Syntactic Change: Toward a Theory of Historical Syntax 9783110854947, 9783110126518

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Syntactic Change

Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs 50

Editor

Werner Winter

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

Syntactic Change Toward a Theory of Historical Syntax

by

Jan Terje Faarlund

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

1990

Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague) is a Division of Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin.

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Faarlund, Jan Terje. 1943 — Syntactic change : toward a theory of historical syntax / Jan Terje Faarlund. p. cm. — (Trends in linguistics, Studies and monographs ; 50) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-89925-749-6 (acid-free paper) 1. Grammar, Comparative and general — Syntax. 2. Historical linguistics. 3. Scandinavian languages — Grammar, Historical. I. Title. II. Series. P291.F24 1990 415 — dc20 90-45615 CIP

Deutsche Bibliothek Cataloging in Publication

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Faarlund, Jan Terje: Syntactic change : toward a theory of historical syntax / by Jan Terje Faarlund. — Berlin ; New York : Mouton de Gruyter, 1990 (Trends in linguistics : Studies and monographs ; 50) ISBN 3-11-012651-6 NE: Trends in linguistics / Studies and monographs

© Copyright 1990 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-1000 Berlin 30 All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, 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. Printing: Ratzlow Druck, Berlin — Binding: Lüderitz & Bauer G m b H . Printed in Germany.

Preface

Writing about syntactic change necessarily implies using data from extinct linguistic stages, for which only written sources are available. The example sentences from extinct stages of languages used in this book come from a variety of sources. Information about the source is given either in the preceding text, or immediately following the translation. It is usually given as the name of the work where the sentence occurs. Many of the Old Norse examples stem from the book Νοπφη syntax by M. Nygaard (1906), others are from my own excerption of Old Norse prose texts. All the examples from Old Norse are printed in the standardized spelling adopted for Old Icelandic. In a work on syntax, I find it unnecessarily complicating to use the spelling of the original manuscript edition, or to add all the philological or bibliographical information about each edition used as a data source. A few Old Norse examples are constructed, and can be recognized by their not having any source information. Such examples are of course never used to support an argument or to prove a point, only to illustrate a point. In the glosses of the examples, only those grammatical morphemes that are relevant in each particular case are included. I am grateful to the Norwegian Research Council for Science and the Humanities (NAVF) for travel support, and in particular for a grant enabling me to spend a year of research at the University of Chicago in 1988-89. I have benefited from the opportunity to discuss the Old Norse data with Jan Ragnar Hagland, data from Old English with Conrad Lindberg, and data from Old French with Lise Lorentzen and Arne Halvorsen. Historical linguistics of course also includes our own time, with languages and dialects with live speakers. Where I could not rely on my own knowledge, I have had to rely on native speakers. I am grateful for the help that I have received from Margit Hansen and Maud Heinesen with Faroese, from Ragnheiöur Karlsdöttir and l»0rarinn Stefänsson with Icelandic, and from Elisa Steinberg with Spanish. Several students and colleagues have contributed to the ideas presented in this book, such as my students in historical syntax at the University of Chicago in 1979-1980 and 1983-1985, and audiences at guest lectures at Agder College, the University of Athens, and University College London.

vi

Preface

I also want to thank those of my colleagues who have patiently read the manuscript and suggested many improvements: John Ole Askedal, Leiv Egil Breivik, John Goldsmith, Jan Ragnar Hagland, and Kjell Venäs. In particular I want to thank Marianne Gullestad, my wife, who has offered stimulating discussions of the philosophical and metatheoretical aspects of my work, as well as general inspiration and support.

Trondheim, July 1990

Jan Terje Faarlund

Contents

Preface Abbreviations Introduction

ν ix 1

1. Preliminaries 1.1. The subject-matter of diachronic syntax 1.2. The logic of syntactic change 1.3. The North Germanic languages and dialects 1.4. Theoretical framework 1.5. The data 1.5.1. The lack of negative data 1.5.2. Literary sources and illiterate societies 1.5.3. The interpretation of data and syntactic theory

5 5 9 10 13 16 17 18 19

2. Explanation and syntactic change

31

2.1. 2.2. 2.3. 2.4. 2.5.

The locus of linguistic change The meaning of "explanation" Explaining linguistic change Motivation and predictability Formal and functional explanations - a summary

3. Functional change 3.1. 3.2. 3.3. 3.4. 3.4.1. 3.4.2. 3.4.3.

Synchronic variation and diachronic change Word order typology The verb-second constraint The expletive topic Describing the changes Explaining the changes Origin of expletive word

31 34 37 41 44 47 47 50 59 63 66 68 70

viii

Contents

4. Formal change 4.1. 4.2. 4.3. 4.3.1. 4.3.2. 4.3.3. 4.3.3.1. 4.3.3.2. 4.3.3.3. 4.3.3.4. 4.3.3.5. 4.4. 4.4.1. 4.4.1.1. 4.4.1.2. 4.4.1.3. 4.4.2.

Predicate and argument Grammatical function and semantic role Configurationality Modern Norwegian as a configurational language Characteristics of nonconflgurationality Old Norse VP-constituent? Discontinuous phrases Empty argument positions Idioms Conclusion Prototypicality Subject in Old Norse and Norwegian Discourse functions Syntactic properties Semantic roles Prototype and change

5. Some consequences 5.1. 5.1.1. 5.1.2. 5.1.3. 5.1.4. 5.2. 5.2.1. 5.2.2. 5.3. 5.4. 5.5.

Case systems Case system of Old Norse Case system of modern Norwegian Case system of modern Icelandic Case system of modern Faroese Passive Passive and configurationality Different passive constructions "Impersonal" constructions From preposition to verbal particle The expletive subject

Notes References Index

75 75 78 82 83 85 86 86 94 102 106 110 110 112 112 115 127 131 137 137 140 150 159 166 167 168 173 177 185 189 195 203 215

Abbreviations

In the glosses, the following abbreviations are used for grammatical morphemes: A ASP D F G IMPR INF Μ MDL Ν NEU Ρ PART PCL RFL S SUBJ

Accusative Aspect marker Dative Feminine Genitive Imperative Infinitive Masculine Modality adverb Nominative Neuter Plural Past Participle Particle Reflexive suffix Singular Subjunctive

Other abbreviations used are self-explanatory. In general, the form you is used as a gloss for the second person pronoun in the singular, dual, and plural.

Introduction

Historical syntax is not a new discipline. But like so many other linguistic sub-disciplines involving syntax, its scope and methods have been revolutionized as a result of the development of syntactic theory during the second half of this century. On the other hand, many practitioners of historical syntax are more firmly rooted in linguistic tradition and in philology than the average "synchronic" syntactician may be. Therefore even contemporary work in historical syntax often leans heavily on the work of more traditional linguists and grammarians. For these and other reasons we find that historical syntax today is characterized by great diversity in methods, goals, and theoretical assumptions. The linguistic enterprises that are usually branded historical syntax include at least the following: a) Syntactic studies of earlier stages of a language or of extinct languages. b) Descriptions of syntactic changes from one stage to another through the history of one language or of a group of related languages. c) Explanations of such changes. d) Reconstruction of the syntax of preliterary stages of a language and of proto-languages. The term diachronic syntax covers the last three of these types of historical syntax, whereas the first is synchronic syntax applied to languages of the past. Each of these tasks can be pursued as goals in themselves, but they are not totally independent of each other. The items b), c), d) on the list above presuppose the preceding item. In order to be able to reconstruct nonattested stages of a language, we need some understanding of the principles and mechanisms of linguistic change. These are the principles and mechanisms that are needed also to explain linguistic change. Hypotheses about regularities in syntactic change can be established inductively on the basis of the observation of the kinds of changes which actually do take place in languages; we need descriptions of changes. And finally, such descriptions of changes of course presuppose descriptions of individual stages. Earlier generations of philologists and historical linguists have furnished

2

Introduction

us with a host of descriptions of earlier stages of languages, particularly of those of the Indo-European family. Present-day theoretical linguists have provided us with hypotheses and theories about syntactic structure. We are therefore in a fairly good position to work towards goal c) above, trying to explain the syntactic changes from one stage to the next. The present work is an attempt to contribute towards that goal. The aim of the work is thus not to offer an exhaustive description of one or more stages of any language. I have not been concerned with details from attested texts for the sake of completeness, and the reader will look in vain for statistical information on the relative frequency of any given grammatical pattern. The data on which I base my claims and conclusions are not the product of systematic excerptions from large and complete corpora. There are basically two "excuses" for this: first, no matter how large the corpus from a former stage of a language is, it will only represent a fraction of the utterances produced by the speakers of that language, and often also only certain genres or styles; secondly, I have found that without certain theoretical assumptions about linguistic structure and a careful analysis of available data, it is impossible to bring claims about the mechanisms of linguistic change beyond pure speculation. Common patterns are therefore more important than the deviant and philologically "interesting" ones. What I call "common patterns" are those which can be found reasonably often while reading and, above all, they are the patterns that are described and abundantly attested in reference grammars (although they may be cited to illustrate points other than those that are interesting to the diachronic syntactician). Rather than presenting large bodies of new data, I present some new data to support my analyses, and new interpretations of already available data. The question of available data and the possibility of interpreting them in interesting and relevant ways has also largely determined my choice of language area. I am reasonably familiar with various stages and varieties of the North Germanic (or Nordic) languages and dialects, and they are also quite well attested and described; some of these dialects exhibit an unbroken line of attested linguistic material from the second century AD up until the present. Therefore my conclusions based on material from North Germanic are probably less speculative and better founded than they would be if I used material from any other group of languages. The problem of data in a dead language will be discussed more thoroughly in Chapter One, section 1.5. In Chapter Two I discuss the problem of explanation with regard to language in general and with regard to syntactic

Introduction

3

change in particular. I arrive at the conclusion that there must be two kinds of explanation of linguistic phenomena, and these are applied to syntactic change in Chapters Three and Four, respectively. In Chapter Five I deal in more detail with certain types of changes that can be shown to follow from the two basic types.

Chapter one Preliminaries

1.1. The subject-matter of diachronic syntax Before attempting to determine what the subject-matter of diachronic syntax is, I will make a distinction between four kinds of objects: a) Actually occurring linguistic utterances (Saussure's parole). b) The set of possible grammatical sentences in a language. c) The system that underlies b) (Saussure's langue or Chomsky's competence).1 d) A description of c). The actually occurring linguistic utterances, a), are the raw data of linguistic studies. They form the basis of inferences about the nature and inventory of b), the set of possible grammatical sentences. It is, however, not the only basis for our knowledge about this set. Other data sources are for example statements by native speakers about possible or impossible utterances in the language. The set b) are in turn the basis for inferences about the system that underlies it, c), which reflects the speakers' internalized knowledge, or competence. A description of the system is a set of generalized statements about it. As is well known, the frameworks used in grammatical descriptions are numerous. They are all aimed at giving a description of the system, but they do not all claim to be that system. No matter how strong the isomorphism between speakers' internalized knowledge of the grammatical system and the grammatical description of that system is, it is important to keep in mind that they are not identical (see page 13). We are now ready to return to the questions of the subject-matter of diachronic syntax. Obviously we are not interested in studying the changes that can be observed in the raw data itself. It makes little sense to compare a random sentence in Shakespearean English with a random sentence in twentieth century English. The difference between (1) and (2) is of course

6

Preliminaries

not due to historical linguistic change: (1) (2)

If music be the food of love, play on If unemployment continues to soar, the whole welfare system will be in jeopardy

Neither are we concerned with differences between singular sentences that are semantically and functionally equivalent. The fact that (1) is found in Shakespearean English and (2) in twentieth century English is not in itself very interesting as a historical fact. Nor is it necessarily interesting to historical linguistics that (1) is found in sixteenth century English and (3) in twentieth century English. (3)

If music is the food love, then go on playing

It might be, for example, that both (1) and (3) could occur in either period. Then the observed difference would not reflect a historical syntactic change. We are therefore not interested in comparing linguistic utterances at different stages. Such a comparison does not become more relevant or interesting even if we compare two random sets from the two periods in question. A comparison of the general properties of the sentences of Act I, Scene I of Hamlet and of the sentences of the first page of the Chicago Tribune of February 12, 1990, may reveal several differences, but unless we can provide a grammatical analysis of the material based on a theory about linguistic structure, we have no way of knowing whether or not those differences reflect grammatical differences between the two historical stages. The larger the two sets of utterances are, the greater are of course the chances that the differences actually do reflect grammatical differences. A real basis for historical comparison is obtained only when we compare the underlying grammatical systems of each stage. The changes that are the subject-matter of diachronic syntax are changes in the grammar of a language. Since the grammar of a language can be understood as a set of rules which generates an infinite set of sentences, a grammatical description of an extinct language can of course only be an approximation to the actual system which underlies the sentences produced by the speakers of that language. Our grammar (in the sense of a grammatical description) of a language is just a hypothesis about the grammatical system of the language.2 Of course the fewer data we have from a given stage, the weaker is the hypothesis, but the

The subject-matter of diachronic syntax

7

difference between our basis for writing grammars of living languages and of poorly attested extinct languages is really a difference of degree rather than a difference of kind. For a further discussion of the problem of data from earlier stages of a language or from extinct languages, see section 1.5. Of the traditional branches of grammar - phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics - syntax is the least immediately accessible. Phonology deals with the sounds of the language, semantics with the meaning. Thus they correspond to the two sides of the 'sign' in the structuralist sense, expression and content. Both sound and meaning can be observed more or less immediately, and users of the language have a conscious awareness of their existence. It is relatively easy to explain to lay people what phonology and semantics are about, and opinions about them can be elicited from naive speakers. Syntax is different. The entities of syntax cannot be directly observed in the same way. They are at best abstract, or they are constructs made up by the linguist. They can be observed only indirectly, and only by people who have been trained to understand and use a linguistic metalanguage. Phonology and semantics of course also need metalanguages, but not at the level of immediate observation. Sounds and meaning are "real things", they can be observed and even described in terms of categories from everyday life. Such things as voiced sounds and things referred to by the word chair are parts of everyday life. But what do "verb phrase" and "subjacency" correspond to out there? Before we can even begin to study syntactic change, we therefore first have to make sure that the entities we operate with, the terms of our metalanguage, are given an empirical interpretation; the term "verb phrase" has to be interpreted in such a way as to refer to something in the world just as the term "voiced sound" does. Next we have to make sure that the data are correctly assigned to the terms of the metalanguage, in other words that the utterances that make up the data source are correctly analyzed in terms of the linguistic model. The linguistic competence of a speaker of a given language can be represented as consisting of a universal part and a language-specific part. Since the universal part is common to all natural languages at all times, changes can only take place in the language-specific part of the grammar. The entities that this part of the grammar consists of are things like phrase structure rules, interpretation rules, mapping principles, etc. These are the objects that may undergo change. Those objects are obviously very different from some of those involved in phonological change, for example features and values. The "classical" changes in the phonological components of some

8

Preliminaries

familiar languages, such as the Great Vowel Shift, Grimm's Law, etc., involve changes in the feature composition of the phonemes and in their mutual distribution. The syntactic units which would correspond to the phonological cluster of distinctive features would have to be the kind of entities upon which rules operate, namely syntactic categories, such as V or NP. There are, however, some important differences between phonemes and syntactic categories, and there is some controversy as to the importance and relevance of those differences. First, phonemes come in ordered /i-tuples in the shape of lexical items. The lexical item is a historical constant, an etymon, which constitutes a context that makes it possible to identify a phoneme at one stage with a phonetically different phoneme at another stage. What enables us to identify Old English [i:] with the Modern English [ai] is the set of etymons including life, wife, wine, etc. Each word in a set like this contains a token of the phoneme type. There is no syntactic unit corresponding to the etymon or the lexical item. According to Mithun & Campbell (1982: 275) "a syntactic pattern is not learned anew for each sentence which exemplifies it. ... In syntax, the type has only one token, the general rule." This may be true of some purely distributional phenomena, such as movement or deletion rules. But Harris (1985: 23f.) demonstrates how simple clauses can serve as an etymon, or a cognate, in the syntactic comparison of closely related languages. Between two Caucasian languages, modern Georgian and Laz, there is a regular correspondence of case distribution in a large class of simple sentences: where modern Georgian uses the nominative for the subject, Laz uses the narrative case. It should be noted, however, that the use of cases in these languages is really determined by the verb, so that case assignment may be seen as a property of the verb as a lexical item rather than of the sentence. Second, the inventory of syntactic categories is relatively small and more or less constant across languages. A set of phonemes in a language, for example all rounded front vowels, may lose their feature [+rounded], whereby the inventory of phonemes is reduced. Yet the basic structure of the language is not really affected, since perhaps most relevant oppositions are still maintained. But a set of syntactic categories, for example adjectives, is much less likely to lose its feature [+nominal] and become verbs. A third difference has to do with the directionality of change. "Many sound changes are more likely to occur in one direction than another" (Mithun & Campbell 1982: 274). For example, if in two related languages we find that one has intervocalic voiced stops and the other intervocalic

The logic of syntactic change

9

unvoiced stops, we may assume that it is the former that has undergone a change, since the voicing of intervocalic stops is a much more natural change than the devoicing of intervocalic stops. According to Mithun and Campbell there is no such directionality in syntax. Again, this may be true of most types of syntactic change, but probably not for word order change, which seems to occur in predictable directions. Several linguists have demonstrated both empirically and theoretically how word order change is determined by implicational universale in the sense of Greenberg (1963). The best-known works of this kind are those by Vennemann (e.g. 1975) and Hawkins (1979, 1983). Implicational universale are statements of the type "If a language has property P, then it also tends to have property Q", schematically: Ρ > Q. A language tends to maintain this typological consistency through its history and to avoid the inconsistency *P & -Q. If we let Ρ stand for the order verb - object (VO), -P for the order object - verb (OV), Q for preposition, and -Q for postposition, we get the universal implication that VO languages have prepositions rather than postpositions.3 Now if an OV language with postpositions (-P & -Q) changes into a VO language, that would lead to the universal inconsistency *P & -Q. At this point the language will change from postpositions to prepositions in order to conform to the universal implication Ρ > Q. So if two related VO languages differ in that one has postpositions and the other prepositions, we have reasons to assume that the one with prepositions has undergone a change, whereas the one with postpositions still keeps the old structure inherited from an earlier OV stage. Furthermore, the OV - VO alternation seems to be unidirectional even independently of implicational universals. This is the topic of section 3.2. in Chapter Three.

