was. But how was it, actually? However much I try to re-create the past, I necessarily view it through the unreliable eyes of the present. No, Croce had it right: 'All history is contemporary histoiy.' Nor was Hobbes far off the mark: 'Imagination and memory are but one thing.' And further complicating my difficulty, I have always felt a certain sympathy with what is essentially a Marxist stance vis-ä-vis the role of accident, chance and contingency in history - as compared, I mean, with the role of underlying, ineluctable social patterns. For example, I believe it unlikely European history would have been much different in the Thirties and Forties had Hitler died in 1928. But I find myself, for all that, increasingly of the opinion that accident, chance and contingency rule individual lives, mine in particular. Alan Isler, Clerical Errors. Jonathan Cape, 2001

Acknowledgements

There is a large group of people that helped fiction become fact, by reading drafts of the manuscripts, by answering silly questions, commenting on certain ideas, or simply by providing lots of input. The cast in alphabetical order: Randy Bax (numerous discussions and sheer endless enthusiasm about historical social network analysis), Alun H. Davies (profreading and cheking evry single words onn every singel paige), Bridget Drinka (great encouragement in times of need, and tons of input), Edith Moravcik (very acute comments on connectionism, pronoun paradigms, and scientificness), Elise Morse-Gagne (virtually everything you need to know about the history of English pronouns), Rainer Holtei (getting me into and out of the intricacies of Middle English) Terttu Nevalainen (constructive criticism on virtually all aspects presented here), Anette Rosenbach (well-structured thoughts in a sea of trouble), Monika Schmid (Microsoft Word and Excel troubleshooting hotline, among some many other things), Birgit Sievert (patience, encouragement, and the 'careful reminder' that there's a publisher waiting for a manuscript...), Dieter Stein (coffee, and all the rest), Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (prime mover, in the Aristotelian sense, and valuable comments on some very, very early drafts of some chapters), Elizabeth Closs Traugott and Bernd Kortmann (in the role of the perceptive, eagle-eyed readers-editors with just the right idea at just the right time. This book would not be the same, in fact not even exist without them), Marta Turek (network enthusiast and small-world theorist). Needless to say, any shortcomings or mistakes in the book are due to my ignoring their well-meant suggestions, comments, and questions. Last but by no means least, heartfelt thanks go to all my friends, family, and colleagues in and around Düsseldorf, who patiently supported an increasingly moody author over much more time than originally planned. And thanks for the champagne-truffles. A number of publishers and/or authors also have been very helpful in granting me permission to use their copyrighted material: Figure 6 in Chapter 3 on the history and tradition of social network analysis has been reproduced from Dorothea Jansen Einführung in die Netzwerkanalyse (Opladen: Leske und Budrich 1999) by kind permission of GWV Fachverlage, Wiesbaden.

Acknowledgements

vii

I am grateful to the Authors of Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English for permission to reproduce the dot maps 39, 40, 51, and 52 from volume 1 of the Atlas. The map of main roads in Medieval England and Wales has been reproduced from Ralph A. Griffith's chapter "The Later Middle Ages (12901485)" in Kenneth O. Morgan The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain (1996, p. 183) by permission of Oxford University Press. Figure 56 in Chapter 7, 'Language change as altered replication', has been adapted from Bergs (2004b) by kind permission of Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin.

Abbreviations

123 AAVE ADV AN CEEC DE DO EmodE GEN HC A-forms INA ΙΟ LALME LVC ME MED NP NRS NSS OB OE OED ON Ρ PdE PL RC RCO RC 1

Generation I, II, III of the Paston family African American Vernacular English Adverbial Animate Corpus of Early English Correspondence (see Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 1996, 2003) Deity Direct Object Early modern English, c. 1500-1650 Genitive Helsinki Corpus (see Kytö 1996) hem, here etc. Inanimate Indirect Object The Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (see Mcintosh et al. 1986) Light verb construction Middle English, c. 1100-1500 Middle English Dictionary (see http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/rn/med/) Noun Phrase Non-restrictive Network Strength Scale Oblique Old English, c. 700-1100 Oxford English Dictionary (see http://www.oed.com) Old Norse Probablility Present-day English, c. 1650-today Plural Relative clause relativizer + NP, e.g. {the) which house that

Abbreviations

RC 2 RC 3 RC 4 RC 5 RC 6 RC 7 RC 8 RC 9 RS SG SU //z-forms TTR VP w/z-pronouns

which who whose whom Double relativisers, e.g. which that zero (0) the which Undefined Restrictive Singular Subject they, them, their etc. Type-token ratio Verb Phrase which, who, whose, who

ix

Table of contents

Proem Acknowledgements Abbreviations Chapter 1 Introduction 1. Aims and contents 1.1. Empirial objectives, historical embedding 1.2. Structure of the book Chapter 2 Historical sociolinguistics 1. What is historical sociolinguistics? 1.1. Social sciences - history - linguistics 1.2. Historical sociolinguistics 1.2.1. The object of investigation 1.2.2. Research material 2. Summary Chapter 3 Social network analysis - present and past 1. Introduction 2. Social netork analysis 2.1. The development of network theory 2.1.1. Elements and constructs of network theory 2.1.2. Attitudes and behavior in networks - network roles 2.2. Social network analysis, language variation, and language change 2.3. Principles of language change 2.4. Historical network analysis 2.4.1. Background 2.4.2. The principle of uniformity 2.4.3. Data problems 2.5. Micro-versus macro-studies 2.6. Developing a network for (late) medieval England 3. The network(s) of the Paston family 3.1. Biographical sketches 3.2. The network(s)

ν vi viii

1 1 6

8 9 12 13 14 21

22 22 22 24 27 30 37 43 43 43 45 52 55 60 60 68

Table of contents

4. The corpus 4.1. Scribes and authors 4.2. Methodology

xi

76 79 80

Chapter 4 Personal pronouns 1. The development of personal pronouns in Middle and Early Modern English 1.1. Sources: dialect geography 1.2. Sources: internal factors 1.2.1. Therapeutic change in the pronoun system 1.2.2. Analogy 1.2.3. Formatives and analogical levelling 1.2.4. Frequency and analogy 2. Pronouns in the Paston letters 2.1. General developments 2.2. Distribution across time 2.3. Individual patterns 2.4. External factors 2.4.1. Gender of the speaker 2.4.2. Addressee and relationship to addressee 2.5. Internal factors 2.5.1. Syntactic function 2.5.2. Gender of the referent 2.5.3. Animacy of the referent 2.5.4. Stress and phonetic environment 3. Summary 4. Ye and You

84 91 93 96 98 101 103 103 104 107 109 109 110 113 114 116 118 119 126 129

Chapter 5 Relative clauses 1. Introduction 2. Relativization - some technical remarks 3. Relativization and the history of English 4. Relative clauses in the Paston letters 4.1. Methodology 4.2. Results: a community grammar 4.2.1. Restrictiveness 4.2.2. Animacy 4.2.3. Definiteness 4.2.4. Number

132 132 13 8 144 144 149 150 151 165 167

83

xii Table of contents

4.2.5. Syntactic function 4.2.6. Distance 4.3 Results: a social grammar 4.3.1. Gender of the author 4.3.2. Gender of the addressee 4.3.3. Relationship between author and addressee 4.3.4. Variation across time 4.4. Results: individual grammars 5. Summary

168 178 179 180 181 183 184 188 207

Chapter 6 The light verb construction 1. Introduction 2. The structure of the light verb construction 3. Historical developments 4. The light verb construction in the Paston letters 4.1. Methodological issues 4.2. Results: A community grammar 4.2.1. Number, determination, modification 4.2.2. Syntax 4.3. Results: A social grammar 4.3.1. Temporal factors 4.3.2. Gender 3.4. Results: individual grammars

210 210 215 217 217 222 227 231 234 234 240 243

Chapter 7 Conclusion: a network perspective 1. A historical whodunit 1.1. Personal pronouns, relativizers, and light verb constructions 1.2. Corroborative data 2. Networks and language use in the Paston family: Take One 2.1. Why network strength scales should not simply correlate with historical data - at least in this case 2.1.1. Now you see it, now you don't 2.1.2. The times they are achanging - ans so are the networks 3. Networks and language use in the Paston family: Take Two 4. Social networks and language use: a new perspective Notes References Author index Subject index

246 246 248 254 255 255 257 260 263 266 271 305 311

Chapter 1 Introduction

1. Aims and contents 1.1. Empirical objectives, historical embedding The present study deals with morphosyntactic variation in the late Middle English Paston letters. The three central linguistic variables are the third person plural pronouns, relativization patterns, and light verb constructions. This study is basically couched in the framework of historical sociolinguistics, and in particular social network analysis. This approach naturally raises at least three different questions: Why study the Paston letters? Why study these linguistic variables? And why use a sociohistorical approach and social networks? In the following, we will address each of these questions in turn. Why study the Paston letters? The Paston letters as one of the earliest letter collections in English have always been a popular field of study, beginning with the first edition by Fenn in the eighteenth century. One of the first "linguistic" studies, more than a hundred years old, is that of Blume (1882). A number of works are available by now that focus on various linguistic, historical, and social aspects of the letters. The most prominent examples are probably the monograph by Carstensen (1959) and the numerous studies by Davis (1949, 1952a, 1952b, 1954, 1965, 1967). None of these studies, however, uses recent (socio-)linguistic theory and methodology. The immensely detailed and valuable studies by Davis, for example, do not use computer technology and therefore are somewhat restricted in their scope. Also, they usually do not consider social factors in any systematic way. Thus, one of the first aims of this study is to bring to the fore new evidence and data with the help of modern, computerized corpus linguistics, and from the perspective of recent (socio-)linguistic theory and methodology. The letters themselves are inherently interesting since they do not only record a rather natural, personal style of their authors (in contrast, for example, to the highly formulaic language of charters, scientific treatises, or even litera-

2

Introduction

ture), but also because they exemplify the transition period between Middle English and early Modern English. The development of English can be characterized as one of punctuated equilibriums (see Chapter 3 §2.5), i.e., there are equilibrious periods of relative stability and very little linguistic change, interspersed by punctuation periods of dramatic changes and rapid developments. While both types of periods are theoretically of equal interest - it is just as important and interesting to study why language changes as why it does not change - this study is particularly concerned with the details of actual linguistic change, e.g., innovation, actuation, and diffusion. Therefore, the late Middle English Paston letters qualify as prime material on language and speakers in a transition, punctuation period. Last but not least, the letters also offer sufficient personalized data from individual speakers, which is important for a study on the role of social networks, as will be discussed below (see Chapter 3 §2.4.3). Why study these linguistic variables? This study is mostly concerned with the structure and development of two nominal and one verbal variable: the third person plural pronouns, relativization, and light verb constructions. Let us briefly look at the state of the art concerning each of these items. Numerous handbooks briefly sketch the development of the third person plural paradigm and comment on its unusual characteristics (e.g., Baugh and Cable 1994: 157-158; Berndt 1989: 65; Bolton 1982: 119; Fennell 2001: 102, 124; Mustanoja 1960: 134-135; Pyles: 1971: 171-172; Strang 1970: 235-237). Yet, very few in-depth studies have been offered so far. The most detailed are veiy early philological approaches, e.g., Diehn (1901) and Greul (1934); some more recent discussions can be found in Howe (1996); Morse-Gagne (1992, 1993); Ritt (2001); Samuels (1972: 7072); Smith (1996: 132-134) and Werner (1991). Nevertheless, there are still some unresolved issues concerning the development of these forms, and the present study will attempt to show that this is a very interesting and important variable for this period, and that variation approaches still have something to add to the picture. The structure and development of relativization in Middle English, in contrast, has been studied very extensively for more than a century (see Allen 1980; Curme 1912; Dekeyser 1983, 1984, 1996, 1997; Geoghegan 1975; Kock 1897; Meier 1967; Montgomery 1989; Mustanoja 1960: 187208; Poussa 2000; Ryden 1966, 1983; Seppänen 2000; Traugott 1972: 152-160, to name but a few. See also Fischer 1992: 295-312, Fischer et al.

Aims and contents

3

2000: 91-95, and references therein). While the basic developments have been well established and offer little if any controversy, the devil lies in the detail. Questions that have remained unanswered so far include among others the precise chronology of the observed changes, their directionality, the reason for the temporal lag of some relativizers, and the possible contrast between the two relativizers which and the which. While this study cannot hope to answer all these questions satisfactorily, it will try to shed some more light on these and other problems by offering detailed data from this crucial period and by suggesting one possible model that may account for some of the observed phenomena. The light verb construction in English has been described as one of its main characteristics and resources (cf. Akimoto and Brinton 1999; Hiltunen 1999). There are numerous studies on light verb constructions in present-day English (see Algeo 1995; Allerton 2002; Cattell 1984; Dixon 1991; Live 1973; Olsson 1961; Rensky 1964; Wierzbicka 1982); very little, however, has been offered on the historical development. The noTable exception is the collection of papers in Brinton and Akimoto (1999), which sketch the major lines of development and key issues from the Old English period to the present day. In particular, Tanabe's (1999) paper on composite predicates in the Paston letters is of particular importance for the present study, both in terms of data and theory. However, it focuses only on the female authors in the letter collection; its database is therefore considerably expanded in the present study. Furthermore, the present study basically works from a construction grammar perspective, which also presents a slightly different approach to light verbs. The three variables are studied both independently and in comparison to each other. The comparative perspective is used to demonstrate in how far exactly every single variable requires its own framework, methodology, and approach. But not only does every variable per se require different analytical tools, the specific batches of results also call for specific interpretations. Why me a sociohistorical approach and social networks? One of the central claims of this study, based in no insignificant degree on works by Weinreich, Herzog, and Labov (1968), Labov (1994, 2001), Kroch (1978), Stein (1990), J. Milroy (1992a), and Eckert (2000) is that linguistic variation is not random, but mostly influenced by a number of definable factors, and that these factors fall both inside and outside the boundaries of "linguistics proper":

4

Introduction Linguistic and social factors are closely interrelated in the development of language change. Explanations which are confined to one or the other aspect, no matter how well constructed, will fail to account for the rich body of regularities that can be observed in empirical studies of language behavior. (Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog 1968: 188)

Therefore, in contrast to many previous studies, both intra- and extralinguistic variables will be discussed without ascribing logical priority to one or the other. It will be shown that these two groups of factors are not independent and mutually exclusive, but rather that they complement each other and should, therefore, not be studied in isolation. This study begins with a summary and discussion of what has come to be known as "socio-historical linguistics" (Romaine 1982b), "social history of language" (Leith 1997, first published in 1983), or "historical sociolinguistics" (J. Milroy 1992a; Raumolin-Brunberg 1996a; Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003). Twenty years after the first international workshop on socio-historical linguistics, held in conjunction with the Sixth International Conference on Historical Linguistics in Poznan (Romaine and Traugott 1985), and the publication of Suzanne Romaine's groundbreaking work on the topic, social approaches to language history and change seem to be more popular than ever (see, e.g., Burke and Porter 1987; Machan and Scott 1992; Raumolin-Brunberg 1996; Knowles 1997; Jahr 1998; Kastovsky and Mettinger 2000; Taavitsainen et al. 2000; Tieken-Boon van Ostade et al. 2000; Fennell 2001; Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003). It seems about time to summarize the research carried out so far with a view to finding common denominators in a field that is more diverse than ever, and to define within this kaleidoscope of principles, methods, theories, and approaches a suitable framework for the present analysis. Despite, or maybe even because of the recent wealth of data and theories, historical sociolinguistics is a discipline still in the making, and it seems worthwhile to reflect on the (meta-)theoretical background that lies at the heart of the matter. The majority of sociohistorical studies has mainly focused on questions that have been central to present-day oriented sociolinguistics. These include correlative studies with macrosociological concepts such as class (Nevalainen 1996a; Meurman-Solin 2000), sex and gender (Nevalainen 1996b; Wright 1997a; Stein 2001), register and style (Romaine 1980, 1982a, 1982b), as well as studies dealing with issues such as regional variation, urbanization, and mobility (Keene 2000; Nevalainen 2000a, 200b; Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2000), socio-pragmatic evolu-

Aims and contents

5

tion of address pronouns (Wales 1983; Jucker 2000; Mazzon 2000; Jucker and Taavitsainen 2003), and standardization (Gneuss 1972; Montgomery 1989; Finegan 1992; Stein and Tieken-Boon van Ostade 1994; Heikkonen 1996; Wright 2000). Only recently has the concept of social networks been brought to the fore in this respect. It seems that it has been received fairly well, judging from the sheer number of studies that have been published on the topic (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 1991, 1996, 1999; Lippi-Green 1994; Fitzmaurice 2000a, 2000c; Imhoff 2000; Nevalainen 2000b). There even was a first international workshop on social network analysis in historical linguistics, which took place at the Tenth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics in 1998 (Tieken-Boon van Ostade et al. 2000). These facts are taken to warrant a closer look at the concept of social networks in general and its applicability to problems in historical linguistics in particular. It will have to be asked how far the Late Middle English period and the Paston letters are suiTable for such an analysis and in what way the concepts and methods of present-day social network analysis have to be modified to make them explanatorily valuable for this period and data set. This issue of historical sociolinguistics in general and of social networks in particular is closely linked to another central claim. Most analyses (with the notable exception of some early studies, e.g. Humboldt 1963 [1827-29]; Spitzer 1956; some studies couched in the variable rules paradigm, e.g. Bickerton 1973; Guy 1980; and some pragmatics-oriented approaches, e.g., Nowak 1983; Johnstone 1996; Verschueren 1998) seem to have ignored the role of the individual in linguistic theory and practice. Only recently, it seems, the individual speaker again came to the fore (e.g., in Maclagan et al. 1999). The present study will attempt to show that significant patterns of variation may become visible on different levels of (socio-) linguistic analysis: on the level of the group or speech community as a whole, its various subgroups, and on the level of the individual speaker. The aim is to show that any claim about cognitive, universal, or typological determinants of linguistic change need not only hold for the level of the speech community or its subgroups, but also for a substantial number of speakers in isolation, if it wants to reflect reality. Finally, it will be shown that variation on the level of the individual speakers need not be random or purely idiosyncratic, but that it is also guided by a number of both intra- and extralinguistic factors. In accordance with the theory of linguistic change as it is associated with social network analysis (see, e.g., J. Milroy and L. Milroy 1985; J. Milroy 1992a, 1992c; J. Milroy 1993), the role of individual speakers in the Paston family network will be scrutinized

6

Introduction

with respect to their influence on language stability and change within this network.

