Studies in the history of the english language

Studies in the History of the English Language

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Topics in English Linguistics
39

Editors

Elizabeth Closs Traugott
Bernd Kortmann

Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York


Studies in the History
of the English Language
A Millennial Perspective

Edited by

Donka Minkova
Robert Stockwell

Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York 2002

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

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

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication-Data
Studies in the history of the English language : a millennial
perspective / edited by Donka Minkova, Robert Stockwell.
p. cm. Ϫ (Topics in English linguistics ; 39)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 3 11 017368 9
1. English language Ϫ History. 2. English language Ϫ
Grammar, Historical.
I. Minkova, Donka, 1944Ϫ
II. Stockwell, Robert P. III. Series.
PE1075 .S88 2002
4201.9Ϫdc21
2002067795

Die Deutsche Bibliothek Ϫ Cataloging-in-Publication-Data
Studies in the history of the English language : a millennial
perspective / ed. by Donka Minkova ; Robert Stockwell. Ϫ Berlin ; New York : Mouton de Gruyter, 2002
(Topics in English linguistics ; 39)
ISBN 3-11-017368-9

” Copyright 2002 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, 10785 Berlin
All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this
book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or

mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin.
Printed in Germany.


Table of Contents

Foreword

1

Millennial perspectives
From etymology to historical pragmatics
Elizabeth Closs Traugott

19

Mixed-language texts as data and evidence in English historical
linguistics
Herbert Schendl

51

Dialectology and the history of the English language
William A. Kretzschmar, Jr.

79

Origin unknown

Anatoly Liberman

109

Issues for a new history of English prosody
Thomas Cable

125

Chaucer: Folk poet or littérateur?
Gilbert Youmans and Xingzhong Li

153

A rejoinder to Youmans and Li
Thomas Cable

177

Phonology and metrics
On the development of English r
Blaine Erickson

183

Vowel variation in English rhyme
Kristin Hanson

207

Lexical diffusion and competing analyses of sound change
Betty S. Phillips

231


vi

Table of Contents

Dating criteria for Old English poems
Geoffrey Russom

245

How much shifting actually occurred in the historical English
vowel shift?
Robert Stockwell

267

Restoration of /a/ revisited
David White

283

Morphosyntax/Semantics
Pragmatic uses of SHALL future constructions in Early Modern
English
Maurizio Gotti

301

Explaining the creation of reflexive pronouns in English
Edward L. Keenan

325

Word order in Old English prose and poetry:
The position of finite verb and adverbs
Ans van Kemenade

355

The “have” perfect in Old English:
How close was it to the Modern English perfect?
Jeong-Hoon Lee

373

Reporting direct speech in Early Modern slander depositions
Colette Moore

399

The emergence of the verb-verb compound in twentieth century English and twentieth century linguistics
Benji Wald and Lawrence Besserman
417

Envoy

A thousand years of the history of English
Richard W. Bailey

449

Name index
Subject index

473
483


Foreword
This collection contains papers selected from those presented at a conference at UCLA in the Spring of the year 2000. The conference was called
Studies in the History of the English Language, abbreviated SHEL-1. It was
intended to be the first in what we hope will become a regular biennial
series at various sites in North America; SHEL-2 is being organized at the
University of Washington as we are preparing this volume. The intention of
the series is to stimulate research and other scholarly activity in the field of
historical English linguistics. Our emphasis was deliberately on the history
of English as a discipline: how healthy was it at the end of the millennium
and what if anything needed to be done to maintain its scholarly energy and
relevance? A comparable series of meetings in Europe, the International
Conferences on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL), have proved to be
very vigorous since the first conference, in 1979, at Durham.
The scholars who work in our field in non-English speaking countries
have the advantage that English is a popular choice for foreign language
study there and often there is generous government and public support for
this kind of enterprise. They have a steady student demand based on that fact.
In Britain, the 19th and 20th century dedication to historical English studies

created a robust research tradition and a new generation of outstanding
scholars in whose hands the field is thriving. The tradition flourished in British and American universities in the 19th century and during the first half of
the 20th century, but during the last two decades only in British universities
has this kind of scholarship remained in the mainstream of academic life.
It has been apparent for some years that in America comparable vigor
did not exist in this field. In fact, the field has been declining as scholars unfamiliar with the linguistic history of English themselves fail to see the relevance of a traditional subject in a newly fashioned humanistic curriculum.
We believe this to be a misapprehension of the field and its present-day involvement with other disciplines. Researching the cognitive and social conditions, causes, and consequences of language change should not be
brushed aside as peripheral to the concerns of the new generation of humanists in this country. We organized the first SHEL with the conviction that
the study of the history of English is central to the interpretation of our cultural and literary heritage, and both the meeting, and the contributions to
this volume, reaffirmed our conviction.


