Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T11:33:45.476Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The noun phrase and the ‘Viking Hypothesis’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2019

Paola Crisma  and
Susan Pintzuk
Paola Crisma
Affiliation:
Università di Trieste and University of York
Susan Pintzuk
Affiliation:
University of York
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In this article we use the syntax of the noun phrase to evaluate two competing hypotheses: the traditional account, that Middle English is a West Germanic language with Old English as its immediate ancestor, and Emonds and Faarlund's (2014) proposal, that Middle English is a North Germanic language, the direct descendant of Old Norse. The development of nominal syntax shows that the Middle English noun phrase can be derived only from Old English, not from Old Norse. We examine six nominal characteristics; in each case, we find in Middle English exactly the construction that one would expect given the nominal syntax of previous Old English stages. The evidence from Old Norse shows that, although some of the same constructions did develop in the same way in the attested Norse varieties, the development occurred only at a later stage, too late to have affected the syntax of Middle English.

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , July 2019 , pp. 219 - 246
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

This paper was mostly written during Crisma's research leave in 2017–18. It was presented at DiGS 19 (Stellenbosch, 6–8 September 2017), AICED 20 (Bucharest, 7–9 June 2018), and the ICEHL XX workshop English as a syntactic outlier (Edinburgh, 27–30 August 2018). The authors thank the audiences of all these conferences for their helpful comments. Sincere thanks also to the two anonymous Language Variation and Change reviewers for their contribution in making it a better paper. A special thanks to Endre Mørck for his careful reading of an early draft and the detailed comments he provided.

The paper is the result of continuous collaboration between the two authors. Crisma is responsible for all the research on the literature on Nordic, Pintzuk conducted all the original searches on the YCOE, PPCME2, and IcePaHC. The first draft was mostly written by Crisma and subsequently changed by the two authors after discussion. For legal purposes, Crisma takes responsibility for the following sections: Materials, The morphological realization of the definite article, The establishment of the definite article, The indefinite article. Pintzuk for the following sections: Introduction, Background: political and linguistic history, Demonstratives, Possessive pronouns. The authors take joint responsibility for sections Genitive position and Discussion and conclusions.

References

SOURCES

Danish:

The Legend of St. Christina (appr. 1300). In Nelly Uldaler & Gerd Wellejus (eds) Gammeldansk læsebog. København: Gyldendal 1968, pp. 283–286.

The Stockholm B 69 manuscript containing the Scanic Law (1174, ms appr. 1350). In Johs. Brøndum-Nielsen et al. (eds) Danmarks gamle Landskabslove (: Medieval Danish Lawtexts), I-VIII. 1933–1941, København: Gyldendal. Vol. 1,1, Text II.

English: we refer to OE/ME texts with the short titles of the YCOE and the PPCME2, which provide philological information.

Icelandic: for the texts used for Figure 5, refer to the documentation in the IcePaHC.

Heimskringla (13th c). In: Jónsson, Finnur (ed.), Heimskringla [Noregs konunga sögur af Snorri Sturluson I–IV]. Copenhagen 1893–1901.

Swedish

Texts quoted in the examples:

Äldre Västgötalagen (1225, ms 1280). In: Samling af Sweriges gamla lagar, ed. Hans Samuel Collin and Carl Johan Schlyter, 1827, vol. 1. Stockholm: Haeggström.

Codex Bureanus (1276–1307). In: Ett fornsvenskt legendarium, ed. Georg Stephens, 1847. Samlingar utgivna av Svenska fornskriftsällskapet 7:1. Stockholm: Norstedt.

Karl Magnus-sagan (a.1400, ms 1430–50). In: Prosadikter från Sveriges medeltid, ed. Gustaf Edvard Klemming, 1887–1889. Samlingar utgivna av Svenska fornskriftsällskapet 28. Stockholm: Norstedt.

Abbreviations (with approximate date of composition/manuscript):

Bild

Codex Bildstenianus (first half of the 15th c).