1.2. The logic of syntactic change As a first step in a discussion of the theoretical implications of syntactic change (which will be discussed more fully in Chapter Two), I will make certain assumptions explicit. They are only assumptions, since I will not defend them on the basis of empirical facts, but rather on the basis of logical inference. The first assumption is that the locus of linguistic change is language acquisition by new generations of native speakers. In that case, change occurs as a result of reanalysis. On the basis of linguistic utterances in the environment, the learner infers a grammar which is different from the

10 Preliminaries grammar of the adult speakers that produced the utterances. The objection may be raised that contact situations involving adult speakers also lead to linguistic change. This is obviously true; the internalized grammar of the adult speaker may change as a result of influence from utterances generated by a different grammar, whether in a different language, a different dialect, or just a different idiolect. Presumably, such influence is possible only in bilingual situations (in a wide and general sense): by adopting elements from another system (language, dialect, idiolect) grammatical rules generating that other system are mixed with the rules generating the original system. Yet such changes do not constitute a diachronic linguistic change until a future generation of speakers have adopted the mixed system as their own, uniform system. The second assumption is that the factors causing change to take place do not determine what the actual changes will be. That is determined by the cognitive and communicative properties of language. The cognitive aspect of language determines what is learnable, and hence what is a possible language. The possible results of a linguistic change is therefore limited by what is a possible language: a language cannot change into something which is not a possible language! The communicative aspects of language prevent changes from taking place beyond intelligibility: a language cannot change to the extent that parents do not understand their children! Within those limits, "anything can happen". Grammars are created anew by each generation. In that sense each individual speaker has his or her own language, and each new speaker creates the language from scratch. Thus there can be no "rules of change", as also argued by Lightfoot (1979a). In this book I will concentrate on the internal factors that may have determined the course of the change. Making such a choice should in no way be construed as implying that I do not recognize the importance of contact as an external cause. The one does not exclude the other, and doing the one at the exclusion of the other does not mean that one does not recognize the importance of the other.

1.3. The North Germanic languages and dialects Most of the data in this book will be drawn from the North Germanic languages. In accordance with accepted usage in Scandinavia, I will use the term Nordic as a synonym of North Germanic. The Nordic languages have

The North Germanic languages and dialects

11

a documented history of some 1,800 years. The first detectable dialect split between East and West Nordic is due to sound changes that may have taken place by the seventh century. The common Nordic language of the period prior to that is called Ancient Nordic. The East Nordic dialects were spoken in Denmark and Sweden. West Nordic included the dialects spoken in Norway and in the Norse settlements in the West (Iceland, the Faroe Islands, the Shetland and Orkney Islands, the Isle of Man, parts of Scotland, and Greenland). The present-day descendants of West Nordic are Icelandic, Faroese, and Norwegian. Of these, Norwegian has changed most radically, partly under the influence from neighboring Swedish and Danish, but mainly as part of a common mainland Scandinavian linguistic development. This shared linguistic development in the Scandinavian peninsula and the relative isolation of the dialects of Iceland and the Faroes have led to a major partition in the modern languages between Mainland Nordic, also called Scandinavian (East Nordic and Norwegian) on the one hand, and the more conservative Insular Nordic languages (Icelandic and Faroese) on the other. Icelandic and Faroese are clearly distinguishable and to a large extent mutually unintelligible, while the Scandinavian languages constitute a continuum of mutually intelligible dialects. By a definition based on mutual intelligibility there would thus be three Nordic languages spoken today: Icelandic (220,000 speakers), Faroese (45,000), and Scandinavian (17.5 million). Scandinavian includes four standard languages: Danish, Swedish (also an official language in Finland), and two Norwegian standards, NewNorwegian (inynorsk) and Dano-Norwegian (bokm&l).4 The distinction between West and East Nordic is of historical relevance only. When referring to the present, a distinction between mainland Nordic and insular Nordic is much more relevant. We can distinguish three periods in the history of Nordic:

12 Preliminaries I. II.

III.

Ancient Nordic, until the seventh century. No known significant dialect differences. Medieval Nordic, seventh century to fifteenth century. a) West Nordic: Old Icelandic, Old Norwegian, etc. b) East Nordic: Old Danish, Old Swedish Modern Nordic, fifteenth century to present. a) Icelandic b) Faroese c) Mainland Nordic: New-Norwegian, Dano-Norwegian, Danish, Swedish.

Ancient Nordic is attested in short, formalized memorial or ritualistic inscriptions5 in the older runic alphabet (the Older Futhark) from the second century AD. Medieval West Nordic is commonly referred to as Old Norse, which is the term that will be used in this book. Old Norse is attested in runic inscriptions (the Younger Futhark), and in manuscripts written with the Latin alphabet. The Latin alphabet came into use with the introduction of Christianity shortly after the turn of the millennium. The oldest preserved original manuscripts are some charters from around 1200. The old orally transmitted literature was recorded in writing, such as the Edda poems and the skaldic poetry. Then there are copies of manuscripts containing sermons, legends, laws, chronicles, many of them translations from other European languages. And the most important literature from this period are perhaps the sagas. Syntactically there were few significant dialect differences even in the Medieval period; today there are still few syntactic differences within Scandinavian; in particular, the syntactic differences between New-Norwegian and Dano-Norwegian are negligible. Most of the discussion in this book is therefore based on data from Ancient Nordic; from one Medieval dialect, Old Norse; from one modern Scandinavian language, New-Norwegian (mostly referred to as simply Norwegian); from modern Icelandic; and from modern Faroese. The interrelationship between these various historical stages and dialects can be represented graphically as in (4), where the double line marks the course of development that will be followed most closely in this book.

Theoretical framework

(Insular Nordic)

(

Mainland Nordic

13

)

1.4. Theoretical framework The importance of the choice of theoretical framework depends on the degree of isomorphism assumed between grammar as an internalized system and grammar as a description of such a system. If there is a one-to-one correspondence between the terms of a grammatical description and the components that make up our internalized grammatical system, then of course there is such a thing as a "correct" or "true" model. I will, however, adopt the view that no existing framework for grammatical description can be shown to be isomorphic with the grammatical system of any language, for the simple reason that that system is unavailable to direct inspection. It can only be observed through its concrete manifestations, the actual linguistic utterances, and every grammatical description is an inductive generalization based on those utterances. A change in the grammatical description from one stage to the next therefore is a hypothesis about a change in the system, but it cannot be assumed to be isomorphic with the actual change. For example, the loss of a movement rule in the grammatical description will at best reflect a corresponding change in the grammatical system, but as long as we do not know the exact nature of that system, we do not know exactly what change the rule loss reflects. For these reasons the choice of grammatical framework depends in part on considerations other than just the question of whether or not it gives a "true" picture of the

14 Preliminaries grammatical system itself. In this book I will adopt a somewhat modified version of the Extended Standard Theory of generative grammar. I will, however, depart from the theory and practice of that framework in certain respects. Most importantly, I will adopt a modular, nonsequential view of linguistic organization. By modular, I understand an organization of the grammar where the various components - phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics - are autonomous modules with their own separate and distinct rules and principles. The fact that linguistic representations can be organized into separate components or modules is by no means a new idea. In fact, it is hard to imagine how linguistic structure could be represented without such a principle of organization. In recent years, this principle and its possibilities have been explored to a much larger extent than before. The notion of component or module has taken on a wider meaning than the traditional one of "phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics" (or any subset thereof), and the mutual autonomy of these modules has been emphasized. In particular, the sequential view of linguistic components has been challenged, that is, the view that the components of linguistic structure and representation are dependent on each other in such a way that one component feeds into the other, or that the output of one component is the input to the next (Sadock 1985, 1987, in press; Goldsmith 1976, 1989). Sadock (1985, in press) has worked out a theory known as autolexical syntax, where syntax and morphology are organized into two discrete modules, each with its own rules and principles. A sentence is thus given both a syntactic and a morphological representation, and in order to pass as a grammatical sentence, it has to satisfy the independent requirements of each of the modules. In accordance with this modular view of linguistic structure, it has been suggested that semantics be treated not only as a separate module, but as a module independent of syntax (Faarlund 1985a, 1990; LaPointe 1987: 181182). Jackendoff (1983, 1987) and Culicover (1988) propose an organization of grammar where an autonomous conceptual component is generated independently of syntax and then mapped onto a syntactic representation. I will follow this view of the relationship between syntax and semantics, as I will Jackendoffs (1987: 372) rather programmatic statement that "the fundamental point, from which all else proceeds, is that thematic relations are part of a level of semantic/conceptual structure, not part of syntax". I will furthermore entertain what may be considered a rather extreme autonomous view in trying to distinguish as strictly as possible between semantic and

Theoretical framework 15 syntactic phenomena. In other words, I basically agree with Culicover that "A grammar consists of a set of components, each of which characterizes a set of well-formed representations at one or more levels. Each component of the grammar has its own primitives, rules of combination, and wellformedness conditions" (Culicover 1988: 38). The organization of the syntax and the semantics into two discrete modules first of all means that the semantic structure associated with a linguistic expression such as a sentence is not derived from the syntactic structure of that sentence, be it the deep structure, the surface structure, or any level in between. Rather, the semantic representation is generated independently as a representation of the meaning associated with the expression, and whether the semantic representation is well-formed is determined within the semantic module alone. Hence, a sentence is well-formed if its syntactic structure is well-formed by the rules and principles of the syntactic module, if its semantic structure is well-formed by the rules and principles of the semantic module (generally, this means that it should be interpretable or "make sense" within the universe of discourse established by the context of that sentence), and if the two representations can be associated by means of general principles of some interface system. Those principles are presumably partly universal and partly language-specific. In this mapping relationship, certain kinds of mismatch between the two modules are permitted, while others are not. In English, for example, there may be a mismatch between syntax and discourse function; functional principles would require the first element of the sentence to be topical, whereas the syntax requires the subject to precede the verb. This may result in sentences like (5), which start with a nontopical subject. (5)

A stranger came up to me

The modular approach allows us to relieve the syntax of certain tasks that otherwise complicate it in the traditional view of the relationship between syntax and semantics. Such phenomena as anaphor binding and thematic roles are strictly part of semantics. Specifically, the relative position or the morphological marking of argument NPs, combined with certain general principles, suffice to determine their semantic roles, as demonstrated in Faarlund (1990). One consequence of this organization of the grammar is that a separate level of grammatical relations - as posited by, for example Marantz, (1984: 4) - is not needed, at least not for the purpose of the interpretation of

16 Preliminaries thematic roles, or semantic roles as I will be calling them henceforth.

1.5. The data A grammatical description of a living language is a hypothesis about the grammar generating the sentences of that language. Since the number of utterances that can be elicited and inspected in such a language is extremely high, the grammatical description can become a very strong hypothesis about the grammar of the language, in spite of the fact that the number of sentences generated by the grammar is infinite. Negative data from speakers' grammaticality judgments lend further support to the hypothesis. In the case of dead languages the situation is of course different, but it is mainly a difference of degree. As long as we are dealing with attested languages, we still have the possibility of observing and inspecting real utterances.6 The problem is how to use those records. In philologically prepared written sources from the past we may expect to find data of roughly the following kinds: a)

Grammatical utterances consistent with the grammatical rules of the language at the time when the text was produced. b) Utterances reflecting construction types that were obsolete at the time, such as legal, magic, or religious formulas. c) Construction types that deviate from the norm for metrical reasons. d) Utterances that are ungrammatical for any other reason. In the case of b) we may assume that obsolete forms were once grammatical. All we risk by including them in our data base is to construct a grammar which generates too many "generations" of the language, and as a consequence treats chronologically separate forms as synchronic variation. Utterances of type c) are deviant mainly in their word order. If we can find a meter, rhyme, or alliteration pattern which "explains" the deviation, the sentence form should of course be discarded from any material used to study word order, but otherwise included in the study of other syntactic phenomena. The confidence with which we can separate the good data from the bad of course depends first of all on the total amount of data. A deviant form will stand out all the more conspicuously the larger the total amount of "normal" forms is. In a large corpus the lack of a repetition of the deviant form is a

The data

17

kind of negative data.

1.5.1. The lack of negative data The most deeply felt privation of the historical syntactician is probably the lack of informants who can tell him or her "No, we can't say it that way." In some dead languages, however, the attested material is so copious that to some extent this need can be met. For some languages we are also fortunate enough to have large data collections with examples of most conceivable syntactic construction types. For Old Norse, Nygaard (1906) is such a collection. He went through most of the extant texts in Old Norse, and there seem to be very few construction types that have escaped him. Lack of mention by Nygaard could then almost be said to be a kind of negative data. Despite the lack of native speakers, some classical languages do have professional readers: philologists, linguists, historians, theologians, and others, who have done such extensive reading in the language that they have acquired intuition about grammaticality. The acquisition of such intuition may not be all that different in principle from the acquisition of the grammar of one's native language. Another type of negative data can be found in the so-called "missed opportunities". If a certain syntactic form F is used regularly in a given function or type of context C in a living language L, and if F is absent in C at an earlier stage of the language, OL, then there is good reason to assume that F does not exist in OL. For example, modern Norwegian existential sentences have the expletive subject det 'it', as in (6a). In Old Norse the equivalent sentence would be (6b). (6)

a. Det var ein mann som heitte Bjarne it was a man who was-named Bjarni b. Bjarni hit maör Bjarni was-named man 'There was a man called Bjarni' (Hrafhkels saga)

The fact that the expletive subject is absent even in those contexts where it is more or less obligatory in the descendent language provides rather strong negative evidence against its existence in Old Norse.

18 Preliminaries The task of the linguist is often compared to that of a child learning a language: they both proceed by creating hypotheses about the grammar on the basis of available linguistic data, then revising the hypotheses as more data becomes available. This comparison is probably most accurate in the case of the historical linguist, who has to depend on very inadequate and impoverished data, and who has no direct access to negative data. Consider Chomsky's ideas about negative data in language acquisition: If certain structures fail to be exemplified in relatively simple expressions, where they would be expected to be found, then a (possibly marked) option is selected excluding them in the grammar, so that a kind of "negative evidence" can be available even without corrections, adverse reactions, etc. (Chomsky 1981:9) A similar procedure is available for, and undoubtedly practiced by, historical linguists.

1.5.1 Literary sources and illiterate societies An important caveat about the use of ancient written records should be pointed out: most past civilizations that have left us written documents represent speech communities where the large majority of the members were illiterate. In many cases, as for example in ancient Germanic societies, writing was a skill accessible only to a small elite. The fraction of the population who could read the script was presumably also very small, and even for those few who somehow communicated in writing, the handling of written material took up a relatively small part of their time. The impact of writing on speech, and thereby the influence of the written language on the overall development of the language, must therefore have been very limited. In view of this the importance ascribed to the written language in much of the literature on historical linguistics is vastly overrrated. A case in point is the explanation of the change in the use of the verb like through the history of English. I will return to this change in Chapter Five, section 5.3. For the present purpose it suffices to observe that in Old English the verb lician means 'please* and takes its object in the dative. Jespersen (1927: 209) hypothesizes that the change has gone through the following stages:

The data 19 (7)

a. b. c. d.

Pam cyngeticodonperan The king likeden peares The king liked pears He liked pears

The evolution from the Old English stage, with a verb meaning 'please', a human experiencer in the dative, and the verb agreeing with 'pears', to the modern English stage where the experiencer is the grammatical subject, is explained on the basis of the loss of case-marking and number agreement in the past tense of verbs, and the identification of the first position with the subject. This "confusionist" hypothesis is plausible to the extent that (7a) was the most frequent sentence type where such verbs as 'like' would occur. The sentence has a topicalized dative NP, which is by no means unusual in Old English and related languages, especially not when it refers to a human being. It may well have been typical to put the dative person object first in sentences like this, thus laying the ground for the confusion. But this also presupposes that the dative object is a full NP, and not a personal pronoun, since the latter have kept their case distinction till this day. It may be that in the kind of narrative prose which remains from the Old English period, the human experiencer of verbs like lician, hyngrian, pyrstan, etc. was referred to with a full NP, but in the spoken language of the uneducated and illiterate masses of early inhabitants of England the most common experiencer of these verbs must have been - then as now - the first person, and in questions the second person. Gaafs statement that "The declinable pronouns [...] were used less frequently than nouns and uninfected pronouns, and had in the end to conform to the prevailing practice" (Gaaf 1904: 198) cannot have been true of sentences with verbs of this sort.

1.5.3. The interpretation of data and syntactic theory Although we may arrive at rather safe assumptions about the inventory of construction types found in a dead language, it is not always obvious how to interpret such data to reconstruct the grammar that generated those sentences. The conclusions about the underlying grammar obviously depend on the linguistic model used, which again depends on the linguistic theory. Furthermore, just as the theory adopted may determine the conclusions about the grammatical structure of specific utterances, the theory may also

20

Preliminaries

determine the actual interpretation of attested material. As an illustration, let us look at the problem of basic word order in Ancient Nordic in connection with the interpretation of one specific inscription in the older runic alphabet.7 The question of word order in Germanic has been much discussed from different angles, and there are no doubt good arguments both for and against all logically possible orders. For a summary of the discussion, see Braunmüller (1982: 113f). Various counts have been made to establish the relative frequency of verb positions in Ancient Nordic. Thus Ureland (1978) studies the word order in 35 sentences from Krause (1971), and finds that 22.9% have verb-first order, 42.8% are verb second, and 34.4% are verb final or verb third.8 In the same corpus, Antonsen finds 34 Northwest Germanic and 14 North Germanic sentences "with the position of the verb determinable" (Antonsen 1975: 25). Of the Northwest Germanic sentences, 71% have final verbs, 10% have initial verbs, and 25% have the verb in medial position. Braunmüller (1982: 138) counts 63 sentences, including the cases whose membership in a particular basic word-order category is uncertain, and finds 66.67% SVO, 28.57% SOV, and 4.76% VSO. After having counted the verb positions, he concludes: Für die Grundwortstellung in den urnordischen Inschriften und damit auch für das älteste belegte Germanische ergibt sich folgendes Ergebnis (es sei nochmals darauf hingewiesen, dass die Prozentangaben nur im Sinne einer Tendenzangabe interpretiert werden dürfen): (1) 2/3 aller les- und (einigermassen) deutbaren urnordischen Inschriften ... sind ... zur SVO-Grundwortstellung zu rechnen. (2) Ca. 30% sind demgegenüber der Grundwortstellung SOV zuzuordnen. [For the basic word order in the Ancient Nordic inscriptions and thereby also for the oldest attested Germanic the following result emerges (it should be noted once more that the percentages should only be interpreted as tendencies): (1) 2/3 of all the Ancient Nordic inscriptions that can be read and somehow interpreted ... belong to the basic word order SVO. (2) By comparison, ca. 30% belong to the basic word order SOV.] (Braunmüller 1982: 139) It is not quite clear what Braunmüller means by Grundwortstellung [basic word order]. Since both SVO and SOV are called "basic", it is clear that "basic word order" cannot be taken to mean either the most unmarked or

The data

21

the statistically most frequent order. It can therefore only mean the deepstructure order. But this entails the claim that there are two randomly distributed orders in the deep structure. Even more bizarre is the use of statistics to establish the deep structure. The scarcity of attested sentences and the total randomness of the corpus of course gives us no basis whatsoever for concluding anything about the actual relative frequency of the sentence types in Ancient Nordic, or even in the total amount of runic inscripions written during that period. The only thing that such counts tell us is the relative frequency within the corpus. What, then, can we conclude about the basic structures of very poorly attested languages, such as e.g. Ancient Nordic, known to us from some 120 runic inscriptions? This is where linguistic theory may be of some help. In the Ancient Nordic inscriptions we may discern altogether 69 full sentences (Faarlund 1989a). On the basis of these sentences, data from related languages, and universal grammar, there are three plausible underlying orders: VSO, SVO, and SOV. a) Underlying VSO would presuppose one optional rule of fronting or topicalization. Application of this rule would yield the verb-second sentences, nonapplication would yield the verb-initial sentences. In addition, there would have to be a rule of verb postposing, moving the finite verb to the end of the sentence, yielding the verb-final sentences. This rule would operate both in subordinate and in main sentences. We have no basis for stating anything about an interplay between these two movement rules. One feature that might support this analysis over an SVO analysis is that not only nominative NPs could precede the verb. Besides 0 , there are also oblique NPs, as in (8)

hAidzruno

ronu

fAlAhAk hAidera ginArunAz

bright-runes-G row-Α conceal-I here mighty-runes-A "The sequence of bright-runes I commit here, mighty-runes' (Björketorp stone) There are also preverbal adverbial phrases: (9)

uti

Az welAdAude

out is deceptive-death-D 'Abroad (he) is (given to) an insidious death' (Björketorp stone)

22

Preliminaries

The rule of topicalization would then be a general rule which can front NPs in any case form, and adverbials. This basic word order for Ancient Nordic has had very few supporters, and it is rejected by Braunmüller (1982). b) SVO as the underlying order has enjoyed considerable support within traditional nongenerative grammar, mainly because of its relative frequency and similarity with the unmarked pattern in Old Norse. It has, however, few supporters in today's generative camp. In addition to the rules of fronting (which fronts an oblique NP or an adverbial) and verb postposing, it also requires the postulation of a rule of inversion, to generate the nominative NP in a postverbal position: (10) ni

lagi

maz

nAkdan

not lay man-N naked-A 'No man should expose it (to the sun)' (Eggja stone) c) SOV as the underlying order seems to be more or less agreed upon by present-day generative grammarians and others (e.g. Lehmann 1972a; Hopper 1975; Stockwell 1977). This is mainly based on comparative evidence: SOV seems to have been the predominant and unmarked word order in most of the oldest attested Indo-European languages. But there is no logical basis for inferring from "most frequent" in a randomly attested corpus to "underlying" or "basic". Furthermore, even if we had evidence that the predecessors of Ancient Nordic really were underlyingly SOV, we would still have no evidence that this had to be the underlying order at the stage which we are dealing with here. Hopper makes the reverse but similar inference from "derived" to "later development": To assume that the second position was original, and to derive the final position from it, involves the considerably more complex shift of both the nonfinite and finite elements of the verbal constituents. I therefore assume that the second position, and not the final position, of the verb was a later development. (Hopper 1975: 86) Referring back to the argument in section 1.2., I will claim that the equation of "oldest" or "original" with "underlying" or "basic" is a fallacy in diachronic linguistics and in linguistic theory generally. To show why, let us assume that two languages, LI and L2, are genetically related. Both are attested at earlier stages, OL1 and OL2. In both OL1 and OL2 we find

The data

23

some form F. F is therefore reconstructed for the parent language, Proto-L. F is also found in LI. In L2 we also find F, but here it alternates with the semantically equivalent form E. Assuming then that Ε and F are derivationally related in L2, the question is which, if any, of the two is a direct reflex of the underlying structure, and which is derived. The "original = basic" theory would predict that F is underlying and Ε is derived. This is true of the grammar of the first generation of speakers using E, but the next generation will of course construct their grammar on the basis of the linguistic data that they are exposed to, not knowing which form is the older. If at a later stage of L2, ML2, only Ε exists, that of course would mean that at some point Ε becomes the underlying form, in competition with the older F, although F remains the oldest form. Therefore, evidence from relative chronology cannot be used to support a claim about underlying forms. From an underlying SOV we would get surface structure VSO by verb fronting, and SVO by topicalization of the subject. VSO and SOV would thus offer equally simple descriptions of the various possible orders. The choice between the two, then, might depend on the relative plausibility or justifiability of a rule of verb postposing versus preposing. By coupling a linguistic theory with the parsimonious data sources, we can make at least three relevant observations. First, a theory which operates with movement rules ought to incorporate some principle of conditions on movements. One such principle is the Empty Category Principle, whereby a trace has to be governed by its antecedent. The antecedent is the moved element, and for it to govern its trace it has to occur in certain, well-defined structural positions. Another type of principle is based on discourse function. It might for example be claimed that movement to the right has a focusing function whereas movement to the left has a topicalizing function (Faarlund 1980). If we had movement to the right from a VSO structure, we would expect final verbs to be focused and to carry new information. This does not seem to be the case, however. In final position we find such verbs as 'write', 'make', or 'carve' with a preceding object referring to the stone or the artifact with the inscription on it, or to the runes themselves. (11) ek hlewagastiz holtijaz homa tawido I Hlewagasti-N of-Holt horn-Α made Ί, Hlewagasti, (son-of) Holt, made the horn* (Gallehus gold horn)

24

Preliminaries

Such verbs cannot be said to be focal or to carry new information, so it is hard to see why they should be moved to the end of the sentence if they were not already there in the deep structure. We even find forms of the verb 'be' in final position. (12) ek erilaz asugisalas em I runemaster-N Asugisala-G am Ί am the runemaster of Ansugisala' (Kragehul spearshaft) The last type of verb we would expect to be moved to the end of the sentence would be an auxiliary verb. The only attested auxiliary is, however, sentence final: (13) haitinaz was called was (Kalleby stone) Second, the fact that the three subordinate clauses in the corpus, such as (14), are all verb final is at least an indication that this might have been the underlying order. (14) is nip rinz when down runs Vhen it descends' (Eggja stone) If this is the obligatory order in subordinate clauses, a theory which includes a principle that movement rules be either structure-preserving or operate only in root sentences would predict that it is also the underlying order, since we would otherwise have a rule that is obligatory in subordinate clauses and optional in main sentences. Of course, only three attested sentences (two of which are identical and seem to be part of the same magical formula) do not allow us to generalize about the structure of subordinate clauses. Therefore, very little evidence can be derived from this argument. The same type of argument can be made on a functional basis: if movement rules are functionally motivated, we would expect subordinate clauses to have a structure closer to the underlying one, since they do not usually have their own independent information structure and discourse

The data

25

function. Whenever the grammar of a language treats the internal structure of subordinate clauses differently from that of main sentences, the former tends to be the less flexible. Third, certain syntactic processes seem to depend on whether a language is verb-final or not. Such processes may therefore be used as a diagnosis of underlying word order. In a long since dead language with 69 attested sentences, we can of course not expect to be able to detect many such processes. One inscription, however, that on the Stentoften stone, may offer interesting evidence of the underlying syntactic structure, depending on how it is read. The interesting part in this context is the first three lines of the main part of the inscription. There is general consensus in the runological literature about the transliteration: (15) niuhAborumz / niuhagestumz / hApuwolAfegAfi

When it comes to the actual interpretation of the lines, various proposals have been presented. However, this is not the place to get involved in a runological and paleographical debate about the correct reading. I will instead look at the syntactic implications of the various proposals. Marstrander (1953: 115-116) reads (15)

a. niu

hAborumz

niu

hagestumz

nine high-sons-D nine high-guests-D

hApuwolAfz

gfif

Hathuwolf-N

gave

j[ara]

year-A 'Hathuwolf gave a good year (=harvest) to nine noble sons and to nine noble guests' The final rune, < j > , is assumed to represent the Proto-Germanic *jara 'year', which at the time of the inscription would have the form or. Krause (1971: 164-165) reads niuhA borumz niuha gestumz and translates niuha as 'new'. Although these readings may be defended morphologically and paleographically, the order NP NP V NP is, as we have seen, syntactically deviant, since the verb is in third, non-final position. We should therefore look for another interpretation. Antonsen (1968: 134, 1975: 85-87) takes up a proposal by Makaev (1965) and presents the following interpretation:

26 Preliminaries

(15)

b. ni

not

g*f

uhA

borumz

ni

uha

gestumz hApuwolAfz

Uha-N

sons-D

not

Uha-N

guests-D Hathuwolf-N

j

gave year 'Uha did not give good harvest to the sons or to the guests, but Hathuwolf did' If Antonsen's reading is correct, we have some interesting examples of the syntactic process of deletion in Ancient Nordic. If we fill in the deleted parts, we get three sentences, each complete with a finite verb and three nominal arguments. Assuming that the finite verb is in second position in the surface structure in all three sentences, they will be: (15)

c. ni [gfif] uhA borumz [ar] ni [gAf] uhA gestumz [ar] hfipuwolAfz gaf [borumz gestumz] ar

There are three separate instances of deletion here: Deletion of the finite verb, gaf, to the left; deletion of the direct object, ar, to the left; and deletion of the indirect object, borumz gestumz, to the right. Naturally, the plausibility of Antonsen's interpretation depends on whether these processes can be motivated in universal grammar and within the framework of what is otherwise known about the syntax of old Germanic languages. Let us first take a look at what seems to be the simplest instance, the deletion to the right of the indirect object. In the modern Germanic languages only subjects are deleted freely and regularly in conjoined sentences. (16)

a. He- made a cake and [-]t ate it b. *He made a cafcet and he ate [-]i c. *John sent her/ a check and I gave [-]/ cash

However, in older Germanic languages deletion of cases other than the nominative in conjoined sentences is well attested, as shown by the Old Norse sentences (17) and (18).

The data

(17) SiÖan fluttu peir Porgils lOdt upp afterwards moved they-N Thorgils-N the-corpse-Aup άηηΐ ok gröfu [-] par niör the-river and buried [-A] there down 'Then Thorgils and his men moved the corpse up the river and it there' (Heimskringla) (18) Einarr Pambarskelftr för med Uki Magnus Einar-N Thambarskelfi-N went with corpse-D Magnus-G konungs ok meÖ honum alt Prtndaherr ok king-G and with him-D all Thronder-army-N and fluttu [-] tü Niöaröss moved [-A] to Nidaros-G 'Einar Thambarskelfi and the whole Thronder army took the of King Magnus with them and moved it to Nidaros' (Heimskringla)

27

meÖ along

buried

corpse

(For further examples involving other combinations of cases, see pages 104105). On this basis we may be justified in assuming that the second occurrence of each of the conjoined dative phrases borumz and gestumz may have undergone a deletion process of this kind. The other two deletions are deletions to the left. There are basically two kinds of deletion to the left available in current syntactic theoiy: "gapping" and "right node raising". Gapping is deletion of a verb under identity with a verb in a conjoined sentence. An example would be the English sentence (19b), derived by gapping from the structure underlying (19a). The direction that the process of gapping takes does not seem to be random. Ross (1970) has argued that it depends on the position of the verb. Compare the two possible kinds of gapping below, where only gapping to the right yields a grammatical sentence in English: (19) a. Mary went to England and Sue went to France b. Mary went to England and Sue to France c. *Mary to England and Sue went to France In a consistently verb-final language, such as Japanese, only gapping to the left is possible.