1.2. Structure of the book This study is divided into three major parts. Part I comprises a general introduction (Chapter 1), a survey of the field of historical sociolinguistics (Chapter 2), and all the relevant background information for a (traditional) social network analysis of the Paston family, including short biographies of the family members, some general information about the socioeconomic and cultural history of fifteenth century England, and a description of the corpus (Chapter 3). Part II includes the three case studies described above, each of which is principally self-contained with an in-depth discussion of the intra- and extralinguistic factors involved in the formation of the variable at issue. Chapter 4 describes the development and use of third person plural pronoun forms in the corpus. It is suggested that in this case both social and cognitive factors must be considered. The completion of the ί/ζ-paradigm is not credited to traditional structural factors such as symmetry or paradigmatic pressure, but rather analyzed in the light of connectionist views on language processing. This processing, however, can also be influenced by social factors, such as the position of the speaker in given network structures. Chapter 5 looks into the structure and development of the late Middle English relativization system. Here it becomes particularly clear that large-scale corpora often lead to misconstrued images of actual language use in individual speakers. In this chapter, two intralinguistic factors are discussed in greater detail: on the one hand, results from (mostly presentday) studies on language processing in relative clauses (Romaine 1982a, 1984; Prideaux and Baker 1986, Bever and Townsend 2001) are critically evaluated in the light of the Paston data. On the other hand, the Paston letters are used to illustrate and evaluate grammaticalization processes in action. To be more precise: it is claimed that who/whose/whom as relativizers underwent some kind of grammaticalization process and that this process in its various stages can be visualized in the individual speaker by using a number of diagnostics. Chapters 6 analyzes the verbal variable, light verb constructions (or complex predicates). Tanabe (1999) has already carried out an initial study of light verb constructions in a small part of the Paston letters (i.e. three female authors). The present study extends this initial

Aims and contents

7

report considerably and analyzes the whole collection of letters. In particular, gender specific language use is at issue here. This section also includes a brief discussion of issues pertaining to the lexicon-syntax boundary, the role of formulaic language and construction grammar in language change (cf. Traugott 2003). Part III (Chapter 7) generally summarizes the findings of Part II and reviews these in the light of the results of Part I. Further data from previous studies (e.g. Carstensen 1959, Davis 1954) are introduced and discussed. These, together with the results of the present study, are then used in developing a refined model of social network analysis which can account for the phenomena observed in the present case and which can be put to test in future studies. This third part concludes with a summary of a new model of language use that lies at the heart of this study. This model looks at individual speakers, their social embedding in various network structures, and the linguistic resources they have at their hands - either consciously or sub-consciously. Intralinguistically, this model highlights on the phasetransfer between lexicon and grammar and the role of formulaic language as entry and exit point for grammatical structures. There is only one last thing: When we dwell on certain issues and immerse ourselves in problems which only have a loose connection to the outline of our exposition, this is not owing to a tendency to circumlocution and comprehensiveness. Rather, we would like to keep the reader from boredom; because, when the examination dwells long on a single issue, this leads to satiety and impatience. But when it passes from one field of study to another, the reader is in the same position as a man who wanders through garden landscapes. As soon as he has passed one, another appears in front of him and arouses his interest and his desire to see this as well. Not without good reason do we say: "What is new, is pleasing". al-Blram, What pleases the reader, Al-ätär al bäqiya 'an al-qurün al-häliya (c. 1000)

Chapter 2 Historical sociolinguistics

1. What is historical sociolinguistics? Historical sociolinguistics as it is understood in this study may be visualized as in Figure 1:

Figure 1. A model of historical sociolinguistics All three areas or disciplines (in the widest possible sense) have one core that distinguishes them from each other as well as from other disciplines that are not mentioned here, like any of the natural sciences. They also have fuzzy boundaries and overlapping areas which constitute subdisciplines of various sorts. Whereas the labels history and linguistics may seem intuitively clear, social sciences needs some clarification. In this specific context, social sciences is to be understood as a short-hand form that subsumes an open list of different disciplines such as anthropology, psychology, sociology, gender studies, cultural studies, economics, geography, and politics. Social Sciences is neither seen as opposed to natural sciences nor as opposed to some disciplines that deal with social matters, but which are not scientific; the debate about criteria of scientificness in each of these disciplines is deliberately shunned here and not important for the following discussion (see Toulmin 1961; Stegmüller 1969; Seiffert 1996; Popper 1972, and other standard works on the philosophy of science for that matter). Strictly speaking, then, history (and even linguistics, according to

What is historical sociolinguistics?

9

some approaches) should be included in this diagram in social sciences, and in other circumstances, it would certainly be found here (see the discussions in Burke 1992; Carr 1990: 56-87; Seiffert 1996: 185-204). Nevertheless, since it forms such an important component of historical sociolinguistics, it seems necessary to stress its position and to visualize its special status by giving it a separate area. The same could have been done with anthropology, for example, if this were at issue.

1.1. Social sciences - history - linguistics In Figure 1 above, we find three fields that overlap on two sides, respectively, and one area that shows an overlap of all three fields. The overlaps are meant to designate certain subdisciplines of the respective fields. For instance, the overlap between linguistics and social sciences represents the subfields of sociolinguistics, sociology of language, and anthropological linguistics, among others. The overlap of linguistics and social sciences reflects the truly integrative nature of these approaches as it has been advocated by Hymes: "Adding a speechless sociology to a sociology-free linguistics can yield little better than post-hoc attempts at correlation between accounts from which the heart of the relevant data will be missing" (Hymes 1974: 76). Social sciences are not an additive to linguistics proper but must be fully integrated into the linguistic enterprise. "Identity" or "Gender" as sociological factors, for example, are not only a plus that helps to understand certain patterns of linguistic variation, but must be analyzed and understood as penetrating the whole language structure; moreover, they must be seen as something that is both present and negotiated in everyday communication, as both shaping and depending on language use in the individual (cf. Eckert 2000; Watts 1991; Wilson 1993: 25-26). Instead of looking towards one or the other discipline as a mere supplement, bilateral paradigmatic integration seems necessary, maybe even crucial. In consequence, theories in the subdisciplines are not autonomous; rather, they depend on data and theories from all their mother disciplines. "The whole must, in other words, equal more than the sum of its parts if any claim to independent status is to be made" (Romaine 1982b: 7). Nevertheless, this does not contribute to the unification of the subdisciplines of course, and conflicts even within the realm of one single subdiscipline, e.g. sociolinguistics, are frequent when it comes to aims, methods, and principles, like data versus theory, descriptivist versus explanatory approaches - not to mention the

10

Historical

sociolinguistics

ongoing debate about whether sociolinguistics is a subpart of linguistics, or whether it is the only form of doing linguistics (see Labov 1972b). "What is sociolinguistics proper?" is a question that one can read all too often. Coupland, it seems, was one of the first and clearest advocates of an entirely different approach, an approach that does not ask about the one and only right way of doing sociolinguistics: The diversity of social processes researched within sociolinguistics suggests not only that a unified theory does not exist, but that it should not. Sociolinguistics needs to theorise local social relationships just as well as the dynamics of large-scale social change. The concept of a unified theory is ideologically alien to sociolinguistics, premised as it is on diversity and resistant to hegemony. (Coupland 1997: 113)

Exactly the same applies to the overlap of linguistics and history. Here we mostly find studies in philology or textual history, but also studies that mainly describe the external history of a given language. Some present-day historians have also started to become interested (again) in the textual basis of their materials. Questions about the provenance of texts again seem to play a role: oral versus written transmission, the history and role of writing, questions of speech acts and philological details are keywords in this context (cf. Burke 1987: 1; Clanchy 1993). A third major type of linguistic study that somehow borders on history as a discipline are the discussions about historical laws in language, about evolution, drift, and cyclicity. These are principles derived in part from theories of history and historiography (in the case of drift also geology). The principle of uniformity, which will become important later on in this study (see Chapter 3 §2.2.4), also goes back to studies in geology and history (see Koerner 1993; Labov 1981: fn. 5; Lass 1997a: 28; also cf. Janda and Joseph 2003: 23-31). The third area of overlap is between history and social sciences. Here we find, among others, social history and historical sociology (again, depending on one's point of view, just as in the case of sociolinguistics versus sociology of language). The relationship between history and social sciences, or history and sociology has been subject to probably as many discussions as that between linguistics and social sciences. Some have claimed that there is no distinction between the two: history must necessarily be social, just as sociology can only make meaningful statements if it takes the historical dimension into account (cf. Carr 1990; Abrams 1980; Giddens 1979; Seiffert 1996: 185-204). But while sociologists seem to have had fewer problems in embracing historical principles or data though not necessarily history as a discipline (Burke 1992: 9) - the reverse

What is historical sociolinguistics?

11

seems to have been more of a problem. Braudel once described the "communication" of sociologists and historians as essentially "a dialogue of the deaf' (cf. Burke 1992: 2-4), and Carr felt the need to assert: "the more sociological history becomes, and the more historical sociology becomes, the better for both. Let the frontier between them be kept wide open for two-way traffic" (Carr 1990: 66). This points towards certain problems that not only pertain to the overlap between history and social sciences, but also to history and linguistics, and linguistics and social sciences: every field of enquiry has certain methods, principles, paradigms, and foundations. In other words: all disciplines that scholars seek to well together today bring with them their own deeply rooted histories, traditions, ideologies, and also their own conflicts. And these conflicts, too, are imported - must be imported - into the overlapping areas. For instance, the discussion in sociology between methodological individualism and holism is far from being resolved and seems to have penetrated deep into both history and linguistics (see, for instance, the papers in Acham and Schulze 1990, and in Bergs and Curdts 2003, or the discussions in Burke 1992, and Hollis 1994). A second field in the overlapping area between history and social sciences that will be important later on in the discussion is historical anthropology. Here, principles and paradigms from both history and anthropology as well as from a broad range of other neighboring disciplines, ranging from cognitive psychology to geography and economics, are merged in what has been described as essentially an "open project" (see Dressel 1996). Apart from traditional social history, which can be said to focus on large-scale social entities, like the history of guilds, of certain sects, of certain social strata, historical anthropology often concentrates on certain anthropological or cognitive domains, such as family and neighborhood, childhood, anger, death, sexuality. N.B., these studies often do not come under the heading of anthropological history, but as studies in the histoire des mentalites, or studies couched in the Annales paradigm or la nouvelle histoire (see Burke 1990; Daniel 2001; Dressel 1996); nevertheless they may be described as belonging to anthropological history in a wider sense. A similar development is the so-called "Gesellschaftsgeschichte" or history of communities (Dressel 1996: 65; MacFarlane 1977). Some other studies, partly influenced by American cultural anthropology, focus on small-scale social entities such as the history and social context of the individual (e.g., Ginzburg 1990; Ozment 1997), or small communities (e.g., Bennett 1995; Homans 1941; Ladurie 1980; MacFarlane 1977; Raftis 1981). Here, again, we find conflicts between traditional historians, anthropologists, and even sociolo-

12

Historical sociolinguistics

gists, which need to be discussed if a noteworthy, though not necessarily "unified" subdiscipline is to be established.

1.2. Historical sociolinguistics Historical sociolinguistics (J. Milroy 1992a) or socio-historical linguistics (Romaine 1982b) is to be found at the intersection not of two, but of three different fields: history, social sciences, and linguistics. As such, it not only has to incorporate theories, practices, and paradigms from all three fields, but it also has to struggle with and in conflicts that originate in all three areas. The present study assumes that historical sociolinguistics belongs to sociolinguistics as it tries to combine both social sciences and linguistic enterprises from the viewpoint of linguistics. Note, however, that this does not necessarily mean that it is restricted to traditional, correlative sociolinguistics. Rather, it may seek to answer questions relating to politics and language, anthropology and language, geography and language, etc. In any case, it deals with linguistic variation of some sort, and it focuses on the question "What kind of person can say what, how, using what means, to whom, when, and why?" (Crystal 1977: 196). In doing so, however, it must genuinely try to incorporate its neighboring disciplines, and not only look for shallow supplementary theories and evidence. Historical sociolinguistics is historical as it is not concerned with the present, but only with (linguistic variation in) the past. This does not mean, of course, that it has nothing important to say about linguistic problems of the present. However, this need not be its focus, and there should be no requirement of present relevance; some questions may only be important and interesting for certain periods. In studying this kind of historical variation it is not restricted to one particular theory of history or one way of doing history; rather it should seek to work within one particular framework that answers its questions in the most convincing or plausible way. Historical sociolinguistics is also not necessarily concerned with diachrony or language change, as Mattheier (1987: 1432) and Townend (2000) suggest. It may also describe socially motivated linguistic variation at one particular point in the past, i.e. the synchronic state of a language and its varieties, irrespective of whether these are dynamic or static. Therefore, the projection of present-day sociolinguistics into the past is only one part of historical sociolinguistics. The discipline as a whole must be more than that. It seeks to develop new ways of doing sociolinguistics; it must shape

What is historical sociolinguistics?

13

its own frame of reference if it is to fully embrace the principles, theories, and nature of history. One major difference between historical sociolinguistics and present-day sociolinguistics, for example, would be the nature of data. While present-day sociolinguists may commonly choose and design their experimental set-up and may therefore determine or alter their data more or less at their liking (see, for example, Johnstone 2000; J. Milroy and L. Milroy 1987), historical sociolinguists have to make do with what is there. They cannot go back to their informants and elicit some more social or linguistic data. They cannot endlessly expand their (necessarily defective) database. In Labov's words, historical linguistics may be seen as "the art of making the best use of bad data" (Labov 1994: 11). It will be argued that this does not preclude linguists from socio-historical studies. On the contrary, the greatest challenge is to develop a framework that underlines the possibilities and relevance at this point (see also Romaine 1982c).

1.2.1. The object of

investigation

Sociolinguistic investigations, in the broadest sense, past and present, may principally deal with all levels of language and linguistic analysis: phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, even pragmatics and discourse. Certain areas lend themselves more easily to quantitative studies, of course. While phonological variables usually show very high token frequencies, (morpho-)syntactic or pragmatic variables are comparatively rare in a given text. But this problem applies to both historical and present-day sociolinguistics. One problem that both present-day and historical sociolinguistics also have to reckon with is the "equivalence of meaning" requirement (Lavandera 1978; Romaine 1982b: 32-35, 1996). This says, in a nutshell, that only those variables can be meaningfully correlated and compared that cognitively or descriptively "mean" the same thing. In phonology, for instance, we currently witness the glottalization of word-medial /t/ in a number of British varieties. This glottalization is determined by both intra- and extralinguistic factors such as phonetic environment, word class, formality of the situation, gender, and education of the speaker. There is no reason to believe that speakers use [bAta] referentially to signify something different from [bA?a], In morphosyntax, the situation is somewhat more complicated. Many sentences or constructions superficially look very similar (e.g., active versus passive voice). But it is far from clear whether these

14

Historical sociolinguistics

actually do mean to the same thing. If it can be established that the two do not cognitively differentiate events or states, they are in principle comparable. If they do, these differences must be taken into consideration first (for an extensive discussion and the conclusion that "functional equivalence" must suffice, see Lavandera 1978). Another problem with which studies in historical morphosyntax are often confronted is the question of grammaticality. Present-day studies can rely on experiments and native speaker intuition as evidence for grammaticality. Obviously, neither of these is available to historical linguists. Thus, historical linguistics generally only has positive evidence available. In other words: whatever construction is actually there in the data should have been grammatical. If some construction does not occur in the data, this does not allow for the conclusion that it was ungrammatical.

1.2.2. Research material Perhaps the most important point to make about evidence for past states of the language is that, until the very end of the nineteenth century, direct (as opposed to reconstructed) evidence is to be found solely in the written record. Thus the most important act of evidential contextualisation needed in an historical study of English is a clarification of the relationship between the written and spoken modes of language. (Smith 1996: 15) Spoken and written: The loci and diffusion of change Although it is true that present-day sociolinguistics is concerned mainly with spoken data and historical sociolinguistics mainly with written documents, this does not necessarily pose a problem. Raumolin-Brunberg argues that one of the major drawbacks of written texts is the "ineviTable temporal gap between the introduction of new forms in speech and their first recordings in written texts" (1996a: 17). This goes hand in hand with Chafe's model of diffusion in speaking and writing (Chafe 1984: 97). In this model (see Figure 2 below), a new form is absent from the language system until it surfaces in "Speaking"; at the same time it remains absent from "Writing". Eventually, however, it may also emerge in "Writing", i.e., it becomes visible in the written mode. The middle period is characterized by some sort of layering, where the form is present in the linguistic system but only surfaces in the spoken mode (for some well argued criticism and valuable refinements of this model, see Krug 2000: 194-198).

What is historical sociolinguistics?

