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

Quantifying information structure change in English

| Radboud University Nijmegen
| Radboud University Nijmegen
| Radboud University Nijmegen
ORCID logo | University of Edinburgh

The verb-second constraint in Old and Middle English made available a special clause-initial position that could host more than just the subject. Los (2009) suggests that this position served a discourse-linking function, expressed by, for instance, an adverbial. This allowed the subject to be reserved for human “protagonists”. It stands to reason that the loss of verb-second in the fifteenth century entailed a decrease in the prevalence of discourse-linking clause-initial adverbials. The subject took over the discourse-linking function, thus extending its functional load. This article tests four hypotheses concerning the changing functional load of the English subject. Our corpus consists of syntactically-parsed texts that have been enriched with referential information, allowing us to quantify the changes affecting the subject.

Published online: 7 May 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.213.04kom
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Cited by

Cited by 4 other publications

Bech, Kristin & George Walkden
2016. English is (still) a West Germanic language. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 39:1 ► pp. 65 ff. DOI logo
Dreschler, Gea
2017. Chapter 6. The information status of late subjects in passive main clauses in Old English. In Word Order Change in Acquisition and Language Contact [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 243], ► pp. 103 ff. DOI logo
Los, Bettelou
2018. Chapter 1. “Permissive” subjects and the decline of adverbial linking in the history of English. In Explorations in English Historical Syntax [Studies in Language Companion Series, 198], ► pp. 23 ff. DOI logo
LOS, BETTELOU, GEA DRESCHLER, ANS VAN KEMENADE, ERWIN KOMEN & STEFANO CORETTA
2023. The decline of local anchoring: a quantitative investigation. English Language and Linguistics 27:2 ► pp. 345 ff. DOI logo

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