Bir

The revelations of Saint Birgitta (end of 14th c).

Did

Sagan om Didrik af Bern (1449–1476).

Gadh

Hemming Gadh's letters (1498–1520).

MELL

Magnus Erikssons landslag enligt Cod. Ups. B 23 (1347).

Mose

Fem moseböcker på fomsvenska enligt Cod. Holm. A1 (beginning 14th c).

ÖgL

Östgotalagens (1290).

PMB

Peder Månsson's bondakonst (1507–1524).

SD1

Svenskt diplomatarium (SD 709, SD 799, SD 813) (1281, 1285, 1285).

SD2

Svenskt diplomatarium (1335–1354).

Sko

Skomakarnas skrå (1474 - some parts from before 1450).

ST

Själens tröst (1430–40).

UL

Upplandslagen enligt Cod. Holm. B199 (ca. 1350).

Vidh

Vidhemsprästens anteckningar (1325).

VKE

Vadstena klosters ekonomi (1443–1448).

Codex Bildstenianus (first half of the 15th c).

The revelations of Saint Birgitta (end of 14th c).

Sagan om Didrik af Bern (1449–1476).

Hemming Gadh's letters (1498–1520).

Magnus Erikssons landslag enligt Cod. Ups. B 23 (1347).

Fem moseböcker på fomsvenska enligt Cod. Holm. A1 (beginning 14th c).

Östgotalagens (1290).

Peder Månsson's bondakonst (1507–1524).

Svenskt diplomatarium (SD 709, SD 799, SD 813) (1281, 1285, 1285).

Svenskt diplomatarium (1335–1354).

Skomakarnas skrå (1474 - some parts from before 1450).

Själens tröst (1430–40).

Upplandslagen enligt Cod. Holm. B199 (ca. 1350).

Vidhemsprästens anteckningar (1325).

Vadstena klosters ekonomi (1443–1448).