Presence:

Speaking

Absence:

Writing

15

Figure 2. Innovations between Writing and Speaking (Chafe 1984: 97)

Chafe himself suggests two alternative models: Presence:

Speaking

Absence:

Writing

Figure 3. Innovations between speaking and writing, model 2 (Chafe 1984: 98)

The model in Figure 3 shows that a form may be present in both speaking and writing, then suddenly disappear from writing (e.g., for prescriptivist or stylistic reasons), only to re-surface a while later (again, for stylistic reasons). Presence:

Absence:

Writing

Speaking

Figure 4. Innovations between speaking and writing, model 3 (Chafe 1984:99)

The last model (Fig. 4) shows a new form present in writing, but absent from speaking. This may be the case with "changes from above" in highly literate styles, for instance. Then, due to "prohibitions" (Chafe) of whatever nature, this form suddenly becomes obsolete in writing and disappears from the language system, only to reemerge in writing when the decision to stop using it is rescinded. These models seem to miss a few important points. For example, there is a temporal gap between spoken and written language only in some cases. Changes may originate in the spoken mode and may later (if ever) spread

16

Historical sociolinguistics

into the written language. This has been demonstrated convincingly by Samuels (1972: 6), and later on by Smith (1996: 15-17): see line (B), "delayed transmission", in Figure 5 below. Time

Spoken Mode

Written Mode

Figure 5. Changes in the Spoken and Written Medium (Samuels 1972: 6)

Examples of spoken language influencing written language include some of the features of Noah Webster's spelling reform: became , became , and so on. The same holds true for most cases of "phonetic spelling", as they are frequently witnessed today in the context of computer-mediated communication ( is commonly spelled , as , etc.) Note, however, that this need not always happen, and spoken and written language may run on separate tracks for quite a while: [hiLvp] is still, after more than four hundred years, often spelled , despite the fact that the spelling is based on false etymology (the sound was thought to resemble a noise). So, the written mode may be more conservative on average than the spoken one, which in turn may be more prone to change. But some changes originate in the written medium and then spread to the spoken one - see line (C) in Fig. 2.5 - a fact that has been neglected by Chafe (1984: 96). Smith (1996: 15-17) mentions the pronunciation of . The traditional pronunciation is ['weskit], the modern, spelling-oriented one is ['weistjCaut]. Thus, writing may influence speaking.

What is historical sociolinguistics?

17

Spoken and written: the quest for the vernacular (or: why the vernacular is not the Holy Grail) Sociolinguists deal with language variation, and in doing so, it seems sensible to assume that no utterance can be purely referential/denotational or completely "style-less". Every utterance is located in and influenced by the Hymesian coordinates: message, form, topic, genre, channel, speaker, setting (see Traugott and Romaine 1985: 8-9). Labov has insisted from very early on that speech styles may be arranged on a linear continuum from the most public, monitored and constrained ("high") style to the most private, least monitored, and relaxed ("low") style (Labov 1972a, 1972b). The least monitored, most private, and most relaxed style is commonly defined as the "vernacular".1 Wardaugh summarizes the key characteristics of this style in the Vernacular Principle: The style which is most regular in its structure and in its relation to the history of the language is the vernacular, that relaxed spoken style in which the least conscious attention is being paid to speech. (Wardaugh 1998: 18) The image invoked is one of a line with two endpoints, one signifying the highest style, the other one the lowest style, or vernacular: • • Vernacular

Standard (Written) English

Labov, Wardaugh, and with them many others, claim that the vernacular is the most interesting, if not the only interesting speech style, since it gives researchers "the most systematic data for [their] analysis of linguistic structure" (Labov 1972b: 208). Appealing as this notion of the least monitored variety might be, J. Milroy (1992a: 66) has pointed out that this concept of a vernacular style must necessarily be an idealization, just like "social class" or "dialect". Any sociolinguistic interview, in fact any speech situation, may interfere with the speakers' speech monitoring, and it is virtually impossible to tell when speakers are most relaxed. Therefore, the quest for the vernacular must be a futile one. What can be observed, however, is a number of structured varieties or '"real language in use' ... on a continuum of relative closeness to, or distance from, the idealized norm, or (in some cases) the idealized standard language" (J. Milroy 1992a: 66, emphasis original). In other words, if the varieties of a language are thought to be arranged in a linear fashion, there is no way of telling what the vernacular endpoint of this line is, so that the result is a vector:

18

Historical

sociolinguistics

'Greater Vernacularity'
Λ r Ο

+

C O 0) Ο (Π Ο

Cluster*

Contacts

(Inter-) national National High Prestige No

Local/none Low Prestige Yes

Local/none

Rare

Frequent

Ο Local/none Low Prestige Yes

Local/none

Rare

Family

(Inter-) national National High Prestige No

Frequent

Other

>> c

Family

Single

Local/none Low Prestige Yes

Local/none

Rare

Other

Village

Married

High Male Higher Low/none Single

Low Female Lower High

(Inter-) national National High Prestige No

Frequent

Family

Ο

Other

Village

Married

Low Male Higher High

Local/none Low Prestige Yes

Local/none

Rare

Family

Village

Married

Single

Overall networkstructure Close-knit I Loose-knit Female Male Lower Higher Low/none High

(Inter-) national National High Prestige No

Frequent

Other

Ö

Reference group Travel frequency Travel destinations

Village

(Λ •ϊ ίο 4> Δ ε 3 Ζ

Married

e υ Ο

Single

Ρu1 υ -3 υ >>

High Female Lower Low/none

!s '5 ο

Low Female Lower Low/none

"3 1ΙΟ 's U 1. £ ο £ υ

High Male Higher High

>·> ΙΟ Λ 'S

Gender Education8 Literacy Marital Status

V1

Variables

Social network analysis

-o e ca

3

60

Έ te o. e ο

§ö ß

59

•2

ε: § cd Ο C Υ)

cS « e ^ I ο ο S w ω u, ο .b^ —. co ca ο .. Ο μ § ω ο Sä η SG ^ ο ω ω -ω Ο caβ -C

Ή 3 § C3^ Μ Ο > 3α

£ ρ

υ CS Si

- £" ^ ο,* ^Ί ™ Μ ΙΛ C - 1-> j- CS C ο s Μ Ä « _ _ _ _ — eji Vi/Scή ^f "Λ ^ no "Λ O ^N 2 ι- ^r ^r ^h O· C^· c^· c^·

« C ^ ο (U _> 13

c ο Τ3 >Λ ω Χ

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ε

CS

β

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ω

£

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κ .ο β . Grantham' StoneV ^ ^I / - ΛIStamford , ^Coleshill/'Xl^^roVviSiiftxd ) 3irm\ngham; \ ^ \ /Werstonl

/^tford

en

Clyro, StD^ids Carmaräen®!/—Twd Llandeilo Haverfordwest

/"Droitwich.-^ ^^N0rtWpton\ —^tawmarfc«; Worcester* ^ /^-CaxtoiA (Cambridge Hereford . / ~ ,•raclcley ,. -, ' -,X „„,,, „ . Ä r d ,Xfy*™ Newent.. //Tewkesbury / L-1Barkwsry Glouccst^^,.^ Bristoli—

SffiiSL^ Sa lisbury_

English

Map 3.

Äton .'Winchester 'V

Alresfonl

- Dow Winchelsea,

Channel

Map of main roads in Medieval England and Wales (Griffiths 1996: 183), based on H. Rothwell, English Historical Documents, Volume III. London: Methuen. Reprinted in Kenneth O. Morgan (ed.) The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain (1996). By permission of Oxford University Press.

90

Personal pronouns

For modern England, Trudgill was able to demonstrate the importance of the London-Norwich route (cf. Chambers and Trudgill 1994: 196-202; Trudgill 1974a, 1974b). Labov in his Atlas of North American English was able to trace the spread of a number of features and isoglosses along telecommunication lines, highways, and airport connections in the United States (Labov 1974, 2000, 2001: 19). It should be noted, however, that both Trudgill and Labov demonstrated that, while these routes were important, linguistic features were not found "on the way from A to B", but only in A and B. A new feature χ would appear first in London, then in Norwich, and then in rays around these centers (see Trudgill 1974a for a similar study on the Brunlanes Peninsula in Norway; cf. Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 2003). In the Middle Ages, before the advent of fast travel by car, train, or plane, the situation must have been different. While a three-to-four-hour drive from London to Norwich has hardly any impact on the villages that lie on the way, it seems quite likely that a three or four day journey from London to Norwich left its mark on the countryside that was passed. A journey on horseback took three to four days (for a detailed account see Bennett 1995: 128-64). It must have taken about a week by coach, and even longer on foot. On top of that, one should not forget that travel as such was a prestigious - and dangerous - activity, and that wealthy travelers were generally welcomed and admired, so that accommodation to their speech was not unlikely. The Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, henceforth LALME, (Mcintosh et al. 1986) was a first step to demonstrate the validity of general dialectological principles for historical languages, a development which has been taken up and developed further by studies such as Smith (1996: 91-93), Keene (2000), and the Helsinki School (Nevalainen 2000a, 2000b; Nevalainen and RaumolinBrunberg 2000). For a collection of more recent essays on the Atlas itself, see Riddy (1991); for a general discussion of the LALME methodology with regard to th- versus h-, see Morse-Gagne (1992). Map 3 above shows how London and Norwich were linked by only one main road in the high and late Middle Ages, and how London had its connections to the north. Geographical expertise lacking, it may be suggested that these roads map more or less onto the spread of Λ-forms given in LALME maps 1 and 2. There are clusters of forms around London, and around northeast Norfolk, mainly Norwich. We can see a trail of -use leaving (or coming to?) London from the north, with heavier concentrations around Cambridge, a Y-formed split in the Cambridge area with one arm leading northwest towards the Midlands and one arm leading northeast towards

The development ofpersonal pronouns

91

Norwich. Norwich then, is approached from two sides: first from the London-Cambridge-Norwich route, but also from the north side along the coast. Apart from that, there are several rays from various spots leading to the coast, presumably harbor towns. This again suggests that the spatial diffusion principles can indeed be found in these data What is different from our present-day results is that features do not "jump" as clearly or as often as they do today (for more detailed discussions and examples, see Bergs, submitted).

1.2. Sources: Internal factors Some questions arise in the context of the new forms: are we dealing with simple borrowing through direct language, or at least dialect contact (as long term accommodation between dialects, cf. Trudgill 1986), or was the change maybe only initiated by borrowing, but then spread through analogical leveling due to language internal factors in each speech community individually (Howe 1996: 156-157)? The distribution of forms in the LALME suggests that speakers in the south of England from around 1200 to 1400 lived indeed with mixed paradigms, and that they adopted only nominative they through direct (or maybe even indirect) borrowing from another language. The rest of the forms may have been adopted either through dialect contact (certainly not language contact), or through independent analogical formation. The fact that in many areas the pronoun forms were not substituted across the paradigm in one fell swoop but rather one after another with more than three hundred years between the substitution of the subject and the object form rather leads to the impression that we are dealing with a case of analogical leveling that was facilitated maybe through dialect contact and migration from north to south. In other words: this appears to be a case of Andersen's scenario of dialect boundary displacement through simplification, involving areal diffusion through norm blurring (see Andersen 1988: 45-46). With regard to the general data given above, it may be posited that the development followed an implicational hierarchy of the following form: Object 13 Possessive 3 Subject (read: Possessive implies Subject, Object implies both Possessive and Subject substitution)

92

Personal pronouns

The reasons for this direction must still be established. Morse-Gagne, for example, notes that certain manuscripts (79 texts out of a sample of 253 linguistic profiles in the LALME) show a reversal of the final two positions, i.e. Possessive z> Object 3 Subject. However, she is also able to show that many of these reversals are based either on spurious results from the LALME investigation, or very small numbers of //z—forms, which may in turn result from textual transmission and not genuine linguistic production. A small residue of texts that do indeed show a reversal of the hierarchy can be localized in such a way as to suggest that this reversed hierarchy was a feature of a later spread of the form in the south (Morse-Gagne 1992; personal communication, January 2002). Also, it may be asked whether this implicational hierarchy is based on averaged data from language communities or whether it reflects (universal) cognitive factors in the single speaker. Moreover, one may wonder whether speakers distinguished between direct and indirect objects in the substitution process, since the morphological distinction between the two had already been leveled in the late Old English paradigms. In the following, these questions need to be discussed before we can turn to further evidence from the Paston letters. Why should people change their pronominal system in the first place? The borrowing of pronouns across languages is indeed a rare process that hints either at some very intimate contact between the two cultures (Leith 1997: 102; Jespersen 1894: 172-174 - see Thomason and Kaufman 1991: 323; J. Milroy and L. Milroy 1985: 378 for exactly the opposite point of view), or maybe at least some "problematic" state of affairs in the language that had to be compensated for by adopting these forms (Howe 1996; Ritt 2001; Samuels 1972; Thomason and Kaufman 1991). The former approach falls into the realm of sociolinguistics and leaves us where we started: was this change a true borrowing in the south? Also, it does not answer the question of the actuation of this change, but rather only describes its implementation. The latter approach begs the question whether there is indeed something like "therapeutic" or "prophylactic" language change. Therapeutic changes would simply correct a "dispreferable" state of the language, such as unwanted homophonies or ambiguities (see Martinet 1955; Lass 1997b), in general: anything that runs counter to the principle of maximal biuniqueness (cf. Stein 1985b), and maybe also the principle of least effort (cf. Keller 1990). "Prophylactic" changes effectively do the same, but they step into action before the critical situation occurs in the first place. Note that one argument brought up against prophylactic mecha-

The development of personal pronouns

93

nisms of change is the problem of psychological reality: how could speakers actually know what the changes that are about to happen might actually lead to? And how would they know how to avoid the problems they might have spotted beforehand? And how does a speech community agree upon the proper remedy? Prophylaxis of this kind can be regarded as highly implausible, as it endows speakers with far too much foresight and circumspective power. We may therefore conclude that in all likelihood, language change can only act therapeutically, if it acts at all in such a way.

1.2.1. Therapeutic change in the pronoun system What, then, was there to be treated therapeutically? It has been argued that the loss of case and gender distinctions in late OE led to a situation where potentially problematic ambiguities in the pronoun system arose. The loss of clear vowel distinctions in the CV-pronouns of late OE and the leveling of the accusative-dative distinction led to the situation illustrated in Table 16. Here, generally ambiguous forms are printed in bold italics, small caps mark potential singular-plural ambiguity. Table 16 below shows that the reduction of final (i.e. mostly unstressed) vowels in the early Middle English period may indeed have caused problems in various places in the paradigm. In the nominative case, feminine and masculine singular and plural became indistinguishable, just as in the possessive. Dative and accusative have merged, but retain unambiguous plural forms. The loss of a singularplural distinction in the pronouns may even have been tolerable had there been a fixed word order and full verbal inflection. Neither is the case: we still have free or at least non-fixed word order in Early Middle English and notice a gradual loss of verbal inflections. It must be added, though, that the plural morpheme on verbs was one of the last to be lost, although a weakening of the system was surely felt already in the fourteenth century (Lass 1992: 138). The high tide of pronominal substitution coincides with a marked increase in zero plural inflection on present tense verbs in the fifteenth century (Lass 1999: 160-166). All this taken together makes it at least imaginable that some miscommunication might have occurred due to these changes and that - subconsciously? - remedy for this problematic state might have been sought, maybe by introducing the new Norseinfluenced pronouns in the northern dialects (particularly Northumbria) for the ambiguous OE nominative forms (Thomason and Kaufman 1991: 324). Ritt (2001), however, rightly points out that the Scandinavian forms

94

Personal

pronouns

Table 16. Third person pronouns from late Old to Early Middle English Old English (simplified)

Singular

Masculine Feminine Neuter

Plural

Nominative

Genitive

Dative

Accusative

He

His

Him

Hine

Heo Hyt

Hire Hys

Hyre Him

HT Hyt

Heo

Heora

Heom

Heo

His, hise, hies, hys, hisen

Him, hym(e), (hem)

Hin(e), hene

Early Middle English Masculine

Singular

Feminine

Neuter

HE,

hee,

HA, A

HEO, hu(e), HIR(E), hires, HIR(E), HERES, hur(e), hi HEREN HER(E)

HO, HE, HA,

Hit, hyt, it, A

His, hise, hies, hys HER(E),

Plural

hor,

HEO, HO,

heore, har,

HE, HA, A

HIR(E), HERES, HEREN

Heo, hi, HA

Him, Hit, hyt, it, hym(e), a hit, hyt, it Heom, Heom, hem, hem, hom, hom, ham ham

were introduced at a time when the OE system was still intact. He demonstrates that in OE the adoption of the Scandinavian forms runs counter to the principle of minimal ambivalence and that it reduced biuniqueness instead of increasing it. In OE, there was a unique morph for the category {3Pers}, namely /hV/. With the introduction of the Scandinavian forms, two or even three morphs became available for this one single function: /hV/ and /0V/-/0V/ 15 . What advantage the /0/-/ö/-pronouns had over the OE ones was a phonetically strong onset. In other words: [δ]-[θ] have a universally preferred greater sign prominence than [h] (Ritt 2001: 290291) 16 . It was only when the OE forms lost their inflections that the Scandinavian forms gained some ground. As processing ease and reduced ambiguity in this case are more advantageous for the recipient than for the speaker, Ritt expects the Scandinavian forms to appear first in careful speech and formal registers, where clear communication is important. It should be noted, however, as Thomason and Kaufman have already pointed out, that in the south, particularly Norfolk, the ambiguities did not

The development of personal pronouns

95

cause as dramatic changes as in the north; in fact, people in Norfolk lived quite happily with what must have been homophonous forms for him and them (Thomason and Kaufman 1991: 324). In Ritt's account, we would have to say they felt no need for strong, recognizable forms. For Thomason and Kaufman, this leads to some suspicions concerning the harmful homophony argument and the breakdown of communication, which might have necessitated therapeutic change. In any case, these facts show that potential ambiguities have only little explanatory value and may only account for changes in a post hoc fashion. At around 1200, the first /A-pronouns (nominative forms) begin to appear in the written records. As has been shown above, it is quite likely that they had been present in the spoken language system in the north long before, but we lack written evidence for that (which, in turn, would support Ritt's account, as phonetic sign prominence cannot have been important in written communication). The forms move southwards along the main communication lines and spread through contact between speakers of Northern Middle English, maybe "Norsified Middle English", and the rest of the nation. The implicational hierarchy observed in the change may be due to two factors. First, considering the data in Table 16, it becomes clear that the nominative forms were most likely to be ambiguous, at least in their unstressed forms: - maybe realized as [?a] or [ha] - could be anything from nominative masculine or neuter singular, through accusative feminine singular to nominative plural. The possessive plural forms, however, could only be confused with their feminine singular counterparts. The object plural forms were - at least in the early ME period - clearly distinguishable by word final , although even here minor problems in the area of masculine object singular and plural are to be expected: [him], [ham] and [am] were potentially ambiguous, just as PdE unstressed [am] (Wales 1994). PdE [am], by the way, also serves to illustrate the generally non-explanatory value of ambiguity factors in language change. PdE unstressed [am] arguably goes back to OE and thus has been around in the language system for several hundred years as a potentially ambiguous form without being subject to change. Utterances like [aidgaskvam] must (still) be disambiguated through context as either Ijust love him or Ijust love them. In sum, the Scandinavian pronouns must have been borrowed initially in the north at a time when the OE pronoun system was still intact. They most probably did not have the advantage of disambiguating a defective system, but of offering more phonetic material and stronger sign prominence.

