Keywords
Language Contact
Germanic Languages
Old English
Early Middle English
Norse
Celtic
How to Cite
Abstract
McWhorter (2002) argued that contact with Norse caused simplifications in English grammar that set English apart from other Germanic languages. This paper focuses on one of the losses McWhorter attributed to the linguistic impact of the Scandinavian invasions, External Possessors. An investigation of electronic Old and Early Middle English corpora reveals that the construction was already on the decline in the Old English period, and that Norse contact cannot explain the Early Middle English data. There is no support for the view that the loss of the construction spread from the Scandinavianized areas southwards. The facts are consistent with the view that while Celtic influence did not cause the loss of the construction in Old English, Celtic speakers shifting to English may have played a role in triggering the initial decline of the construction. Study of non-standard variants of other Germanic languages is needed to increase our understanding of the history of External Possessor constructions in those languages.
References
Ahlgren, Arthur. 1946. On the Use of the Definite Article with ‘Nouns of Possession’ in English. Uppsala: Appelbergs Boktryckeriaktiebolag.
Allen, Cynthia L. 1995. Case-Marking and Reanalysis: Grammatical Relations from Old to Early Modern English. Oxford: Clarendon.
Allen, Cynthia L. 2019. Dative External Possessors in Early English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bosworth, Joseph, T. Northcote Toller, Sean Christ, and Ondřej Tichy. 2014. An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online. Prague: Faculty of Arts, Charles University.
Coetsem, Frans van. 1995. “Outlining a Model of the Transmission Phenomenon in Language Contact.” Leuvense Bijdragen 84: 63–85.
Coetsem, Frans van. 2000. A General and Unified Theory of the Transmission Process in Language Contact. Heidelberg: Winter.
Cole, Marcelle. 2018. “A Native Origin for Present-Day English They, Their, Them.” Diachronica 35: 165–209.
Dance, Richard. 2003. Words Derived from Old Norse in Early Middle English: Studies in the Vocabulary of the South-West Midland Texts. Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
Dankert, Lieven, and Liliane Haegeman. 2013. “Multiple Subjects in Flemish: The External Possessor.” In Irish Network in Formal Linguistics, Proceedings, edited by Alison Henry, Catrin S. Rhys, and Iosad Pavel, 2–21. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Donaldson, Bruce. 1994. “Afrikaans.” In The Germanic Languages, edited by Ekkehard König, and Johan van der Auwera, 478–504. London and New York: Routledge.
Filppula, Markku. 2008. “The Linguistic Outcomes of the Early Contact.” In Markku Filppula et al., 24–132. New York: Routledge.
Filppula, Markku, Juhani Klemola, and Heli Paulasto. 2008. English and Celtic in Contact. New York: Routledge.
Filppula, Markku, Juhani Klemola, and Heli Pitkänen, eds. 2002. The Celtic Roots of English. Joensuu, Finland: University of Joensuu, Faculty of Humanities.
Gelling, Margaret. 1992. The West Midlands in the Early Middle Ages. Leicester: Leicester University Press.
Gordon, E.V., and A.R. Taylor. 1957. An Introduction to Old Norse, 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Haspelmath, Martin. 1999. “External Possession in a European Areal Perspective.” In External Possession, edited by Doris L. Payne, and Immanuel Barshi, 109–35. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Havers, Wilhelm. 1911. Untersuchungen zur Kasussyntax der indogermanischen Sprachen. Strassburg: Karl J. Trübner.
Kershaw, Jane, and Ellen C. Røyrvik. 2016. “The ‘People of the British Isles’ Project and Viking Settlement in England.” Antiquity 90: 1670–680.
Kitson, Peter. 1993. “Geographical Variation in Old English Prepositions and the Location of Ælfric's and Other Literary Dialects.” English Studies 74: 1–50.
Kroch, Anthony, and Ann Taylor. 2000. The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English 2. York: Department of Language and Linguistic Science, University of York.
Kurath, Hans, and Sherman Kuhn, eds. 1956. Middle English Dictionary. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Kytö, Merja. 1996. Manual to the Diachronic Part of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, 3 edn. Helsinki: Department of English, University of Helsinki.
Laing, Margaret. 2013–. “A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, 1150–1325, Version 3.2.” Accessed July 20, 2023. http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laeme2/laeme2.html.
Lee-Schoenfeld, Vera. 2006. “German Possessor Datives: Raised and Affected.” Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 9: 101–42.
Lødrup, Helge. 2019. “The Accusative External Possessor with Norwegian Unergatives.” Argumentum 15: 561–74.
Lutz, Angelika. 2009. “Celtic Influence on Old English and West Germanic.” English Language and Linguistics 13: 227–49.
Lutz, Angelika. 2011. “Why is West-Saxon English Different from Old Saxon?” In Anglo-Saxon England and the Continent, edited by Hans Sauer, and Johanna Story, 113–38. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
Mack, Frances M., ed. 1963. The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle Edited from Cotton MS Titus D. xviii (Early English Text Society 252). London: Oxford University Press.
McWhorter, John. 2002. “What Happened to English?” Diachronica 19: 217–72.
McWhorter, John. 2009. “What Else Happened to English? A Brief for the Celtic Hypothesis.” English Language and Linguistics 13 (2): 163–91.
Payne, Doris L., and Immanuel Barshi. 1999. “External Possession: What, Where, How, and Why.” In External Possession, edited by Doris L. Payne, and Immanuel Barshi, 3–29. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Pintzuk, Susan, and Leendert Plug. 2001. “The York-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Poetry.” Accessed July 20, 2023. https://www-users.york.ac.uk/~lang18/pcorpus.html.
Pokorny, Julius. 1927. “Das nicht-Indogermanische Substrat im Irischen.” Zeitschrift für Celtische Philologie 16: 95–144, 231–66, 363–94.
Pope, John Collins, ed. 1967. Homilies of Ælfric: A Supplementary Collection (Early English Text Society 259). London: Oxford University Press.
Roberts, Jane, Christian Kay, and Lynne Grundy. 2017. “A Thesaurus of Old English.” Accessed July 20, 2023. http://oldenglishthesaurus.arts.gla.ac.uk/.
Scholten, Jolien. 2018. The Ins and Outs of External Possession: A Micro-Comparative Perspective. Utrecht: LOT.
Taylor, Ann, Anthony Warner, Susan Pintzuk, and Frank Beths. 2003. “The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (YCOE).” York: Department of Linguistics, University of York. Accessed July 20, 2023. http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~lang22/YcoeHome1.htm.
Tolkien, J. R. R. 1963. “English and Welsh.” In Angles and Britons. The O’Donnell Lectures, edited by Henry Lewis, 1–41. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
Tristram, Hildegard. 2004. “Diglossia in Anglo-Saxon England, or What Was Spoken Old English Like?” Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 40: 87–110.
Trudgill, Peter. 2011. Sociolinguistic Typology: Social Determinants of Linguistic Complexity. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Vandeweghe, Willy. 1987. “The Possessive Dative in Dutch: Syntactic Reanalysis and Predicate Formation.” In Ins and Outs of Predication, edited by Johan van der Auwera, and Louis Goossens, 137–51. Dordrecht: Foris.
Vennemann, Theo. 2002. “On the Rise of ‘Celtic’ Syntax in Middle English.” In Middle English from Tongue to Text: Selected Papers from the Third International Conference on Middle English: Language and Text, Held at Dublin, Ireland, 1-4 July, edited by Peter J. Lucas, and Angela M. Lucas, 205–34. Bern: Peter Lang.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Copyright (c) 2023 SELIM. Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature.