This chapter discusses results from a quantitative study of possible contact-induced change in
Middle English in a multi-genre corpus (the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English
2 (PPCME2), Kroch & Taylor 2000, and a single-genre
corpus, the Penn Corpus of Early English Correspondence (PCEEC), Taylor et al. 2006). We claim that the data from the correspondence corpus are critical to
understanding the rise of the recipient passive (more traditionally called the indirect passive) in late ME because
they reflect the active competence of writers, much more than other genres do (at least in the PPCME2). More
precisely, we argue that our data reflect a verb class specific passive construction that seems to be firmly
established in the grammar of the writers. This construction is not calqued from the model language (Old French) but
the result of interpreting the French dative as different from the English ‘dative’.
Article outline
1.Introduction
2.Passive and case
3.The rise of the recipient passive in English
3.1
Allen’s (1995) study
3.2Comparing results from a multi-genre and a single-genre corpus study
Allen, Cynthia. 1995. Case Marking and Reanalysis: Grammatical Relations from Old to Early Modern English. Oxford: OUP.
Ambridge, Ben, Pine, Julian M., Rowland, Caroline F. & Chang, Franklin. 2012. The roles of verb semantics, entrenchment, and morphophonology in the retreat from dative
argument-structure overgeneralization errors. Language 88(1): 45–81.
Ambridge, Ben, Pine, Julian M., Rowland, Caroline F., Freudenthal, Daniel & Chang, Franklin. 2014. Avoiding dative overgeneralisation errors: Semantics, statistics or both?Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 29(2): 218–243.
Buridant, Claude. 2000. Grammaire nouvelle de l’ancien français. Paris: Sedes.
Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding Studies in Generative Grammar. Dordrecht: Foris.
Eisenbeiss, Sonia, Narasimhan, Bhuvana & Voeikova, Maria. 2009. The acquisition of case. In The Oxford Handbook of Case, Andrej Malchukov & Andrew Spencer (eds), 369–383. Oxford: OUP.
Grevisse, Maurice. 2011. Le bon usage. Grammaire française, 15th edn. Paris-Gembloux: Duculot.
Heine, Bernd & Kuteva, Tania (eds). 2005. Language Contact and Grammatical Change. Cambridge: CUP.
Heine, Bernd & Kuteva, Tania. 2008. Constraints on contact-induced linguistic change. Journal of Language Contact – THEMA 2: 57–90.
Ingham, Richard. 2012a. Syntaxe et valeur discursive de la construction et VS en anglo-normand par rapport au français du
continent. In Actes du 3e Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française (CMLF), Lyon, 4–7 Juillet 2012, 177–186. Paris: Institut de Linguistique française.
Jensen, Frede. 1990. Old French and Comparative Gallo-Romance Syntax [Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie 2232]. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Johanson, Lars. 2002. Contact-induced change in a code-copying framework. In Language Change: The Interplay of Internal, External and Extra-linguistic Factors, Mari C. Jones & Edith Esch (eds), 285–313. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Johanson, Lars. 2009. Copying case markers and case functions. In The Oxford Handbook of Case, Andrej Malchukov & Andrew Spencer (eds), 494–502. Oxford: OUP.
Kroch, Anthony & Taylor, Ann (eds). 2000. The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English (PPCME2), 2nd edn. Philadelphia PA: University of Pennsylvania.
Levin, Beth. 1993. English Verb Classes and Alternations. A Preliminary Investigation. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.
Levin, Beth & Rappaport Hovav, Malka. 2005. Argument Realization Research Surveys in Linguistics. Cambridge: CUP.
Los, Bettelou. 2009. The consequences of the loss of verb-second in English: Information structure and syntax in
interaction. English Language and Linguistics 13: 97–125.
McFadden, Thomas. 2002. The rise of the to-dative in Middle English. In Syntactic Effects of Morphological Change, David Lightfoot (ed.). Oxford: OUP.
Mitchell, Bruce. 1985. Old English Syntax. Oxford: Clarendon.
Pinker, Steven. 1989. Learnability and Cognition. The Acquisition of Argument Structure. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Prévost, Sophie & Stein, Achim (eds). 2013. Syntactic Reference Corpus of Medieval French (SRCMF). Lyon/Stuttgart: ENS de Lyon; Lattice, Paris; Universität Stuttgart. <[URL]>
Scherger, Anna-Lena. 2015. Schnittstelle zwischen Mehrsprachigkeit und Sprachentwicklungsstörung: Kasuserwerb deutsch-italienischer
Kinder mit spezifischer Sprachentwicklungsstörung [Schriftenreihe Philologia 200]. Hamburg: Kovač.
Seoane, Elena. 2006. Information structure and word order change: The passive as an information-rearranging strategy in
the history of English. In The Handbook of the History of English, Ans van Kemenade & Bettelou Los (eds), 360–391. Oxford: Blackwell.
Taylor, Ann, Nurmi, Arja, Warner, Anthony, Pintzuk, Susan & Nevalainen, Terttu (eds). 2006. Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence (PCEEC). York & Helsinki: Universities of York and Helsinki.
Trips, Carola & Stein, Achim. Forthcoming. Contact-induced changes in the argument structure of Middle English verbs on the model of Old
French. Journal of Language Contact. Special Issue Valency and Transitivity in Contact, Eitan Grossman, Ilja
Serzants & Alena Witzlack-Makarevich (eds).
Troberg, Michelle. 2008. Dynamic Two-place Indirect Verbs in French: A Synchronic and Diachronic Study in Variation and
Change of Valence. PHD dissertation, University of Toronto. <[URL]>
Zaenen, Annie & Maling, Joan. 1990. Unaccusative, passive and quirky case. In Modern Icelandic Syntax, Annie Zaenen & Joan Maling (eds), 137–152. New York NY: Academic Press.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.