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When the OE system changed due to phonetic erosion, the Scandinavian system offered greater distinctiveness and thus maybe won over the native system. It is important to stress that these changes must have started in the spoken language first and that the very scarce data from this period makes them very difficult to record, if at all. The nature of the changes (advantageous to the recipient) suggests that the new forms spread first in more formal spoken language functions.

1.2.2. Analogy One factor that has not been mentioned so far is analogy. Analogy has always been regarded as a very strong factor or mechanism in language and language change (see, for instance, Antilla 1977, 2003; Hock 2003; Lahiri 2000a; Mayerthaler 1980; Vincent 1974). The most popular and often cited form of analogy is proportional analogy (Lahiri 2000). It works, basically, as a mathematical (geometrical) equation: "Analogy": 3/5 = x/10 => 3/5*10 = χ => χ = 6 The variable χ is determined as proportional to the division given on the left of the equation. The principle is, of course, "as a is to b, so is c to d" (Lahiri 2000: 1). One of the most frequently cited examples of analogy in morphology is the formation of the plural, as in: dog : dog-s = cow : cow-s If the plural on {dog} is formed with a [z], the same should apply to {cow}, therefore: [kauz]. Children often try to create analogical plural forms, as in {mouse} :[mauziz] (in analogy, for instance, to {house} :[hauziz]). Adults use regular plural forms (i.e. those created by analogy) with foreign or difficult words they don't know or which have accumulated a certain degree of opacity (Mayerthaler 1980: 89): {fungus} :[függasiz] (instead of [fuqgai]). Morphological processes like this are commonly treated under the heading of "natural morphology", as they, arguably, reflect some natural principles and mechanisms in human cognition (Mayerthaler 1980: 83; cf. Antilla 2003; Dressier 2003). As far as natural morphology makes predictions about language change, it predicts

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that eventually regular, analogical forms win over irregular ones, at least in infrequent items (Bybee 2001: 12; 2003; Corbett et al. 2001). When the principle of analogy is applied to the southern Middle English pronoun system, it becomes obvious that the mixed paradigm found in Chaucer and his contemporaries seemed to be disadvantageous (Table 17). Table 17. Pronoun 'optimization' in Middle English

Nominative Genitive Dative Accusative

Old English

Middle English

Present-day English

Hi(e) Hire/heora Him/heom HJ(e)

Pei Her(e) peitHem ->pe(i)m Hem pe(i)m

They Their Them Them

This can also be expressed in an equation they : (nom) = χ : (obj). The only problem is that speakers would have to have an idea what (obj) must have looked like. In other words, they would have to be able to segment {they} into two separate morphs, one for {THIRD PERSON PLURAL} and the other for {NOMINATIVE} in order to create an analogy in {THIRD PERSON PLURAL}and {OBJECT}. In addition, they would have to have a separate morph (or morpheme) stored for {OBJECT} in order to perform this operation. This would not be a problem in agglutinating languages, but it is indeed a problem for Middle English. It is possible that speakers interpreted {R} as possessive, and {M} as object markers (cf. {heR}, {youR} or {hiM} in the singular) - and such a model of PdE morphology was proposed by Trager (1967). This would then allow for a simple analogical formation: ö ö

e - y : nom = ö e - y : nom = ö

e - m : obj e - r : poss (cf. Howe 1996: 40-41)

This seems plausible for the (late) OE situation, where adjectives still had complex inflectional patterns, and plural possessive and object (dative) were marked by {-ra} and {-um} respectively. With the loss of these inflectional patterns, however, it seems unclear how speakers could have realized that {r} and {m} represent inflectional morphs. Thus, this argument seems hardly feasible, as it would strain the capacities of the morphological toolkit quite a bit, especially in a situation when the linguistic system as a whole was very much in flux. Also, the morphemic status of some of Trager's units is very much in doubt. Mühlhäusler & Harre (1990) point

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Personal pronouns

out that Trager's morphemic decomposition runs into serious trouble when put to two tests: (i) what do the single morphemes refer to? What is the meaning that they are supposed to bear? (ii) what are the smaller units of, e.g., [wi:] (as opposed to [AS] or [aus]) and how are these forms logically related? It may therefore be concluded that this model is not truly helpful in accounting for the developments at hand.

1.2.3. Formatives and analogical leveling More realistic and plausible seems to be an appeal to the unit of the "formative" as it has been suggested by Pike (Pike 1963; Howe 1996). Pike characterized formatives as "some kind of meaning elements with a strong or weak signaling value" or "reminders". They do not carry morphemic status as such, but only function as intuitive reminders or "sounds like" elements. Bauer described them as "a recurrent element of form, independent of whether it is an empty morph or whether it realises some morpheme" (Bauer 1988: 243). For some informative discussion and critique of the formative concept, particularly in its application to OE data, see Colman (1985). In some respect, they resemble the sound bites of connectionism, or wickelphones. The wickelphone as a concept goes back to the psychologist Wickelgren, who developed this unit in order to account for associative patterns in verbal behavior (Wickelgren 1969). Its main use, however, was in the connectionist model in parallel-distributed processing (Rumelhart et al. 1986). A wickelphone is a string that consists of three elements, or trigrams. These elements may be sounds, characters, or word boundaries. The word , for instance, contains the wickelphones {#st, str, tri, rip, ip#}. The order is completely irrelevant here - the word can be uniquely reconstructed from its trigram set. In this framework, "words" are not stored as independent, free elements; "any given word is encoded as a pattern of node activations over the whole set of Wickelphone nodes - as a set of Wickelphones" (Pinker and Prince 2001). However, since this first model seems to invoke serious problems when put into practice (see Pinker and Prince 2001; Rumelhart et al. 1986), Rumelhardt et al. decomposed the notion of wickelphones again and suggested wickelfeatures instead. These are sequences of three phonetic features, one from each of the elements of the wickelphone. The wickelphone {tri}, for instance, would contain the wickelfeatures "stop, lateral, vowel", "voiceless, voiced, high" and so on.17 How does that relate to formatives in general and personal pronouns in

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particular? Formatives as such seem to have suffered generally from their very limited formalization (especially in contrast to items such as phonemes and morphemes). Wickelphones, or -features, however, show that formatives, too, may have a psychological real-life correlate, maybe even more so than phonemes and morphemes. Words can not only be decomposed into morphemes and phonemes, but can also be accessed, produced, and processed through a network of wickelphones or wickelfeatures. Howe, in summarizing Pike, distinguishes between three basic types of formatives: Vector formatives ("a formative which occurs in every cell of a particular vector (row or column) ..."), Single Cell formatives ("[which] is found in only one pronoun in the whole paradigm"), and Ordinary Formatives (which refers to forms that are neither of the former two). In considering the ME pronoun paradigm, several potential formatives become visible (Table 18). Table 18. ME pronoun system (simplified, adapted from Howe 1996: 138) Nominative lsg Ic, ik, I 2sg Pu, pou, you, ye 3sg m He, hee, ha 3sgf (s)cho, s(c)he, heo 3sgn Hit, hyt, it lpl We 2pl 3e> ye 3pl

Object Me Pe, ye Hine, him Heo, hi, hise, hire, hure Hit, hyt, it, him, hym Us, ous jow, you

Possessive Min, my Pin, pi, thy His, hise, hisen Hire, here, hires His, hise, hys Ure, owre, oures, ouren Sure, youre, oure, yours, youren pai, they, thei, heo, Tham, paim, pem, hem, Thair, per, theyr, here, ho hom, hise, hysen hor, peires, peirem heres, heren

With the introduction of the new forms, the following formatives can be distinguished: a) [-m] b) [h-]

object ordinary formative 3ps masculine /feminine (=animate) vector formative (assuming that [h-] was lost in the third person singular neuter) c) [m-] lps object/possessive ordinary formative d) [ H 2pl vector formative e ) [ ό ]—[θ—1 3pl vector formative f) ...

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Personal pronouns

What matters for the present argument is only point e) in the list: the formation of a vector formative for the third person plural through analogical leveling. This vector formative may be regarded as a facilitating device for communication and language learning (even more so as [δ]-[θ] had a greater phonetic signaling value than [h]). Howe pointed out: large inflectional systems may exhibit idiosyncratic and irregular pronouns while systems with little inflection rather show base plus inflection patterns or stronger formatives. How does that relate to the idea of connectionism and Wickelphonology outlined above? The original OE system of third person plural pronouns could be uniquely represented by {#he} or {#hi} sequences, which would make (lexical/phonological) access fairly easy. It should be noted, however, that the phonetic sequence of [h] and [e]/[i] is acoustically anything but optimal and that [h] in this particular case seems to be fairly unsTable (cf. Kohler 1990; Lass 1976: 158-159; Lass 1984: 179, 334; Lutz 1991; Mielke 2001). Once the Scandinavian pronouns were adopted for the most frequently used pronoun form (in subject function) a mixed system arose - which may be optimized. Within the connectionist framework we may assume that the frequent production and perception of the [θ]-[δ] form(s) (or {#öe} Wickelphones) may have led to a strengthening of that connection, which in turn may have facilitated a change of the pronoun system in that direction. It seems also possible to incorporate the variability of the initial fricative, i.e. [Θ] and [δ]. One would only have to assume that both carry the Wickelfeatures [+dental][+fricative], which make them quite similar. Overall, the pronouns generally consist of their "final parts" {em#, er#}, a "middle part" {0/öer}/{her}, {0/öem}/{hem}, and a "first part" {#he} in OE, and {#0/öe}/{#he} in ME (admittedly simplifying somewhat and neglecting any schwas and reduced forms that may have been present). From this, it follows that the introduction of a single Wickelphone, or respective features, and the strengthening of that connection may have sufficed for a change in the system. This makes a change in this direction, once the subject form was adopted, quite understandable and may even account for the spatio-temporal pattern and diffusion of these forms, which simply depended on the exposition of speakers and hearers to these (new) forms (note, again, the compatibility with Andersen's Boundary Displacement through Simplification; see Andersen 1988). A question that remains is whether the implicational hierarchy established above is based on and therefore also reflects actual cognitive principles (such as naturalness) in the individual, or only mere coincidences in

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averaging the available data. The data from the Paston letters will help to answer this question.

1.2.4. Frequency and analogy One further factor that has already been mentioned in passing which might have played a role in the ordering of the implicational hierarchy given above is sheer frequency of forms. Maiiczak (1980) has already pointed out that the frequency of certain items makes them more (or less) susceptible to linguistic change (see also Bybee 2003; Bybee and Hopper 2001). High frequency auxiliaries, for instance, are very prone to phonetic erosion, but almost immune against lexical substitution through borrowing. Low frequency learned nouns are often subject to morphological changes (e.g., regularization of irregular plural forms) and lexical substitution, but do not readily undergo gradual phonetic erosion (cf. Berg 1998: 241-254). 18 In the context of the observed pronominal changes in Middle English, the hypothesis would be that the forms that were substituted first must have been less frequent. This is obviously not the case. If we turn to PdE, nominative they occurs about 10,000 times in one million words of conversation and 5,000 times in fiction (Biber et al. 1999: 334). Them occurs about 4,000 times in conversation and 3,000 times in fiction. Their occurs roughly 500 times in one million words of conversation and 2,000 times in fiction. If we assume that personal letters range text typologically somewhere between conversation and fiction,19 we arrive at a frequency ranking of they>them>their. This in turn would clearly run counter to the developments observed. The figures from PdE may be supplemented with figures from the Paston corpus. Fig. 16 below lists all the occurrences of third person plural object and possessive forms (subject forms were not investigated, as the Pastons only had //z-forms here). More than 870 object forms can be found in the corpus, but only about 340 possessive forms (i.e., 3,480 object and 1,360 possessive forms per million words of text). If the idea "the more frequent the easier accessible" is accepted, then the object forms should change earlier and/or more rapidly. As they do not (see below), this cannot be the right explanation. The counter-claim "the more frequent the less susceptible to change" also does not hold, as nominative forms, the most frequent of the three according to PdE data, changed first. The latter idea may be saved, though, if the principles elaborated above are brought into play. The most frequent item, the subject form, was most prone to

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Personal pronouns

phonetic erosion and was thus most likely to be substituted by a form with higher signaling value, i.e. Scandinavian they. Once this had happened, the other forms may have followed suit because of different principles, like analogy, the (natural?) appeal of uniform paradigms, and effective processing in connectionism. Still, this does not explain why the low frequency possessive form changed earlier than the more frequent object form. In conclusion, we might say that the OE personal pronouns in the whole third person plural paradigm were first substituted in the north of England before the twelfth century and in direct language contact with speakers of Proto Norse. These changes, however, can only be attested in written documents well after the twelfth century. This may be either due to these changes taking place in oral registers or due to our lack of written data from the crucial periods. Once suppletion in the plural was completed, the nominative form spread south, most likely through dialect contact between speakers of northern and southern varieties of Middle English. The substitution process was facilitated, if not even triggered by phonetic erosion in the nominative in late Old and early Middle English. The rest of the paradigm was introduced in the south approximately 200 to 250 years later, i.e., not before the fifteenth century. There is no reason to believe that the completion of the change was solely caused by further language contact with the North (although the Wars of the Roses may have triggered considerable migration from north to south during that time). Rather, it is to be expected that at least two factors contributed to this change. First, a uniform plural paradigm seems desirable form the viewpoint of natural morphology and may be based on natural needs for formatives, even more so perhaps as some forms were (still) ambiguous; second, recent migration may have confronted speakers of southern varieties, who had mixed paradigms, with growing evidence for uniform f/z-based plural paradigms from speakers of northern varieties. One should not forget that pronominal systems are generally very central aspects of languages and not readily available for change - which partly helps to account for the fact that speakers in the south lived happily with potentially ambiguous object and possessive forms for more than 200 years. However, these two factors, language internal and external, taken together may help to understand why the shift was nevertheless completed more than three 300 years after the nominative forms were first borrowed from Norsified Middle English. But how do the Pastons fit into this picture? Do we find further evidence for the developmental mechanisms at work? How do the systemic accounts given so far graft onto real life data of the period? Is there a psycholinguistic reality

Pronouns in the Paston letters

103

behind the pathways sketched so far - in other words: are we dealing with real implicational hierarchies or only statistical probabilities?

2.

Pronouns in the Paston letters

2.1. General developments Figure 16 below shows the total distribution of selected personal pronouns. From a global perspective, the situation is this: on the one hand, the traditional OE pronoun form hem20 is used only slightly less often than the northern innovative form them (398 versus 478 occurrences, respectively), the northern innovative form their, on the other hand, is much more common than the traditional OE form her(e), (258 versus 85 occurrences). 600

398 400 200 0

w m

478 258

Figure 16. Personal Pronouns in the Paston letters (totals) The only form for the third person plural subject is northern they. This distribution confirms Lass's diagnosis: "nominative />forms appear first, then the genitive, then the oblique" (1992: 120). As for the dialectal development of these forms, the Pastons fit into the general picture given in the handbooks: their outweighs her(e) by more than 4:1, whereas them and hem are still on a par. The Pastons, as a fifteenth-century Norfolk family (i.e. East Midland speakers), produced both h- and //z-pronoun forms, although their linguistic behavior as a family is not as uniform as it might be expected. While the family as a whole seems to confirm the tendencies outlined above, this is only on average. When we zoom in on individual family members, quite a different picture emerges. Even though the process of language change seems to run more or less smoothly and seamlessly on the surface, inter- and even intra-generational differences reveal a much less uniform picture with innovators, fast adopters, and lames.

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Personal pronouns

2.2. Distribution across time Figure 17 below gives the distribution of hem versus them across time in the corpus. It clearly shows how the OE form dominated the scene until about 1467 when them took over (cf. Davis 1954: 56). Up until 1444 only hem can be found (though this is very infrequent due to low overall token frequencies); from 1446 to 1466 both hem and them can be found, but hem dominates, from 1467 to roughly 1474 the situation is reversed, and from 1475 to 1503 them is the only possible form (with 1479 as an exception). 100%

Ί

Figure 17. Distribution of hem through time (in %) With the ten-year periodization (see Table 11 above), the results are even clearer (Figure 18):

1425-1445

1446-1455

1456-1465

Figure 18. Hem and them in periods A I - A VI

1466-1475

1476-1485

1486-1503

Pronouns in the Paston letters

105

The same kind of analysis was carried out with her(e), the traditional form, and their. The results are given in Figures 19 and 20 below.