2

Foreword

So the first motivation for us to convene this conference was to provide a
forum for the presentation of research in English linguistics, specifically
English historical linguistics, to serve as a stimulus for quality and a probe
for what more needs to be done. Measured by the quality and variety of the
presentations and discussions, 35 speakers and over 80 participants, we
happily report that energy and vigor continue to characterize our field. A
Workshop, organized by Anne Curzan (University of Washington), addressed various approaches to the teaching of the History of English. The
North American representation at SHEL-1 was greatly augmented by transatlantic scholars whose participation was deeply appreciated. For the record, a list of paper presenters and session chairs appears at the end of the
Foreword.
The second motivation was to provide, in as many areas as possible, a
sort of millennial stock-taking. The millennial focus is fully apparent in
the envoy paper by Richard Bailey (University of Michigan); and in the
field-survey papers by Elizabeth Traugott (Stanford University); Herbert
Schendl (University of Vienna); William Kretzschmar (University of Georgia); Anatoly Liberman (University of Minnesota); Thomas Cable (University of Texas, Austin); and Gilbert Youmans and Xingzhong Li (University

of Missouri and Central Washington University).
The papers addressing individual issues fall into two natural groups:
(1) Phonology and metrics – the papers by Blaine Erickson (Kanazawa
Institute of Technology, Japan); Kristin Hanson (University of California,
Berkeley); Betty Phillips (Indiana State University, Terre Haute); Geoffrey
Russom (Brown University); Robert Stockwell (University of California,
Los Angeles); and David White (University of Texas, Austin).
(2) Morphosyntax/Semantics – the papers by Maurizio Gotti (University
of Bergamo); Edward Keenan (University of California, Los Angeles); Ans
van Kemenade (Katholieke Universiteit, Nijmegen); Jeong-Hoon Lee
(University of Texas, Austin); Colette Moore (University of Michigan);
and Benji Wald and Lawrence Besserman (Los Angeles and Hebrew University, Jerusalem).


Foreword

3

Millennial Perspective
Elizabeth Traugott’s contribution is entitled “From etymology to historical
pragmatics”. As is well known, she was one of the principal scholars in the
initiation of research into the historical process of grammaticalization, by
means of which new grammatical formatives come into languages. In introducing her survey of the field, she notes that many of the major themes
of the early twentieth century, e.g. the arbitrariness of the sign, the non-predictability of change, and distinctions between structure and use, were developed against the background of historical work primarily on Romance
and Germanic languages. Among many themes debated at the end of the
century have been the extent to which change is predictable and non-arbitrary, this time against the background of synchronic work primarily on
English, as well as many other languages.
She points out that throughout the twentieth century diachronic theory has
lagged behind synchronic. Though the seeds of many ideas about morphosyntactic change that dominated the end of the century are to be found in
work at its beginning, the pragmatics, semantics and syntax were not sufficiently far advanced for those ideas to be developed in principled ways. New

possibilities for understanding language change have opened up with advances in the study of the relation between language and use, especially from
the perspective of work on grammaticalization and historical pragmatics.
One area of intense debate arising from these new studies is what status
in linguistic theory the widely attested unidirectionalities in semantic and
morphosyntactic change should have. On the one hand there has been an
active research program seeking to identify unidirectionalities (e.g. Traugott 1982, 1989, Heine, Claudi and Hünnemeyer 1991, Bybee, Pagliuca
and Perkins 1994); this has recently been complemented by a research program seeking to formalize them (e.g. Roberts 1993, Kemenade 1999). 1 On
the other it has been argued that since unidirectionalities are tendencies, not
absolute universals, they are epiphenomena and not explanatory (e.g. Roberts 1993, Newmeyer 1998 on the unidirectionalities identified in grammaticalization), and even that such searches are a hold-over from nineteenth century historicism (Lightfoot 1999).
Her paper suggests some ways in which historical pragmatics can shed
light on the unidirectionalities observed in grammaticalization, as the field
moves toward an explanatory theory that can account for them.


4

Foreword

Herbert Schendl is one of the world’s premier experts on the new and
relatively unexplored subject of mixed-language texts. His essay here,
“Mixed-language texts as data and evidence in English historical linguistics”, essentially lays out the whole field, what has been accomplished
and what needs to be done. As he writes, the changing multilingual situation of medieval Britain as well as the foreign influence on the lexicon and
structure of English over the centuries have been extensively studied. He
highlights the surprising fact that most historical linguists still regard
monolingual English texts as the only data base for research and have paid
little attention to the numerous older texts showing alternation of languages, especially of Latin, French and English. While the central role of
code-switching for sociolinguistics and general linguistics has been established for some time, older mixed-language texts have been seen as literary
peculiarities or as the result of insufficient language competence. For the
Middle English period it has even been claimed that bilingual texts are
more frequent than monolingual ones. Their relative neglect by historical