28 Preliminaries (20) a. Tarooga Amerika ni ik-i, Hanako ga Huransu ni itta TarooTOP America D went Hanako TOP France D went 'Taroo went to America, and Hanako went to France' b. *Taroo ga Amerika ni ik-i, Hanako ga Huransu ni c. Taroo ga Amerika ni, Hanako ga Huransu ni, itta (ιik-i and itta are forms of the same verb 'go'.) To be sure, Kuno (1978: 132) states that Japanese lacks a rule of gapping, but it "has a process called Right-Node Raising, which extracts the rightmost common constituent from conjuncts". In that case, (20c) is an instance of right node raising, not gapping. Right node raising consists of the raising of the second of two identical right nodes in conjoined sentences into a higher position, followed by the deletion of the two constituents in the individual sentences. A structure like (21b) would thus be derived from the structure underlying (21a) by right node raising. (21) a. John did not give us good advice, but Mary gave us good advice b. [Not John -J [but Mary -J [gave us good advice]f One difference between gapping to the left and right node raising is that the latter may involve other material than just the verb. Since the direct object of (15), or, is also deleted in the left conjuncts in the inscription, gapping alone does not account for all the deletions in this sentence. On the other hand, if the deletion follows from right node raising, the finite verb gaf and the direct object ar would have to be one constituent and adjacent at some level. If the verb is final in underlying structure, it might be adjacent to the direct object, but the question still remains whether the direct object and the verb are one constituent at any level of derivation. The Ancient Nordic runic material provides no additional basis for determining anything about the underlying constituent structure. If we look at later and better attested stages of Nordic, it still seems impossible to find any syntactic evidence for a constituent consisting exclusively of the main verb and its closest object NP (see Chapter Four, section 4.3.3.1.). Even in contemporary Germanic languages there does not seem to be much evidence in favor of such a structure. In English, if the verb and the object following it make up one constituent, it ought to be possible to delete them and leave the second object behind. (22) John gave Mary a record and Paul *(gave her) a book

The data 29 (The resulting sentence would of course be grammatical in a reading where Paul is the indirect object and not the subject of the second conjunct.) There seems to be no evidence for a rule treating the verb and the direct object as one constituent in Ancient Nordic, and Antonsen's reading can therefore not be supported on syntactic grounds. Gr0nvik (1981: 143, 1984: 70) suggests that the final ;-rune may not represent another constituent in that sentence. In Gr0nvik (1990: 287) he suggests that it might represent the past tense of a verb *jehan 'give, entrust', which introduces the sentence following. The first part of the inscription is then a separate and complete sentence, and Gr0nvik quotes it as a verse: (15)

d. niu hAborumz niu hagestumz HApuwolAfz gAf

In that case we have a well-behaved verb-final sentence with an understood direct object. On the basis of these observations it can be concluded that the underlying sentence structure in Ancient Nordic is verb final. The language has a rule of verb-fronting which moves the finite verb to sentence-initial position.9 This rule is optional in main sentences and perhaps blocked in subordinate sentences. Furthermore, there is an optional rule of topicalization, whereby a fronted verb ends up in second position. If "basic word order" is taken to mean constituent order in the deep structure, then a hypothesis about a basic verb-final order in Ancient Germanic has considerable support in the data and in linguistic theory, even regardless of the statistical proportion in the extant material.

Chapter two Explanation and syntactic change

In the Introduction I mentioned explanation as one of the tasks of historical linguistics. When we have a description of some phenomenon in the world, and thus have an answer to the question "what is it like?", the next natural step seems to be to ask "why is it the way it is?" This step hardly ever seems to require a justification. Leaving something unexplained seems to reflect an "un-scientific" or intellectually indefensible attitude. Yet explanations may not just be purely intellectual attempts to find answers to the question "why"; they may be reflexes of a more deep-rooted need to place phenomena in the context of other pheomena, to see things in connection with each other, in other words, to create patterns in the world around us and impose order on chaos.

2.1. The locus of linguistic change The first question to answer is the question of where exactly linguistic change takes place. This is closely connected with the question of the ontological status of language. First of all, it is important to keep in mind the distinction between a system of rules, that is, the grammar, and the actual concrete manifestations of that system. A linguistic description is a description of a grammatical system, and not of concrete utterances. Explaining linguistic change, for example, means to explain changes in the grammatical system, not changes in the actual linguistic behavior of individual speakers. Most linguistic schools of thought have more or less explicitly stated opinions about "where" language is. I am not going to present an exhaustive survey of the different views on the ontology of language through the history of linguistics. That would by far exceed the scope of this work.10 Instead I will summarize three main types of theses, which I will somewhat schematically refer to as the mentalist, the social, and the abstract. The mentalist thesis sees language as part of the human mind, possibly even with a concrete location in the brain. This is the thesis of the

32 Explanation and syntactic change Chomskyan tradition. An extreme reductionist version of this thesis sees language purely as a biological object (e.g. Lightfoot 1984). The social or realist thesis sees language as a social or cultural object which exists only within a specific community as part of the culture of that community. This thesis is represented by Labov and his school of sociolinguistics. The abstract or Platonist thesis sees language as an autonomous system divorced from speakers and society. Representatives of this thesis of language are above all Hjelmslev (1966) and Katz (1981). For some specific synchronic purposes, this way of seeing language may have its merits. Nevertheless, in a diachronic perspective it is quite futile. Linguistic change is an event, and as such it is connected to other events or conditions (which may or may not deserve the labels of "cause" and "effects"). Those events or conditions have to have some kind of existence, physical, mental, cognitive, cultural, or social. Each of the other two theses on the localization of language has its own consequences and implications for the interpretation of linguistic change. On the strict mentalist thesis, the grammatical system is physically situated in the brains of speakers; no two speakers share the same grammar, and hence there are as many languages in the world as there are speakers. Nobody speaks "the same language". Communication is possible only to the extent that certain speakers' languages are similar enough. A "language" in the sense of for example "the English language" can then only be understood as a set of individual languages which are so similar that their speakers can understand each other. "English" does not exist as a language as such. In the case of some other "languages" this notion is even more problematical. The Scandinavian languages Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish are considered three separate languages although they are mutually intelligible. The "Danish language" would then have to be defined (still in a simplified way) as the set of mutually intelligible languages of (the majority of) individuals living in Denmark. If a language exists only in the minds or brains of each individual speaker, then it will die with the speaker. Thus it does not make sense to talk of linguistic change except in the trivial case of changes in one person's language through his or her lifetime. If each individual acquires a new language of his own, then there is no language that can change from one generation to the next. Language as a social or cultural object, on the other hand, also has a historical mode of existence. It is the result of a series of changes in a particular speech community, and hence its history is tied to the history of

The locus of linguistic change 33 the community. The problem with this thesis of course is how to account for the linguistic competence of individuals. How is it that eveiy normal child acquires language in more or less the same way? And how does language change if not through the intervention of its individual speakers? The answer to this is that there must always be some cognitive basis of social phenomena. Although it is easily agreed that a human society is more than the sum of the individuals of whom it consists, it is just as easily agreed that it is in itself inconceivable without those individuals. By the same token, language as a social phenomenon must have a basis in the individual (Itkonen 1984). Ferdinand de Saussure's view on the mode of existence of language has been a matter of much debate, and he has been accused of being rather fuzzy on the topic (Lass 1980:116f). In his discussion of Saussure's view on the ontology of language, Roger Lass observes (1980:117): Saussure apparently has a problem in coping with the "elusive" quality of language, and the fact that it is constantly being used, or manifested in speech. There is a real conceptual crux, then: how do we account for change? Since langue and parole belong to different orders of being, it is inconceivable that the latter should affect the former. According to Saussure, langue and parole are separate, just like a symphony is in itself independent of how it is performed in each individual case. Yet this analogy fails on one important point. The various performances of a symphony do not in any way affect the original score. A symphony, once composed, does not change through time. Although the customary way of performing a symphony may change, the score (i.e. the "grammar" of the symphony) remains the same. The grammar of a natural language, on the other hand, is in fact affected by the way the language is "performed". If, for example, speakers gradually stop using the dative case, replacing it with the accusative, the grammar will in the end undergo a change and drop the dative case. Besides the problem of the localization of language, there is the problem that we have inherited from Saussure, namely that of the relationship between langue and parole in a diachronic perspective. That problem follows from seeing language as necessarily having only one mode of existence. Therefore I will assume that language has a double ontology. It is both a mental and a social object. This is no more contradictory or counterintuitive than seeing human beings as biological organisms and at the same

34 Explanation and syntactic change time social beings. It would be absurd to try to determine whether human beings are mammals or members of complex societies, thereby excluding the possibility that they may be both. Some aspects of human behavior can be explained on the basis of our biological dispositions, for example that we try to reach the surface if we are submerged in deep water; other aspects can be explained on the basis of our capacity as social beings, for example that some of us (e.g., Americans and Scandinavians) tend to turn the steering wheel towards the right when we meet an oncoming car while driving on a narrow road. Still, most of our actions are probably conditioned by a combination of the two types of factors. In a parallel fashion, language has a double ontology: it is both a mental object and a social object. In its capacity as a mental object it is shaped and conditioned by genetic or biological factors connected with the human mind. As a social object it is shaped and conditioned by its role as a means of human communication. Thus linguistic change can and must be explained both on the basis of properties of the human mind and on the basis of properties of human communication and social intercourse.

2.2. The meaning of "explanation" If we take a closer look at the kinds of things that are posed as explanations in linguistics, we find that they are basically of two different types, which also correspond roughly to two separate usages in other academic fields and in everyday language: to explain something is either to subsume it under a generalization, or to relate it to something in a different domain. Subsuming something under a generalization is not a very interesting explanation. It is, rather, a description of a regularity, which itself has been established on an inductive basis. Say for example that we want to explain why the individual Ε has the property P. We know that Ε is a member of the set S, and we have established through induction that all members of S have the property P. If we then sugggest that Έ is Ρ because Ε is a member of S and all members of S are P", it would be an explanation in the first sense above, indistinguishable from a generalization; and generalizations are merely steps towards a final generalization which can be explained within a different domain. Explaining something within a different domain of course only means to subsume it under a higher order generalization. Thus there is no difference in principle between the two kinds of explanations introduced here.

The meaning of explanation

35

However, when dealing with a certain subject-matter, such as syntax, it is crucial that the two notions of explanation be kept apart Because if we never depart from the domain under study to find explanations we end up with a circular system where pure formalisms become explanations. How to determine what constitutes different domains in each case is an analytical and methodological problem, rather than an empirical one; domains do not of course exist per se independently of our analytical concepts. Domains are usually separated by different terms, notations and principles. Syntax and semantics may be different domains since the former deals with VPs and NPs, and the latter with predicates and arguments. They may both belong to the same domain, however, relative to, say, anthropology, since they deal with verbal signs as opposed to nonverbal symbols, etc. When two domains are combined into one "higher order" domain and opposed to another outside domain, that corresponds to taking one further step along the (infinite) explanatory chain, one more step towards the (unattainable) ultima causa. It follows that what at one point is a description may later turn out to be an explanation. Theoretical constructs which have been established for the sake of generalization may later turn out to have a real existence. Gregor Mendel established a theory of genes which could predict the distribution of colors and other properties among peas. But some 30 years later the existence of genes was independently confirmed by the observation of chromosomes in cellular nuclei. And only then could they be used to explain phenomena in other domains. As long as the genes were abstract constructs based on generalizations over observed properties, they had no real explanatory value. The better the description is in the sense that it covers the data in an exhaustive and economical way, the greater are the chances that it will turn out to be an explanation at a later point. But no matter how successful a description, it does not qualify as an explanation until it has been independently demonstrated that it is isomorphic with phenomena outside the domain of the phenomenon one wants to explain. It follows from this that a theory is not in itself explanatoiy. The term "explanatory theory" may therefore in many cases be misleading. A theory is a set of statements about a subject. The statements are assumed to be true, and hence the theory has predictive power. However, prediction is not the same as explanation. For example, assume that according to some theory every NP has to be governed by a case assigner. Which elements count as case assigners is a language-specific question. In English, verbs

36 Explanation and syntactic change and prepositions, but not adjectives, are case assigners. Therefore the theoiy predicts that while (la) may be a sentence of English, (lb) is not. (1)

a. John is afraid of the dog b. *John is afraid the dog

Yet, we have no explanation why (lb) is ungrammatical. The prediction is based on a theory and a definition of the terms that are used to express the theory, notably "case assigner". The theoiy is established on the basis of observed facts in a number of sentence types and (hopefully) languages, and is thus the expression of a generalization. The notion of case assigner is established on the basis of observed facts in one particular language, the kinds of observations that form the basis of the definition of case assigner in English are based on data like (1), and we are back to where we started. Hence the case theoiy, while making interesting generalizations, has no explanatory value. For a theory to have explanatory value, it must relate the facts to other facts in a different domain. One such domain relative to syntax may be learnability and universal grammar. A grammar is a set of rules which generate the sentences of a language. The basic question to explain, then, may be formulated as "Why does the grammar of language L include rule R but not rule P?" A typical nonexplanatory and circular answer to that question would be for example "Because R is not needed to generate any of the sentences of L". A more successful explanation would be "Because R is not permitted by universal grammar", or, even better, "Because R is not learnable". These answers are better explanations because they make reference to universal grammar or cognitive psychology, which are different domains than the syntax of L. But what if rule R is permitted by universal grammar; what if it in fact is part of the grammar of a related language M? The fact that R is in Μ and not in L has to do with the selection that the two different languages make among the rules made available by universal grammar. And since the inventory of rules in the grammar of a language may change through time, the explanation of why the grammar of L contains exactly the subset of possible rules that it does is a historical explanation. Universal grammar is to be understood as a "grammar of grammars", and as such it shares certain properties with other grammars. Instead of generating sentences in a langauge, it generates grammars of human languages. On the basis of observations of a large number of languages, and on the basis of facts from language acquisition, we may want to assume the

Explaining linguistic change 37

existence of universal grammar in such a sense. However, the actual form of universal grammar is largely unknown. We do not yet have much of a description of universal grammar. There is of course no contradiction in this situation. It is parallel to the situation where we know that a tribe in the interior of New Guinea has a grammar although nobody has yet described their language.11 Any attempt at describing universal grammar on the basis of known languages and grammars is of course a hypothesis, just as a grammatical description of any particular language is also a hypothesis.

