2.1. Object pronouns and finite main verbs

In OE, object pronouns can either precede or follow finite main verbs, but preverbal placement is the majority option. ‘Subject – Object pronoun – Finite main verb’ (SOproV) order is illustrated in (1) (object pronoun in italics, finite main verb in bold print).

1. (1)

   

In the ME period, SOproV order declines. This is shown in table 1, which is based on all clauses containing an overt subject, a finite main verb and an (unmodified) object pronoun in the York–Toronto–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (YCOE; Taylor, Warner, Pintzuk & Beths Reference Taylor, Warner, Pintzuk and Beths2003) and the Penn–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English (PPCME2; Kroch & Taylor Reference Kroch and Taylor2000b). As is common practice, I have divided the ME data into the four major periods, m1 to m4, as distinguished in the PPCME2. Only texts that can be clearly assigned to one of these periods are included.

Table 1.

The distribution of object pronouns and finite main verbs in Old and Middle English

Table 1 suggests that preverbal placement of pronominal objects is very common until the middle of the fourteenth century and then drops abruptly at the end of that century. Nevertheless, the frequency of SOproV order remains non-negligible in period m3, and we see a further significant decline from period m3 to period m4 in the fifteenth century (chi-square = 28.98; p < 0.001).

However, once we consider the contribution of individual texts to this overall picture, our account of the decline of SOproV has to be modified. Let us start by taking a closer look at period m2. Prose material for this period is very scarce, and the PCCME includes only three texts in this period: the Kentish Sermons (c.1275), the Ayenbite of Inwyt (1340) and the Earliest Complete English Prose Psalter (c.1350). With respect to SOproV, table 1 hides a substantial imbalance in the way these texts use the different orders. Whereas the author of the Prose Psalter almost never uses SOproV (1.6 per cent; n = 309), the other two heavily favour this order. In the Ayenbite, the frequency of SOproV is 89.3 per cent (n = 300), and in the Kentish Sermons 67.2 per cent (n = 21).

A similar observation can be made for period m3. Among the sixteen texts included in this period, only half contain examples with SOproV orders. But among those eight, only one has frequent occurrences of SOproV, and that is The Brut or the Chronicles of England (c.1400). No fewer than 87 of the 111 cases listed in table 1 come from this text. With 178 examples with SVOpro order, the frequency of SOproV reaches 32.8 per cent in the prose Brut.

Finally, in period m4, the SOproV frequencies are very low. Nevertheless, a considerable imbalance remains among texts. Two of them have frequencies of SOproV order that are well above those found in other texts from the same period: The Siege of Jerusalem (c.1500; SOproV 34.8 per cent, n = 66) and The Commonplace Book of Robert Reynes (1470–1500; SOproV 45.5 per cent, n = 11). Once we remove these texts, 13 instances of SOproV order remain.

Table 2 provides revised figures for SOproV order, excluding outliers that have particularly high frequencies of this word order compared to other texts from the same period.Footnote ⁴

Table 2.

The distribution of object pronouns and finite main verbs in Old and Middle English – outliers separated

The overall picture emerging from table 2 is that SOproV is common until the middle of the thirteenth century, but it is then largely lost. No major developments occur after the thirteenth century. The loss of SOproV therefore seems to occur considerably earlier and more rapidly than suggested by the data in table 1.

2.2 Object pronouns and finite auxiliaries

Similar observations can be made for all clauses containing an overt subject followed by a finite auxiliary (Aux) followed by a non-finite main verb (V). In OE, the object pronoun generally precedes either the auxiliary or the main verb in such clauses. This is illustrated in (2a) (SOproAuxV) and (2b) (SAuxOproV).

1. (2)

   

During the ME period both of these word orders are lost. Table 3 presents this decline in the same way as table 2 in that clear outliers are listed separately.

Table 3.