linguists is thus the more surprising. Only in the last few years, Schendl
claims, has there emerged an awareness of the relevance of such texts,
which explicitly document bilingualism and code-switching in action and
thus provide invaluable evidence of the close contact between different languages in the history of English. His paper surveys research in this promising new field of historical linguistics. After a brief discussion of some
general aspects of mixed-language texts, the author addresses the earlier
literary and philological approaches to such macaronic writings. The main
body of the paper is devoted to a discussion of recent linguistic research
into these texts from a syntactic and a functional-pragmatic point of view
with illustrations from a wide range of text types. Finally, two more general
questions are addressed; first, the distinction between code-switching and
mixed codes; second, the relationship between code-choice, code-switching, and code-shift.
William A. Kretzschmar, Jr.’s paper is entitled “Dialectology and the
history of the English language”. In it he argues persuasively that dialectology has much to offer to historical linguistics and to the history of the English language in particular. Survey research is the hallmark of the field, in
line with the empirical emphasis of the Neogrammarians who were the
initiators of this approach, yet dialectologists have been among the strongest critics of the central Neogrammarian position on mechanical sound


Foreword

5

change. Given this state of affairs, the central role of dialectology is to describe, for the particular time of a survey, the facts of the complicated language behavior in the survey area. These facts make up a body of raw material for historical linguistics to use, first as studies of individual words,
and second for description of the situation of language variation today
which can enlighten our attempts at historical reconstruction. Kretzschmar
maintains that contemporary variation is indeed the trace of change for particular words, because the low-frequency responses often reflect historical
precedents. The asymptotic curve (A-curve), the pattern of few common
linguistic types and many infrequent types which emerges from survey research on a single linguistic target, appears to be a basic fact about the distribution of linguistic types and tokens. The A-curve gives historical linguistics a more realistic model than the all-or-nothing pattern predicted by
mechanical sound change. The A-curve and the familiar S-curve are thus
complementary quantitative descriptions of the distributional facts of variant linguistic forms upon which we can develop improved “realism” in accounts of linguistic change.
Anatoly Liberman’s brilliantly entertaining, yet deeply scholarly essay,

is entitled “Etymology unknown”. The author is engaged in the production
of a new etymological dictionary of English that focuses entirely on the
mysteries of English etymology – the words for which no adequate etymology exists in any of the standard works like the Oxford English Dictionary.
He notes that many words are dismissed in etymological dictionaries with
the verdict “origin unknown.” In English, some such words go back to
Common Germanic and even Indo-European, while others are more recent.
Sometimes, “origin unknown” means that there is no consensus on a
word’s prehistory, but equally often scholars indeed have no clue to the
sources and the semantic motivation of words current today. Relatively
easy to etymologize are only onomatopoeias, words from names, some
simplified compounds, and borrowings (if an agreement is reached not to
pursue the origin of foreign words in the lending languages). In other cases,
historical linguistics usually fails to achieve the avowed goal of etymological research and present an unmotivated sign as motivated. The most urgent
task of English etymology as a science, Liberman believes, is to produce a
dictionary comparable to those by Feist, Vasmer, Frisk, and others with a
full critical survey of the existing literature on every word. If the idea of
such a dictionary materializes, many words of allegedly unknown etymol-


6

Foreword

ogy will be upgraded to words of uncertain or even acceptable etymology,
and scholars will be able to pick up where their numerous forgotten, disregarded, and misunderstood predecessors left off. Anatoly Liberman has
been working on “an English Feist” for thirteen years, and his suggestions
are the result of this work.
Thomas Cable’s paper, “Issues for a new history of English prosody”,
proceeds from the observation that an adequate new history of English prosody must resolve the main incompatibilities of three rich traditions of prosodic study: temporal, accentual, and generative. He argues that the problems and possible solutions can best be illustrated by focusing on generative metrics (a particular development of the stress tradition) because of
the explicitness of its goals and rules, a virtue often missing in the other two

approaches. In his critique of the generative tradition, he assigns special relevance to three contexts: (1) the diagnostic relevance of the W, or Weak,
position, (2) the lack of attention to the metrical pause, and (3) the misleading attention to the caesura. He examines and seeks to correct generative
analyses of the iambic pentameter as used by Chaucer and Shakespeare, and
by the poets between them, in a way that he believes clarifies this pivotal
period in the history of English prosody. He concludes that there is a significant difference in the internal structure of the line in Chaucer and Shakespeare, and that the most succinct formulation of this difference is to say
that Shakespeare made use of the iambic foot and Chaucer did not.
Cable’s original and controversial position on the difference between the
Chaucerian and the Shakesperean iambic line is disputed in a counterpoint
paper entitled “Chaucer: Folk Poet or Littérateur?” by Gilbert Youmans and
his student Xingzhong Li. Youmans and Li were not participants in the conference but became involved in the exchange at our request. Thus we have a
comparison of these two views on how the prosody of iambic pentameter
can be best described, Cable’s own view and a version of the generative
view represented, in this instance, by Youmans and Li. The differences are
vast and extremely interesting, and having them aired this way we believe is
greatly to the benefit of us all. In a framework consistent with Optimality
Theory, Youmans and Li propose a central prototype for iambic pentameter
verse and describe gradient “tension” rules (violable constraints) for
measuring degrees of deviation from this prototype. They provide statistical
evidence in support of the traditional view that Chaucer’s decasyllabic verse
is iambic pentameter [WS][WS] rather than an unfooted sequence of alter-