2.3. Explaining linguistic change Many different kinds of attempts have been made to explain historical linguistic change. One type is the implicational-typological approach, which has enjoyed a renewed interest over the last 10-15 years. This approach is based on the typological work of Greenberg and his followers (cf. page 9 above), in particular Greenberg (1963), which is a comparative study of some 30 different languages. The correlations that he found among different properties in the grammars of these languages were formulated as implicational universals. Consider for example again the correlation between the order of verb and object and the use of prepositions or postpositions: Universal 4. With overwhelmingly greater than chance frequency, languages with normal SOV order are postpositional. (Greenberg 1963: 79) As discussed above, such implications have been used to predict historical change: a change in the grammar of a language will tend to bring the language into conformity with the implication; a change with the opposite effect is considered highly unlikely. Nevertheless, implicational universals are inductive modes of explanation, and predictions on the basis of such explanations can be made only with a limited degree of certainty, since they are really based on statistical probability. However, attempts have been made to base the statistical correlations on some general underlying principles. In the case of the position of NPs relative to both verbs and prepositions, it has been pointed out that verbs and prepositions are at some level the same category. They may both take objects, i.e., govern an NP. In either case the relationship between a verb/preposition and an NP may be seen as that between an operator and an

38 Explanation and syntactic change operand (Vennemann 1975). And since grammars will tend towards symmetry in the operator-operand relationship, there is an underlying tendency for VO languages also to have prepositions, and for OV languages to have postpositions. This is what is sometimes called "drift towards consistency" (Lehmann 1978: 408), which again is supposed to be a universal principle underlying change. Such an account would at least have the formal properties of an explanation, since it relates Greenberg's statistical tendency to an underlying principle. Smith (1981) discusses this notion of consistency and the related notion of markedness in the context of language acquisition, processing, and change. He finds that there is no evidence from language acquisition or from processing that "consistent" patterns are less marked and therefore learned or processed more easily. As far as language change is concerned, Smith shows that the principle of "drift towards consistency" is vacuous as an explanatory principle: What then is excluded by the claim of "drift towards consistency"? As far as I can see, nothing. If a language acquires a characteristic which brings it into typological line, this is supposed to be due to the pressure of typological consistency; if, on the other hand, changes occur which are not susceptible to this explanation, they are due to social forces, to pragmatic factors and above all to borrowing. When all these variables are excluded there is always the ultimate escape-hatch that language X has not undergone this change yet. (Smith 1981: 49) There is thus an important distinction to be made between observing a statistical correlation, making predictions on the basis of such a correlation, and promoting the correlation to the status of an explanatory principle. An observation of correlations has a value in itself as a statement of typological facts, and such facts may be used to predict the probability of expected correlations in new, still unanalyzed data. But this is inductive prediction, which is in principle unfalsifiable, and thus weaker than deductive prediction. But most importantly, statistical correlations do not explain anything within their own domain, in casu word order; they are themselves facts to be explained. A similar point is argued also by Bybee (1988), who maintains that the theory of universal implications has little to contribute when it comes to explaining linguistic change and thereby explaining why a given language has precisely the grammatical rules that it does. Bybee is not satisfied with

Explaining linguistic change 39 Vennemann's natural serialization and other generalizations over word-order correlations. "My suggestion is that complete explanations must specify a causal mechanism; thus we cannot explain change with reference to preferred types, but we must explain common types by referring to the factors that create them" (Bybee 1988: 357). These factors would then belong to what I have called a different domain. Consequently we should look for explanations also in other domains. As an illustration, let me return for a moment to grammars of specific languages. We may observe that languages display variant sentence forms with the same content, such as, e.g., active vs. passive sentences. (2)

a. The truck hit the pedestrian b. The pedestrian was hit by the truck

Particularly within functional and discourse-oriented syntax attempts have been made to establish rules or principles for the choice between variants such as (2a-b). Let us assume that (2b) is the output of the application of the (set of) rule(s) R. We will then ask the question, "What are the conditions on the application of R?" Note that this is not a question about the use of a sentence or an utterance. Nor is it a question about the causes or motives of an act of speaking. We are asking about general principles because we assume that the choice between (2a) and (2b) is rule governed. Explanations of correlations between form and context can be found in at least two domains. One is the grammar of the language, which limits the range of possible alternatives. The answer to the question "Why do we find X but not Y in context C in language L?" may be simply that Y is not generated by the grammar of L. This of course is usually not a satisfactory explanation, since Y may also be missing from context C in language M, whose grammar does generate Y. Another domain would be pragmatics, including discourse functional rules and principles. In the case of (2), the choice may, for example, depend on a general principle whereby elements that have been activated in the previous context are placed as far to the left in the sentence as possible. Bybee argues against functional explanations. But she seems to equate "functional" with "teleological". However, we should distinguish between two types of functional explanations, teleological and nonteleological. Teleological explanations see change as aiming at a state preferable to the initial one. I agree with Bybee in not accepting teleological explanations as sufficient in diachronic linguistics.

40 Explanation and syntactic change Before totally dismissing functional explanations, however, it is important to distinguish between functionalism as telos and functionalism as causa. Using functionalism as telos means explaining a change by referring to a preferred state as the end result of the change; using functionalism as causa means explaining a change by referring to causal factors of a functional nature. Assume for example that the basic constituent order of a language changes from OV to VO (concrete examples of this have already been referred to above, and will be discussed further in Chapter three, section 3.2.). Assume furthermore that we can make the case that the VO order is more "functional" than the OV order, for example because of the more rhematic nature of the direct object than of the verb. If we explain the change from OV to VO by saying that it has taken place in order to bring the sentence structure more in accordance with a theme-rheme structure and thereby make it more functional, it would be a teleological "explanation" of the invalid kind. But suppose now that the language has passed through an intermediate stage where the two constituent orders coexist, and where the choice of one over the other is determined by functional factors. The use of VO over OV may have become so frequent during this period that OV disappeared from the language. The result is the same as in our first scenario, but the explanation, although functional in nature, is causal, not teleological. Bybee (1988) wants to distinguish teleology (although she does not use that term) from causality. According to her, only causal explanations are valid. A teleological explanation which makes reference to some preferred state does not explain how the language reaches that stage. She discusses some proposed synchronic explanations of grammatical phenomena, such as processing, iconicity, economy, and discourse. For each of these (with the possible exception of the last one) she finds that they are not really explanations either, merely generalizations over observed facts. Under the heading "Economy", for example, she quotes (from Haiman 1983) Zipfs "principle of least effort" (Zipf 1935) "which is intended to explain why the more frequently used words tend to be shorter than the less frequently used words" (Bybee 1988:360). She then goes on to cite studies which show that frequent words undergo reductive change at a faster rate than infrequent ones, but concludes with the questions What causes reductive sound" change to progress more quickly in frequent words? If reductive and assimilatory sound change is caused by a sort of physical economy of articulation, why isn't that economic motivation

Motivation and predictability

41

equally applicable in infrequent words and phrases? In the end we must admit that the "principle of least effort" labels a correlation or at best describes the outcome of change, it does not provide an explanation for the facts of phonetic reduction. (Bybee 1988: 360-1) And one might make the additional observation that the principle of least effort would make the rather absurd prediction that languages with many speakers have shorter words than languages with few speakers, since any given word is used more frequently in a large speech community than in a small one.

2.4. Motivation and predictability One problem which comes up again and again in connection with the explanation of historical events, such as linguistic change, is that whatever cause we are able to establish, that cause never seems to be a sufficient condition for the event. We can always find languages where the change does not seem to have taken place: there are still OV languages, and there are still languages with intervocalic voiceless stops. It is even hard to determine whether any given cause can be said to be a necessary condition for a change: in most languages that have undergone the OV -> VO change, the same change has occurred also in nonassertive sentences, such as conditional clauses, where there is no theme-rheme structure; some languages have had voiceless stops other than just intervocalic ones voiced; and so on and so forth. A linguistic change is an event that takes place within an extremely complex system, and any causality within complex systems such as languages or living organisms or societies must involve a great number of causes that are interrelated in complex ways (Lass 1980: 103-104). It should be clear from the previous discussion that we are in no position to establish a "theory of change" whereby we can predict future changes. As also argued by Lightfoot (1979a), such a theory is excluded not only in practice, but also in principle. A formal theory of change would be a way of distinguishing between possible and impossible changes. But since grammars are constructed anew by each generation of speakers, the only changes that may be excluded in principle are changes that would lead to something which is excluded by universal grammar, and changes that would lead to mutual unintelligibility between the generations. Any "theory of

42 Explanation and syntactic change change" would thus be a mere corollary of a theory of language as a mental or a social object. In previous eras of the history of transformational grammar, it was assumed that changes could take place in the transformational component only, while the base remained unchanged and unchangeable (King 1969; Lehmann 1972b; Faarlund 1977). A hypothesis like this, which would be entailed by, but not presuppose, the Universal Base Hypothesis, would limit the class of possible syntactic changes once the line between the base and the transformational component had been drawn on independent grounds. Conversely, the observable syntactic changes might have provided a basis for the delimitation of the components of the grammar. Of course here, too, was a ready opportunity for circular argumentation. Anyway, the transformational component has since been heavily constrained, and the Universal Base Hypothesis has found little if any empirical support. Changes seem to take place in all components of the grammar, and can therefore not be formally constrained in that way. On the other hand, Lightfoot derives an explanatory principle from the assumption that grammars have shallow bases and impoverished transformational components. This is the Transparency Principle: "the Transparency Principle requires derivations to be minimally complex and initial, underlying structures "close" to their respective surface structures" (Lightfoot 1979a: 121). When the Transparency Principle is violated, a change takes place to restore the minimal complexity of derivations. This would then allow predictions of syntactic change. But again there is no other way of determining how transparent or opaque derivations must/may be, except by observing when changes in fact do take place. So again facts are "explained" on the basis of data that should themselves be explained. And note that this is not an infinite regress in the causal chain, which we must allow, but a circle! Even if it were possible to establish limits to the opacity of derivations on purely synchronic and typological grounds, those limits would have to be phrased in the theory-specific terminology of Lightfoot's version of generative grammar, where terms such as "underlying structure" and "derivation" are given theory-specific definitions. Furthermore, even if it were possible to define "derivation" and "closeness" of levels in theory neutral terms on an empirical basis, the Transparency Principle would still not predict changes, since a grammar would never change to a point beyond permitted transparency. Rather than predicting changes, the Transparency Principle would explain lack of change. The histories of individual languages are of course replete with changes

Motivation and predictability

43

that would be totally unpredictable. The introduction of Language I

Grammar II — > Language II As is shown here, the grammar - and hence the language - of the second generation is directly determined by the language of the first generation, only indirectly by its grammar. Yet, since a language is infinite, all of Language I cannot possibly determine Grammar II. The inventory of grammatical rules acquired by a new generation therefore depends on a selection of utterances in Language I. For example, let Grammar I generate the infinite set of sentences {S 1 ...S m+n }. Assume that of these, only {S v ..S m } are used frequently enough to form the linguistic input for the next generation during its acquisition of Grammar II.

Grammar II

Grammar II, inferred from {S 1 ...S m }, is not necessarily identical with Grammar I, which generates {S v ..S m + n }. Thus the grammar may have changed from generation I to generation II. This change is explained if we can explain the selection of {S r ..S m } in Language I. Hence, the description and explanation of diachronic change does not differ in principle from the description and explanation of synchronic variation. Let me therefore formulate the following principle of diachronic change: PRINCIPLE OF SYNCHRONIC COEXISTENCE A change from one form F to another form G cannot take place unless F and G can coexist as alternatives in a language.

Synchronic variation and diachronic change 49 A diachronic change, then, can be seen as the result of two specific historical processes: the appearance of a new form as an alternative to an already existing form, and the disappearance of one of two coexisting, alternative forms at a later stage. Consequently, the two questions to be answered in diachronic syntax are how a new form comes into existence, and how that new form ends up taking over the whole domain that used to belong to the old form. The appearance of new syntactic forms can be explained as a means of meeting functional requirements posed by communicative situations.12 In a pragmatic perspective one can furthermore assume that whenever two or more forms coexist in a language there are functional reasons for using one rather than the other. "Functional" is here taken in a wide sense, covering communicative factors such as information structure, as well as factors related to processing and memory. A syntactic form that allows such an agreement between linear order and information structure may be said to be more functional than one that does not. This principle can also be used to answer the second question above: the new alternative form may end up taking over the whole domain that used to belong to the older form, because, if the new form turns out to be more functional than the older one, the latter may become so infrequent that new learners of the language will not incorporate it into their grammar. To begin with, a novel construction will often be felt to be highly unnatural and almost ungrammatical, and it will have to compete with the already established, stylistically neutral, form. Most novel constructions that happen to pop up from time to time in a speech community presumably vanish unnoticed without leaving any traces in the history of the language, the reason being that although they may be more functional than the existing forms, the cost of adopting them may still be too high.13 But once a new form has become part of the grammar, the speakers have a choice between the two forms, and the choice is determined by whether the functional factors that were once the rationale of the novel construction are present in the context. At this point the functional causes of its existence will turn out to be the very cause of the eventual complete victory of the new form over the older form. In the remainder of this chapter I will discuss certain changes related to word order and expletive elements in Nordic in this perspective.

50 Functional change 3.2. Word order typology The order object - verb (OV) as the basic constituent order has been reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European (Lehmann 1974), and the change from OV to verb - object (VO) has been described for many daughter languages (Hopper 1975; Braunmüller 1982; and Faarlund 1985b for Germanic; Leumann, Hofmann & Szantyr 1965 for Latin). Outside the IndoEuropean area a similar change has been reconstructed for Niger-Congo (Hyman 1975). Apart from a possible Chinese case,14 all known instances of a change from VO to OV are due to contact with OV languages (cf., for example, Givön (1979) on Amharic which changed from VSO to SOV because of contact with Kushitic). So why does the change move mainly in one direction, and why does it take place at all? Joseph Greenberg observes that there is a correlation between word order and case systems: Universal 41. If in a language the verb follows both the nominal subject and the nominal object as the dominant order, the language almost always has a case system. (Greenberg 1963: 96) The lack of OV languages without case systems is presumably due to the fact that it would create ambiguities in those cases where only one of the two NPs is expressed. This would be particularly pernicious if the language allows null-subjects; an NP preceding the verb could be either a subject or an object. In addition, every transitive relative clause would be ambiguous, since there the order would be determined by which NP was relativized. Vennemann (1975) demonstrates how, in a language with verb-final order and no case marking, sentence embedding would lead to perceptually impossible structures, as demonstrated by the German subordinate clause (1): (1)

weil Hans Maria Peter Paul vorzustellen bat because Hans Maria Peter Paul to-introduce asked 'because Hans asked Maria to introduce Peter to Paul'

In what follows, I will evaluate the ambiguity argument as a functional explantion in general, and Greenberg's correlation observation in particular, as an explanation of the change from OV to VO, and of the virtual lack of change in the opposite direction.