Figure 19. Distribution of here through time (in %) γ

1

• here

•

- '

B H ·

• their

Ί 1 ΙΟΡ 1425-1445

β

_

• • 1446-1455

1456-1465

m

ΓΊ I u 1

1466-1475

1476-1485

J

r i 1485-1503

Figure 20. Here and their in periods A I - A VI Figures 19 and 20 show that the same tendency can be observed in the change of the possessive pronouns that has already been found with the object pronouns. The only difference is that in the case of the possessive pronouns the takeover was one period earlier. While them took over in period A IV (1466-1475), the change to their took place in period A III (1456-1465), i.e. roughly ten years earlier. This kind of analysis only gives a holistic picture of the developments and of the variation across time, as the change in patterning may be due either to generational shifts, i.e. child-

106

Personal pronouns

based language change (as in Halle 1962; King 1969), or to age-grading, i.e. change in the variational patterns in the individual speakers over time (see Eckert 1998). Thus, an analysis not by arbitrary periods but rather by generations seems necessary and interesting. In the collection of Paston letters we have documents from three generations of family members (see Chapter 3 §3), analyzing the corpus according to these generations may help to develop a clearer picture of generational differences and the adoption of new forms in each generation, as has already been done in contemporary sociolinguistic analyses (cf. Chambers 1999: 146-206; Downes 1998: 48, 223-227; Eckert 1998; Hudson 1996: 56, 84, 125; Labov 1994: 83). Figures 21 and 22 below show that the first generation of the Paston family, i.e. the grandparents, born before c. 1400, showed a strong preference for the /z-forms, while the third generation, their grandchildren, born after c. 1440, showed the same strong preference for the /A-forms. The second generation, born around 1420, seemed to be middling with a slight preference for the /z-forms. In a generative framework, it seems clear that it was the third generation that actually changed their "underlying grammar" according to the evidence they perceived in the performance of their parents and grandparents. So this seems to be a beautiful example of a generational shift as it has already been observed by Raumolin-Brunberg in the Cely letters (Raumolin-Brunberg 1996b: 103).With here and their, the change is even clearer. In the first generation, the th-form is practically non-existent; in the third generation, the /z-form is practically unknown. The second generation again seems to be the middling sort.

Generation I

Generation II

Generation III

Figure 21. Hem and them according to generations (total figures given in the individual column)

Pronouns in the Paston letters

107

100% 80% 60% 40% 20% 0% Generation I

Figure 22.

Generation II

Generation III

and their according to generations (total figures given in the individual column)

Here

It is remarkable that with the possessive pronouns the change seems to have happened much more quickly, within less than twenty years, whereas the object forms varied somewhat longer. Nevertheless, Labov's stipulation that generational change becomes most obvious with morphological and sound change (Labov 1994: 84) is confirmed.

2.3. Individual patterns As has already been pointed out above, the averaging of data in arbitrary periods or generations may indeed hide intragenerational patterns that are interesting or even significant for an analysis of the overall development and its mechanisms. Thus, Table 19 below shows the distribution of the pronoun forms in individual authors. It demonstrates that some family members show considerable variation in their object and possessive forms (such as 2John I or 2Margaret), while others only vary to any noteworthy extent in one of the two ('Agnes, 3John III, 2William II only vary in the object forms; interestingly none of the speakers shows significant variation in the possessive forms only), while yet some others hardly vary at all (3Edmond II, Elizabeth, 3William III, 3John II). Note that 2Edmond, 3 Margery, and 3Walter do not show sufficiently high overall frequencies (N>15) and were thus excluded in the following discussions. Table 20 visualizes the basic variability in individual speakers and shows who is in principle suitable for a study in pronoun variation.

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Personal pronouns

Table 19. Individual pronoun usage (totals) Author 'Agnes 2 Clement 3 Edmond II 2 Elizabeth 2 John I 3 John II 3 John III 2 Margaret 3 Margery 3 Walter 'William I 2 William II 3 William III Total

Hem 12 4

Them 7 1 12 12 33 140 82 126 4 4

94 5 65 190 2 9 8

27 30 478

389

Here 2 1

22 1 2 44 1 13 1 87

Their

4 4 26 69 64 66 1 1 23 8 266

Total 21 6 16 16 175 215 213 426 8 4 23 59 38 1220

Table 20. Variability in individual speakers (summary) Author

Varies in object forms

Varies in possessive forms

'Agnes

0

HI

3

Edmond II

HI

HI

2

Elizabeth

HI

HI

2

John I

0

0

3

John II

HI

HI

3

John III

0

HI

2

Margaret

0

0

'William I

HI

HI

2

William II

0

HI

3

William III

Ξ

HI

0

= varies 13 = does not vary

In the following discussion, I will therefore focus mainly on those informants who do vary to some degree in at least one form: 'Agnes, 2 John I, 3 John III, 2 Margaret, and 2 William II. These will be called the "Variation Group". Their individual patterns are shown again and evaluated in terms of statistical significance in Table 21. The other speakers will be discussed later on.

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109

Table 21. Individual variation in selected speakers Author

Hem

Them

Total

P*

'Agnes 2 John I 3 John III 2 Margaret 2 William II

12 94 65 190 8

1 33 82 126 27

19 127 147 316 35

* ***

Here 2 22

Their 26

44

66

* *** ***

Total 2 48 0 110 0

Ρ n.s. **

*** Total 369 275 644 68 92 160 * [$ χ2 results: *= pai the mater shold do well j-now. Thomas Wy[n]gfeld told me and swore on-to me that when hys maters ayenst yow, that the Kyng and seyd on-to hym a-yen, 'Brandon, thow thou can begyll the Dwk of Norffo/A:, and bryng hym abow[t] the thombe as thow lyst, I let the wet thow shalt not do me so, for I vndyrstand thy fals delyng well j-now' (John Paston III, no. 333, 1469, p. 544/21-28) '... and he gave me this answer, that whether he had spoken to the King or not that the matter should do well now. Thomas Wyngfeld told me and swore to me that in his matters against you, that the King [spoke to him] and said to him again, "Brandon, though thou can beguile the Duke of Norfolk, and wrap him around your finger as thou like, I let thee know thou shalt not do that with me, for I understand thy false dealing well now'".

This, again, is the representation of spoken language from a person of very high social status to somebody inferior. Also, in both cases the speaker has a very negative and reproachful attitude towards the addressee, which may also hint at some pragmatization of the pronoun forms. In sum, thou/thee are in the system but have not yet entered into (or have just left?) the realm of written language proper. The Pastons did write letters to inferiors where they could have employed (even in a reproachful way) thou or thee. The fact that they did not do so shows that their written linguistic system did

Ye and you

131

not allow for this option - neither on the semantic macro-level {ye/thou usage according to status and social roles) nor on the pragmatic micro-level (ye/thou usage according to individual interactions and interactional status - for the distinction, see Jucker 2000). Leith believes that the use of the plural pronoun you as a respectful marker of address was a change led by the most powerful social groups. ... At first, you, as a marker of special esteem, was rare, an emblem of courtly custom; but gradually, relationships such as parent/child, lord/servant, husband/wife were power-coded, in that the former in each pair demanded you, and returned thou. By about 1500 it seems that this practice had been copied by the middle class, and thou was becoming the 'marked' form. It could be used for special effects; moreover, it was the reciprocal pronoun of the lower classes. (Leith 1997: 106)

This appears to be quite an adequate description of what is going on in the Paston letters even though it needs to be added that there obviously was no need for "special effects" in the letters. It seems that the Pastons' letters illustrate the gradual spread of you as a polite form, and the surprising fact that thou has either completely disappeared from their system, or has not set in yet. As thou was (still) available to Shakespeare as marker of either social superiority (thou as address pronoun to inferiors, who had to reciprocate with you), or solidarity, it is not entirely clear and cannot be decided on the present data basis whether the middle-classes joined ranks with the lower-classes and adopted thou/thee/thy/thine as markers of intimacy, or whether they had already abandoned them by the time of the Pastons and the wealth of analyses of address pronouns in Shakespeare only deals with "common lower class usage" (for a detailed analysis and comparison to other early letter collections, see Bergs 2004a).

Chapter 5 Relative clauses

1.

Introduction

One of the many interesting areas of linguistic change in Middle English concerns the formation of relative clauses (RCs). In a nutshell: in OE, the declinable demonstrative pronoun se, the indeclinable particle pe, a combination of both, or zero could be used as relativizers (Quirk and Wrenn 1993: 72; Traugott 1972: 103-106; Traugott 1992: 224-228; Wright and Wright 1908: 231). Present-day English Standard English has "declinable" who (whose/whom), "indeclinable" which and that, and zero. 23 Obviously, massive changes in this central area of grammar must have taken place. From a diachronic perspective, it is important to consider the time before the relevant period in view of the fact that, following the concept of diachronic vectors in synchronic language states (see, e.g., Stein 1985a), certain linguistic developments can already be encoded, in some complex way, in synchronous linguistic structures. 24 There may be certain predetermined breaking points (in German "Sollbruchstellen") in the language system where changes are more likely to happen than elsewhere, and the direction of these changes may be guided not only by universal or typological principles, but also by the synchronic state of the language, as has been demonstrated with evidence from linguistic processing constraints (Berg 1998). In the following, these processes will be investigated, as with the personal pronouns in Chapter 4, on the level of the the language community, of individual social groups, and of individual speakers.

2.

Relativization - some technical remarks

Relativization is one of the most thoroughly studied linguistic phenomena, and the literature on almost every aspect of the topic is abundant. This not only leads to a wealth of material but - (un-)fortunately - also to a multitude of sometimes quite contradictory frameworks, interpretations, definitions, and terminologies. What may be a relative pronoun to one scholar may be a subordinator to another, a particle or complementizer to a third

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and fourth. Thus, a few words need to be said about how a range of terms is to be understood in the present study. "A relative clause (also called 'adjectival clause' in some grammars) is characteristically a postmodifier in a noun phrase" (Biber et al. 1999: 195, emphasis added, ATB). The noun phrase itself contains the antecedent (head), and it has its own specific syntactic function in the superordinate matrix clause. The RC contains the relativizer, which (prototypically) acts as an anaphoric pronoun or particle, and points back to the antecedent. Some grammars distinguish between invariable particles, such as that - or even analyze these as subordin a t e d rather than relativizers (e.g., Allen 1980; Grimshaw 1975; Jespersen 1954; Kruisinga 1924) - and relative pronouns proper, such as who, which show typical pronoun features (e.g., Bianchi 1999; Kayne 1994). For studies that treat that as a pronoun, see Curme (1912) and Quirk (1957); an informative discussion of this "centennial dispute" may be found in van der Auwera (1985) and Ryden (1966: xliv). The present study will simply use the fairly neutral term relativizer and will leave most of the theoretical debates about relative pronouns versus relative particles to others. A few more comments on central issues seem in order, though. The relativizer within the RC has a double function. First, it prototypically refers back to the antecedent. This can be seen, in some cases, in the copying of semantic features from the head noun onto the relativizer (e.g. [+/~animate] or [+/-defmite]). Second, it has its own syntactic function within the RC. This need not be the same as that of its mother NP in the matrix clause. The list of relativizers in standard PdE includes which, who, whose, whom, that, zero, adverbs such as where, when, and the question particle what. The present study will concentrate mainly on that, which, who, whose, whom. Apart from prototypical RCs, which modify noun phrases, at least two more types must be mentioned. First, there are so-called headless RCs, or free RCs (Bresnan and Grimshaw 1978). They are often said to contain their own antecedent as in (1) (1)

I took offence at what John said (McCawley 1988: 417).

Here, what John said semantically functions as some kind of RC. The sentence may easily be transformed into (2) and finally (3): (2) (3)

I took offence at that which John said I took offence at the things which John said

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Examples (2) and (3) then illustrate quite nicely the underlying RC. Closely related is a subform of this type, the generalizing RC in example (4). Here, the relativizer is better substituted by forms like by whatever, whichever etc. instead of that which. (4)

You can count on me, come what may.

Some sentences may be interpreted as either free or generalizing, as in (5): (5)

John liked what I cooked. (Alexiadou et al. 2000: 22)

Example (5) may be interpreted either as (6) or (7): (6) (7)

John liked whatever I cooked. John liked that which I cooked.

In (6), John liked everything the speaker cooked, irrespective of time and place. This is the generalizing interpretation. In (7), John liked the one particular dish the speaker cooked, maybe even in a contrastive sense (the "one-out-of-a-set" effect, i.e., the dish that the speaker cooked, not the one cooked by somebody else). Here we find what can be called a normal free RC, i.e. internally headed, but without generalizing force. An interpretation of (5) would have to rest on co-text and context of the utterance. The third major type of RC are so-called sentential RCs. Here, the antecedent is neither an NP nor is it contained within the RC. Rather, a whole clause, predication, or even sentence can function as antecedent, as in (8): (8)

And then they went back to Liverpool, which was really a bad idea.

Which in (8) obviously refers back to something mentioned previously in the discourse and it should be treated functionally as a relativizer. However, it is neither Liverpool nor they that functions as antecedent, but the whole predication. It is the act of going back to back to Liverpool that was a bad idea. This third type of RC not only differs from the others because of its antecedent, but also because it must necessarily be non-restrictive. One of the most prominent and least disputed assumptions about RCs in English is the distinction between restrictive and non-restrictive ("appositive") RCs (Ball 1996: 228-229). The most common criterion for distinguishing between the two is based on semantics and pragmatics: when the antecedent is identified by the RC, the RC is regarded as restrictive. It lim-

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its the set of possible referents, "defining" or "complementing" the head. When the antecedent is clearly identifiable through context, co-text, shared knowledge, etc., and is therefore only modified, but not identified by the RC, the RC is classified as non-restrictive ("non-defining", "modifying"). Intonation-wise, restrictive RCs in PdE usually - but not always - follow their head noun directly within one single tone unit, while non-restrictive RCs are usually - but not always - introduced by a tone unit boundary, e.g. a pause. This pause is commonly visualized in writing by a comma (cf. Quirk et al. 1985: 1258; Reuter 1936: 3; Ryden 1966: xlv). Huddleston, however, encountered serious problems in his study of written present-day English when using this criterion: In written English - or at least in our scientific corpus - punctuation provides a much less reliable guide than is often supposed ... In general, commas are not used to mark off restrictive ... but, contrary to the prescriptions of normative grammarians, many non-restrictive relatives are not preceded by a comma. (Huddleston 1971: 212) From a generative point of view it has been argued that the pragmasemantic distinction of restrictive versus non-restrictive is also reflected in different syntactic structures and properties (Alexiadou et al. 2000: 31; Stockwell et al. 1973: 422; also compare McCawley 1988: 418^4-20). These features (which, by the way, do not apply to all varieties of English, see Finegan and Biber 1997; Newbrook 1997; Seppänen 1999), have led to the assumption that appositives are not RCs proper. Instead, they are said to form some special paratactic construction more or less independent of the preceding clause. It will be shown in the following that such a clear-cut binary distinction between restrictive and non-restrictive clauses may be very valuable for a theoretical model of sentence structure and production, but that it is also difficult to apply to real historical data since none of the criteria mentioned above can be used as necessary and sufficient diagnostic. In fact, even in PdE they are anything but foolproof: There are nonrestrictive RCs with intonation breaks and restrictive ones without; there are non-restrictive RCs introduced by that (Finegan and Biber 1997; Newbrook 1997); there are restrictive RCs modifying bare names, and appositives on quantified heads. Thus, although generativists tend to assign two very different structures to restrictive and non-restrictive RCs (see Bianchi 1999: 36-37), the distinction is not as straightforward. There remains the philosophical or psycholinguistic question whether the cases that are dubious for the researcher are also dubious for the speaker, and whether this

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vagueness - if it can be attested - is intentional or merely a matter of performance: (9) (10)

Mary knows few boys who are knitting (Φ- Mary knows few boys) Mary knows few boys, who are knitting (=Mary knows few boys) (quoted from Bianchi 1999:36)

Here the distinction is fairly clear proposition-wise and can be expressed in formal logic and in different syntactic structures: (9a) (10a)

[Mary [knows [few boys [who are knitting]]]] [Mary [[knows [few boys]] [the boys are knitting]].