Foreword

7

nating syllables WSWS. Chaucer’s verse, they acknowledge, is more regular
than Shakepseare’s and Milton’s, but all three poets share the same central
prototype, a 4//2/4 line structured [WS][WS]//[WS]/[WS][WS]; and variations from prototypical stress patterning are most common at the beginnings of their lines (and hemistichs) and least common at the ends of their
lines (and hemistichs). Thus, Chaucer’s verse differs stylistically from

Shakespeare’s and Milton’s, but it embodies strikingly similar metrical
principles.
Cable’s response summarizes the differences between his theory of pentameter and that of the generativists, as represented by Youmans and Li,
under six categories. (1) A rigorous insistence on finding five beats to the
line – no reading without five beats is acceptable, some beats no doubt
weaker than others but still stronger than the adjacent “weak” beats.
(2) “Tilting” some weaker syllables toward strong, and some stronger syllables toward weak, is both necessary and proper. (3) Non-lexical words,
i.e. function words, not just lexical words, can bear ictus under the right
contextual circumstances. (4) Distinctions between unstressed syllables
that are cliticized as function words, and lexically unstressed syllables, are
irrelevant for the purposes of assessing poetic rhythm. (5) Constituent
bracketing, except with respect to caesura marking, is irrelevant to the determination of metricality. (6) Metricality is not the same as tension: What
is relevant to measuring tension may not be relevant to assessing metricality. What may reasonably be considered a seventh category, though not so
numbered by Cable, is his insightful discussion of trisyllabic feet in
Chaucer, in particular pointing out that there are no trochaic reversals in
which the reversal depends on a weak position two syllable consisting only
of a final -e. Though there are epiphenomenal reasons which might explain
this gap, the final -e in position two would be an incontrovertible and untiltable trochaic reversal: Cable argues that this gap requires explanation.
As editors we would not be willing to take sides and say who won this
exchange, even if we had a firm clear answer (which we don’t). We found
the exchange extremely enlightening, and we believe our readers will also.
We are deeply grateful to all three scholars for having the integrity and
courtesy to present these vigorously conflicting views of the nature of the
iambic pentameter as it is (mis)understood at the turn of the century.
Finally, among the millennially-oriented papers, Richard W. Bailey’s
paper, printed at the end of the book because of its envoy tone, “A thousand


8

Foreword

years of the history of English”, is a swashbuckling tour through English
philology of the 19th and 20th centuries (“text-centered study of language”, in Bailey’s words) in support of the view that we need a “renewed
philology”. The paper is a vigorous reminder that descriptions of linguistic
facts are not by any means free from assumptions, and that our views of the
history of English often express biases that are only dimly apparent to us.
Bailey compares our own histories of English with those of our predecessors: members of the Philological Society squabbling over standards as
its New English Dictionary began to appear in 1884; Thomas Percy, the
eighteenth-century clergyman who nearly single-handedly invented a distinctive Middle English and demonstrated how he could revive feudalism
and place himself within it as a cosseted minstrel even in the midst of the
Age of Reason; John Free, writing the first book-length history of English,
who managed to revive pride in Germanic languages by demonstrating that
English was one of them; Byrhtferth, in the twelfth-century, who used English to demonstrate revealed truth through words. His argument concludes
with the claim that we make better histories if we understand, and make
public, our assumptions, an appropriate appeal to the scholars of the twenty-first century.

Phonology and Metrics
Blaine Erickson’s paper on “The history of English r” is not a full-scale history of all varieties of /r/ found in the English language so much as it is an
effort to explain how the phonetic properties of the common American
English /r/ came about. This topic deserves such special treatment because
it is the odd articulation of /r/ that is the most strikingly different feature of
American as compared with any other variety of English.
In American English, retroflex and central approximant articulations are
the most common phones found for /r/. Cross-linguistically, both sounds
are rare, and since they are almost unknown in other Germanic languages,
the r phones of American English are more likely to be innovations than retentions.
Many other Germanic languages have a coronal trill as their phone for
/r/; evidence suggests that this was also the original phone for English /r/.
Erickson assumes that during the development of pre-modern English, the

