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The syntactic status of V-final conjunct clauses in Old English: the role of priming

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2023

ANNA CICHOSZ Open the ORCID record for ANNA CICHOSZ [Opens in a new window]
ANNA CICHOSZ*
Affiliation:
Department of Corpus and Computational Linguistics Institute of English Studies University of Łódź ul. Pomorska 171/173 90–236 Łódź Poland anna.cichosz@uni.lodz.pl
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Abstract

This study is a corpus-based investigation of the use of the V-final (VF) order in Old English conjunct (or coordinate) clauses. The aim of the analysis is to determine which of the two hypotheses formulated in earlier studies of the subject finds more convincing data support in the available corpora of Old English. According to one interpretation, conjunct clauses are a subtype of main clauses, and the VF order is used in both groups to signal continuation in discourse, especially with punctual, dynamic and relatively heavy verbs. Under the other view, VF conjunct clauses are syntactically subordinate, with the coordinating conjunction blocking verb movement like a complementiser. The present study shows that while both hypotheses are descriptively adequate, the main mechanism responsible for the use of the VF order in conjunct clauses is syntactic priming, with the VF order activated by a trigger clause (usually subordinate) and spreading to the following conjunct clause(s), which often results in long chains of subsequent VF clauses.

Keywords

Old Englishconjunct clauseverb-finalsyntactic primingcorpus study
Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , First View , pp. 1 - 28
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Ans van Kemenade for her methodological support and invaluable comments on an early version of the article, as well as Tara Struik and Erwin Komen for their help with Corpus Studio queries and Artur Bartnik and Maciej Grabski for their feedback.

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