Contributors

• Martina Giarda

Comments

General comment

Old English is an ancient Germanic language, belonging to the subbranch of West-Germanic, in particular to the group of the so-called Ingvaeonic languages. The Old English period started in the V century AD; however, the first attestations are only brief runic inscriptions, which are comprehensible to a limited extent. (Francovich-Onesti 2002: 92). It is only in VIII century AD that the production in Old English starts flourishing. Conventionally, the Old English period ends in 1066, when the Normans guided by William the Conqueror conquered England and replaced its aristocracy with a new, French-speaking élite.

The coding frames given here include all arguments/adjuncts of the pre-defined role frame with the corresponding Old English case-marking, plus a few additional ones that were found regularly in the sources.

Characterization of flagging resources

The major resource for argument/adjunct identification is case marking, which applies regularly to all noun phrases. After some merging processes, only four of the eight original IE cases are found in Old English: nominative, accusative, genitive, and dative. Some traces of a fifth case, the instrumental, are also present, but remain residual. Cases can serve both syntactic and semantic functions, the latter being coded also by prepositional phrases. The nominative marks what, in traditional Indo-European studies, is called ‘subject’ (both S/A). The accusative generally marks the direct object or could be used adverbially in expressions of time and space extent. The dative generally marks the indirect object (mainly R). Besides that, it encompasses a variety of additional functions, such as indicate possession or be used adverbially. The genitive has both adnominal and adverbial functions

Accusative, dative and genitive could also be found in PPs, headed by a variety of adpositions, the most common of which is to+dat.

Ditransitives usually adhere to the indirective alignment, with few exceptions (notably TEACH, that allows neutral alignment and FILL, that allows secundative alignment).

Characterization of indexing resources

Nominal subjects in the nominative case are always cross-referenced by verbal endings on the verb, (though some show form syncretism). Both A and S trigger agreement with the verb and are encoded in the same way, i.e. the nominative, differently from O. This results in a nominative-accusative alignment.

Characterization of ordering resources

Word order in Old English is not as rigid as in Modern English. The three most common orders (both in prose and in poetry, even though in the latter more freedom is allowed) are i) SV, found both in principals and subordinates; ii) S…V, i.e. verb-final, which was most common in subordinates, but could also be found in principals; iii) VS, found in positive and negative non-dependent questions, positive and negative statements, concessive and conditional subordinates and principals introduced by certain adverbs (Mitchell & Robinson 2012: 63-65). Other word orders may occur and be used for emphasis.

Despite its freedom, Old English already exhibits some preferences for the SVO order (Mitchell & Robinson 2015: 65). However, as other Germanic languages, Old English also exhibits V2, i.e. the tendency of the verb to follow the first constituent, regardless of the type of constituent, i.e. whether it is a subject, object, PP, adverb, etc. (Van Kemenade 2012: 823).

Concerning the order of other constituents, nouns are generally preceded by modifiers (e.g. demonstratives or adjectives) and by genitive complements, but the latter can follow the noun if this is preceded by another modifier. In PPs, adpositions tend to precede a noun but generally follow a pronoun and, even more frequently, a verb form.

Source of the data and generalizations/background of the contributor(s)

Data were collected in the second half of 2022 and in 2023 for the 80 core meanings in ValPaL, from a subset of the YCOE (Taylor et al. 2003) and YCOEP (Pintzuk & Plug 2002) treebanks. The list of texts selected as sample can be found at the following link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kGDLULwAoNdWDUwQ_8YeN7qZq47_-GT9/view?usp=sharing.

Counterparts to verb meanings were selected searching the electronic Bosworth-Toller Dictionary and the Dictionary of Old English. Occasionally, examples were taken from other texts in the treebanks or from the above-mentioned dictionaries when occurrences were missing in corpus samples but the patterns were clearly attested elsewhere.

The contributor, Martina Giarda, is a PhD Student in Linguistic Sciences at the University of Pavia and the University of Bergamo.