But eventually, one has to see the actual fuzziness of the distinction and acknowledge Jacobson 's dictum that "the transition between Restrictive] and N[on]R[estrictive] is gradual" (Jacobson 1965: 123). This fuzziness can be modeled as a scale with most prototypical and clear-cut cases as boundaries. Some ME sentences provide us with prototypical examples of each category. (11) shows a good example of a clearly non-restrictive RC, while the RC in (12) is undoubtedly restrictive. Non-Restrictive (11) sum of my felawys, whe[che] I suppose schold not lyke yowe some of my fellows, which I suppose should not like you ( 3 John Π 1461,231) Restrictive (12) lkowd not spede to myn jntent the materys that ye sent to me fore I could not speed to my intent the matters that you sent to me for ( 3 John II 1461,231) But quite a few utterances may be quoted from the present corpus in which the strict classification proves to be very complicated: (13)

And I send you a copy of the warant that they were a-restyd by, &c. And I send you a copy of the warrant that they were arrested by, &c. ( 2 Margaret 1465, 183)

Were they arrested by the copy that she sends, or by the warrant, of which she sends a copy? This question has consequences for the classification of

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this clause as restrictive or non-restrictive RC, and for determining the definiteness of the antecedent. Compare example (14): (14)

Item, I most haue myn jnstrumentys hydder why che are in the chyst in my chambre at Norwyche, whyche I praye yow and Berney togedre, joyntly but natt seuerallye, to trusse in apedde... Also, I must have my instruments here which are in the chest in my chamber at Norwich, which I pray you and Berney together, jointly but not severally, to throw in a pad... ( 3 John II 1473,282)

In (14), it is far from clear whether the first whyche should be interpreted as restrictive or non-restrictive; neither context nor co-text provide the necessary information, so that it depends upon shared knowledge between speaker/author and hearer/addressee ( 3 John II and his brother 3 John III, respectively) what instruments are meant, and whether "whyche are in the chyst in my chambre at Norwyche" is only intended as additional information. Fortunately, ambiguous cases like this are relatively rare in the corpus and constitute not more than approximately five percent of all cases (see below for precise figures). Nevertheless, these ambiguous cases make it necessary to analyze and interpret each and every instance individually. In (14), for instance, the clause was interpreted as restrictive. In Jacobson's framework one could even say that the sentence is not actually "ambiguous" but rather simply in the middle of a scalar continuum between restrictive and non-restrictive RCs, with "these two qualities more or less cancelled out" (Jacobson 1965: 125): Restrictive Examples (12)

Non-restrictive (14)

(13)

(11)

As tagging, however, requires mostly binary information (restrictive or non-restrictive), decisions must be made wherever possible, and cases that were not to be decided on the basis of co-text and context finally had to be excluded from the main body of data. Further complications arose from very complex passages containing more than one RC, as in example (15). (15)

I mervell moche I here no word from you in writyng sith the letter 0 I sent you be Symme weche he delyuerd you at London, wherin I sent you word that I desired to knowe how ye wold that I, and other weche ye wold, shulde do for you here bothe for your liflode and for other thynges and also for the mater be-twix your vncle and you, and

138

Relative clauses also be-twix yow and other folkes; for, as God defende, and ought come to you but weele nowther I nor non other that I knowe pat owyth yow wery goode wille wot not in what cace ye stonde nor how ye wold it shulde be dalte wyth, nouther in lyfelode nor in othyr thynges, weche is ryght hevy to me for to remembre concederyng the viage weche ye be in nough at this tyme. Ί marvel much I hear no word from you in writing since the letter I sent you by Symme which he delivered you at London, wherein I sent you word that I desired to know what you would like that I, and others which you want, should do for you here both for your livelihood and for other things and also for the matter betwixt your uncle and you, and also betwixt you and other folks; for, as God defend, and ought come to you but well neither I nor no other that I know that owes you very good will knows not in what case you stand nor how you would it should be dealt with; neither in livelihood nor in other things, which is right difficult for me to remember considering the journey which you are in now this time.' ( 2 Margaret Paston 1475, 225)

In this passage of only 144 words, we find no fewer than seven RCs (ignoring all the forms that were not investigated in this study: what, how, wherein, etc.). The average sentence in the corpus contains only one or two RCs; sentences with three or more RCs are not infrequent, though. These sentences naturally were hard to tag mainly because of the difficulties in keeping track of antecedents. Moreover, the situation is complicated by the fact that modern principles of punctuation (which are already unreliable in themselves, see above) had not yet been established in ME, so that the presence or absence of commas does not help in interpreting a given sentence, just as pronunciation clues are simply not available (cf. Romaine 1980: 82). A slight tendency has been noted to use commas to separate whclauses from the rest of the sentence, but this is only a tendency and cannot serve as a reliable criterion.

3.

Relativization and the history of English

As has already been mentioned, there were at least four different forms of relativization available in the Old English period:

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a) se relatives (declinable demonstrative se functioning as a pronoun proper) b) se pe relatives (a combination of declinable se and indeclinable pe) c) pe relatives (introduced by indeclinable pe) d) 'zero' relatives where the relativizer is not realised or deleted (see Fischer et al. 2000: 58; Quirk and Wrenn 1993: 72; Traugott 1972: 103-106; Traugott 1992: 223-228; Wright and Wright 1908: 231) In this ideal form, option (a) is a relative pronoun strategy, options (c) and (d) are gap strategies, and (b) a mixed form. A number of complex syntactic, semantic, and stylistic constraints figured in the use of these relativizers. Zero, for example, though maybe the oldest and "most Germanic" form, was, overall, quite rare and occurred mostly with verbs such as hatan "to call, name", wesan "to be", belifan "to remain" and nyllan (= ne willan) "not want" (Traugott 1992: 228). Isolate pe appears to have been the overall most frequent relativizer (Fischer et al. 2000: 59). It can be found in prose and poetry throughout the OE period. It is mostly found with antecedent NPs functioning as subjects or objects, but may occur with other types of antecedents as well. Singular number and modification by a demonstrative or quantifier also favoured relativization by invariable pe. In general, it also seemed to require preposition stranding (for a detailed account, see Traugott 1992: 226-227). The se pe combination was not popular in verse, but was favored in general with antecedents that did not contain a demonstrative or quantifier. And while the problem of the distinction between restrictive versus non-restrictive RCs applies to all stages in the history of English, the OE period also challenges present-day linguists with the distinction between proper relatives, where se functions as a relative pronoun, and those instances where se functions as a demonstrative with the effect of two appositive main clauses instead of main and subordinate clause. Another problem in OE is the development of a second invariable particle pcet. These developments may have had some bearings on future changes, as Traugott remarks: "The presence of invariable poet is of particular interest because that totally replaced pe in Middle English as the invariant relativizer" (Traugott 1992: 227). It is certainly a truism that Middle English did not begin in 1066, just as Old English did not suddenly stop then. The change from Old to Middle English was a gradual change; fast maybe, but gradual. The Norman Invasion did not surgically cut off one language stage from the other. It merely accelerated what had already been emergent in pre-1066 English (i.e.,

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apart, of course, from lexical changes, which would not have been possible without the conquest, but these will not be considered here). As has been discussed above (Chapter 3 §2.5), the Norman Conquest may have finally punctuated the equilibrium of English before 1066 and may thus have triggered a fast change along some vectors that had already been present in late Old English. The only problem is the lack of data from exactly this period. What kind of changes can be traced in the relative system, then? Fischer's analysis of the thirteenth century may serve as an axis here: "in the thirteenth century that stood practically alone as a relativizer" (Fischer et al. 2000: 91). Note, however, that Morris for example sees this point about one hundred years later: "in the fourteenth century it [tha] is the ordinary relative" (Morris 1882: 198). An extensive study of the Helsinki Corpus or the Penn-Helsinki Corpus of Parsed Middle English, for instance, would have to clarify this. For present purposes, suffice it to say that the OE system of indeclinable pe and demonstrative se must have collapsed and given way to indeclinable pcet before c. 1300, at the latest. It has been argued (for instance by Fischer et al. 2000: 91) that these changes originated in the north and quickly spread southwards. Coming back to Fischer's dictum that that was the only relativizer available at around the middle of the thirteenth century, we may now start our discussion from this point going forwards in time. The so-called "whseries" or "w/z-paradigm" {which, who, whose, whom) was introduced into English in the early Middle English period (Fischer et al. 2000: 92), maybe through exaptation of the OE interrogative pronouns hwcet, hwylc, hwa..., as Traugott and many traditional grammarians assume (Curme 1912; Mustanoja 1960; Steinki 1932; Traugott 1972: 153). What is disputed is the amount of influence of Latin and French on the origin and spread of these forms. Curme (1912) is ardent in his defense of this purely English development and represents one end of the spectrum. Meier seems to advocate a middle position when he acknowledges Curme's important contribution to the (otherwise biased?) discussion, but, as Meier says, "he [Curme] is surely overshooting the mark" with some of his claims (Meier 1967: 280). Mustanoja (1969: 192) suggests an influence of Latin on the spread, but not necessarily on the origin of the w/z-relativizers, and a possible strengthening of their position through French influence. More recent studies (e.g. Bailey and Maroldt 1977; Dekeyser 1984; Romaine 1980) go somewhat further than that and ascribe their introduction to Latin/French influence. Romaine even adds to this claim in that she isolates the frequent use of the new w/z-forms in (later) Middle Scots in those texts that may be classified

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as marked for high style and Latinate learning, so that this also gives the impression of a highly synthetic language influencing a more analytic one (Romaine 1982a, 1982b). Interestingly enough, Dekeyser (1983) revises his earlier assumption (Dekeyser 1984, apparently written before 1983), and argues that there is evidence to the point that the introduction and incipient phase of the w/z-forms cannot be ascribed to Latin/French influence: w/z-forms were used to a certain extent in the two continuations of the Peterborough Chronicle. We find very little evidence, however, of Anglo-Norman vocabulary in these texts, which makes it unlikely (though not impossible) that syntactic influences played any role (cf. the discussion in Harris and Campbell 1995: 120-150, esp. 133-134). Moreover, Dekeyser asks why Latin influences did not play a role one or two centuries before the Norman Conquest, when Latin learning flourished. These questions need to be answered before the actuation riddle of the w/z-paradigm can be solved, though not here and now. One particular construction that is sometimes attributed specifically to French usage is late Middle English the which. It has been suggested that the which is a direct borrowing from Central French liquel(s)/lequel(s) (cf. Mustanoja (1960: 198) and Fischer (1982: 303), who discuss the claim; as far as I can make out, however, the only scholar who actually made the claim was Einenkel 1887). Both Curme (1912) and Reuter (1937) have shown that there is evidence (particularly from the geographical distribution of the which) which does not permit a French origin of this form. What may have happened instead is a fusion of OE se pe and swa hwylc swa into forms like sede suahuelc and done suce hucelc (see Curme 1912: 153). These forms then may have developed into the which as se > pe and huelc > which with concomitant loss of swa (as in the generalizing relatives). As Fischer (1992: 303) notes, this may account for the frequent use of the which in non-restrictive RCs separated from the antecedent and therefore with a special "need" to put the antecedent back into focus and to reintroduce it into the discourse domain. We will return to that in our discussion of the present corpus. From the point of view of abstract syntax, it has been assumed that the w/z-forms developed from interrogative pronouns into relative pronouns through two different though interrelated processes. The OE interrogative pronouns hwa (hwcet), hwilc could be used in direct and indirect question. Indirect questions, though clearly still interrogative in nature, may allow a reading that somehow smacks of a free or generalizing relative (see Bresnan and Grimshaw 1978), as in (16):

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(16)

She asked who had kissed him.

In other sentences such as (17) or (18) the relativizing function is further foregrounded, while the interrogative reading steps into the background: (17) (18)

He knew who did it. He wanted to know who did it.

Here, who may be understood as "the one who", "him who", or "whoever". And "in Old English the interrogative pronouns hwa, hwcet and hwilc often accompanied by swa, which was lost in Middle English - were indeed used as free relatives next to the more usual se pe" (Fischer et al. 2000: 92). The second process mentioned by Fischer et al. works on socalled reduced RCs as in (19): (19)

Ne meahte hire Iudas [...]/sweotole gecypan be dam Nor could her Judas clearly make-known about the sigebeame,/ on hwylcne se hcelend ahafen were victory- tree on which the saviour up-raised were 'Nor could Judas tell her clearly about the victorious tree, [tell her] on which [tree] the Saviour was raised up' (El 859, quoted from Fischer et al. 2000: 92)

Fischer et al. argue that in (19) we find two paratactically adjoined clauses, and that in the second clause the verb and its object(s) were deleted. The remaining parts may be interpreted as hypotactic with which referring back to the first mentioning of the tree, thus functioning as a relative pronoun proper and not as a determiner. This analysis is appealing in so far as it can be easily incorporated into an analysis of PdE relativization, where whrelativizers are base-generated as relative determiners (e.g., Bianchi 1999; Kayne 1994). Moreover, in this way antecedents for the w/2-elements may be introduced. While the w/j-forms were generally introduced as relativizers in the early Middle English period, i.e., between 1100 and 1300, they did not become frequent until the fourteenth-century. And even then did they not spread explosion-like, but rather trickled into the system in a more or less orderly fashion. First we find whose and whom and quite infrequently also which. These first seem to pervade in non-restrictive RCs, which is often taken as evidence for their origin in free and generalizing relatives. Moreover, " W h o m and which were generally preceded by a preposition [...]

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Which was found with both animate and inanimate antecedents, whom and whose mainly with animate ones. Which began to supplant that only in the fifteenth century" (Fischer et al. 2000: 92). Who was only introduced in the late fifteenth century and its lag is still one of the great puzzles of the history of English (Fischer 1992: 301; Kivimaa 1966; Meier 1967; Ryden 1983; Stein 1998; Traugott 1972: 154). Romaine (1982b) was one of the first to consider this phenomenon in a socio-historical context in that she included text types and situational contexts as factors in her study. She argues that the introduction of the w/z-series was a change that was initiated "from above" and due to Latin influences. As changes from above are not "natural", but rather forced upon language users through prestige and various other normative mechanisms (cf. Stein 1985b, 1990: 56; J. Milroy 1992b; L. Milroy and J. Milroy 1997; Kroch 1978) 25 , this development seems to run counter to the "natural" or "universal" accessibility hierarchy proposed by Keenan and Comrie (1977) and discussed by Maxwell (1979, 1982). The accessibility hierarchy states that noun phrase positions are differently accessible to syntactic processes, such as relativization, and, therefore, also to linguistic change. Data from a number of languages shows that if a given language has relativization of NPs in direct object position, for example, it also has relativization of NPs in subject position. If it can relativize indirect object NPs, it can also relativize direct object NPs and subject NPs and so forth. This result is an implicational hierarchy, which may be represented diagrammatically thus: Accessibility Hierarchy (AH): Object of Comparison (OComp) 3 GEN 3 OB 3 IO id DO 3 SU This hierarchy has been established on the basis of typological synchronic data and has been confirmed by studies on (second) language acquisition and psycholinguistics which were able to show that the A H in fact reflects the order of processing and acquisition of relativization strategies (e.g., Aarts and Schils 1995; Eckman et al. 1988). Middle English data on changes in relativization strategies (e.g. those of Romaine 1982b) at first sight seem to run counter to this natural tendency: the prediction would be that subject NPs are more readily accessible to change than genitive or object positions. It is important to stress, however, that the change only seems to run counter to the prediction made by the AH. The AH, strictly speaking, does not make any real predictions about the direction of substitution processes. All the positions were readily available for relativization,

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none of them had been newly created. If there had not been any genitive or object NP relativization in ME and if a new pronoun had emerged that was first available for, say, genitive positions, and later only for DO or 10, this would have been a case for the AH. But we are only dealing with simple substitution processes in which that was substituted by the wh-series. Nevertheless, if we consider merely the gist of the AH, it seems surprising, still, that the change started from the most "difficult" syntactic position (see Ramat 1982; Maxwell 1982). Ramat (1982) discusses the idea that two relativization strategies complement each other. While the new one proceeds, the other recedes. This means that the Gap-Strategy (that) recedes towards the Subject position, while the Pronoun-Strategy (who, whose, whom) proceeds from the most difficult position, 10, towards the subject. In how far this position, IO or oblique, was more "difficult" than the others, and what other factors in general may have played a role, will be considered in the next few sections.

4. Relative clauses in the Paston letters Variation in relativizers in the Paston letters is abundant. Even in a very short passage, a multitude of forms appears (see example (15) above). As regards the corpus as a whole, but also the individual family members, the prediction is that that should still be prominent, but not the exclusive form as in the thirteenth century. Which should also have gained ground considerably and should be in strong competition with that, whose and whom should make up for a small, but significant part of the system, while who should still be very restricted in its use. We can thus study the diffusion of one part of these forms (which, whose, whom), the rapidly increasing speed of the spread of whose/whom, and possibly also the innovation and actuation of a new form, who.

4.1. Methodology The study of relative markers starts on the same basis as the analysis of personal pronouns. Relative markers were manually tagged for a number of intralinguistic factors that have been mostly distilled from previous studies (e.g., Alexiadou et al. 2000; Ball 1994, 1996; Dekeyser 1984; Geoghegan

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1975; Jack 1975, 1988; Montgomery 1989; Quirk 1957; Romaine 1982b; Ryden 1966; van den Eynden 1993). These fall into three categories: (a)

(b) (c)

factors relating to the relativizer and the relative clause: e.g., relativizer type, restrictiveness, and syntactic function in the relative clause; factors relating to the antecedent: e.g., animacy, number, syntactic function, definiteness, word class; one factor relating to both: e.g., distance of antecedent and relativizer

In tagging the various relativization structures in the corpus, the following abbreviations have been used: RCO = rel + NP, (the) which house RC1 =that RC2 = which RC3= who RC4 = whose

RC5 = whom RC6 = double relativizers, e.g. which that RC7 = zero (0) RC8 = the which RC9 = undefined

Clauses were classified as being either restrictive (RS) or non-restrictive (NRS), mainly on the basis of pragmasemantic criteria (for a discussion of the relevant problems that are involved in the distinction, see Chapter 5 §2). In about 5% of all cases, this distinction could not be established, so that these had to be excluded. 26 Headless RCs were also mostly excluded from further considerations. As has been pointed out above, relativizers usually have a double function in that they anaphorically refer back to the antecedent and have a syntactic function of their own within the RC. Keenan and Comrie (1977) and others investigated the role of this function as the position on which the clause relativized. Biber et al. (1999) call this the relative "gap". Syntactic functions that were investigated both include subject (SU), direct object (DO), oblique object (OB) - subsuming indirect objects and complements of prepositions and adverbial functions (ADV). Apart from these, free or headless relatives were classified as a separate category. Antecedents were tagged for their syntactic function in the matrix clause. These could be direct objects (DO), oblique objects (OB), subjects (SU), and sentential/clausal antecedents (SE), which, of course, form a separate class. Again, free or headless relatives were classified as a sepa-

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rate category. The syntactic functions of both antecedent and relativizer taken together give the following picture of possible combinations in the present corpus (Table 40). Table 40. Syntactic functions of antecedent and relativizer DO/DO DO/OB DO/SU