REFERENCES

Allen, Cynthia L. (2008). Genitives in Early English. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Barnes, Michael P. & Page, Raymond I. (2006). The Scandinavian runic inscriptions of Britain. Uppsala: Institutionen för nordiska språk - Uppsala universitet.Google Scholar
Barnes, Michael. 2016. Joseph Embley Emonds and Jan Terje Faarlund: English: The Language of the Vikings. Maal og Minne 1: 173–179.Google Scholar
Bech, Kristin & Walkden, George. (2016). English is (still) a West Germanic language. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 39(1):65–100.Google Scholar
Björkman, Erik. (1900–02). Scandinavian Loan-Words in Middle English. Studien zur englischen Philologie, 7. Halle: Niemeyer.Google Scholar
Blake, Norman. (1992). Introduction. In Blake, N. (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language, vol. II: 1066–1476. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1–22.Google Scholar
Börjars, Kersti, Harries, Pauline, & Nigel, Vincent. (2016). Growing syntax: The development of a DP in North Germanic. Language 92(1):e1–e37Google Scholar
Bošković, Zeljko. (2005). On the locality of left branch extraction and the structure of NP. Studia Linguistica 59:1–45.Google Scholar
Crisma, Paola. (2011). The emergence of the definite article in English: a contact-induced change? In Sleeman, P. & Perridon, H. (eds.), The Noun Phrase in Romance and Germanic. Structure, variation, and change. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. 175–192.Google Scholar
Crisma, Paola. (2015). The ‘indefinite article’ from cardinal to operator to expletive. In Gianollo, C., Jäger, A. & Penka, D. (eds.), Language Change at the Syntax-Semantics Interface. Berlin: De Gruyter. 125–151.Google Scholar
Crisma, Paola & Pintzuk, Susan. (2016). An from Old to Middle English. In Vikner, S., Jørgensen, H. & van Gelderen, E. (eds.), Let us have articles betwixt us. Aarhus: Dept. of English, School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University. 161–183.Google Scholar
Dahl, Östen. (2015). Grammaticalization in the North. Berlin: Language Science Press.Google Scholar
Delsing, Lars-Olof. (2002). The morphology of Old Nordic II: Old Swedish and Old Danish. In Bandle, O., Braunmüller, K., Jahr, E. H., A. Karker, , Naumann, H.-P., Teleman, U., Elmevik, L., & Widmark, G. (eds.) The Nordic languages: an international handbook of the history of the North Germanic languages. Volume 1. Berlin: De Gruyter. 925–39.Google Scholar
Emonds, Joseph Embley & Faarlund, Jan Terje. (2014). English: The Language of the Vikings. Olomouc: Palacký UniversityGoogle Scholar
Faarlund, Jan Terje. (2002). Syntactic developments from Ancient Nordic to Old Nordic. In Bandle, O., Braunmüller, K., Jahr, E. H., A. Karker, , Naumann, H.-P., Teleman, U., Elmevik, L., & Widmark, G. (eds.) The Nordic languages: an international handbook of the history of the North Germanic languages. Volume 1. Berlin: De Gruyter. 729–733.Google Scholar
Faarlund, Jan Terje. (2004). The Syntax of Old Norse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Faarlund, Jan Terje. (2005). Syntactic development from Old Nordic to Early Modern Nordic. In Bandle, O., Braunmüller, K., Jahr, E. H., Karker, A., Naumann, H.-P., Teleman, U., Elmevik, L., & Widmark, G. (eds.) The Nordic languages: an international handbook of the history of the North Germanic languages. Volume 2. Berlin: De Gruyter. 1149–1161.Google Scholar
Faarlund, Jan Terje. (2009). On the history of definiteness marking in Scandinavian. Journal of Linguistics 45:617–639.Google Scholar
Fellows-Jensen, Gillian. (1975). The Vikings in England: A review. Anglo-Saxon England 4:181–206.Google Scholar
Harries, Pauline. (2014). The distribution of definiteness markers and the growth of syntactic structure from Old Norse to Modern Faroese. Doctoral dissertation, University of Manchester.Google Scholar
Hogg, Richard. (1992). Introduction. In Hogg, R. (ed.), A Grammar of Old English, vol. I: Phonology. Oxford: Blackwell. 1–25.Google Scholar
Jensen, Eva Skafte. (2016). Changes in the properties of the noun in Danish – evidence from the indefinite article. In Vikner, S., Jørgensen, H. and van Gelderen, E. (eds.), Let us have articles betwixt us. Aarhus: Dept. of English, School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University. 261–280.Google Scholar
Jespersen, Otto. (1956). Growth and Structure of the English Language, 9th edition. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Kroch, Anthony & Taylor, Ann. (2000). The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English, second edition (PPCME2). Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania. http://www.ling.upenn.edu/ppche/ppche-release-2016/PPCME2-RELEASE-4.Google Scholar
