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Diachronica
Vol. 35:2 (2018) ► pp.165–209
Articles / Aufsätze

A native origin for Present-Day English they, their, them

| Utrecht University

It is commonly held that Present-Day English they, their, them are not descended from Old English but derive from the Old Norse third-person plural pronouns þeir, þeira, þeim. This paper argues that the early northern English orthographic and distributional textual evidence agrees with an internal trajectory for the ‘þ-’ type personal pronouns in the North and indicates an origin in the Old English demonstratives þā, þāra, þām. The Northern Middle English third-person plural pronominal system was the result of the reanalysis from demonstrative to personal pronoun that is common cross-linguistically in Germanic and non-Germanic languages alike.

Keywords: Old Northumbrian, Old English, Old Norse, Northern Middle English, personal pronoun, demonstrative, Lindisfarne Gospels gloss, LAEME
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Pronoun usage in Old English
  • 3.Pronoun usage in Old Northumbrian
    • 3.1Preliminaries
    • 3.2Old Northumbrian data
      • 3.2.1Old Northumbrian nominative pronouns
      • 3.2.2Old Northumbrian dative and accusative pronouns
      • 3.2.3Old Northumbrian genitive pronouns
    • 3.3Discussion thus far
  • 4.Third-person plural pronouns in Northern Middle English
    • 4.1Morphosyntactic continuity
    • 4.2Phonological continuity
      • 4.2.1A variationist account
      • 4.2.2Northern Middle English development of OE ā
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.16026.col
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