Word order typology 51 First of all, there is a meta-theoretical problem that has to do with the the formula "almost always" in Universal 41. This means that there may be languages that do not conform to the universal; and in fact such languages do exist, Dutch being one example. But the way the universal is phrased, the existence of such a language does not falsify the claim, which merely expresses a strong tendency. Lass (1980) argues that such an "explanation" does not explain anything. If, for example, an OV language loses its case marking, then according to Universal 41 it will with great probability change into VO, but only "almost always". That is, it may not change. So instead of explaining why languages do change from OV to VO, we will have to explain why some languages do not As argued in Chapter Two, section 2.3., probabilistic statements like this do not predict, much less explain, anything. They are post hoc descriptions of statistical facts. Second, the explanatory value of Universal 41 is reduced by the fact that it is not a biconditional: it says that an OV language has a case system; it makes no predictions about VO languages, and therefore it does not preclude the possibility that VO languages with case systems may change into OV. Yet we do not find this. Neither does it explain why languages with case systems change from OV to VO while retaining the case system. There are several known instances of such a change in case-marking languages. For example, classical Latin was predominantly verb final. According to Leumann, Hofmann & Szantyr (1965) 84% of main sentences with objects in Caesar's De Bello Gallico have the order OV. In the late Latin text Aetheriae Peregrinatio ad Loca Sancta from the fourth century the corresponding figure is 25%. If this drastic change in relative frequency indicates a change in the underlying order, it must have taken place independently of any change in the case system, since in fourth-centuiy Latin the case system was still intact. Also in Old English the SVO order was well established before the case system collapsed. In Nordic, the complete change from OV to VO can be followed closely in the extant material. The oldest runic inscriptions in Ancient Nordic show verb final order: (2)

ek hlewagastiz holtijaz homa tawido I Hlewagast of-Holt horn made Ί, Hlewagast (son of) of Holt, made the horn' (Gallehus gold horn)

Towards the end of the Ancient Nordic period, sentences with a direct

52 Functional change object after the verb become more and more common: (3)

hapuwolafa sate staba pria Hathuwolf set staves three 'Hathuwolf set three staves' (Gummarp stone)

At this stage the direct object can optionally follow or precede the verb. I will therefore assume that one of the orders is basic while the other one is derived transformationally.15 In Old Norse, the order VO is the only one in main sentences, (4), and also the predominant one in subordinate clauses, (5). (4)

(5)

a. HallfreÖr setti bii saman Hallfred set home together 'Hallfred set up a home* (Hrafhkels saga) b. Porbjprn ätti fi litit Thorbjorn owned money little Thorbjorn had little money' (Hrafhkels saga) a. VU ek, at pir brjör farit pessa ferö want I that you brothers travel this journey Ί want you brothers to take this trip' (iόΐά/s saga helga) b. Eirikr ok Gunnhildr dttu son, er Haraldr konungr Eirik and Gunnhild had son who Harald-N king-N }6s vatni poured water-D 'Eirik and Gunnhild had a son who was baptized by King Harald' (Heimskringla)

The only distinction between nominative and accusative that was lost in the transition from the OV language Ancient Nordic to the VO language Old Norse, was in the singular of feminine o-stems. Third, there is a purely empirical problem. There are plenty of ambiguities of this sort across the languages of the world. In fact, (1) is an example of such an ambiguity but, rather than being excluded, it is a grammatical sentence of German, and therefore it is an argument against the

Word order typology 53 type of explanation it is supposed to argue for. In German, not only proper names, but also most nouns are not marked for case. The case-marking appears only in accompanying modifiers and determiners, and even then the nominative and the accusative cases are distinguished only in the masculine singular. Dutch also has no case-marking. We would therefore think that an OV order in subordinate clauses would be unacceptable in German and Dutch, and that the order there would change as it has done long ago in main sentences. However, not only German, but also Dutch has OV as the unmarked order in subordinate clauses. Furthermore, VO order in subordinate clauses is even less common in contemporary German and Dutch than it is in early New High German (Ebert 1980) and Middle Dutch (Gerritsen 1979). Furthermore, according to Hyman (1975) Proto-NigerCongo was verb final, but had no case marking. (Later, as we have seen, it changed into a VO language.) Even though the loss of case-marking may have been one factor in some instances, it certainly does not explain some of the best-known instances of such a change. All languages have ambiguous forms, and although they are often avoided, they do not seem to be avoided systematically in such a way that they lead to changes in the grammar. To take one example of syntactic ambiguity, consider the modern Norwegian sentence (6). (6)

Kari likte Ola Kari liked Ola 'Kari liked Ola' or 'Kari Ola liked'

As it stands, this sentence is ambiguous, since either the subject or the object may precede the finite verb in surface structure. In either case the verb is in second position in a main sentence. If something other than the subject precedes the verb, the subject follows the verb immediately. So in (6) either Kari or Ola may be interpreted as the subject. The question is then, how can a language without case marking live with such a pernicious ambiguity? Why has it not undergone a syntactic change that would exclude at least one of the two readings in (6)? The answer is that sentences like those in (6) are of course avoided on a singular basis whenever they can lead to real misunderstanding, but as a possible syntactic form they cause no problem. In most instances a sentence with one NP preceding and one NP following the finite verb is not ambiguous. This is the case when one or both of the NPs is a personal pronoun of first or second person, where the case distinction is still maintained. And if there is both a finite and a

54 Functional change nonfinite verb in the sentence, only the subject may occur between the two: (7)

a. Kari vil lika Ola Kari will like Ola b. Kari vil Ola lika Kari will Ola like Ola will like Kari'

Also, in many cases the semantics of the NPs will preclude ambiguity: (8)

Iskrem liker barna Icecream like the-children16 'Icecream the children like*

Finally, the context will disambiguate most of the remaining cases. Ambiguity is therefore not a valid functional explanation of the change from OV to VO. A different explanation offered by both Hyman (1975) and Vennemnann (1975) involve what they call afterthought: This syntactic pattern [SOV] presents one important practical inconvenience which speakers have to cope with. Namely, once the speaker has put the verb down, it is no longer possible to add anything (in a strict SOV language). However, the speaker may forget to say something in the course of his utterance; or he may find that it is necessary to add something, because his interlocutor has not understood; or he may realize that the sentence he has just uttered is unclear or ambiguous. In all of these cases (and doubtless others), he may wish to add something after the verb-final utterance. (Hyman 1975: 120) Formally, this is a satisfactory explanation; it is theory-independent, and it gives pragmatic and communicative causes why speakers would choose a noncurrent form in the first place, and thus introduce a novel form besides the already existing one. Let us then see how plausible it is as an explanation. One problem that immediately comes to mind is that something added as an afterthought will usually make up a separate utterance. The main sentence pattern will still be intact. The most regular syntactic result of afterthought might be a right dislocation construction, which does not alter the word order pattern of the sentence.

Word order typology 55 (9)

I met her in town today, your wife (that is)

Moving things to the right because of afterthought will furthermore not be very frequent, and certainly not something that is done in the majority of cases. As a speech device, afterthought is more along the lines of, say, interruptions and new starts, which to my knowledge have never become parts of the sentence grammar of any language. It is hardly more plausible that afterthought would lead to a radical systematic change in the language. A more serious problem with the afterthought explanation is the question of why it would never affect subjects, only objects and adverbials, and why it is only known to have changed the word order in verb-final languages. If afterthought is to be understood in the normal sense, that is, in the sense in which Hyman uses it, "that the speaker may forget to say something ... or find that it is necessary to add something because his interlocutor has not understood" (cf. quote above), then why does the speaker not find it necessary also frequently to add the subject? The subject, being presumably thematic and thus recoverable from the context, is often omitted in colloquial speech, and therefore often has to be added at the end of the sentence when it turns out that the interlocutor has not been able to surmise the referent of the subject from the context. Yet this has not in any known instance caused a change from SOV to OVS, or from SVO to VOS. Finally, the afterthought theory does not explain why some languages, such as German and Dutch, maintain the OV pattern in subordinate clauses after it has been given up in main sentences. Instead of seeing the change from OV to VO order as a result of a rare and highly marked process of afterthought, I will suggest that it is the result of focusing. By focusing I mean a movement process whereby an element is brought into a position where it is interpreted as being the focus of the sentence. The focus of the sentence is that part of the sentence which carries new information, or which is least predictable from the context. Like afterthought, focusing is thus connected with discourse functional and communicative factors. Every declarative main sentence has a focus, and it is typical of many languages that the focus is not the subject of the sentence. It seems to be a universal tendency of human modes of expression - and perhaps of thinking - to begin with something known and then add something new to it. That is why in most languages where there is any systematic correlation at all between information structure and word order, focus elements tend to follow nonfocus elements in the sentence. In sentences with transitive verbs, the object is typically the focus. Not only is

56 Functional change it less predictable and less known than the subject, but it also usually carries more new information than the verb. For one thing, many transitive verbs express more or less abstract relations, such as 'have', 'own', 'receive', 'know*, 'remember' etc. Similarly, sensory verbs have much less prominence than their objects in their normal usage. In a sentence such as I saw a pink elephant, the interesting part is certainly the object. Even when the verb is semantically very specific, the object is still usually the focus of the sentence. Thus (10c) is more likely to be the answer to (10b) than to (10a): (10) a. What did you do? b. What did you eat? c. I ate a pecan pie In other words, in (10c) a pecan pie is more likely to be the focus than the whole VP ate a pecan pie. From the point of view of information structure, then, the OV order would sometimes be felt as less natural. One way to remedy that would be to move the object to the right of the verb. Thus, if a language has a movement process that is sensitive to the focus-hood of constituents, that rule will move constituents to the right.17 When SOV languages change their basic word order, they typically change into SVO, not, for example, into OVS or OSV. In other words, the subject does not change its position as readily as do objects. This is also consistent with the focus theory, but not with the afterthought theory. One can imagine that anything, and perhaps particularly the subject, might be added as an afterthought. Imagine, for example, a situation where the speaker starts by omitting or maybe just slurring the subject since (s)he assumes that it is known by the addressee and therefore recoverable. Then, by the time the end of the sentence is reached, the speaker may realize that perhaps the referent of the subject was not so evident after all, and add it as an afterthought. This has led to a very frequent type of right dislocation in colloquial Norwegian (11), yet to my knowledge it has not led to a subjectfinal structure in any previously verb-final language. (11) Hyggeleg kar, Kjell nice fellow Kjell 'Kjell is a nice fellow' There are, particularly, two situations, however, where the object is not likely to be focused. One is when it is an unstressed anaphoric pronoun.

Word order typology 57 These refer to entities already introduced in the preceding context, and are therefore not likely to carry new information or to be focused for any other reason. Hence we find languages where such objects still precede the verb although other objects follow the verb, as for example in Romance languages and in many Bantu languages. French, an SVO language, has nevertheless clitic pronouns attached to the beginning of the verb: (12) a. Nous connaissons cette femme we know this woman b. Nous la connaissons we her know 'We know her' In Zulu, a Bantu language, unstressed anaphoric pronouns precede verbs, whereas emphatic independent pronouns are focused and follow the verb (the data are from Givön 1979: 243): (13) a. u-ya-yi-shaya he-ASP-it-hit 'He hit if b. u-shaya yona he-hit that 'He hit that one' The other situation where the object is not likely to be moved would be in nonasserted subordinate clauses. These are sentences that are presupposed, and thus do not have their own information structure. Therefore the distinction given - new information is also irrelevant, and nothing needs to be focused. This is what we find in German and Dutch. Example (14) is from German. (14) a. Der Film interessiert mich nicht the movie interests me not 'The movie does not interest me' b. Wenn dich der Film nicht interessiert, tun wir if you the movie not interests do we etwas anderes something else 'If the movie does not interest you, we will do something else*

58 Functional change As it becomes common to move a focused element to the end of the sentence, the language develops two possible utterance forms, SOV and SVO. The choice between these two then depends on whether the object is focused or not. From an underlying OV order it gradually becomes more and more common to move the object to the right. Since the object is the most frequently focused sentence element, the SVO order will soon be conceived of as the unmarked form, and by subsequent reanalysis it also becomes the underlying form. This is the end of the SOV order. When the underlying form is SVO, a movement rule would be needed to get SOV. If there is no functional motivation for such a movement, e.g. if the SOV order is not required by some principle of information structure, then such a movement process will disappear from the grammar, and the SOV order will disappear from the language. This leads to the formulation of the following principle: PRINCIPLE OF FUNCTIONAL MOTIVATION A sentence form which systematically deviates from an expected functionally motivated form must have the same form as the underlying structure. The strategy of focusing an element by moving it to the right is based on a universal discourse-functional principle; therefore it serves as an explanation at a different level from the type of explanation that invokes only some universal implication or natural serialization. It explains why a new sentence form would appear, why it would gain ground over the older form, why the older form would vanish, except in subordinate clauses in some languages, and thereby lead to a reanalysis at the level of deep structure. The focus theory does not exclude the possibility that afterthought may also have played a role in the change in question. It may have had a reinforcing effect by increasing the total frequency of VO sentences. Other factors as well may have been involved in such a change. Stockwell (1977: 306-307) lists other construction types that may have served to make the VO order more common and thereby less marked in Old English, such as relative-clause extraposition, as in (15a), and conjunct-extraposition, as in (15b).

The verb-second constraint

59

(15) a. ond pa men ofslogon pe hie foran and those men-Α slew whom they from-in-front forridan mehton butan geweorce ride-down might outside encampment 'And they slew those men who they rode in front of outside the encampment' (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) b. ond eac swa pa pone cniht agef ond poet wif and then he the boy gave-back and the woman 'And then he returned the boy and the woman' (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) The combination of various factors of this kind of course creates a snowball effect, whereby the change acquires more and more momentum. To conclude this section, let me return to the parallel with phonology: it seems that what we have here is a syntactic counterpart of a "natural change". Just as a change from an intervocalic unvoiced stop to a voiced stop is somehow a more natural change than the reverse change would be, so is a change from OV to VO also a more natural one than the reverse, for reasons given in this section.

3.3. The verb-second constraint The change discussed above has also been given a different explanation in the literature, particularly as far as its occurrence in Germanic languages and in French is concerned. Thus Hock (1986: 330) ascribes the change to what he calls "AUX-cliticization". This process consists in a shift of the auxiliary verb into the second position of the sentence, where it is cliticized to the first element. A process of cliticization of particles and pronouns to the first autonomous word in the sentence, known as "Wackernagel's Law", is well documented and described for several Indo-European languages. As a result of such a process, certain elements would regularly appear in second position. The implication is that auxiliary verbs belonged to the class of elements that could cliticize in this way. Hock cites as evidence the fact that auxiliary verbs in many languages have undergone phonological changes that would otherwise occur only in unstressed syllables: Latin habet 'have' became ha in Italian and Spanish, etc. In Nordic the third person singular present of the

60 Functional change copula and auxiliary 'be* lost its final consonant. In the earliest Runic inscriptions, such as (16a) from the middle of the fourth century AD, we find the form ist in final position. This was later shortened to isles or even just s, as in (16b) and (16c) from ca. 700. By the time of classical Old Norse, the -s was rhotacized and the copula verb appears as er (16d), which is still the form found in the contemporary Scandinavian languages. (16) a. flagdafaikinaz ist attack-deceived is is subject to deceitful attack* (Vetteland stone) b. ni s solu sot not is sun-D sought 'It is not touched by the sun' (Eggja stone) c. sikli s nAhli clasp is death-shelter 'The clasp is protection against death* (Strand clasp) d. hvar er sä guö where is that god (Snorri's Edda) As we can see from these examples, the phonologically reduced form is also in second position. This rule was then presumably extended to all auxiliary verbs, and hence to all finite verb forms. This is then another instance of a generalization of a rule. The motivation for the shift of finite verb forms to a clitic position after the first sentence element would be similar to the motivation for moving an object to the position after the verb; they are both related to the relatively low degree of information value carried by the verb, and by the auxiliary verb in particular. The result is also a similar one: the verb ends up in a position preceding certain other sentence elements, particularly internal arguments (nonsubjects) and adverbials. So far so good. The problem with this kind of explanation is, however, that it assumes that verb-second (V2) order is identical to verb-object (VO) order, and that if a language has one as a dominant pattern it follows that it must have the other. It can easily be shown that the two concepts are not synonymous, and that therefore a language may very well be V2 without

The verb-second constraint

61

being VO, and vice versa (even disregarding any exotic instances of OVS languages). We only need to go as far as English, which is VO but not V2; for example: (17) Last year we visited Paris Now it may be objected that (17) has a marked structure, and is therefore not valid in an argument about basic word order. But there are more problems: the "V" does not seem to mean the same thing in V2 and in VO. The "V" in V2 is the finite verb, originally an auxiliary, then by extension it would later include also finite main verbs. The "V" in VO is the main verb only, the verb that is subcategorized for a complement Hence we may have sentences with two verbs, one in second position and another preceding its complement. (18) We have never visited Paris Therefore a language may be OV and V2 at the same time. German is of course a case in point. (19) Er hat seine Frau geliebt he has his wife loved 'He has loved his wife* In (19) one verb, the auxiliary hat, is in second position, while the main verb follows its object, seine Frau geliebt. The same pattern is found in Old English (example from Hock 1986). (20) Beowulfe wearö guöhreö gyfepe Beowulf was glory given (Beowulf) We are therefore dealing with two separate changes, but as we have seen, they can both be related to the same functional factors: information structure and order of sentence elements. A supporting factor - or even a major factor - in the development of the verb-second order in Germanic may have been the need to differentiate between main and subordinate sentences. Stockwell & Minkova (1990)