The distribution of object pronouns, finite auxiliaries and non-finite main verbs in Old and Middle English – outliers separated

If we first consider the different periods without the outliers, we can observe that pre-auxiliary placement of object pronouns (SOproAuxV) is very common in OE and early ME, but it is then entirely lost after 1250. But we note once again that the next data point (m2) corresponds to a single text from the mid fourteenth century and that the development for a century after the period m1 therefore remains uncertain. As for the order SAuxOproV, there is a substantial decline in its frequency in the transition from OE to ME already. After period m1, this word order becomes marginal, but residues can be found until the end of the ME period.

Once again, individual texts behave differently, and they are largely the same ones as those identified in table 2. In period m2, the Kentish Sermons and the Ayenbite show a pattern that is highly unusual even compared to OE and the ME period m1 in that SOproAuxV is by far the most frequent word order. But as in OE, there are only marginal findings of the innovative word order SAuxVOpro in these texts. In period m3, the most distinctive text is again the prose Brut, with the order SAuxOproV occurring as the majority option. Finally, in period m4, The Siege of Jerusalem and The Commonplace Book of Robert Reynes remain distinctive. Whereas the former text has a frequency of SAuxOproV order of 43.5 per cent (n = 23), the latter has a rate of 20 per cent (n = 20). This is at a time when other texts generally no longer have any orders of this type.

2.3. Variation in object pronoun placement

The data in tables 2 and 3 raise the question as to why certain texts have substantially higher frequencies of preverbal object pronoun placement than other texts from the same periods. For the three texts with the highest rates of preverbal objects a closer look at the historical background may provide a plausible answer. The Kentish Sermons, the Ayenbite as well as the prose Brut have the striking common property of being relatively close translations of source texts written in French, more precisely OF for the former two and AN for the Brut. This is of importance because object pronouns (clitics) generally precede the main verb in both OF and AN.Footnote ⁵ Many instances of OV found in these three texts have a corresponding word order in the French versions of these texts. Influence of the source text is therefore a very likely explanation for the distinctive behaviour of these ME texts. As a consequence, residual preverbal object pronoun placement in ME is a phenomenon that may allow us to gain some insight into the nature of translation-induced effects in medieval texts.

3.1 The ME prose Brut and its source

The prose Brut is a chronicle that gives a comprehensive account of the history of England and survives in over 240 manuscripts in the three major literary languages of medieval England (Matheson Reference Matheson1998: 1). It is generally agreed that the earliest versions of the prose Brut were written in AN. On the basis of the historical events reported, different stages in the development of the AN prose Brut can be distinguished (Matheson Reference Matheson1998: 4): (a) Stage I, events up to 1272 (the original form of the text, sometimes referred to as the Common Text); (b) Stage II, events up to 1307 (first continuation); (c) Stage III, events up to 1333 (second continuation, either in a short version or in a long version). The original texts representing the different stages are likely to have been written shortly after the events they recorded. In the late fourteenth century, the long version of Stage III was translated into English. This initial translation then gave rise to most texts of the family of the ME Brut, with later versions regularly bringing the historical records up to date independently of an AN source.

In order to examine what influence AN may have had on the syntax of a translated ME text, I will compare an ME version of the Brut to an AN version. For ME, I will focus on the sections of the Brut contained in the PPCME2 (Kroch & Taylor Reference Kroch and Taylor2000b). These are taken from the first part of Brie's (Reference Brie1906) edition, which represents the earliest English copy of the Brut from around 1400. As Brie (Reference Brie1906: ix) observes, this ‘first part of our Chronicle is a mere translation of the French Brut d'Engleterre’ (see also Matheson Reference Matheson1998: 79). The content suggests that the original AN source for this translation was the long version of Stage III (see Matheson Reference Matheson1998: 6; Pagan Reference Pagan2011: 4). Ideally, one would therefore use that version for a comparative study of ME and AN. Unfortunately, to my knowledge, edited versions of the AN texts are available only for Stage I of the AN version (Marvin Reference Marvin2006) and the short version of Stage III (Pagan Reference Pagan2011). I will therefore base my discussion on the latter AN text. This should not be too problematic, however. The main differences between the short and the long versions of Stage III concern the events from 1307 onwards. Brie (Reference Brie1905: 26) therefore claims that there is no doubt that the writer of the long version based it on a common text of the Brut up to the death of Edward I (i.e. 1307). There are only very minor factual differences between the long and the short versions of Stage III for the period before 1307. No indications can be found in the literature as to any significant linguistic differences between the different versions.

