Agreement in Language Contact

Gender development in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

Author
Florian Dolberg | TU Dortmund University
HardboundAvailable
ISBN 9789027203298 | EUR 99.00 | USD 149.00
 
e-Book
ISBN 9789027262417 | EUR 99.00 | USD 149.00
 
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Gender in English changed dramatically from the elaborate system found in Old English to the very simple he/she/it-alternation in use from (late) Middle English onwards. While either system is well described and understood, the change from one to the other is anything but: more than 120 years of research into the matter provided no prevailing opinion – let alone a consensus – regarding how it proceeded or why it occurred. The present study is the first to address this issue in the context of language contact with Old Norse, assessing this contact influence in relation to both language-formal and semantico-cognitive factors. This empirical, functional account uses rigorous, innovative methodology, interdisciplinary evidence, and well-established models of synchronic variation in diachronic application to draw a fine-grained picture of the variation, change, and loss of gender from Old to Middle English and its underlying mainsprings. The resulting plausible and parsimonious explanations will prove relevant to students and scholars of historical linguistics, morpho-syntax, language variation and change, or language contact, to name but a few.
[Studies in Language Companion Series, 208] 2019.  xxi, 351 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Table of Contents
Cited by

Cited by 5 other publications

Berg, Thomas
2020. Nominal and pronominal gender: Putting Greenberg’s Universal 43 to the test. STUF - Language Typology and Universals 73:4  pp. 525 ff. DOI logo
BERG, THOMAS
2023. Gender marking in the first-person singular: A case of paradigm (in)consistency. Journal of Linguistics  pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Kostadinova, Viktorija, Marco Wiemann, Gea Dreschler, Sune Gregersen, Beáta Gyuris, Ai Zhong, Maggie Scott, Lieselotte Anderwald, Beke Hansen, Sven Leuckert, Tihana Kraš, Shawnea Sum Pok Ting, Ida Parise Alessia Cogo, Elisabeth Reber & Furzeen Ahmed
2021. I English Language. The Year's Work in English Studies 100:1  pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Kranich, Svenja & Tine Breban
2021. Lost in Change. In Lost in Change [Studies in Language Companion Series, 218],  pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2021. Lost in Change. In Lost in Change [Studies in Language Companion Series, 218], DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 21 february 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Subjects

Main BIC Subject

CFF: Historical & comparative linguistics

Main BISAC Subject

LAN009010: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / Historical & Comparative
ONIX Metadata
ONIX 2.1
ONIX 3.0
U.S. Library of Congress Control Number:  2019007612 | Marc record