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2002, Peter J. Lucas and Angela M. Lucas (eds.), Middle English from tongue to text: Selected papers from the Third International Conference on Middle English: Language and Text, held at Dublin, Ireland, 1-4 July 1999, Bern: Peter Lang, 2002, 203-234
This article deals with the loss of the affected possessor construction (external possessor construction, sympathetic dative) in the history of English. First it is shown that Old English made a formal and semantic distinction between coding the possessor noun-phrase externally in the dative and noun-phrase internally in the genitive, as all other old Indo-European languages do, and as German does to the present day. [Sie schlug ihm (dative) den Kopf ab ‘she cut off his head (he: a living person)’ vs. Sie schlug seinen (genitive) Kopf ab (he/it: a corpse, a statue, etc.)’. Then the loss of this distinction in Middle English is demonstrated. Several possible reasons for this development are discussed and rejected, and the fact is pointed out that the only other languages spoken in Europe (beside Lezgian and Turkish) not making the distinction are the Insular Celtic languages. This leads to the conclusion that English lost the distinction because the Celtic substrate population did not acquire it in the language shift to Anglo-Saxon. Finally the question how Insular Celtic itself lost the distinction is answered analogously, viz. by the Semitic substrate population’s not learning to make the distinction in the language shift to Celtic (which then still made the inherited distinction), all the old Semitic languages only knowing the internal genitive possessor construction.
The loss of the DATIVE EXTERNAL POSSESSOR (DEP) as a productive construction in English has been regarded as setting English apart from most European languages. While this claim can be disputed, the loss of this construction in English needs an explanation. Both internal and external explanations have been suggested, but we lack a solid empirical base for evaluating them. This article supplies the beginnings of the empirical foundation necessary for further discussion of this topic by presenting the results of a systematic corpus-based study of external possessors with body parts playing the role of subject or (accusative) object in Early Old English. This investigation establishes that any explanation for the eventual loss of DEPs must be compatible with the fact that the construction was already reduced at an early stage in Old English compared with Gothic and although productive, was more limited in its range and use. The DEP was not obligatory even in the situations that favored it, and it varied with the INTERNAL POSSESSOR (IP), the unmarked possessive construction. Contact with Brythonic Celtic at an early stage provides a possible explanation for this early decline.
English Language and Linguistics
Review of Cynthia L. Allen, Dative External Possessors in Early English (Oxford Studies in Diachronic and Historical Linguistics 39). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi + 284.2021 •
Reviewed by Rodrigo Pérez Lorido , University of Oviedo This monograph is the first large-scale corpus-based diachronic study of external possession (EP) constructions in the English language. The study focuses on structures like (1), in which an NP in the dative case (dem Kind / me, the possessor), which behaves as an external argument of the clause, establishes some semantic relationship of possession with another NP in that clause (die Haare / el dedo, the possessum). This kind of structure was available in the Old and Middle English periods, but is preserved in Present-day English only in a few set phrases and expressions of the type look someone in the eye, having overall been replaced by internal possession (IP) structures containing a premodifier in the genitive case, like those in the idiomatic translations in (1a, b). (1) (a) Die Mutter wäscht dem Kind die Haare The mother washes the DAT child the hair 'The mother is washing the child's hair.' (Example from van de Velde and Lamiroy 2016: 353) (b) Lucía me vendó el dedo Lucía me 1SG.DAT bandage 1SG.PAST the finger 'Lucía bandaged my finger.' A characteristic of dative external possessors (DEP henceforth) is that they systematically display a strict affectedness condition, i.e. they are necessarily associated with beneficial or negative effects on the possessor (Haspelmath 1999: 111). From a typological-areal perspective, DEPs are considered as prototypically European, and external possession structures of this type are found in languages such as French, Spanish, German, Greek or Russian, to name a few. Allen's study seriously challenges two widely accepted hypotheses concerning the history of DEP structures in English and their demise over time: the strict connection between the disappearance of DEPs in English and the loss of the dative/accusative distinction (Ahlgren 1946), and the impact of the contact with the Celtic linguistic substratum in accelerating (or actually triggering) the change after the Germanic invasions. Allen does so in a very convincing way, combining-as is usual in her-formal linguistic analysis, thorough corpus research and absolute philological rigour. In English Language and Linguistics, page 1 of 7.
Handbook of comparative and historical Indo-European linguistics, ed. Jared Klein, Brian Joseph, Matthias Fritz, & Mark Wenthe, ii 1218–1249. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
The syntax of Celtic2017 •
Folia Linguistica Historica
Constructional change in Old and Middle English Copular Constructions and its impact on the lexicon2009 •
Applying the framework of Radical Construction Grammar to diachronic phenomena, the present paper examines Copular Constructions in Old and Middle English, with special attention to the loss of the Copula weorðan ‘become’. First we reconstruct the extension of the OE Verbs is, beon, weorðan and becuman to various types of Copular Constructions. We further argue that schematic Copular Constructions emerge in overlapping usage areas resulting from these developments, in which abstraction is made of the Copulas’ particular aspectual semantics. These schematic Copular Constructions in turn undergo some changes themselves. In Middle English a Passive Construction developed out of an original Copula Construction involving Adjectival Participles. However, the constructional profile of weorðan comprised an association between Participial and Adjectival Subject Complements much stronger than in other copulas, and this conflicted with this development, with the archaisization of weorðan as a result. This process of archaisization was further strengthened by the takeover of Weak Verbs in -ian (type ealdian ‘become old’) by new copulas like becuman. In general, we show how diachronic construction grammar might account for the loss of a function word otherwise difficult to account for.
2010 •
E. R. Luján y J. L. García Alonso (eds.), A Greek man in the Iberian Street. Papers in Linguistics and Epigraphy in honour of Javier de Hoz, Innsbrucker beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft, pp. 365-379, Innsbruck 2011
Genitive and Possesive Adjectives in Ancient Indo-European languages2011 •
The Germanic languages exhibit several interesting developments with respect to genitive and 'possession'. The genitive cannot be considered a structural case in line with the nominative or accusative, the function of which can often be expressed by word order alone. It has a very complex semantic status in its own right and shows several intersections with the semantics of the dative, also a formerly complex case. The transfer of pos
Transactions of the Philological Society
Morphological Causatives in Old English: the Quest for a Vanishing Formation12012 •
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