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The Determinants of Diachronic Stability
Edited by Anne Breitbarth, Miriam Bouzouita, Lieven Danckaert and Melissa Farasyn
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 254] 2019
► pp. 215–244

Chapter 9
What is a diachronically stable system in a language-contact situation?

The case of the English recipient passive

ORCID logo | Universität Stuttgart
| Universität Mannheim | University of Westminster
| Universität Mannheim
In this paper we present data showing that the development of the English recipient passive (RP) was linked predominantly to verbs of French origin, although Old French (OF) did not have an RP. We present two explanations of the role that contact with French could have played in this development. The first explanation builds on the fact that only structurally case-marked arguments can become subjects of passive clauses and assumes that the RP was developed with French verbs because the OF structural dative was copied to Middle English (ME). The second explanation is that clause-taking ditransitive verbs in Anglo-French (AF, the variety of OF spoken in England) showed case idiosyncracies that licensed the RP in AF and may thus have acted as a bridge construction. We relate both explanations to current approaches in contact linguistics as well as to the degrees of stability of the three languages involved, ME, OF, and AF.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The Recipient passive in the history of English
    • 2.1Previous studies and first occurrences
    • 2.2Middle English data extracted from the PPCME2 and the PCEEC
  • 3.Structural datives: A case of copying abstract case features?
  • 4.Clause-taking verbs: A possible bridge construction?
  • 5.Contact and stability
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 20 March 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.254.09ste
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Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Stein, Achim
2019. Le rôle de l’ancien français dans le développement du passif indirect en anglais. Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 135:2 ► pp. 356 ff. DOI logo

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