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Old ‘truths’, new corpora: revisiting the word order of conjunct clauses in Old English1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2016

KRISTIN BECH
KRISTIN BECH*
Affiliation:
Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages, Faculty of Humanities, University of Oslo, PO Box 1003, Blindern, 0315 Oslo, Norwaykristin.bech@ilos.uio.no
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Abstract

In Bech (2001a, 2001b), I took issue with the oft-repeated claim that Old English conjunct main clauses are commonly verb-final, and disproved it. However, the myth persists. In the meantime, the York–Toronto–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (YCOE, Taylor et al.2003) has been created, so the time has come to revisit this topic and consider it in light of new, extensive and generally accessible data. Using the YCOE corpus, I confirm and expand on Bech's (2001a, 2001b) empirical findings, showing that (i) OE conjunct clauses are neither typically verb-final nor verb-late, but they are more frequently verb-final and verb-late than non-conjunct clauses are; and (ii) verb-final and verb-late clauses are typically conjunct clauses. These two perspectives must be kept apart: in the first, the starting point is the entire body of conjunct clauses, and in the second it is the entire body of verb-final/verb-late clauses. I propose that the failure to distinguish between the two perspectives, i.e. whether it is conjunct clauses or word order that constitutes the point of departure, is the origin of the misconception concerning conjunct clauses and word order. In order to establish whether this distinction has been fuzzy all along, or whether it must be ascribed to distorted referencing in the course of a century of research, I trace the research on this topic back to the end of the nineteenth century. I show that the alleged verb-finality of conjunct clauses may be ascribed to a whisper-down-the-lane effect – the retelling of the story has changed the story.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , March 2017 , pp. 1 - 25
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

1

I would like to thank Laurel Brinton, Kari Haugland, Kristian Rusten, George Walkden and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments and observations.

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