Cover not available
Part of
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. 311–333

Chapter 14
Exploring the role of information structure in the word order variation of Old English verb-particle combinations

| Leiden University, Centre for Linguistics

This article examines the interplay between information structure and word order in Old English separable complex verbs, the precursors of Present-Day English Verb-Particle Combinations (VPCs). Studies of Present-Day English VPCs (e.g. Dehé 2002; Gries 1999, 2002, 2003) and Middle English and early Modern English VPCs (Elenbaas 2013) have shown that the choice of word order is influenced by information structural factors. The findings in this article for Old English VPCs with up and out indicate that the word order variation in Old English VPCs is more morpho-syntactic than information-structural in nature.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction and previous research
  • 2.Verb-particle combinations in Old English: Syntax, semantics and information structure
  • 3.Results
  • 4. Discussion and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.243.14ele
References
Bech, Kristin
2001 Word Order Patterns in Old and Middle English: A Syntactic and Pragmatic Study. PhD dissertation, University of Bergen.Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Johansson, Stig, Leech, Geoffrey, Conrad, Susan & Finegan, Edward
1999 Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Blais, Mary-Jane & Gonnerman, Laura
2012 The role of semantic transparency in the processing of verb particle constructions by French-English bilinguals. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Naomi Miyake, David Peebles & Richard P. Cooper (eds), 1338–1343. Austin TX: Cognitive Science Society. [URL]
Bolinger, Dwight
1971 The Phrasal Verb in English. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Bresnan, Joan, Cueni, Anna, Nikitina, Tatiana & Baayen, Harald
2007 Predicting the dative alternation. In Cognitive Foundations of Interpretation, Gerlof Bouma, Irene Krämer & Joost Zwarts (eds), 69–94. Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.Google Scholar
Bresnan, Joan & Hay, Jennifer
2008 Gradient grammar: An effect of animacy on the syntax of give in New Zealand and American English. Lingua 1(18): 245–59.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Broccias, Cristiano
2008 Towards a history of English resultative constructions: The case of adjectival resultative constructions. English Language and Linguistics 12(1): 1–28.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chen, Ping
1986 Discourse and particle movement in English. Studies in Language 10: 79–95.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Collins, Peter
1995 The indirect object construction in English: An informational approach. Linguistics 33: 35–49.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dehé, Nicole
2002 Particle Verbs in English: Syntax, Information Structure and Intonation [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 59]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dietz, Klaus
2004 Die altenglischen Präfixbildungen und ihre Charakteristik. Anglia 122(4): 561–614.Google Scholar
Elenbaas, Marion
2007 The Synchronic and Diachronic Syntax of the English Verb-Particle Combination. PhD dissertation, Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen. Utrecht: LOT.Google Scholar
2013 Motivations for particle verb word order in Middle and Early Modern English. English Language and Linguistics 17(3): 489–511.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Elenbaas, Marion & van Kemenade, Ans
2014 Verb particles and OV/VO in the history of English. Studia Linguistica 68(1): 140–167.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Erades, Peter
1961 Points of modern English syntax XL (continued). English Studies 42: 56–60.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fischer, Olga, van Kemenade, Ans, Koopman, Willem & van der Wurff, Wim
(eds) 2000 The Syntax of Early English. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Givón, Talmy
1984 Direct object and dative shifting: Semantic and pragmatic case. In Objects: Towards a Theory of Grammatical Relations, Frans Plank (ed.), 151–182. London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Gonnerman, Laura & Hayes, Celina
2005 The professor chewed the students… out: Effects of dependency, length, and adjacency on word order preferences in sentences with verb particle constructions. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Bruno Bara, Lawrence Barsalou & Monica Bucciarelli (eds), 785–790. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Gries, Stefan T.
1999 Particle movement: A cognitive and functional approach. Cognitive Linguistics 10(2): 105–145.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2002 The influence of processing on grammatical variation: Particle placement in English. In Verb-Particle Explorations, Nicole Dehe, Ray Jackendoff, Andrew McIntyre & Silke Urban (eds), 269–288. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2003 Multifactorial Analysis in Corpus Linguistics: A Study of Particle Placement. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Hiltunen, Risto
1983 The Decline of the Prefixes and the Beginnings of the English Phrasal Verb: The Evidence from some Old and Middle English Texts. Turku: Turun Yliopisto, University of Turku.Google Scholar
van Kemenade, Ans
1987 Syntactic Case and Morphological Case in the History of English. Dordrecht: Foris.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2009 Discourse relations and word order change. In Information Structure and Language Change, Roland Hinterhölzl & Svetlana Petrova (eds), 191–220. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
van Kemenade, Ans & Los, Bettelou
2006 Discourse adverbs and clausal syntax in Old and Middle English. In The Handbook of the History of English, Ans van Kemenade & Bettelou Los (eds), 224–248. Malden MA: Blackwell.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
van Kemenade, Ans & Milicev, Tanja
2011 Syntax and discourse in Old English and Middle English word order. In Grammatical Change: Origins, Nature, Outcomes: Proceedings of DIGS VIII, Dianne Jonas & Stephen Anderson (eds), 239–255. Oxford: OUP.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Los, Bettelou
2000  Onginnan/beginnan with bare and to-infinitive in Ælfric. In Pathways of Change: Grammaticalization in English [Studies in Language Companion Series 53], Olga Fischer, Anette Rosenbach & Dieter Stein (eds), 251–274. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Los, Bettelou, Blom, Corrien, Booij, Geert, Elenbaas, Marion & van Kemenade, Ans
2012 Morphosyntactic Change: A Comparative Study of Particles and Prefixes. Cambridge: CUP.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Los, Bettelou, López-Couso, María José & Meurman-Solin, Anneli
2012 On the interplay of syntax and information structure: Synchronic and diachronic considerations. In Meurman-Solin, López-Couso & Los (eds), 3–18.Google Scholar
Meurman-Solin, Anneli, López-Couso, María José & Los, Bettelou
(eds) 2012 Information Structure and Syntactic Change in the History of English [Oxford Studies in the History of English 2]. Oxford: OUP.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Minkova, Donka
1991 The History of Final Vowels in English: The Sound of Muting [Topics in English Linguistics 4]. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Prince, Ellen
1981 Toward a taxonomy of given-new information. In Radical pragmatics, Peter Cole (ed.), 223–256. New York, NY: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey & Svartvik, Jan
1985 A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Randall, Beth
2005 CorpusSearch2: A Tool for Linguistics Research. [URL]
Rodríguez-Puente, Paula
2012 The development of non-compositional meanings in phrasal verbs: A corpus-based study. English Studies 93(1): 71–90.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Seoane, Elena
2006 Information structure and word order change: The passive as an information-rearranging strategy in the history of English. In The Handbook of the History of English, Ans van Kemenade & Bettelou Los (eds), 360–391. Oxford: Blackwell.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2009 Syntactic complexity, discourse status and animacy as determinants of grammatical variation in Modern English. English Language and Linguistics 13(3): 365–384.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt
2006 Morphosyntactic Persistence in Spoken English: A Corpus Study. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Taylor, Ann & Pintzuk, Susan
2012 The effect of information structure on object position in Old English: A pilot study. In Meurman-Solin, López-Couso & Los (eds), 47–65.Google Scholar
Taylor, Ann, Warner, Anthony, Pintzuk, Susan & Beths, Frank
(eds) 2003 The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose. Oxford: Oxford Text Archive. [URL]
Trotzke, Andreas, Quaglia, Stefano & Wittenberg, Eva
2015 Topicalization in German particle verb constructions: The role of semantic transparency. Linguistische Berichte 244: 409–426.Google Scholar
Versteegh, Kees
1997 The Arabic Linguistic Tradition. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Wurmbrand, Susanne
2000 The Structure(s) of Particle Verbs. Ms, McGill University.Google Scholar