Given these observations, I will assume that Pagan's (Reference Pagan2011) edition of the AN Brut is representative for the AN text that provided the basis for the ME translation, at least for the events up to 1307. I will therefore use this edition up to 1307 to explore the possible influence of AN on the ME used in the translation. It is important to stress, however, that this is unlikely to be the perfect match of translation and source text. One reason for this is that ‘[n]one of the English manuscripts preserves the original translation’ because ‘they represent copies written some time after the presumed date of composition of any portion of text’ (Matheson Reference Matheson1998: 84). Furthermore, with respect to AN, it is impossible to establish exactly what AN source the ME translator had access to. But since large parts of Brie's ME text read like a very close translation of Pagan's AN text, it seems to me that these two texts provide a sufficiently solid basis for a close comparative analysis.

3.2 Object pronoun placement in the ME prose Brut and the AN version

In this section, I will compare the placement of object pronouns in the ME and the AN Brut. As pointed out earlier, the hypothesis that increased preverbal object pronoun placement may be due to AN influence is based on the fact that AN object clitics precede the main verb. In clauses with finite main verbs, the presence of SOproV word order in the AN source text may therefore have led the translator to use the same order in English. This is illustrated in (3).Footnote ⁶

1. (3)

   

In Taylor's (Reference Taylor2008) terminology, the matching word orders in (3) could be considered as being due to a direct translation effect of the statistical type. The ME word order corresponds to the AN one, but it is not an innovation in ME. Instead, the contact situation leads to a substantial quantitative increase in the use of a declining word order that is still occasionally used in other texts.

However, it is not the case that the author of the ME Brut slavishly follows the AN text. As shown in table 2, postverbal placement of the object pronoun is the majority option with finite verbs in the ME Brut. This means that the author often uses postverbal object pronouns when the AN text has a preverbal clitic. This is shown in (4).

1. (4)

   

The second type of evidence suggesting that the ME author does not strictly imitate the AN syntax is presented in (5). In these examples, the ME translations (5a, b) are relatively free, and they introduce an object pronoun where there is none in the AN text (5a′,b′). Despite the absence of an AN model, the object pronoun precedes the finite main verb in the ME version.

1. (5)

   

In Taylor's (Reference Taylor2008) terminology, (5) illustrates indirect translation effects. The systematic occurrence of preverbal object pronouns elsewhere in the AN source and the frequent use in the translation may have a priming effect that leads the translator to use this word order option even when it does not occur in the source. For the reasons discussed in section 3.1, this type of evidence has to be treated with some caution, however. Although no object pronoun is found in the corresponding passages in Pagan's (Reference Pagan2011) edition shown in (5), we cannot be absolutely certain that this was also the case for the AN text on which the original translation was based. Thus, the data in (5) are suggestive (albeit not entirely conclusive) of the translator's independence with the use of SOproV order.Footnote ⁷

In order to shed further light on the nature of the interaction between AN and English, I will now consider the placement of object pronouns in clauses containing a finite auxiliary and a non-finite main verb. In clauses with an auxiliary, a pronominal object could occur in three positions: (i) in a position before the finite auxiliary (SOproAuxV); (ii) in a position between the auxiliary and the main verb (SAuxOproV); (iii) in a position following the main verb (SAuxVOpro). AN generally uses option (i), even in contexts with modal auxiliaries where present-day French would now have option (ii) (clitic climbing; see example (6) below).Footnote ⁸ Hence, if AN influence played a role in the choice of the placement of object pronouns in ME, we would expect a high frequency of option (i) in the prose Brut. As table 3 shows, this expectation is not borne out. The majority pattern is SAuxOproV, which is nevertheless highly unusual compared to other texts from the same period (50.7 per cent in the Brut vs 3.4 per cent elsewhere). However, here, it is generally not the case that this predominant order reflects a word order found in the AN source text. Instead, we can distinguish three different contexts in which ME has SAuxOproV order. Each of these options corresponds to about a third of all the cases of SAuxOproV in the Brut. First, this order may occur when AN has the order SOproAuxV.

1. (6)

   

Secondly, the ME text sometimes uses SAuxOproV order when, as in (7), the AN text lacks an auxiliary and has SOproV instead.

1. (7)

   

2. (7′)

   

Finally, SAuxOproV can also be found when there is no match in the AN text, either because the ME text contains elements that are entirely absent in the AN text or because the translation is not literal. Illustrations of the latter type are given in (8).

1. (8)

   

Although there is no exact match in word order in the sentences shown above, AN influence cannot be entirely excluded, at least for cases such as (6) and (7). What may have been the salient feature for the translator in these examples is simply the fact that the object pronoun occurs to the left of the main verb in AN. This distributional property is then reproduced in the ME version.

The main question these observations raise is why the most frequent word order in the Brut is one that is generally not found in the AN source text (i.e. SAuxOproV) and why the AN word order is virtually absent in the Brut. A plausible explanation for this state of affairs is that by about 1400, when the Brut was written, the order SOproAuxV had become an ungrammatical option in English. According to table 3, the last example of SO(pro)AuxV in a non-French-based text indeed goes back to the period 1150–1250, i.e. to a text written around 150 years before the Brut. The very low frequency of SOproAuxV order in the Brut may therefore be related to the reluctance of the translator to use an entirely ungrammatical option. Instead, he prefers the order SAuxOproV, which can still be found in some other texts from the same period, albeit at a very low rate (3.4 per cent).Footnote ⁹ Furthermore, the position between a finite auxiliary and the main verb can also be occupied by quantified and negative objects in late ME. Pintzuk & Taylor (Reference Pintzuk, Taylor, Kemenade and Los2006: 259) show that in the fifteenth century around 6 per cent of all quantified objects and around 20 per cent of all negative objects occur preverbally. Thus, the position between the auxiliary and the main verb is a position that is still available, at least marginally, for objects in late ME. This word order option then reflects that of the AN at least with respect to the placement before the main verb.

The frequent use of SOproV in the Brut is compatible with the scenario sketched above. As shown in table 2, this word order has a marginal status in the fifteenth century, but it is not entirely absent from other texts. Thus, as with SAuxOproV, the translation effect would be a quantitative reinforcement of a word order option that is nearly extinct but not fully ruled out by other authors.

I will finish the discussion of clauses with auxiliaries by briefly considering the status of the word order SAuxVOpro in the ME Brut. A comparison with the AN source leads to very similar results to those of the order SAuxOproV. SAuxVOpro can occur when AN has SOproV with a finite main verb, when it has SOproAuxV, or when no corresponding object pronoun can be found for AN. Once again, the ME SAuxVOpro examples are spread almost evenly across the three scenarios. An illustration of each option is given in (9).

1. (9)

   

The examples in (9a/a′) and (9b/b′) confirm the observation made in section 3.1 that the author of the ME Brut does not mechanically transfer the AN syntax into ME.Footnote ¹⁰

To conclude this section, I add two observations that lend support to the influence hypothesis of object placement in the Brut. First, as pointed out in section 3.1, the AN text that was used as the basis of the ME translations (long version of Stage III) covers events up to 1333. Thus, if French influence were essential for the high frequency of preverbal pronominal objects, we would expect such word orders not to occur in the descriptions of events after 1333 as these are not based on a French source text. This expectation is indeed borne out. In samples that I have examined for different periods after 1333 in Brie's (Reference Brie1906) edition, preverbal pronominal objects are almost entirely absent. For the period 1333–77, I took the first 50 clauses containing a pronominal object, and found one single instance with preverbal placement. For the periods 1377–1419, 1418–30 (excluding John Page's poem on the siege of Rouen) and 1430–46, I examined the first 30 clauses containing a pronominal object, and preverbal placement did not occur at all. The contrast between the pre-1333 part of the ME prose Brut and the post-1333 part is thus very striking. However, whether there is an AN source or not is not the only variable that could be related to this contrast. Original authorship also varies with the continuations, and that variation may be of importance for the use of preverbal object pronouns. Thus, the pre-/post-1333 contrast is in line with the influence hypothesis for the pre-1333 text but is not entirely conclusive in this respect.

A second observation might provide stronger support for the influence hypothesis. If influence did not play a role, what alternatives would there be to account for the distribution of object pronouns in the ME prose Brut? One possibility would be that it is due to a stylistic choice by the author to use archaic word orders.Footnote ¹¹ But if that were the case, it would be surprising for that stylistic choice to be restricted to object pronouns, and we would expect other archaic features to be present in the Brut as well, for example regular preverbal occurrences of full DP objects. As is well known, full DP objects frequently precede the main verb in OE. As for the development in the ME period, a distinction has to be made between clauses with a finite main verb and clauses with an auxiliary and a non-finite main verb. With finite main verbs, SO_DPV order quickly declines after the OE period and in the ME period m3 most texts no longer contain this word order. In the Brut, SO_DPV is a very marginal option (0.9 per cent; n = 701), so there is no indication here that the translator makes increased use of an archaic word order option. The same conclusion can be reached with clauses that contain a finite auxiliary. From over 50 per cent in OE (see Pintzuk & Taylor Reference Pintzuk, Taylor, Kemenade and Los2006: 259), the rate of SAuxO_DPV order has fallen to 2.5 per cent in the ME period m3 (n = 2,230). Separating the data for the Brut and those for the other texts from period m3, frequencies of 5.6 per cent for the Brut (n = 305) and 2.0 per cent for the other texts (n = 1,925) are obtained. The increase in the Brut is thus minimal compared to what was observed in table 3 for object pronouns. That there is a fifteen-fold increase in the frequency of SAuxOproV order in the Brut compared to other m3 texts but less than a threefold increase with full DP objects would be unexpected if the translator of the Brut simply had a stylistic penchant for archaic word order options.

In terms of the French contact influence hypothesis, the contrast between pronouns and full DPs with respect to preverbal placement can be accounted for straightforwardly. Whereas object clitics occur preverbally in OF and AN, OV order is in decline with full DP objects (see e.g. Zaring Reference Zaring2010 for OF). By the beginning of the thirteenth century, VO is ‘fairly well fixed’ (Zaring Reference Zaring2010: 5) with finite main verbs in OF, and the AN Brut is in line with this observation. In clauses with a finite auxiliary and a non-finite main verb, however, the decline of OV is slower. Zaring (Reference Zaring2010: 8) shows that SAuxO_DPV still occurs with a certain frequency in thirteenth-century OF. The same is true for thirteenth- and fourteenth-century AN (Ingham Reference Ingham, Louviot and Delesse2017). In a sample of 1,500 lines of the AN Brut,Footnote ¹² OV order is found in 29.6 per cent (n = 54) of all clauses containing an auxiliary (modal or auxiliary have) and a non-finite main verb. The regular occurrence of OV in the source text may have led the ME translator to use the corresponding word order more frequently than other authors from period m3. But with a frequency of a bit over a fourth in AN, SAuxO_DPV is far from being as salient as the systematic preverbal placement of object clitics. This could be argued to be the reason why the degree of influence is considerably smaller with full DPs.

In summary, although it is difficult to conclusively prove influence in a medieval situation of language contact through translation, the various observations made in this section make the hypothesis very plausible that the ME prose Brut has syntactic properties that are the result of influence of the AN source text.

4.1 Period m2: The Ayenbite and the Kentish Sermons

As shown in tables 2 and 3, period m2 contains two texts that have unusually high frequencies of preverbal object pronoun placement, the Ayenbite and the Kentish Sermons. Just like the Brut, these two texts are translations from French, in this case OF. In the brief discussion in this section, I will focus on the Ayenbite because the amount of data from the Kentish Sermons is very small (34 clauses with a pronominal object as opposed to 418 for the Ayenbite). Given the context of the discussion here, I simply cite the following observation made by the editor of the Kentish Sermons: ‘The translator gives a very literal rendering of his original; it influences his idiom, order and choice of words, even to the borrowing of an occasional inflection’ (Hall Reference Hall1963: 669). Hence, OF influence is likely to play a role with the distribution of object pronouns in the Kentish Sermons.

According to the information the author himself provides, the Ayenbite was written by the monk Dan Michel in 1340. It is a close translation of the OF Somme le roi, a religious treatise written between 1279 and 1280 (see Brayer & Leurquin-Labie Reference Brayer and Leurquin-Labie2008). As shown in section 2, the Ayenbite has very high frequencies of word orders in which the pronoun precedes the main verb. Compared to the Brut, there are two main differences. First, preverbal placement of object pronouns is much more frequent in the Ayenbite, to the point that postverbal placement is a very marginal option in this text. Whereas postverbal placement in the Brut is found in 67.2 per cent of the clauses with a finite main verb and in 45.7 per cent of the clauses with a finite auxiliary, the corresponding frequencies for the Ayenbite are at 10.7 and 2.5 per cent. Secondly, in clauses with a finite auxiliary, the predominant preverbal position is before the auxiliary in the Ayenbite whereas it is between the auxiliary and the main verb in the Brut.

At first sight, these differences suggest that influence of the OF source text has even bigger effects in the Ayenbite than in the Brut. Given the closeness of the translation, it is certainly very likely that influence crucially contributes to the Ayenbite’s unexpected object pronoun syntax. There are indeed numerous clauses with a preverbal object pronoun in the Ayenbite that have a direct match in Brayer & Leurgquin-Labie's (Reference Brayer and Leurquin-Labie2008) edition of Somme le roi. In addition, there also seem to be indirect translation effects as preverbal object pronouns can be found in cases where there is no corresponding OF source or where the OF source does not have a pronominal object (see Hess Reference Hess2016 for a comparison of the two texts).

However, there is an additional factor that should be taken into account when trying to explain the distributional properties of object pronouns in the Ayenbite. While the ME Brut was written in the second half of the fourteenth century, the Ayenbite is a somewhat earlier text (1340). Furthermore, as the author seems to have been around 70 years old when he wrote the Ayenbite (Gradon Reference Gradon1979: 12), his language can be argued to reflect the linguistic situation of the late thirteenth century. Thus, we get closer to a period (i.e. m1) when the orders SOproV and SOproAuxV still regularly occur across texts (43.2 and 36.2 per cent respectively for period m1). Compared to the author of the Brut, Dan Michel is therefore likely to have been exposed to such word orders more frequently, even independently of the presence of a source text that features preverbal occurrences of object pronouns.