Lander, Eric T. & Haegeman, Liliane. (2014). Old Norse as an NP language: with observations on the Common Norse and Northwest Germanic runic inscriptions. Transactions of the Philological Society 112.3:279–318.Google Scholar
Larm, Karl. (1936). Den bestämda artikeln I äldre fornsvenska: en historic-semologisk studie (Stockholm studies in Scandinavian philology 2). Stokholm: Bonnier.Google Scholar
Lightfoot, David. (2016). English: the Language of the Vikings by Joseph Embley Emonds and Jan Terje Faarlund (review). Language 92(2):474–477.Google Scholar
Lohrmann, Susanne. (2010). The structure of the DP and its reflex in Scandinavian. Doctoral dissertation, Universität Stuttgart.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Bruce. (1985). Old English Syntax, Vol. I. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Mørck, Endre. (2005). Morphological developments from Old Nordic to Early Modern Nordic: Inflexion and word formation. In Bandle, O., Braunmüller, K., Jahr, E. H., Karker, A., Naumann, H.-P., Teleman, U., Elmevik, L., & Widmark, G. (eds.) The Nordic languages: an international handbook of the history of the North Germanic languages. Volume 2. Berlin: De Gruyter. 1128–1148.Google Scholar
Norde, Muriel. (1997). The history of the genitive in Swedish. A case study in degrammaticalization. Doctoral dissertation, Universiteit van Amsterdam.Google Scholar
Ottosson, Kjartan. (2002). Old Nordic: A definition and delimitation of the period. In Bandle, O., Braunmüller, K., Jahr, E. H., Karker, A., Naumann, H.-P., Teleman, U., Elmevik, L., & Widmark, G. (eds.) The Nordic languages: an international handbook of the history of the North Germanic languages. Volume 1. Berlin: De Gruyter. 787–793.Google Scholar
Perridon, Harry. (1996). Noun phrases in runic Swedish. In Ottoson, K. G., Fjeld, R. V. & Torp, A. (eds.), The Nordic languages and modern linguistics 9, Oslo: Novus Forlag. 248–261.Google Scholar
Perridon, Harry. (2002). Dialects and written language in Old Nordic II: Old Danish and Old Swedish. In Bandle, O., Braunmüller, K., Jahr, E. H., Karker, A., Naumann, H.-P., Teleman, U., Elmevik, L., & Widmark, G. (eds.) The Nordic languages: an international handbook of the history of the North Germanic languages. Volume 1. Berlin: De Gruyter. 1018–1028.Google Scholar
Riad, Thomas. (1998). The origin of Scandinavian tone accents. Diachronica 15.1:63–98.Google Scholar
Roehrs, Dorian & Sapp, Christopher D. (2006). The Rise of the Suffixal Article in the Early North Germanic DP. In Martínez, M. T., Alcázar, A. & Hernández, R. M. (eds.), Proceedings of the Western Conference on Linguistics 2004. Fresno CA: California State University. 290–301.Google Scholar
Skautrup, Peter. (1944). Det danske sprogs historie I. Fra guldhornene til Jydske lov. København: Gyldendalske boghandel.Google Scholar
Skrzypek, Dominika. (2012). Grammaticalization of (in)definiteness in Swedish. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM.Google Scholar
Stenbrenden, Gjertrud Flermoen. (2016). Why English is not dead: A rejoinder to Emonds and Faarlund. Folia Linguistica Historica 37:239–279.Google Scholar
Strang, Barbara M.H. (1970). A History of English. London: Methuen.Google Scholar
Stroh-Wollin, Ulla. (2009). On the development of definiteness markers in Scandinavian. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 83:1–25.Google Scholar
Stroh-Wollin, Ulla. (2015). Understanding the gradual development of definiteness marking: the case of Swedish. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 95:11–32.Google Scholar
Taylor, Ann, Warner, Anthony, Pintzuk, Susan & Beths, Frank. (2003). The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (YCOE). Department of Language and Linguistic Science, University of York. http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~lang22/YCOE.Google Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. (1992). Syntax. In Hogg, R. M. (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 168–289.Google Scholar
Townend, Matthew. (2002). Language and History in Viking Age England: Linguistic Relations between Speakers of Old Norse and Old English. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols.Google Scholar
Vangsnes, Øystein A. (1999). The identification of functional architecture. Doctoral dissertation, University of Bergen.Google Scholar
Wallenberg, Joel C., Ingason, Anton Karl, Sigurðsson, Einar Freyr & Rögnvaldsson, Eiríkur. (2010). Icelandic Parsed Historical Corpus (IcePaHC). Version 0.1. http://www.linguist.is/wiki.Google Scholar
Warner, Anthony. (2017). English-Norse contact, simplification, and sociolinguistic typology. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 118.2:317–403.Google Scholar
Wessen, Elias. (1970). Schwedische Sprachgeschichte, Band III - Grundriss einer Historischen Syntax. Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar