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The Noun Phrase in English: Past and present
Edited by Alex Ho-Cheong Leung and Wim van der Wurff
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 246] 2018
► pp. 143–186

Chapter 6
Anaphoric reference in Early Modern English

The case of said and same

| Northumbria University
| Newcastle University

Work on the anaphoric NPs the said + N and the same has shown that both were frequent in sixteenth-century English but declined afterwards. We address the question why this happened. After reviewing earlier work on the two constructions, we present data showing that their properties and development are too dissimilar to assume that they declined for the same reason. Instead, we identify for each of the changes two separate causal factors, which involve tension between form and meaning of the anaphor. In exploring these case histories, we also offer some discussion of the general kinds of explanations that have been proposed for the decline of linguistic forms and constructions, which is an aspect of language change that deserves more systematic investigation.

Keywords: anaphoric NPs, referential distance, the decline of constructions, form-meaning misfit, Early Modern English
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1 Background to the said + N
    • 2.2 Background to the same
  • 3.Further data: Frequency and distance
    • 3.1The frequency of said and same in EModE: Methodology
    • 3.2The frequency of said and same in EModE: Results
    • 3.3The distance of said and same in EModE
  • 4.The decline of said and same : Causation
    • 4.1The decline of said : Wrong word, wrong place
    • 4.2The decline of same : Too costly, too long
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 18 June 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.246.06leu
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