However, even if we take this factor into account, the patterns observed in the Ayenbite remain surprising as the frequencies of SOproV and SOproAuxV go well beyond those found in texts from period m1. As a matter of fact, these frequencies are even higher than those found in OE. Thus, it is not simply the case that the Ayenbite maintains an archaic pattern, it even goes beyond what is attested for a period of almost 500 years before the composition of this text. This is in striking contrast with the fact that in other aspects of word order the Ayenbite is by no means similar to OE. For example, SO_DPV order with any type of non-pronominal object DP is less frequent in the Ayenbite than in most texts from period m1 (3.6 per cent (n = 578) vs an average of 10.0 per cent (n = 1,617) for m1). The same is true for preverbal placement of object DPs in clauses with finite auxiliaries and non-finite main verbs. The two orders SO_DPAuxV and SAuxO_DPV occur with a combined frequency of 17.9 per cent (n = 185) in the Ayenbite while the corresponding average frequency for period m1 is 31.8 per cent (n = 676). Finally, the Ayenbite is perfectly modern when it comes to the distribution of auxiliaries and main verbs. A single example of the common OE word order SVAux is found against 811 clauses with SAuxV order. In period m1, SVAux still occurs somewhat more frequently at an average rate of 3.9 per cent (n = 2,687).

In conclusion, the fact that the Ayenbite represents an earlier ME period may very well contribute to an increased rate of preverbal placement of object pronouns. However, the full extent of the difference between the Ayenbite and the Brut is unlikely to be due solely to these factors. Instead, influence of the OF source text remains a highly plausible factor as well. Without direct and indirect statistical translation effects, it would be very surprising to find rates of SOproV and SOproAuxV that go significantly beyond those found in OE. Furthermore, assuming that the influence hypothesis is correct and that the Ayenbite is diachronically less advanced than the Brut may allow us to account for a difference between these two texts. In clauses with auxiliaries in the Brut, the main effect of AN influence is an increase in SAuxOproV order as this is the only option with a preverbal object pronoun attested in ME when the Brut was written. For the author of the Ayenbite the situation is different and orders of the type SOproAuxV may still have been (at least marginally) in use as well. Since this word order corresponds exactly to what is found in OF, the statistical translation effect is strongest in this context, and the rate of SOproAuxV is substantially higher than in the Brut.

4.2 Period m4: The Siege of Jerusalem and The Commonplace Book of Robert Reynes

Whereas high frequencies of preverbal object pronoun placement in periods m2 and m3 can be related to language contact through translation, the same account cannot hold for the outliers in period m4. Neither The Siege of Jerusalem nor The Commonplace Book of Robert Reynes are translations.Footnote ¹³

As for The Commonplace Book, I have no plausible explanation for its high rate of preverbal object pronoun placement at this point. A better understanding of this document would require a close analysis of the sources that the author uses. Given the properties of commonplace books, it may very well be that parts of the text are taken from sources that do not reflect contemporary usage and that it is this that makes the text look archaic in its use of preverbal object pronouns.

With respect to The Siege, I propose that its properties might be related to an effect that is very similar to a statistical translation effect. Kurvinen (Reference Kurvinen1969: 27) observes that The Siege must be based on the late fourteenth-century ME poem Titus and Vespasian. What might be possible then is that The Siege does not only follow its model with respect to content but to some extent also with respect to form.

I examined the distribution of pronominal objects in a sample of 1,500 lines of the poem Titus and Vespasian (Herbert Reference Herbert1905).Footnote ¹⁴ For the sake of comparison, data were also collected from the last five poems in The Parsed Corpus of Middle English Poetry (PCMEP; Zimmermann Reference Zimmermann2015), which correspond roughly to the period 1350–1400. As shown in tables 2 and 3, preverbal object placement is virtually absent in prose texts from this period. The results for poetry are shown in table 4.

Table 4.

The distribution of object pronouns in Titus and Vespasian and five PCMEP poems from the second half of the fourteenth century

The data in table 4 show that preverbal object pronoun placement is strongly represented in late ME poetry, with frequencies reaching over 30 per cent with finite main verbs and over 50 per cent with finite auxiliaries in both Titus and Vespasian and the PCMEP data.Footnote ¹⁵

Given these observations, a plausible hypothesis for the distinctive distributional properties of object pronouns in The Siege would be that its author was influenced by word orders found in the verse text in a way that is similar to how a translator is influenced by a source text written in another language. Thus, what we seem to find in The Siege are not effects of language contact but effects of register contact.