62 Functional change demonstrate how in Old English subordinate sentences had the order subject • verb for about 200 years, while main sentences were V2. This need for differentiation was particularly urgent since the older Germanic languages did not have unambiguous subjunctions to mark subordinate sentences. What developed into subordinate sentences in Germanic were usually introduced by cataphoric pro-forms, as in Old English (example from Stockwell & Minkova 1990: 5). (21) Ponne hit dagian wolde, ponne toglad hit then it dawn would then glided it 'When it was going to dawn, then it glidedaway' (Chronicle) Since both clauses are introduced by the same word, only the word order distinguishes the subordinate sentence from the main sentence. Modern German is an extreme case of a language where main and subordinate sentences have different word order patterns, the former being strictly verb second, and the latter strictly verb final. And as pointed out by Vennemann (1984), German still has some ambiguous subjunctions/proforms. Vennemann gives the following example, where the situation is exactly like the one demonstrated for Old English above. (22) a. Paula nimmt die Pille, trotzdem ist sie schwanger Paula takes the pill, still is she pregnant 'Paula takes the pill, still she is pregnant' b. Paula nimmt die Pille, trotzdem sie schwanger ist although she pregnant is 'Paula takes the pill although she is pregnant' It is also a part of this picture that German relative pronouns are still identical with the demonstratives, which of course also can introduce main sentences as regular anaphoric or deictic pronouns. (23) a. der Mann, den ich kenne the man whom I know b. Den Mann kenne ich that man know I Ί know that man'

The expletive topic 63 This, then, would be a functional explanation of the teleological type (see page 40). It is therefore tempting to add another possible explanation of the lack of verb second order in subordinate sentences. Let us return for a moment to Wackemagel's Law, whereby elements are cliticized to the first autonomous word in the sentence. In main sentences, this would be a topical element of some kind, whereas in subordinate sentences it would invariably be the little word that eventually developed into a subjunction; and one might of course speculate that subjunctions and other grammatical words are not very attractive hosts for clitics in some languages.18

3.4. The expletive topic An expletive element is a nonreferring word whose function it is to fill an empty slot. There are therefore two prerequisites for the occurrence of expletives in a language in general and for its use in individual sentence tokens: 1) there are positions or syntactic functions that have to be obligatorily filled; and 2) the occupants of those positions have to meet certain requirements. As far as Germanic languages are concerned, it is easier to generalize about the second of these prerequisites than about the first. Positions filled by expletives are positions which otherwise require elements carrying given information, contextually bound elements, or elements that are existentially presupposed. As for the first requirement, it depends on the types of positions or functions that are obligatorily filled in Germanic languages. Two constraints in the syntax of Germanic are relevant in this context: the obligatory subject constraint and the verb-second constraint. If in a language with one or both of these constraints the preverbal position or the subject role cannot be filled by an element with the required pragmatic properties, then that position or role is filled by an expletive. On this basis a distinction should be made between expletive subjects and expletive topics. The former are used to fill an otherwise empty subject position in languages with an obligatory subject, and the latter are used to fill the preverbal position in V2 languages. From the data available in Germanic and Romance languages, it seems that the two kinds of expletives are mutually exclusive. This is to be expected on logical grounds, since an expletive subject may also always serve as a topic. A separate expletive topic in a language with an expletive subject would therefore be unmotivated. German is an example of a language with expletive topics rather than

64 Functional change expletive subjects. The expletive word es 'it' occurs in existential sentences only in the first position of main clauses. (24) a. Es sind noch viele Studenten da it are-3Pstill many students-N there 'There are still many students there' b. Da sind noch viele Studenten c. *Da sind es noch viele Studenten d. Sind noch viele Studenten da? e. *Sind es noch viele Studenten da? f. Ich glaube, dass noch viele Studenten da sind I believe that still many students there are Ί believe that there are still many students there' g. *Ich glaube, dass es noch viele Studenten da sind The expletive es is impossible in a postverbal position, which would be the position of the subject when another element is moved to the preverbal position as in (24b) and in questions, (24c). Subordinate clauses have the verb in final position, and have no topics. Therefore there is no place for existential es. Furthermore, existential es in German does not have syntactic subject properties; it does not undergo raising, for example.19 (25) a. Ich hörte ihn kommen I heard him-Acome b. Es kamen viele Studenten it came many students c. *Ich hörte es viele Studenten kommen I heard it many students come Ί heard many students come' The English expletive there, on the other hand, is a subject by all relevant criteria. It inverts with the auxiliary in questions (26a), it occurs in subordinate clauses (26b), and it raises (26c). (26) a. Are there many students here? b. I believe that there are many students here c. I believe there to be many students here Returning now to German; since German is strictly V2 in declarative main

The expletive topic 65 sentences, it needs an expletive topic. In the sentences in (24) the NP viele Studenten is in the nominative. If nominative case is equal to subjecthood in German, an analysis of es as an expletive topic prevents us from ending up with two subjects in the same sentence. Modern Icelandic and Faroese also have expletive topics in existential sentences. This is illustrated for Icelandic by the examples in (27-28) (from Thräinsson 1979). The expletive word (Icelandic pad, Faroese tad) 'it/that' may precede the finite verb (27a, 28a), but it may not occur in the subject position when something else is fronted (b-c), or in questions (d-e). (27) a. Pad eru mys i baökerinu it are mice-N in the-bathtub 'There are mice in the bathtub' b. f gcer voru mys ί baökerinu yesterday were mice-N in the-bathtub •Yesterday there were mice in the bathtub' c. */ gcer voru pad mys i baökerinu d. Eru mys ί baökerinu? are mice-N in the-bathtub 'Are there mice in the bathtub?' e. *Eru paö mys ί baökerinu? (28) a. PaÖ hefur einhver itiö häkarlinn it has somebody-N eaten the-shark 'Somebody has eaten the shark' b. ί goer haföi einhver itiö häkarlinn yesterday had somebody eaten the-shark c. */ gcer haföi paö einhver itiö häkarlinn d. Hefur einhver itiö häkarlinn? has somebody-N eaten the-shark e. *Hejur paö einhver itiö häkarlinn? The continental Scandinavian languages have expletive subjects like English. Dutch seems to be at an intermediate stage, where an expletive in non-topic position is optional. (29) a. Is (er) hier veel sneeuw? is there here much snow

66 Functional change b. Ik wet dat (er) hier veel sneeuw I know that there here much snow Ί know that there is much snow here'

is is

The reason why er is optional in (29) may not be that the language does not have an obligatory subject, but rather that the NP veel sneeuw may or may not be interpreted as the subject of the sentence.

3.4.1. Describing the changes Of the Germanic languages, English has had an expletive subject since Old English times (see page 190), while German and Icelandic, and to some extent Dutch, still have expletive topics. The mainland Scandinavian languages have, however, gone through all three stages in historical times, from Old Norse with no expletives, via a stage with an expletive topic, to the present-day situation with an expletive subject. I will therefore take a closer look at the development of the syntax of expletives in Norwegian and Dano-Norwegian. Between Old Norse and modern Norwegian we find a stage with an expletive topic, much like what we find in modern German and Icelandic. This stage seems to cover roughly the period from the fifteenth century till the late nineteenth century, with large geographically and stylistically conditioned fluctuations at both ends. In the course of the fifteenth century, verb initial sentences became more and more rare in Scandinavian, and at the same time we find the first occurrences of the expletive word ther/der 'there' or det 'it' in DanoNorwegian (Falk & Torp 1900). (30) ther kom ey een tijl lande hiern there came not one to country home 'No one came back home to his country' (The Danish Chronicle, 1495) For several centuries ater this time the expletive word still only appears sentence initially in Norwegian and Dano-Norwegian. Consider for example the sentences in (31), from the works of the Norwegian-born Danish writer Ludvig Holberg (1684 - 1754).20

The expletive topic 67 (31) a. Ellers kand gives ett viktig Aarsag, hvi... otherwise can be-given an important reason why Otherwise an important reason can be given why ...' b. Derved er given Anledning til de vidl0ftige Reyser thereby is given opportunity for the extravagant journeys c. Hvüket viser, at adskillige Ting endnu ere, hvilke beh0ve which shows that several things still are which need Reformation reformation 'Which shows that there are still many things that need to be changed' Another piece of evidence that the expletive word was not a subject is that it may co-occur with another subject in the sentence, as in (32).21 (32) a. Der har fire Mcend redet over Broen there have four men ridden across the-bridge (Falk & Torp 1900 :10) b. Det vil alle hava den beste it will all have the best 'Everybody wants the best one' (Aasen [1864]: 268)

i dag today

After the Nordic languages became conflgurational, the surface position between the finite and the nonfinite verb is a unique subject position. Therefore fire Mcend and alle in (32) must be subjects. This gives us justification for analysing the expletive as a topic even in (33), where it occurs in a subordinate clause. The NP noget 'some' comes between the two verbs, and must therefore be the subject. (33) Forstaa, huorledis detkan noget skabis aff understand how it can something be-created inted nothing 'Understand how something can be created from nothing' (Christiern Pedersen, 16th century)

from

Finally, there are several sentences from this period without a subject, as for example (31a-b), where no NP appears either first or between the finite and

68 Functional change the nonfinite verb. And if there is no obligatory subject, there is no motivation for an expletive subject. In modern Dano-Norwegian all the sentences in (31-33) would be ungrammatical. The modern forms are (34-36), respectively: (34) a. Ellers kan detgis en viktig ärsak otherwise can it be-given an important reason b. Derved er detgitt anledning thereby is it given opportunity c. Som viser at detennu er adskülige ting which shows that it still is several things (35) a. Det har ridd fire menn over broen it has ridden four men across the-bridge b. Alle vil ha den beste all will have the best (36) Forstä hvorledes det kan skapes noe av understand how it can be-created something from intet nothing All of these have the expletive det22 either in first position or immediately following the finite verb (except 35b where the subject is definite). The expletive word is, in other words, always in subject position. Furthermore, there is no other NP in subject position when there is an expletive in the sentence. In modern (Dano-)Norwegian, as in the other Scandinavian languages and English, the expletive word is clearly a subject, which is also shown by the fact that it has all the relevant syntactic subject properties, such as for example the ability to undergo raising. (37) Egh0rte det /comma nokon I heard it come-INF some Ί heard somebody come'

3.4.1 Explaining the changes An expletive topic presupposes a well-defined topic position which has to be obligatorily filled in certain sentence types. It is not sufficient that the

The expletive topic 69 topic be associated with the first position. Every sentence has a first position, and the requirement that it be filled is thus vacuous. But Old Norse had the finite verb in first or second (and no other) position in main declarative sentences. The topic position is thus defined as the position preceding the finite verb. Such a definition is a necessary condition for the existence of an expletive topic in a language. It is, however, not a sufficient condition: Old Norse does not have an expletive topic; the topic position may be empty even in declarative main sentences. (38) a. Kettni ek, at pu ert Asa-Ρόπ understand I that you areAsa-Thor Ί understand that you are Asa-Thor' (Snorri's Edda) b. Hafiö pit verit hir um hriö meö mir have you been here for while with me *You have already stayed here with me for some time' (Egils saga) c. Er gott filag at eiga viö konung is good companionship to own with king 'It is good to be in the company of the king' (Egils saga) Through an overgeneralization of the rules for association of speech acts with sentence structure, the topicless sentences came to be more and more associated with interrogatives and conditionals, while sentences with topics were associated with declaratives. At that point an expletive topic was needed in declarative sentences when there was no thematic element in the sentence to fill the first position. This is the stage exemplified in (32), repeated here: (39) a. Der har fire there have four b. Det vil alle it will all 'Everybody wants

Maznd redet over Broen men ridden across the-bridge hava den beste have the best the best one'

i dag today

70 Functional change 3.4.3. Origjn of expletive words When we look at all the Germanic and Romance languages with expletive topics/subjects in existential sentences, we find that these are either the adverb 'there' (English, Dutch, Danish, south-western Norwegian) or the neuter pronoun 'it/that' (Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Swedish, German, French). As was suggested already by Western (1921), the origin of 'there' as an expletive word in existential sentences may be its use with a vague anaphoric reference to introduce the location of new elements in the discourse. This idea has also been developed further and applied to the history of English by Breivik (1990, chapter 6). Consider the following examples from Barlaams ok Josaphats saga, a thirteenth century Norwegian text: (40) a. [Faöirminn lit /φδα mik upp ί mikilli äst ok göövilja father mine let raise me up in great love and affection ok las ek par margar bfkr svd af kristinna and read I there many books as-well of Christian manna Iggumsem af annarra manna.] Par vdru ok men's laws as of other men's there were also margir kristir menn meö oss many Christian men with us '[My father raised me in much love and affection and I read many books about the laws of Christian men as well as about those of other men.] There were also many Christian men with us' b. [Ok peystu peir inn ütalulegr figldi fiändaok and burst they in countless multitude devils and fylltu allt hiisit med ymisligri lüaieskju Ιεόηα filled all the-house with various creatures lions ugprliga rautandi ok yxna häskaliga beljandi frightfully roaring and oxen threateningly bellowing meö hvetjandum homum] Par kömu fram ormar with pointed horns there came forward snakes reiöiliga hvcesandi furiously hissing '[And a countless multitude of devils burst in and filled the house with various creatures: frightfully roaring lions and threateningly bellowing oxen with pointed horns.] There were furiously hissing snakes coming forward'

The expletive topic 71 c. [Ok leiddu harm um likunrta staöi.../ Par runnu ok and led him around unknown places there ran also svd sfdr vptn so clear waters '[And (they) took him to unknown places.] There was also such clear water running' Although par in these examples expresses a location, it is easy to imagine how the connection between par and the antecedent might be so loose that it could be interpreted as a semantically empty filler of a topic position. (In 40c the dots represent about half a printed page.) When the time comes for the expletive topic to become an expletive subject, one other feature of par helps to promote the process. In Old Norse the adverbial par would often occur immediately after the finite verb, probably cliticized to the verb. And as we have seen, this is also the position of the nonfronted subject. (41) a. Ρά kemr par elldur af pvi jarrti then comes there fire from that iron 'Then fire comes from the iron' (Konungs skuggsjd) b. Ok varÖ par mikit mannfall and was there great man-fall 'And there was a great loss of men' (όΐά/s saga Tryggvasonar) c. Kemr par mi fall fiqldi manna comes there great multitude men-G "There are many men coming* saga Tryggvasonar) The use of 'it* as an expletive in existential sentences appears in DanoNorwegian during the fifteenth century, as is shown by the following examples from Falk & Torp (1900). (42) a. thet war een man, hwilkcen som it was a man who that 'There was a man who had two sons' (1509, no source given)

haffdee had

twerme sjtooor two sons

72 Functional change b. forstaa, huorledis detkan noget skabis aff understand how it can something be-created from inted nothing 'Understand how something can be created from nothing' (Christiern Pedersen) c. det er faa Heste, som t0r bie Bi0rnen it is few horses that dare face the-bear (Peder Clauss0n) This word is the most unmarked and semantically nonspecified nominal. Thus it could also have a loose connection with its antecedent, and like any other pronoun it could appear as a clitic to the right of the finite verb. The use of 'it* in existential sentences might have been reinforced by its use in extraposition constructions, where it was originally an anticipating pronoun referring to the sentential argument. In Old Norse such a pronoun was already very common in extraposition constructions. (43) Er pat minn vili, at svä is it my will that so 'It is my wish that we all do so' (Oldfs saga helga)

gfiri virallir do we all

The word pat is here base generated as the head of phrase, and is thus not an expletive word at this point. This is shown by the fact that it may also immediately precede the clause (44a), and that it may be the head of a subordinate clause which is not a subject (44b). (44) a. Satt er pat, at mjgk er niörfallit rüd Haralds ins true is that that much is down-fallen power Harald's the hdrfagra fairhair 'It is true that the power of Harald the Fairhair is much reduced' (0ldfs saga helga) b. Pat hyggjum vir, at hann kuntii Jugls rgddu that think we that he knows bird's voice 'We think that he knows the speech of the birds' (Morkinskinna)

The expletive topic 73 As the requirement for a lexically filled subject position became stronger, and eventually absolute, the anticipating pat was reanalysed as an expletive subject.

Chapter four Formal change

In this chapter I will examine certain morphosyntactic changes that have taken place in the transition from Old Norse to modern Norwegian. One difference between these two stages of Nordic is the degree to which the two languages use synthetic or analytic means to encode grammatical functions. Superficially, Old Norse is a synthetic language with case endings and free word order, whereas modern Norwegian is analytic with fixed word order and no case endings in nouns. Neither of the two languages, however, is a consistent synthetic or analytic language. Both make use of both means to encode grammatical functions - but to a varying degree. On the other hand, and more surprisingly perhaps, the two languages are typologically much more different than would be indicated by this rather superficial difference just mentioned. The predominant mechanism for encoding grammatical functions is accompanied by a number of other and "deeper" phenomena, which will be discussed in this chapter.