Foreword

9

place of articulation of the coronal consonants changed from dental to alveolar. This caused the tongue to take on a sulcal shape, which set the stage
for the change from trill to retroflex. Retroflex articulation occurred first as
a conditioned change: when /r/ appeared before other coronals. Later, retroflex articulation spread to other environments, and it supplanted the trill.
After that, the central approximant appeared as an alternate pronunciation
for /r/. This is motivated by the fact that the retroflex and central approximant articulations are nearly identical acoustically, even though the tongue
configurations for the two are opposite: tongue tip up for the former, and
down for latter.
Kristin Hanson’s paper, entitled “Vowel variation in English full
rhymes”, is an effort to account for imperfect rhymes in the history of English verse. Virtually all modern English poets include some rhymes in their
practice in which the vowels differ in present day English, such as Shakespeare’s famous love/prove rhymes in the Sonnets. Versification handbooks
and history of English textbooks tend to suggest that English sound
changes explain such rhymes, in that the vowels would have been identical
in the poets’ own dialects. But philological studies paint a more complex
picture: Kökeritz (1953), for example, concludes that many of Shakespeare’s rhymes would have involved genuine differences in the vowels,
and would have counted as rhymes only in virtue of literary precedents, the
presence of dialect variants in the linguistic milieu, or mere phonetic similarity. Moreover, such differences in rhyme vowels often seem aesthetically
significant. These considerations invite the question of whether for a given
poet’s rhyming practice can be formally defined in such a way as to accommodate expressive variation while still distinguishing possible from impossible variations. For Shakespeare’s Sonnets at least, the explanations
Kökeritz offers are subtly problematic for this purpose, in that they invoke a
conception of language which is social and imitative rather than individual
and creative. A closely related alternative which would reformulate the role
of history in shaping these practices and locate them within a unified grammar rests on the observation that vowels which are paired in such rhymes
are often those which participate in alternations such as reduce/reduction.
Whatever the value of this observation for Shakespeare’s rhymes, it is clear

that the general question of what principles govern the vowel variation in
English poets’ full rhymes, and how these are transmitted and changed
from poet to poet, constitute significant open research questions.


10

Foreword

Betty S. Phillips’ paper, entitled “Lexical diffusion and competing analyses of sound change”, seeks to show that the current theory of lexical diffusion can be used to help choose between competing analyses of a given
sound change, specifically the shift of Early Modern English /u:/ to /U/ in
such words as GOOD and STOOD. Ogura (1987) hypothesized that the impetus behind this change was an attempt to keep the duration of syllabic units
relatively constant – following a suggestion by Dobson (1968) that the early
stages of the change complemented lengthening in an open syllable. Görlach
(1991: 71) suggested that “the short vowel in words like GOOD and STOOD
was introduced on the pattern of words in which the occurrence of a short or a
long vowel was determined by the type of syllable the vowel appeared in
(GLAD vs. GLADE).” Yet since both explanations require lexical analysis, as
defined in Phillips (1999), one would expect the least frequent words to have
been affected first. Ogura (1987), however, finds that the change in question
affected the most frequent words first. For that reason, Phillips offers an alternative, phonetically motivated explanation for this sound change.
Geoffrey Russom’s paper “Purely metrical criteria for dating Old English poems”, seeks to provide a new set of dating criteria for early English
texts, supplementing standard philological techniques, because improved
dating would greatly facilitate research on English linguistic history. He
proposes a method for dating Old English poems by reference to frequencies of verse types. Several strategies are employed to deal with problems
arising in comparable studies. First, verses are selected for analysis in a
way that avoids bias toward the native heroic sphere, which can affect frequencies for many variants of types C, D, and E. Further, nonstandard frequencies due to limited poetic ability are factored out by reference to expert
judgments based in part on the number of verses for which normal scansion
is impossible; and the expert judgments are then cross-checked against frequencies of type A3, the verse pattern that would be easiest for a poet of limited talent to construct. Appropriate relative frequencies are predicted by
fundamental principles of the word-foot theory (Russom 1987, 1998),

which yield a linguistically-based metrical norm and ways to compute
deviation from the norm. Deviation from the norm restricts frequency, as
expected; and the decline of the metrical tradition is accompanied by major
shifts in the placement as well as the frequency of deviant verses. The results of this study confirm, in striking detail, the results achieved by Fulk
(1992), who employs entirely independent dating criteria.


