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Word Order Change in Acquisition and Language Contact: Essays in honour of Ans van Kemenade
Edited by Bettelou Los and Pieter de Haan
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 243] 2017
► pp. 155–183

Chapter 8
Split coordination in Early English

| University of York
| University of York

Split coordination (e.g., the king came and his company ) occurs at a low but robust rate in early English. While similar in some ways to the Present-Day-English (PDE) construction called Bare Argument Ellipsis (BAE), in which the second conjunct (C2) is restricted to clause-final position, in early English C2 frequently occurs clause-internally. As BAE cannot derive such cases, we consider a movement analysis and present empirical evidence for both leftward movement of the first conjunct (C1) and rightward movement of C2. Split coordination is part of a larger pattern of splitting constituents in early English, which is lost by about 1700. BAE continues to be available until the present, however, giving rise to a false appearance of continuity over time.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1What is split coordination?
    • 1.2Split coordination over time
  • 2.Coordination phrases
    • 2.1The structure of coordination phrases
    • 2.2 Split coordination
  • 3.The structure of early English clauses
    • 3.1Subject positions in early English
    • 3.2 Object positions in early English
  • 4.Arguments for leftward movement of C1
    • 4.1 Argument 1: Subject C2s in the middle field
    • 4.2Argument 2: Distribution of subject C2s by verb type (transitive vs. passive)
    • 4.3Argument 3: Number agreement
  • 5.Arguments for rightward movement of C2
    • 5.1Argument 1: Clauses with split COs, C2 in the final field
    • 5.2Argument 2: AuxV transitive clauses with split CSs, C2 in the final field
    • 5.3Argument 3: Clauses with finite main verbs, split COs and C2 in the final field
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Corpora
  • References
Published online: 14 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.243.08tay
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Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

Taylor, Ann
2020. Treebanks in Historical Syntax. Annual Review of Linguistics 6:1 ► pp. 195 ff. DOI logo
Taylor, Ann & Susan Pintzuk
2018. Split coordination in English. Diachronica 35:3 ► pp. 310 ff. DOI logo
2020. Split coordination in English. In Diachronic Treebanks for Historical Linguistics [Benjamins Current Topics, 113], ► pp. 16 ff. DOI logo

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