4.1. Predicate and argument The semantic module includes predicate-argument structures. In the normal case, predicates are mapped onto such syntactic categories as verbs, adjectives, and prepositions in the syntactic module, and arguments are mapped onto noun phrases. I will refer to the syntactic representation of the predicate either by the name of its syntactic category, "verb", "adjective", "preposition", or by the collective term "predicate". This term, then, becomes ambiguous, since it is used both of a logico-semantic and a syntactic category, I will consider this, however, a rather innocent ambiguity in most of the present contexts. I will likewise refer to the syntactic representation of the argument either by the name of its syntactic category ("NP") or by the term "argument". Some verbs, such as rain, take no arguments, but most verbs take one, two, or three arguments. Most adjectives take only one argument, denoting the

76 Formal change entity which the adjective describes. Some adjectives may also take two arguments. (1)

Jim is fond of his cat

Prepositions take two arguments, as in (2), where in denotes a relationship between 'the man* and 'the street'; the former is located relative to the latter. (2)

the man in the street

The first argument of a preposition may be an entire proposition, or another predicate, as in she walked in the street, where the walking event is located relative to a place denoted by an NP. In the syntax, the argument NP may or may not be governed by the predicate. For the present purpose, government may be defined as in (3):23 (3)

α governs ß iff 1. α and ß are sisters dominated by Γ, and 2. α is the head of Γ.

When these conditions are met, I will refer to ß as the object of a. In a configuration such as (4), A and Β may both be arguments of C, but only Β is governed by C and thus is the object of C. (4)

X

The configuration in (4) may be shown to represent the structures of a regular transitive sentence (5a), as well as that of an NP containing a PP (5b).

Predicate and argument

77

In addition, there are transitive adjectives in languages such as German and Norwegian. Thus (4) may also represent the structure of an AP as that in the Norwegian sentence (6a), where the adjective redd is transitive. The structure of (6a) is given in (6b) (disregarding the extra complication due to the copula verb). (6)

a. Jon er redd Hunden Jon is afraid the-dog

78

Formal change

b.

S

NP Jon

VP

V er

AP

A redd

NP hundert

All the NPs in these diagrams represent arguments of the predicates in their respective structures, but only the lower and rightmost NPs are governed and thus objects of the predicates.

4.2. Grammatical function and semantic role The relationship that an argument bears to its predicate in the syntactic module will be referred to as a grammatical function. The predicate argument relationship thus has a syntactic and a semantic nature (Marantz 1984: 6). The semantic value depends of course on the interpretation, in both the informal and the formal sense. The basis for that interpretation is partly the lexical content of the predicate and the grammatical function of the argument. Thus the different interpretation, the difference in meaning, between (7a) and (7b) depends on the lexical content of the verb, whereas the difference between (7b) and (7c) depends on the grammatical function of the NPs. (7)

a. Mary kissed John b. Mary hit John c. John hit Mary

A grammatical function maps onto a certain functional meaning, which I will refer to as semantic role. This semantic role is a function of the lexical content of the predicate and the grammatical function of the argument.

Grammatical function and semantic role 79 Thus in (7a) Mary has the semantic role of "Agent" since it is the subject of the action verb kiss. For an interpretation of a predicate - argument relation to be possible, it is not only necessary to know the meaning of the predicate and the argument separately, but also to be able to identify the grammatical function of the argument. Such an identification is based mainly on three types of factors: morphology, position, and syntactic properties. In English, for example, a subject is identified among other things by its preverbal position, and by its omissibility in infinitival clauses. Whereas case is a morphological category and role is a semantic category, grammatical functions do not have clear morphological or semantic counterparts. If in a language there are direct, semantically predictable associations of semantic role with morphological case, the notion of grammatical function may be redundant. All we need to refer to then is case. If, on the other hand, certain NPs across sentences share some syntactic properties not shared by other NPs, or if case is not relevant in the marking of NPs, then we need the notion of grammatical function. In (8a-b), for example, we need to identify Mary in both sentences as belonging to the same category because they share some relevant properties. (8)

a. Mary wrote the letter b. Mary received the letter

Although the NP Mary refers to the agent only in (8a), it has enough syntactic properties in common with the NP Mary in (8b) for both of them to be assigned to the same grammatical function category "subject". Conversely, in case-marking languages, the subject need not be identified with the nominative case. It is not immediately obvious that the nominative NP in the Old Norse sentence (9) is the subject of that sentence. (9)

Vor peim gefinn dagverör was them-D given lunch-N 'They were given lunch' (Heimskringla)

If the nominative NP dagverör shares certain properties with the nominative NP Hallfreör in (10) and with other nominative NPs, then those properties may be properties of nominative NPs.

80 Formal change (10) Hallfreör setti bti saman Hallfired-N set home together 'Hallfred set up a home' (Hrafnkels saga) If, on the other hand, the nominative in (10) also shares some relevant properties with NPs like peim in (9), then a name for that category is needed, for example "subject". It is thus an empirical question whether a given language has grammatical functions such as subjects and objects. It is argued, for example, by Reis (1982) that the term "subject" is not needed in the grammar of German, and that it can be replaced by "nominative". It can also be shown empirically that grammatical functions are not necessarily primitives, contrary to the basic assumption of relational grammar (e.g. Perlmutter 1983). If a language distinguishes between different grammatical functions, the function of a given argument may be predicted on the basis of the syntactic rules of the grammar of that language, the lexical content of the predicate, and a universal semantic role hierarchy. The semantic role hierarchy is reminiscent of the subject hierarchy of Fillmore (1968). Yet any statement about subject selection based on Fillmore's hierarchy is circular, since the hierarchy itself is based on subject selection. Fillmore's hierarchy is therefore not supposed to explain anything; it is only meant to describe a set of facts. If, on the other hand, we are able to base a semantic role hierarchy on factors other than subject selection, we may use it to predict and explain the distribution of subjects and of other grammatical functions. The semantic representation associated with the syntactic structure of a sentence includes at least one proposition. The semantic roles of the arguments in a proposition follow from the lexical content of the predicate word. Hence the different semantic roles of the NP in Max is sleeping and Max is running follow from the contents of the respective verbs and need not be stated independently in the grammar.24 On the other hand, when there are two or more arguments to a single predicate, the distribution of the roles among those arguments presumably follows from some general - partly universal and partly language-specific - principles. The fact that we interpret (11a) and (lib) differently must follow from some general rule of the grammar of English, which again may follow from some universal principle.

Grammatical function and semantic role 81 (11) a. Sue loves Max b. Max loves Sue The semantic roles have to be distinguished only in those cases where more than one of them occurs in a given proposition. The important factor for the grammar to capture is, then, the distinctive features of the roles, not their actual substantive content. I will therefore offer a description of semantic roles in terms of a minimal number of features. In propositions with two arguments, the argument denoting the source of an action or the place, the owner, the recipient, the person harboring the emotions, etc, will be said to have the feature [+locus]. The sentences in (12) have two-place predicates, and one of the arguments (underscored) contains the feature [+locus], the other one does not. (12) a. b. c. d. e. f.

Sue killed the spider Sue owns a Volkswagen Max received a card Max loves Sue Sue lives in Madison There is a spider in the bathroom

The argument which denotes the actor, instrument or source which brings about the action denoted by the proposition, as in (12a), contains the feature [+agent]. The term does not imply that it has to be animate or intentional. An animate or intentional agent, one which is the source of some sort of action, has the feature [+locus] in addition to [+agent]. The instrumental role is thus distinguished from the actor role by having the minus value for the feature Locus. I will assume that the semantic module includes a tier with the semantic roles linearly represented. Each proposition in the semantic structure has its own role tier. The order of semantic roles on the tier depends on their feature values: a role with the value "plus" for both features precedes one with the value "plus" for only one of the features, which again precedes one with the value "minus" for both features, and [+agent] takes precedence over [+locus]. (13) [+agent, +locus] > [+agent, -locus] > [-agent, +locus] > [-agent, locus]

82 Formal change The four roles specified in (13) may conveniently be given the names "Agent", "Instrument", "Locus", and Theme", respectively, and (13) may be restated as (14). (14) Agent > Instrument > Locus > Theme Since grammatical functions may be characterized by different properties in different languages, we must expect the notion of grammatical function in a given language to cover different sets of phenomena through its history. Cole et al. (1980) describe how dative experiences (15a) and passivized nonaccusative objects (15b) gradually take on subject properties through the recorded history of Germanic. (Both examples are from German.) (15) a. Mir gefallen diese Damen me-D please-3P these ladies-N Ί like these ladies' b. Uns wird von der Polizei geholfen us-D is-3S by the police helped 'We are helped by the police' Whereas Cole et al. (1980) are concerned first of all with how NPs corresponding to the first NPs in (15) in other Germanic languages acquire subject properties in a certain (universally determined?) order, I will here be concerned mainly with how a term such as "subject" changes its content, or even becomes meaningful, through the history of a language.

4.3. Conflgurationality The nature of grammatical functions and their syntactic properties are closely connected with the configurationality of the language. In syntactic typology, a distinction can be made between configurational and nonconfigurational languages. This distinction subsumes roughly the kinds of differences we find between older and younger stages of Western European languages, such as between Old Norse and contemporary Scandinavian, as noted above, or between more or less conservative variants of those languages (see, for example, Hawkins 1985: 41). Within the framework of the theory of Government and Binding, it has been proposed that configurationality constitutes a parameter which divides the world's languages

Configurationality

83

into two distinct types (Chomsky 1981: par. 2.8.; Hale 1983). In a configurational language the syntactic surface structure has a separate VP-node, and there is an external argument represented by an NP-node outside that VP. By the definition of government given in (3), this NP is not governed by the verb; it is a sister of VP and by definition the subject. In nonconfigurational languages all the argument NPs are at the same level of structure, they are all sisters of V; there is no VP-node to the exclusion of one of the arguments. To the extent that we want to use the term subject of any one of the NPs in such languages, it will have to be recognized by criteria other than its structural position. (16a) shows the structure of a typical configurational language, (16b) that of a nonconfigurational language. (16)

a.

S

V

NP

4.3.1. Modem Norwegian as a configurational language The existence of a VP as a separate node in the syntactic structure of a language manifests itself in a number of ways. In this section I will demonstrate the kind of evidence there is for a VP-node in a language, using data from modern Norwegian. In the following sections I will contrast the structure of modern Norwegian with that of earlier stages of Nordic with regard to configurationality.

84 Formal change The VP may be topicalized. In Norwegian that means occupying the preverbal position in main declarative sentences (17a, b).25 This position can accommodate one, and only one, constituent, for example the direct object alone, as in (17c). More than one consituent, for example an object and an adverbial, in that position is ungrammatical, (17d). (17) a. Lesa aviser gjer ho heile dagen read newspapers does shewhole the-day 'Read newspapers is what she does all day long' b. Sjä pä fiernsyn vil eg ikkje look at television will I not 'Watch television is what I don't want to do' c. Aviser les ho heile dagen newspapers reads she whole the-day 'Newspapers she reads all day long' d. *Aviser heile dagen les ho The VP may be clefted, as any other single constituent. (18) a. Det er lesa aviser ho gjer it is read newspapers she does 'What she does is read newspapers' b. Det er sjä pä fiernsyn eg ikkje vil it is look at television I not will 'What I don't want is to watch television' c. Det er aviser ho les it is newspapers she reads 'What she reads is newspapers' Finally, the VP may be pronominalized: (19) a. Liv les aviser, men det gjer ikkje Per Liv reads newspapers butthat does not Per 'Liv reads newspapers, but Per does not' b. Liv vil sjä pä fiernsyn, men del vi/ ikkje Per Liv will look at television but that will not Per 'Liv wants to watch TV, but Per does not' The status of a VP as a separate constituent also puts the subject in a

Configurationality 85 preferred position, as seen from the structure in (16a). In section 4.4.1. we will look at the properties of such a subject in more detail.

4.3.1 Characteristics of nonconfigurationality In a nonconfigurational language, we do not expect to find the kinds of VP properties listed in the above section. Furthermore, the most prominent characteristic of a nonconfigurational language is free word order. In many languages, all that this amounts to is free order of major constituents. This cannot, however, be a criterion of nonconfigurationality, since there is nothing logically unacceptable about, say, a language where the subject may precede or follow the VP, although that seems to be rare among the world's languages.26 In a nonconfigurational language, therefore, free word order would also mean free order at a lower level of structure, such as variant order of noun and adjective. The most extreme case of free word order would be the occurrence of discontinuous phrases, where elements that belong together as in a phrase, for example a noun and an adjective modifying that noun, can be separated by material which does not belong to the noun phrase. Hale (1983), in his study of the syntactic properties of Warlpiri, an Australian language, shows how free word order and discontinuous phrases are generated by the grammar of a nonconfigurational language. Warlpiri is a language with extremely free word-order possibilities, including discontinuous phrases, as in (20) (Hale's example 4). (20) Wawirri kapi-ma panti-mi yalumpu kangaroo AUX spear-NONPAST that Ί will spear that kangaroo' Here the determiner yalumpu is separated from the noun that it determines, wawirri. Hale posits (21) (his 7b) as the rule schema for finite clauses. (21) V' -> AUX Χ'* V X'* V' is the maximal projection of V, namely the sentence, X' is any category, and the star * denotes any number, including null, of that category. The rule says that a sentence starts with AUX (whose properties and internal structure need not concern us here), followed by a V, which may be

86 Formal change

preceded or followed by any number of any category. Under certain circumstances, the AUX is inserted in second position. Free word order is now a function of this underspecified rule schema and lexical insertion. Constituents of any category can be inserted in any position. Furthermore, there is nothing to prevent, say, a noun and a determiner of the same case from being inserted in two different positions, thus giving rise to discontinuous phrases, as in (20). The lexical specification of the verb will determine whether the result of the insertions is a semantically acceptable sentence. A third characteristic of nonconfigurational languages mentioned by Hale is the occurrence of empty argument positions, which he terms "null anaphora". This also follows from the rule schema (21); since the star * can also represent the empty set, a sentence may come out with fewer expressed arguments than required by the argument structure specified for the verb. Such sentences will still be interpretable, if the reference of the empty arguments can be recovered from the context. A corollary of this third characteristic property is the fact that a nonconfigurational language does not have expletive elements to fill empty positions. Obviously, the above mentioned properties do not follow with logical necessity from nonconfigurationality if that is taken to mean just having a flat syntactic structure as in (16b). One could very well imagine a language with fixed word order, no discontinuous phrases, and no empty argument positions, but also with no recognizable VP constituent. However, I do not know of any language for which such a structure can be demonstrated.

4.3.3. Old Norse In this section, I will try to determine to what extent Old Norse can be shown to be nonconfigurational in the sense outlined above.

4.3.3.1. VP-constituent? Like modern Norwegian and Old English, Old Norse is a verb-second language, which means that what precedes the finite verb is maximally one constituent. Sentences equivalent to the modern Norwegian (17a, b) would therefore be evidence of a VP in Old Norse. None of the examples in Nygaard (1906) of what he calls "inverted word order" has a verb followed

Configurationality 87 by another element preceding the finite verb. It is quite common, however, to find a nonfinite verb alone in front position. Here are some examples (sentences 22a-l are from Nygaard 1906): (22) a. Felt hefir hon pd menn hidden has she those men 'She has hidden those men' (Snorri's Edda) b. Sjti md ek pik see must I you Ί must see you' (ΙκαάφΙα saga) c. Pakka viljum viryör thank will we you 'We want to thank you' (Laxdißla saga) d. Purfa muntu, Pjdlfi! at leggja pik meir fram need will-you, Thjalfi, to put yourself more forward 'Thjalfi, you will need to make a greater effort' (Snorri's Edda) e. Svinbeygt heft ek ηύ pann, er rikastr er humiliated have I now the-one who most-powerful is med Svtum with Swedes Ί have now humiliated the one who is most powerful among the Swedes' (Snorri's Edda) f. Hugsat heft ek n