Foreword

11

Robert Stockwell’s paper entitled “Short shrift for the ‘great’ vowel
shift” is an effort to provide an alternative and substantially simplified view
of what might have happened to produce the appearance of vowel shifting
without such a complex set of events having actually occurred. The English
Vowel Shift is traditionally thought of as a chain in which the next vowel up
the chain is displaced, in a continuous cycle. Stockwell argues that this picture is wrong in two ways: (1) Most stages of the English shift are not
chained but actually result in mergers. The targets of these mergers are
diphthongs, either inherited (like MAIDEN or GROW) or borrowed (like
DAINTY or PRAY from French, or RAISE from Scandinavian). (2) Diphthongization of [i:] and [u:] toward [ai] and [au] is not a chain at all, since nothing is ever displaced: all members of these parts of the shift coexist to this
day (e.g., the misnomer “Canadian raising”) and must be considered allophones or diaphones (Kurath’s rarely used but highly appropriate coinage).
Combining (1) and (2), Stockwell gets a very different view of the vowel
shift, reducing the “shift” to the raising of [e:] and [o:] to [i:] and [u:] (FEEL
and FOOT) and the initial diphthongization, though not the continuing diaphonic development, noted in (2). This difference of interpretation raises
difficult problems for the view (e.g. Lass 1999) that assumes leveling of the
RAISE vowel to a long monophthong, and similarly the GROW vowel, with
the general diphthongal quality found over the past three centuries taken as
innovative.
David White’s paper deals with a highly technical philological question
about certain sound changes in Old English. The paper is entitled “Restoration of /a/ revisited”. According to the traditional historical phonology of

Old English, all instances of the phoneme /a/ are supposed to have changed
to /æ/, with some /æ/’s later changing back again into /a/ in certain environments where /a/ later appears. This last change is known as “restoration of
/a/”. That it is inelegant is obvious, and we should only believe it for a very
good reason. The traditional reason, for /h/ to have acted as a blocker of
back-assimilation, as is implicitly suggested by Moore and Knott (1942), is
phonetically implausible. But it is possible that the relevant phenomenon
was not blocking but dissimilation. /h/ is such a weak consonant that /aho/
might as well be /ao/. If stressed back vowels were dissimilated before following unstressed back vowels where no “buccal” consonant intervened,
then /aho/ would develop into /æho/, from which later /æo/ (or whatever we
hold long “ea” to have been) is not problematic. Under such a scenario, dis-


12

Foreword

similation would also motivate the change of /au/ to /æo/. White’s conclusion is that the change of /a/ to /æ/ was not unconditioned, that words
like ea ‘water’ (from /aho/) never had short diphthongs from breaking, and
that restoration of /a/ in words like dagas ‘days’ never occurred. Such
words always had /a/.

Morphosyntax and Semantics
Maurizio Gotti’s paper on “Pragmatic uses of shall future constructions in
Early Modern English” carries us forward in the philological tradition referred to in Richard Bailey’s paper – the “text-centered study of language”.
The object of the paper is the analysis of the uses of the future tense with
shall in an Early Modern English corpus; the texts examined are those included in the third section of the Early Modern English part of The Helsinki
Corpus of English Texts. The results of this analysis are compared to the
pragmatic values pointed out in a few grammars of the same period in order
to assess their degree of faithfulness to the real usages in contemporary
texts. The period taken into consideration is 1640–1710 and includes the

grammars which first describe the pragmatic uses of this modal auxiliary
for the formation of the future tense.
The analysis of the shall-forms contained in the corpus first identifies all
the quotations referring to futurity and then subdivides them into semantic/
pragmatic categories. This is done in order to confirm the basic differentiation between pragmatic and dynamic uses of this modal suggested by the
17th-century grammarians’ adoption of categories labelled “prediction”,
“promising”, “threatening”, “declaration”, “command”. The survey also
points out the qualitative difference between the deontic and dynamic aspects of the shall-forms found in the corpus.
Another aspect which is investigated is the degree of correlation between
these modality categories and the text types contained in the corpus; the results indicate that some genres show a very high correlation rate, while
others are characterised by a much wider range of modal categories.
Edward L. Keenan, a distinguished logician and semanticist, has recently gotten deeply involved in the explanatory aspects of historical philology. In this paper he takes on the subject of reflexive pronouns, under the
title “Explaining the creation of reflexive pronouns in English”. He pro-


Foreword

13

vides an account for the creation and interpretation of the English reflexives
(himself, herself, …) in terms of two general forces of change, two universal semantic constraints on language, and the start state of the Old English
anaphora system. His account is based on the study of some 11,000 instances of locally bound objects of verbs and prepositions, drawn from over
100 texts dating from c750 to c1750, complementing Keenan (2000) which
is a more extensive presentation of these data than we could accommodate
here. He contrasts his account with two other accounts of the creation of
grammatical formatives: grammaticalization and parameter resetting. The
creation of reflexives in English falls into neither category though it shares
one feature with grammaticalization. A comprehensive presentation including a list of Source Materials is to be found in Keenan (2001).
Ans van Kemenade initiated very important work on clitic pronouns in
Old English near the end of the 1980’s. Her contribution here, “The word