OB/DO OB/OB OB/SU

SE/DO SE/OB SE/SU

SU/DO SU/OB SU/SU

ADV FREE

Apparently, there do not seem to be any restrictions as to which antecedent goes with which relativizer function; all possible combinations can be found to a greater or lesser extent (for quantificational data, see below). Antecedents were also tagged for animacy: animate (AN), inanimate (INA), and deity (DE). New in this context is the inclusion of "Deity" as one category. "Deity" is an umbrella term that subsumes entities such as "God", "Jesus", "The Holy Trinity", saints, etc., all of which were semantically marked as important religious entities, and as such often invoke respect and/or adoration. It has been suggested in the literature - mostly in passing - that these referents may have had an influence on the choice of the relativizer, even in early Middle English (see, e.g., Jack 1975: 103; Mcintosh 1948: 80, 82; Meier 1967: 284-285). It has been shown for a number of languages, e.g., Thai, Burmese, and Shona, that speakers may employ particular items, such as noun classifiers or relativizers, to refer to various semantically marked items, such as "ghosts" or "depraved persons" (Foley 1997: 237; Palmer and Woodman 1998). The basic idea behind this is that marked signified entities should require marked signifiers. Speakers may wish to mark their special stance towards these entities, they may wish to attach to them a certain value from the point of their speaker origo. Pronouns and noun classifiers seem particularly susceptible for that kind of marking, as they are borderline cases between grammar on the one hand, and the real, external world on the other. Anaphoric pronouns, for example, by definition co-referential, refer both to certain antecedent(s) in a text and to real life entities at the same time. If we assume, for a start, that the emergence of one or more of the w/z-pronouns was somehow related to the marking of deities, the developments following their emergence should involve reduction of markedness on both antecedent and pronoun. 27 The question whether the cognitively marked status of deities themselves is reduced, or at least has shifted in the history of English after, say, 1400, cannot be answered at this point and should better be left to historians and

Relative clauses in the Paston letters

147

theologians to answer (though one might speculate that some kind of secularization of society following the Middle Ages is noticeable; see Brown 2001; Gaskill 2000; Sommerville 1992). From the point of view of linguistics, however, the idea is that after being restricted to God and similar entities, the w/z-pronouns should spread in their referential possibilities to other valued entities, such the King, or noblemen, and then to friends and personally admired people. Finally, in PdE, the only restriction on who is [+animate] - and even this constraint is presently being abandoned. We can thus posit a developmental cline of the following form: Origin [+deity] > [+noblemen] > [+friends] > [+human] > [+animate?] > ? This hypothesis will be checked against the data from the present corpus (for a full discussion of the issue of grammaticalization, see Bergs 2004b). Relative markers were also checked whether they refer to singular or plural antecedents. Problematic cases were collectives and ambiguous sentences in which verbal agreement was unclear: (20) I trust he shall sende hyre tydyngys pat schall please hyre... I trust he shall send her tidings that shall please her... (3John II, 1474,284) (21) I payed hym the iiij li. why che I had borowyd off hym... I paid him the four pounds which I had borrowed of him... (3John II, 1474, 285) (22) And the maire and comons of the said cite mad ther menys to haue grace be Lord Montagu and Lord Barenars, whiche be-for the Kyngys comyng in-to pe said cite desyred hym of grace for pe said cyte, whiche graunted hem grace. And the mayor and the commons of the said city made their means to have grace by Lord Montagu and Lord Barenars, which before the king's coming into the said city desired him of grace for the said city, which granted him grace. (2William II, 1461, 90) Examples (20) and (21) illustrate problems that may arise with collective and (un-)countable antecedents: it is by no means clear whether tydyngys must be understood as singular or plural (despite its plural {-s}). Tydyngs appears almost exclusively with {-s} although it is derived from late OE tidung (but cf. Old Icelandic tiöendi, pi.). However, "[t]he large number of uninflected plurals, the frequency of pi. forms with sg. meaning, and the occas. use of pi. forms with sg. verbs prob, reflect a confusion caused by

148

Relative clauses

the competition of the sg. and pi. etyma" (MED s.v. TIDING·, cf. OED 5. v. TIDING). Similarly, whether iiij li. ('four pound(s)') is or are a lot of money is also not entirely clear - a problem that even prevails today (cf. Quirk et al. 1985: 757-758). (22) shows referential problems in general. It is left unclear (even in the original context) what the whiches and hym/hems refer to. The first whiche may refer to Lord Montagu, Lord Barenars, or both, maybe even the mayor and commons, just as hym may refer to any single one or all of these and the King (N.B., the varying form of the third person plural forms at that time, see Chapter 4), just as the following whiche and hem have no unambiguous antecedent It is quite likely that the addressee in this case, John I, knew who was meant, but for the reader today it is difficult to see through this mess of hems, hytns and whiches. In the present study, every precaution was taken in order to arrive at one interpretation that was most likely in the given context. In any case, these caveats should also be kept in mind when automated corpora are used and when evidence is presented as easy and clear-cut. Evidence, obviously, can be very tricky at times. Another semantic factor in the antecedent that has often been found relevant to the form of relativization is definiteness (investigated by Romaine (1982b) for Middle Scots; Mcintosh (1948) and Jack (1975, 1988) for early Middle English). The notion of definiteness, however, is not as straightforward as it seems. It is closely connected to both the type of the antecedent and its modifiers, if present. Moreover, scholars have interpreted definiteness quite differently, depending on their theoretical persuasion. While many researchers in generative syntax and Extended Standard Theory (Romaine 1982, for instance) assume that definiteness is solely defined through determiners in the noun phrase (i.e., a definite article makes a definite NP), other approaches distinguish between syntactic definiteness on the one hand and semantic specificity on the other (cf. Lyons 1977: 177-197). The two, though closely related, need not be the same, and specificity itself may be an important cognitive factor influencing the choice of language forms. Still, in the following, definiteness will be understood as solely defined through determiner use in NPs, mainly for the sake of practicability. Specificity is very difficult to determine in individual contexts, particularly in historical data, so that tagging for this feature in the present corpus would have taken far too long and would have been highly subjective. Instead, definite articles, numerals, possessive pronouns, and demonstrative pronouns in determiner position are assumed to be [+definite], which makes their corresponding NP also [+definite]; indefi-

Relative clauses in the Paston letters

149

nite articles, zero modification, etc., are interpreted as [-definite], which makes their corresponding NP also [-definite]. Personal pronouns, proper names, and demonstrative were treated as separate classes. Quirk (1957) demonstrates that the distance between antecedent and relativizer also plays an important role in the choice of the relativizer. RCs may either be directly adjacent to their antecedent or may be separated from it be intervening material. In most cases, the RC directly follows the antecedent as in (23): (23)

I met [the man] who ate the sesame bagels.

Nevertheless, it may also be separated from the antecedent by some intervening material: (24)

I met [the man] in the grey duffle coat who ate the sesame bagels.

Strictly speaking, the RC still follows directly, or rather, is included in its syntactic antecedent, as the PP in the grey duffle coat may be regarded as part of the NP the man·, nevertheless, most speakers will see some distance here between antecedent head noun and RC. Fact is that the two NPs in (23) and (24) differ in size and complexity. Therefore, it is more correct to say that wA-marking co-occurs with complex or large NPs rather than in "distant" RCs (cf. the discussion of complexity in Hawkins 1994, Rohdenburg 2000, and Rohenburg and Mondorf 2003).

4.2. Results: A community grammar Figure 26 shows the total token frequency for the relativizers RC0-RC8 in the Paston letters. Of the 2,364 relative markers that were analyzed, 56% 9Ο

were that, 25% which, followed by 3% whom, 2% whose, and 1% who. The which makes up for about 3%, other relative markers (doubly filled COMPs (e.g. 'which that', 'for that', 'that that') for 0.5%, relative marker and undeleted head noun (e.g. 'which house') for approximately 7%. Roughly, one hundred RCs in the whole corpus (c. 4%) could not be classified and had to be excluded from further discussions. Thus, the initial prediction made on the basis of the handbooks is actually born out: that is clearly prevalent, followed by which and who, whose, whom in reverse order.

150

Relative

clauses

1600

OS > SS > SO 0S>00>SS>S0

The distribution of the which roughly parallels that of which. {The) which as the more "explicit" relativizer, seems to be preferred in structures that f o l l o w t h r e e strategies s i m u l t a n e o u s l y : CLOSURE, NORMAL FUNCTION a n d

ADJACENCY. That, on the other hand, only follows CLOSURE and PARALLEL FUNCTION. The underpinnings of these patterns are very hard to discern. One possible explanation would be that which as the new form is guided both by general cognitive strategies and principles, such as CLOSURE, and more conscious, language dependent, and objectifiable meta-strategies, s u c h as PARALLEL FUNCTION a n d ADJACENCY. B y late M i d d l e E n g l i s h

which had not been automatized enough to follow cognitive principles alone, but could still (had to?) be used consciously, in a planned manner (N.B., the data comes from written language, i.e. planned discourse). That, on the other hand, was a common relativizer for daily use, which thus reflected more intuitive, subconscious strategies. The irrelevance of ADJACENCY a n d PARALLEL FUNCTION in p r e s e n t - d a y E n g l i s h ( P r i d e a u x and

Baker 1986: 146, 152) may then be explained by the fact that by now all of the relativizers are fully automatized and do not need conscious planning and backup. PdE thus follows the more immediate (universal?) cognitive

178

Relative

clauses

strategies, such as CLOSURE; ADJACENCY and PARALLEL FUNCTION may have been abandoned during the history of English after 1500.

4.2.6. Distance One factor that was investigated by Quirk (1957) is the distance of RC and antecedent. In the Paston letters, some fairly good examples of both adjacent and distant RCs may be found. Example (38) illustrates how the antecedent head NP the letter is separated from its RC whych ye sente me word of by another RC, pat he shuld a wretyn - a clear example of separation of antecedent and RC. (38)

John Russe myght not be spoke wyth yit fore the letter pat he shuld a wretyn whych ye sente me word of John Russe might not be spoken with yet for the letter that he should have written which you send me word of (2Margaret Paston 1464, 177)

Fig. 31 shows adjacent and distant RCs with that and wÄ-forms.

1064

383

^

• that • wh-

177

263

,

adjacent

distant

Figure 31. Adjacency in that versus w/?-clauses As was to be expected ("relative clauses normally follow their antecedents immediately", Quirk 1957: 105), adjacent RCs outweigh distant ones by more than 3:1. Interestingly, however, that is more frequent in adjacent RCs, while the w/z-forms are preferred in distant RCs. This fact warrants some further investigation. Table 53 lists the individual relativizers in adjacent and distant RCs. First, the distribution of who-whose-whom need not be discussed at this point, as this is due mainly to their occurring in fixed phrases. Their overall distribution is only remarkable in so far as whose, for instance, occurs more frequently in distant RCs than in adjacent ones and that the rest are more or less on a par (less than 2:1). More interesting

Relative clauses in the Paston letters

179

Table 53. Adjacency/distance of the antecedent in RC1-RC8 That Adjacent 1064 Distant 177 1241 Total

Which 279 179 458

Who 17 12 29

Whose 16 21 37

Whom 35 21 56

The which Total 36 1447 30 440 66 1887

is the distribution of that, which, and the which. As can be seen in Table 53, that outweighs which by more than 4:1 in adjacent RCs, while they are on a par in distant RCs. Also, the majority of the occurrences of that can be found in adjacent clauses (7:1), while the proportion in which is only 2:1. This clearly confirms the preference for which in the case of distant antecedents. A similar preference for wh- to be used in distant RCs has also been noticed by Quirk for PdE (1957: 105). One of the reasons that may be suggested is the greater explicitness, i.e. greater anaphoric force of the "inflected" w/z-forms. Two alternative though possibly interacting principles come into play here. One, with regard to distance, it has been argued that greater grammatical/syntactic complexity requires greater grammatical/syntactic marking. Two, with regard to adjacency, it has been argued that little explicit grammatical marking on dependent elements requires more processing on other superordinate grammatical elements (heads) and thus greater adjacency to these elements (see Hawkins 1994, 2001; Rohdenburg 1998, Rohdenburg 2003, and references therein). In this respect, there is also a very interesting distribution of the which to be noticed. First, it is nowhere near which in its overall frequency. Second, it shows an almost equal distribution between adjacent and distant RCs. This is somewhat surprising, considering the fact that the which is often considered more complex and explicit than the other relativizers. According to the principles just mentioned, this should have resulted in a higher frequency in distant clauses. Factors that might counterbalance the effects of adjacency and distance and that might have led to this suprising fact might include standardization forces, text types, and the status of the which on the oral-literate continuum. Certainly, this question needs to be investigated in the future on a broader data basis.

4.3. Results: a social grammar In the following sections, the results from the study of the community grammar will be further scrutinized and correlated with a range of tradi-

180

Relative clauses

tional sociolinguistic (external) variables. These include gender of the author, gender of the addressee, text type, subject matter of the texts, and social relation of author and addressee. As has been pointed out before, social class and education as factors are more or less stable throughout the corpus. In further studies, however, a comparative analysis with data from other social strata (e.g., the Cely letters, which come from London wool merchants) may be illuminating in that respect.

4.3.1. Gender of the author Relative markers are much more evenly distributed in the letters than personal pronouns. Most of the authors (apart from Edmond I, Margery, Walter and William IV) have most or even all the different relativizers in their repertoire and use them to varying degrees. Thus, there is no need for a separate Variation Group as in Chapter 4. Fig. 32 below gives a clear picture of the situation. It shows the six different relativizers that, which, who, whose, whom, and the which in their correlation with male and female authors. Apparently, relative marking seems to be strongly dependent on the gender of the author, the results in Fig. 32 are highly significant (at p10) for each verb are given in Table 83 below. The most frequent collocations in Table 83 correspond to those established by Tanabe (1999: 102-108). In the case of do, the nouns dever/harm/service/cost/ease appear most frequently. Interestingly, however, do service is the most common item in this corpus, whereas do part is Tanabe's most frequent collocation. Give grace/answer/leave are the most frequent give LVCs. With have the single most important noun by far is knowledge, followed by answer and need. LVCs with make combine with many different nouns at about the same frequency. The most common collocations are make estate/cheer/bargain/labour/will. Frequent collocations with take are heed/distress/action/advice/labour/profit. The most common LVCs in general are have knowledge/answer/need/tiding(s), do service/dever, make estate/will, and take heed. In type 4, which has not been included in the discussion so far, have in keeping is by far the most common combination.

226

The light verb

construction

Table 83. The most frequent (N>10) collocations for individual light verbs Noun /V erb Action Advice Answer Bargain Bill Charge Cheer Comfort Cost Dever Distress End Errand Estate Fejfement Good Grace Harm Heed Help Indenture Knowledge Labour Language Leave Letter Need Part Profit Remedy Rule Service Tiding Way Will Word Writing

Do

Give 4 17

1 1 1 16 21

2

1 4 49 1 3 12 8 13 11

10 2 11

10

12 14 14

3 2 1 8

16 1

29

1 1

Have

Make

Take 13 14

18 13 3 19

1 2 7 1

15 21 14

2 4 1 12 1 119 11 18 1 12 27 7 3 12 11 6 33 2 18 19 13

15 2 5

1 38 11 18

14 2

1

1 15 2 2

1 21

12

3

1

Total 14 22 66 20 18 23 28 17 27 21 15 27 12 37 14 14 18 16 38 12 12 122 45 19 11 12 27 24 20 12 13 37 33 15 39 20 18

The light verb construction in the Paston letters

4.2,1. Number, determination,

227

modification

As has been pointed out above, more lexicalized items, i.e. those that are further advanced in their development as LVCs, are expected to be singular in number, with an indefinite article, if at all, and little or no modification (also cf. Traugott 1999: 255). Tables 84 through 86 summarize the findings for each of these features. Table 84 shows clearly that most of the nouns (89%) are singular, as was to be expected. Interestingly, however, it also shows that the largest percentage of plural nouns can be found in type 3 LVCs, i.e., in structures without simple verb equivalent. The lowest frequency of plural nouns can be found in type 2 constructions. Table 84. Number in LVCs Number Qcr

Ν

% PI

Ν

%

Total

Type 1 867 87.6% 123 12.4% 990

Type 2 539 92.3% 45 7.7% 584

Type 3 226 81.3% 52 18.7% 278

Type 4 148 100%

148

Total 1,780 89% 220 11% 2,000

It may be suggested that this is due to the fact that many of the deverbal suffixes (e.g., {-al}, {-a-tion}, {-ment}) actually produce "largely abstract nouns, nominalizations of the action expressed by the base" (Quirk et al. 1985: 1550), and therefore often result in uncounTable nouns, without the possibility of plural forms. Table 85 looks at the individual light verbs and number as a factor. Apparently, the percentage of plural nouns in LVCs tends to match the overall token frequency of the verbs themselves. Table 85. Number and individual light verbs Number Sg PI Total

Ν

% Ν

%

Do 163 82.7% 84 17.3% 990

Give 100 92.6% 8 7.4% 584

Have 904 91.2% 87 8.8% 278

Make 383 87.8% 53 12.2% 148

Take 230 85.8% 38 14.2% 258

Total 1,780 89% 220 11% 2,000

Have as the most frequent verb in LVCs has the smallest percentage of plural nouns, followed by make, take, and do, in that order. This suggests that the frequency of the construction is inversely proportional to the fre-

228

The light verb

construction

quency of "irregularities". Only give does not follow the predicted pattern. It is also interesting to see that the Figures in Table 85 correspond roughly to those obtained by Kytö in her analysis of the EModE section of the Helsinki corpus (1999: 179-180). She finds plural nouns in 9-14% of all cases. Surprisingly, however, most occurrences in her study are with give (14%), which is the verb with the fewest plural nouns here (7.4%). Take and have show fewest plural nouns in Kytö's study (9% each); here, they diverge (8.8% and 14.2%, respectively). Apparently, some changes must have taken place between c. 1450 and 1710. This issue might warrant further investigation. Table 86 below summarizes the findings concerning determination and modification. Table 86. Determination and modification in LVCs No determiner Indefinite article Definite article

849 241 206

Demonstratives

113

Possessives/ Poss. Pronouns

Ί9.Α zo^t

Quantifiers/ Numerals

163

Negatives

144

TOTAL

2,000

This That Those Which What Such OTHER His Your My Their Her OTHER Any Other Much More Some Many OTHER No Non OTHER

