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Old English verbs of saying and verb-initial order1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 July 2016

ANNA CICHOSZ
ANNA CICHOSZ*
Affiliation:
Department of English and Applied Linguistics, Institute of English Studies, University of Łódź, ul. Pomorska 171/173 90–236 Łódź, [email protected]
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Abstract

OE verb-initial main clauses are associated with a number of stylistic functions and they are said to co-occur with specific verb types, including verbs of saying (Mitchell 1985; Petrova 2006; Ohkado 2005). It has also been observed that the general frequency of the V-1 pattern in OE is text-specific and that the structure is exceptionally well represented in Bede (Calle-Martín & Miranda-García 2010; Ohkado 2000; Mitchell 1985). Latin influence has been suggested as a possible explanation for the high frequency of V-1 in this text, but this hypothesis has never been tested (Ohkado 2000). The aim of this study is to analyse V-1 main clauses containing verbs of saying in order to determine the motivation for the use of the pattern in OE and the possibility of foreign influence on the Bede translation. The analysis shows that OE V-1 clauses with verbs of saying are to a great extent lexically recurrent formulas used for turn-taking in conversations as well as marking transition in a story, and that their frequent use in the OE Bede is only partly influenced by the source text.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , November 2017 , pp. 533 - 558
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

1

I would like to thank Jerzy Gaszewski for his comments on an earlier draft of this article and two anonymous reviewers for English Language and Linguistics for their suggestions, which helped me to give the study the right focus.

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