order of Old English poetry compared with prose once more”, deals with
some non-pronominal aspects of clitic word order in Old English, and has
significant bearing on the issue of dating the earliest documents. The paper
highlights a difference between verse and prose word order in negative root
clauses: in particular, the existence of one main clause word order pattern
that is unique to the early poetry, namely negative-initial clauses in which
the finite verb does not appear adjacent to the negative word. Her study is
both a contribution to the description and analysis of the earliest syntactic
patterns in English and, by implication, a syntactician’s confirmation of the
dating of poetic texts. The same theme, dating the poetic corpus, is addressed from a different perspective in this volume by Geoffrey Russom. The
word order of Old English poetry has given rise to some considerable debate: some hold that the principles governing it represent a genuine departure from those ruling the prose; others argue that it is governed by the same
principles as the prose, albeit at differential frequencies dictated, for instance, by metrical considerations. The special aspect of the word order
that Kemenade focuses on here is that a negative element is the first constituent, but the finite verb is not attracted to it, as it is in later Old English.
The diachronic picture for the history of English suggests that this pattern is
an older one. This in turn supports the familiar view that the extant poetry
is, in some respects at least, older than the extant prose.
Jeong-Hoon Lee deals with the semantics of Perfect tense in Old English
in his paper “The “have” perfect in Old English: How close was it to the


14

Foreword

Modern English perfect?” He examines the semantics of the have perfect
tense in Old English and the perfect tense in Modern English. Lee argues
that there is no significant semantic difference between these perfect tenses,
contrary to the accepted view that the have perfect tense in Old English had
at best only the so-called “resultative” meaning. Based on the three meanings of the Modern English perfect, which represents three subcategories by
perfect tense forms, i.e., the existential, universal, and resultative meanings,

he shows that, in addition to Old English have perfect constructions with the
resultative meaning, there were also many Old English have perfect constructions with either an existential or a universal meaning. He also argues
that there were many Old English have perfect constructions that could not
have been interpreted as the resultative perfect, namely, have perfect constructions modified by manner adverbials, and have perfect constructions in
negative sentences. Additionally, he suggests that many Old English have
past perfect constructions had the same ambiguity as that of the Modern
English past perfect; that is, it was not clear whether they had the “perfect”
sense, or they expressed just an event/situation before a past time.
Colette Moore’s paper is entitled “Reporting direct speech in Early Modern slander depositions”. Determining how speakers used language in the
Early Modern period presents difficulties due to the deficiencies of colloquial source material. Court records, with their recording of witness testimony, provide one source of “speech-based” texts, and they are being more
widely considered in this light after their inclusion in such computer corpora as the Helsinki corpus. Without dismissing the value of depositions as
a potential source for spoken English, we must also be aware that their usefulness comes within a certain context. She investigates the context of these
records and examines the depiction of direct speech in a sample of them.
Defamation depositions reveal both code- and style-switching, and reported speech plays a central role in the records since it presents the alleged
criminal action. She analyses the treatment of direct and indirect speech in
the defamation court records in an attempt to understand the switching between spoken and written language in Early Modern English and the conventions that surround the reporting of speech within a written form. This,
in turn, allows us, she believes, to perceive better the nature of the linguistic
construction of these depositions and its relation to spoken English, so that
we may make more considered use of court records on their own terms and
within computer corpora.


Foreword

15

Benji Wald and Lawrence Bessermann’s paper is entitled “The verb-verb
compound in twentieth century English and twentieth century linguistics”.
It deals with the emergence of the endocentric VV (verb-verb) compound
as a unified productive pattern. This pattern poses an interesting set of problems and challenges for twentieth century historical and synchronic linguistics. Although VV seems to have eluded discussion and even exemplification in most major treatments of English throughout the twentieth century, such studies anticipated a range of relevant historical and synchronic

problems in the analysis of the type. The principal problem that they consider in detail is that VV compounds frequently seem ambiguous as between VV and NV analyses. How can we tell whether sleep in sleep-walk is
N or V? They refer to this analytical problem as the ambiguous category
problem and offer a historical solution to it.
After discussing the analytical issues, and recent innovations from which
they have arisen, including a general constraint on verb compounding
which they label “the activity constraint”, they address the longer term
question: why was the twentieth century a critical period in the development of the VV compound? Their answer is that the development of VV
has depended on a number of preconditions that have successively accumulated since the Old English period. They briefly consider the historical evolution of VV, first through the development of its preconditions in late Old
English and Early Middle English, and then through a quantitative study of
VV and related items listed in the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary and its later additional supplements.

Acknowledgements
The idea of convening SHEL-1 could not have materialized without the financial backing
of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the Department of English, and the
Department of Linguistics at UCLA. We thank the leaders of these units for their support.
For encouragement and advice in preparing this volume we are grateful to the TiEL
series editors, Elizabeth Traugott and Bernd Kortmann, and to Anke Beck, Birgit Sievert, and Wolfgang Konwitschny at Mouton de Gruyter.
Above all, we extend our thanks to our authors who were prompt in submitting, patient in awaiting the comments on their papers, and conscientious in revising. They have
been a terrific group to work with.


16

Foreword

Each paper in this volume was reviewed anonymously by two outside reviewers,
and many of the submissions underwent revision several times. It is with very special
gratitude that we list the names of our colleagues who took time away from their own
pursuits to advise us and the authors, often writing critiques that could easily have become independent contributions. It is a heartening comment on the scholarly dedication to the field that so many people were ready to render first rate professional service with paper bags over their heads. Disclosing their names is the least we can do to
acknowledge their help. We hereby express our very special thanks to them, with the

important further acknowledgement that their criticism was never ignored, though it
was not always accepted with agreement either by the authors or the editors, no doubt
to our eventual discomfort, and certainly no one but the authors and editors can be
blamed for errors that remain.
Leslie Arnovick, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
Laurel Brinton, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
Fran Colman, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Claire Cowie, University of Sheffield, England
Christanne Dalton-Puffer, University of Vienna, Austria
Hans Jürgen Diller, University of Bochum, Germany
Martin Duffell, Queen Mary and Westfield College, London, England
Nigel Fabb, University of Strathclyde, Scotland
Susan Fitzmaurice, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff
Rob Fulk, Indiana University, Bloomington
Elly van Gelderen, Arizona State University, Tempe
Michael Getty, University of Toronto, Canada
Robert Howell, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Andreas Jucker, University of Giessen, Germany
Juhani Klemola, University of Helsinki, Finland
Willem Koopman, University of Amsterdam, Holland
Barbara Kryk, University of Poznan, Poland
Merja Kytö, Uppsala University, Sweden
Bettelou Los, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Holland
Angelika Lutz, University of Erlangen, Germany
David Matthews, University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia
Chris McCully University of Manchester, England
Frances McSparran, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Michael Montgomery: South Carolina, Columbia, S.C.
Robert Murray, University of Calgary, Canada
Mieko Ogura, Tsurumi University, Japan

Päivi Pahta University of Helsinki, Finland


Foreword
Theo Vennemann, University of Munich, Germany
Katie Wales, University of Leeds, England
Tony Warner, University of York, England
Gilbert Youmans, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO

Presenters and Session Chairs at SHEL-1 (UCLA, May 2000)
Noriko Akatsuka, UCLA
Henning Andersen, UCLA
Richard Bailey, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Lawrence Besserman, Hebrew University, Jerusalem
Mary Blockley, University of Texas, Austin
Laurel Brinton, University of British Columbia
Thomas Cable, University of Texas at Austin
Ruth Carroll, University of Turku, Finland
Don W. Chapman, Brigham Young University
Anne Curzan, University of Washington, Seattle
Edwin Duncan, Towson University
Nancy Elliott, Southern Oregon University
Blaine Erickson, Kanazawa Institute of Technology, Japan
Susan Fitzmaurice, Northern Arizona University
Robert Fulk, Indiana University
Elly van Gelderen, Arizona State University
Michael Getty, University of Toronto
Gwang-Yoon Goh, Ohio State University
Chris Golston, Fresno State University
Maurizio Gotti, University of Bergamo, Italy

Kristin Hanson, UC Berkeley
Yukio Haraguchi, Kumamoto Gakuen University, Japan
Bruce Hayes, UCLA
Richard Hogg, University of Manchester, England
Richard Janda, Ohio State University
Dieter Kastovsky, University of Vienna, Austria
Edward L. Keenan, UCLA
Henry Ansgar Kelly, UCLA
Ans van Kemenade, Katholieke Universiteit, Nijmegen, Holland
Willem Koopman, University of Amsterdam, Holland

17


18

Foreword

William A. Kretzschmar, Jr., University of Georgia, Athens
Anthony Kroch, University of Pennsylvania
Barbara Kryk, University of Poznan, Poland
Ian Lancashire, University of Toronto
Eva Delgado Lavin, University of the Basque Country, Spain
Jeong-Hoon Lee, University of Texas, Austin
Anatoly Liberman, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
Hans Lindquist, Växjö University, Sweden
Soon-Ai Low, University of Maryland
Joseph P. McGowan, University of San Diego
Frances McSparran, University of Michigan
Anna Meskhi, Isik University, Turkey

Donka Minkova, UCLA
Colette Moore, University of Michigan
Betty Phillips, Indiana State University Terre Haute
Thomas Riad, Stockholm University, Sweden
Philip Rusche, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Geoffrey Russom, Brown University
Herbert Schendl, University of Vienna, Austria
Catherine Smith, Northern Arizona University
William Spruiell, Central Michigan University
Robert Stockwell, UCLA
John Sundquist, Indiana University
Akinobu Tani, Hyogo University, Japan
Elizabeth Traugott, Stanford University
Geoffrey Russom, Brown University
Benji Wald, Los Angeles
David L. White, University of Texas, Austin

Donka Minkova and Robert Stockwell
Los Angeles, March 2002

Note
1.

For the bibliographical details on all short-form references embedded in the summaries in our Foreword, please see the reference lists attached to the appropriate
paper.