36 8 1 5 25 27 11 154 56 35 12 12 15 46 26 11 11 10 10 49 97 29 18 704

The light verb construction in the Paston letters

229

Of the 2,000 occurrences in the collection, 849 (42.5%) contain no determiner at all, 241 (12.1%) the indefinite article, 206 (10.3%) the definite article, and 704 (35.2%) other elements (e.g., demonstratives, negatives, etc.). Again, this confirms Kytö's (1999: 144) and also Hiltunen's (1999: 183) findings. In their early modern English data, zero modification and the indefinite article are clearly more frequent than the definite article. As Table 86 shows, the most frequent (N>30) other elements in determination and modification patterns include this, his, your, my, any, and no. This is not surprising as all of these items are also high frequency elements in present-day English (see Biber et al. 1999: 271-8). After all, "[t]he distribution of individual [possessive] determiners reflects differences in the speech situation and in the typical topic of texts" (Biber et al. 1999: 272). In this respect, it also seems noteworthy that the letters have a high frequency of those determiners that Biber et al. find frequent in present-day fiction and conversation. From a text typological perspective this suggests that the Paston letters range somewhere between those genres and that they exhibit a high degree of proximity-related language use. Table 87 below looks at the different light verbs and their individual determiner frequency. It gives the total number of tokens for each verb, the occurrences that have a determiner of some sort, and the corresponding percentage. Furthermore, it also gives the number of different determiner types, and the corresponding type/token ratio (TTR) for determination in LVCs. The latter means that the number of determiner types is divided by the total number of determiner occurrences. Table 87. Individual light verbs and determination patterns Tokens Det (N) Det (%) Det-Types (N) TTR

Do 197 130 66% 28 0.142

Give 108 47 43.5% 17 0.157

Have 951 551 57.9% 51 0.054

Make 436 274 62.8% 29 0.067

Take 268 143 53.4% 26 0.097

Table 87 shows that there are very significant (p have > make > do. When it comes to TTRs, however, this picture changes. Here give takes the lead, followed by do, take, make, and have, in that order. What this means is that give occurs preferably in more lexicalized environments, i.e. without determiner, but

230

The light verb construction

when it does occur with determiners, it shows much fewer restrictions than the other verbs. Do shows exactly the opposite behavior. It occurs predominantly with determiners in the noun phrase; the choice in determiners, however, is very limited so that we find only few different types in a large number of tokens (e.g., do his/your/my dever; do a turn). Of the 2,000 LVCs in the collection, 79.8% (1,596) do not have any noun pre-modifying elements (e.g., adjective phrases). The 404 modifying patterns, however, are indeed quite diverse. The most common modifications are good (N=76, 3.8%) and great (N=58, 2.9%). Next come said (N=24, 1.2%), better ( N = l l , 0.6%), and certain (N=10, 0.5%). Certain complex patterns also seem to be fairly productive: as good/great/little/much (N=6, 0.3%), so little/feeble/good/great/heavy/ little/many/much/much mickle/straight (N=17, 0.9%). These findings generally underline Tanabe's results (1999: 113-117). In her corpus, do occurs mostly with possessive pronouns and does not take much adjectival modification. While this is also the case in the present corpus (24.2%, i.e. 48 out of 198 occurrences are with possessive pronouns), there were also a number of instances with the definite article (N=26, 13%) and even the indefinite article (N=8, 6.6%). Table 88 shows the modification frequency for each individual verb. It contains the number of tokens for each verb, overall token frequency of modification, the relative frequency, and finally also the total number modification types and the type/token ratio of modification patterns. It demonstrates that all five verbs differ significantly (p have > do > take > give. Again, these Figures can be seen in relation to TTRs, which express diversity or the degree of fixedness in modification. Interestingly, do has the most diverse patterns, take the least. The corresponding ranking is do > make > have > give > take. This is in stark contrast to the picture found in determination patterns, where give is most diverse, and do the least. It might be speculated that there is

The light verb construction in the Paston letters

231

some correspondence between these elements, so that a certain degree of fixedness in determination allows for some variability in modification patterns, and vice versa. A high degree of variability in both sections would of course mean very little lexicalization. There appears to be one interesting difference between the results of the present study and Kytö's analysis of early modern English data. In Kytö's study, plural nouns in LVCs also had, in the majority of cases, some kind of modification (Kytö 1999: 182-183). In the present study, the number of the noun played no significant role with regard to modification. Of 220 plural nouns, 152 had some modification (69%); of 1,780 singular nouns, 1,173 had modifications of some sort (65%). It should be added, though, that the present study did not include relative clauses or any other postmodifying elements, and that this might have skewed the results.

4.2.2. Syntax As outlined above, this study basically distinguishes between unmarked and marked syntactic configurations, where "unmarked" refers to the canonical V-NP structure. "Marked" subsumes conjoined structures, passivization, relative clauses, fronting, presentational there, etc. (for examples, Chapter 5 §§2, 4.1 above). Table 89 summarizes the initial results. Table 89. Unmarked versus marked syntax in LVCs Syntax Unmarked

Ν %

Marked

Ν %

Total

Type 1 618 62.4% 372 37.6% 990

Type 2 366 62.7% 218 37.3% 584

Type 3 169 60.8% 109 39.2% 278

Type 4 148 100%

148

Total 1,301 65.1% 699 34.9% 2,000

The majority of LVCs (c. 65%) occurs in unmarked syntactic environments, as was to be expected. Interestingly, however, within the single LVC type categories, LVC types 1-3 show a remarkably similar relative percentage of occurrences in marked environments, about 38% each. This might be taken to indicate that although these types show gradualness in prototypicalness, they all behave syntactically in more or less the same way, i.e., even though type 3 is a less prototypical LVC subtype, it still shows basic LVC syntactic behaviour, or fixedness. A much more interest-

232

The light verb

construction

ing picture can be obtained by correlating syntactic markedness with the individual light verbs, as was done in Table 90. Table 90. Syntactic markedness and individual light verbs Syntax Unmarked Marked

Ν % Ν %

Total

Do 116 58.9% 81 41.1% 197

Give 87 80.6% 21 19.4% 108

Have 714 72.1% 277 27.9% 991

Make 198 45.4% 238 54.6% 436

Take 186 69.4% 82 30.6% 268

Total 1,301 65.1% 699 34.9% 2,000

While the first three LVC types in Table 90 show relatively few differences in their distribution in unmarked and marked syntactic environments, the individual light verbs show a significant skew (p have > take > do > make. Table 91 below lists the frequency of individual syntactic structures (N.B. it contains more than 699 tokens, since one particular LVC can be embedded in more than one syntactic environment, as was shown in Chapter 6 §4.1; these embeddings were counted individually, resulting in more syntactic structures than actual LVC tokens). Table 91. Syntactic environment of LVCs (detail) Syntactic Structures Relative Passive Conjoined Negation Wh-clause Fronting Infinitival As for ing There Total

Ν 229 219 207 166 30 22 15 10 6 5 909

% 25.2 24.1 22.8 18.3 3.3 2.4 1.6 1.1 0.6 0.6 100

Table 91 shows that relativization, passivization, and conjunction are by far the most popular syntactic configurations in which LVCs occur. They

The light verb construction in the Paston letters

233

are followed by negation, which is markedly less frequent, and wh-clauses, fronting, infinitival and as for constructions, all of which only constitute a fraction (less than 10%) of the total sum. It must be kept in mind, though, that Table 91 includes both "simple" and "multiple" syntactic configurations, i.e., a relative clause in the passive and with a negated verb was counted three times, once in each of these categories. Leaving aside multiple marked environments, the most frequent "simple" structures are negation (N=146), relativization (N=108), conjunction (N=103), and passivization (N=94). Obviously, this is a much different ranking than the one in Table 91. The most frequent multiple configurations with two elements are passive relative (N=64; see ex. (23)), conjoined relative (N=32; see ex. (24)), and conjoined passive (N=28).The most frequent configuration with three elements is conjoined relative passive (N=20; see ex. (25)). Unfortunately, when these results are correlated with LVC types, the interpretation becomes extremely complicated and no uniform pattern can be made out. Passive relative (23) ye were hurt be affray that was mad vp-on you be feles disgysed you were hurt by affray that was made upon you by fellows disguised. 'you were hurt by the assault that was made upon you by disguised fellows' ( 2 Margaret 1471, no. 213) Conjoined relative (24) oure trobell and grete costys and chargys that we haue and may growe here-aftere our trouble and great costs and charges that we have had may grow hereafter. ( 2 Margaret 1465, no. 196) Conjoined relative passive (25) but aswell by a graunt and bargeyn mad a-thwyx the seid Fastolff and the seid Paston but as well by a grant and bargain made betwixt the said Falstolf and the said Paston ( 2 John I, 1462, no. 65) Table 92 summarizes the different factors discussed so far and ranks them according to their influence. Simple verb frequency is given in total number, the variability in noun selection is represented by its TTR, the amount of plural nouns is given in relative frequency, the amount of determination in the noun phrase is given both in relative frequency and in TTR of the selected nouns, and so is the amount of modification patterns. Finally, the amount of marked syntax is given in relative frequency.

234

The light verb construction

Table 92. Ranking summary Variable Verb Frequency Nouns Selection Number Determination Modification Marked Syntax

Ν TTR

% % TTR

% TTR

%

MORE Have Give Do Do Give Make Do Make

Make Make Take Make Do Have Make Do

Take Take Make Have Take Do Have Take

Do Do Have Take Make Take Give Have

LESS Give Have Give Give Have Give Take Give

Obviously, Table 92 does not offer uniform results, and therefore also does not lend itself to easy and straightforward interpretation. What becomes clear, however, is that give ranks among the low frequency verbs, and that it can be generally found in the lower frequency end of the spectrum, except for type/token frequencies in noun selection and determination. This means that give shows more variability in the nouns that it takes and that these nouns show much variability in their determination patterns. Have, on the other hand, is the most frequent verb, but occurs with only very few different nouns, which also show very little variability in their determination patterns. And while make and take mostly play in the middle field, do also shows some interesting patterns which run counter to both the ones observed in give and have. It is the second most infrequent verb in the corpus, but, unlike give, it also takes very different nouns. In contrast to both give and have, do has the most occurrences with plural nouns. In determination and modification, it also ranks in the more frequent part of the spectrum. All this suggests that do, on the whole, is one of the syntactically most variable items, albeit with only a limited set of nouns. Let us now turn to the specific variability of LVCs, particularly with respect to temporal and generational factors, gender, and the influence of social networks.

4.3. Results: a social grammar 4.3.1. Temporal factors The first problem to be investigated concerns the general frequency of the LVC construction. The problem is that it seems impossible to contrast "use" versus "non-use" of LVCs, since counting the use of corresponding simple verbs or alternative constructions is impossible. Also, as has been shown above, LVCs and corresponding simple verbs, more than any other

The light verb construction in the Paston letters

235

variable perhaps, do not fulfill the criterion of functional equivalence. LVCs cannot always be substituted by simple verbs, and vice versa. Some LVCs have very specific semantic and aspectual features that distinguish them both from corresponding simple V-NP constructions and propositionally similar simple verbs (cf. Wierzbicka 1982, 1988; Dixon 1991). So what has been done here instead is to calculate the overall frequency of LVC tokens and types per total of running words in every single period and generation. Thus, we get at least a picture of how often speakers used LVCs on average, and how diverse their inventories of LVCs were. Figures 39 and 40 below show the general frequency of LVC tokens for the 10year periods (A) and 25-year periods (B) in the corpus (on the issue of periodization, see Chapter 3 §4 above). Figure 41 shows the frequency of LVC tokens per generation. All frequencies were established per 1,000 words. Figures 42 and 43 below show the number of different types (i.e. noun selection in LVCs) for the same periods, Figure 44 for the three generations. Figures 39 through 44 illustrate some very surprising phenomena. Traugott claims that there was an "explosion" of LVC string types in ME. • LVCs/1,000

1 AI

All

AIII

AIV

AV

AVI

Figure 39. LVC token frequency in 10-year periods (AI-AVI), per 1,000 words U LVCs/1,000

]

j j

... ,

1 BI

BII

i

1 Bill

Figure 40. LVC token frequency in 25-year periods (BI-BIII), per 1,000 words

236

The light verb construction

10

• LVCs/1,000

8

6 4 2 0 Generation I

Generation II

Generation III

Figure 41. LVC token frequency in three generations (GI-GIII), per 1,000 words

• Types/1,000

AI

All

AIII

AIV

AV

AVI

Figure 42. LVC type frequency in 10 year periods (Al-AVI), per 1,000 words 4 3,5 3 2,5 2 1,5 1 0,5 0

• Types/1,000

BI

BII

Bill

Figure 43. LVC type frequency in 25 year periods (BI-BIII), per 1,000 words

The light verb construction in the Paston letters

4

237

• Types/1,000

3 2

1 0

Τ Generation I

Γ Generation II

Generation III

Figure 44. LVC type frequency in three generations (GI-GIII), per 1,000 words While her claim cannot be gauged in the present study, which only looks at the fifteenth century, it is very interesting to see that we do not find any linear increase in the corpus, neither in terms of token nor in terms of type frequency. Rather, what we can see is an increase in token frequency (in the sense of proportionally elevated LVC use) in period AIII (1456-65), BII (1451-75), or the second generation of Pastons. Correspondingly, we see a parallel decrease in type/token ratios in exactly the same periods. In other words: the more often speakers used LVCs, the fewer different types of LVCs (i.e. different nouns) they used, and vice versa. When we find fewer LVCs, as in period AI (1425-45) and AVI (1486-1503), we also find many different LVC string types. In sum, there is no linear development to be found here; we do not find support for the idea that the number of LVCs grew steadily during the late Middle English period, neither in terms of tokens nor in terms of types. However, Traugott convincingly shows that string frequency must have increased during the early Modern English period. How can that be explained? It might be argued that the data used here suffer from a certain statistical hiccough. Even when the frequency of LVCs remains roughly sTable, dramatic changes in corpus size naturally lead to great changes in type/token ratios. In other words, there is indeed a remarkable increase in type diversity over the years: from 111 different LVC types in period All (1446-55) to 209 in period AIV (146675); from 86 in BI (1425-50) to 305 in BII (1451-75). However, this increase goes unnoticed as it is drowned in a sharp increase in token frequency in the same periods. Therefore, whenever token frequency increases very rapidly, we get a distorted picture with regard to the TTR. Correspondingly, it might be speculated that changes in type frequency may be slower, but that they can nevertheless be quite significant. Let us now turn to the frequency of individual light verbs in the different LVCs.

238

The light verb

construction

Figures 45 and 46 give the individual share of each light verb in the total L V C s per period. 100% rm ii '

80% 60% 40% 20% 0% • Do

Λ u H b tfc AI

All

AIII

AIV

AV

AVI

4

35

71

67

16

4

15

32

42

12

7

• Give • Have

26

136

314

353

138

24

QMake

27

53

133

166

48

9

• Take

6

9

79

119

49

6

Figure 45. Development of individual light verbs in periods AI - AVI

Figure 46. Development of individual light verbs in periods BI - Bill

The light verb construction in the Paston letters

239

Figures 45 and 46 show that over time take seems to gain ground at the expense of do and make. This becomes particularly clear in comparing period BI (1425-50) and Bill (1476-1503), where take seems to have more than tripled its share, while make has lost about half.Have seems to remain fairly stable. There also is a slight increase in give LVCs, especially since none can be found in period AI (1425-45), but this is, statistically speaking, not very substantial. Figure 47 below shows the development of the individual light verbs across the three generations of Pastons. Apparently, there are no abrupt generational shifts as have been observed in the personal pronouns. Nevertheless, slight tendencies can be made out. Generation I shows a clear preference for LVCs with make. In generations II and III, we observe a gradual increase in have and take LVCs. Do and give LVCs seem to remain fairly sTable across all three generations. Tanabe's study comes to similar results (1999: 101-102). Her data also shows that there is no steady increase in forms over time (her highest percentages are in the 1460s). Also, as regards the development of single verbs, she ventures that do gradually decreases over time, while give increases, at least up to 1470, and have "constantly records the highest ratio among these verbs" (1999: 102). This is certainly borne out by the temporal analyses presented here. The generational analysis, however, does not show any decreases in do, but a rise in have and take at the expense of make.

Figure 47. Development of individual light verbs in three generations

240

The light verb construction

4.3.2.

Gender

About 33.5% (81,643 words) of the corpus were written by the four female authors 'Agnes, 2 Margaret, 2 Margery, and 2 Elizabeth. In terms of sheer token frequency, this part of the corpus contains 736 LVCs, compared to 1,264 LVCs in the male section (159,194 words). This means that we find an average frequency of 9.1 LVCs per 1,000 words in the female section, compared to only 7.9 LVCs per 1,000 words in the male section. LVC tokens are more frequent in female authors. In terms of types, we find 189 different LVC types in the female section, compared to 314 different types in the male section. If these figures are seen in relation to the respective share of the corpus, it turns out that females use only few more different types (2.3 per 1,000 words) than males (2.0 per 1,000 words). This in turn leads to the conclusion that women seem to use more LVC tokens, i.e. more formulaic language, but that they are not quite as creative in producing new string types. However, the difference appears to be marginal. Note also that the general TTR for both groups is roughly the same (0.25).

Η LVC type 4 • LVC type 3 Β LVC type 2 • LVC type 1

Female

Male

Figure 48. Gender specific use of LVC types 1—4 Figure 48 above illustrates gender specific use of the four different LVC types. Apparently, the ratios for the four different types are roughly the same: about 50% type 1 LVCs, 2 5 - 3 0 % type 2, 14-15% type 3. The only difference can be found in type 4 LVC. These make up for about 10% in female LVC use, and only 5% in male use. Figure 49 above shows another interesting gender-related phenomenon. The distribution of the individual verbs is statistically significantly skewed (p0.1, n.s.). Plural nouns are infrequent in both groups, and both male and female authors use determiners in c. 50-55% of all LVCs. However, there is some significant variation in the other two domains: modification patterns and syntactic markedness. Male speakers use fewer modification patterns than female speakers (see Fig. 52, p