Pronouns and Word Order in Old English

This is a study of the syntactic behaviour of personal pronoun subjects and the indefinite pronoun man in Old English, focusing on differences in word order as compared to full noun phrases.

In generative work on Old English, noun phrases are usually divided into two categories: 'nominal' and 'pronominal'.

The latter category has typically been restricted to personal pronouns, but despite striking similarities to the behaviour of nominals there were good reasons to believe that man should be grouped with personal pronouns.

A full investigation was done with the aid of the Toronto Corpus, which confirmed this hypothesis.

This in turn has consequences for the analysis of personal pronouns.

It strongly suggests that the ordering of pronominals in Old English is subject to idiosyncratic constraints, arguing in favour of treating them as clitics and non-clitics - the so-called 'weak pronouns' - fails to solve the problem of clitic-like pronominal elements for which it is difficult to establish a host.

In addition, evidence was found that certain other types of pronouns (demonstratives in particular) do not fit neatly into either the 'pronominal' or the 'nominal' category. Moreover, the findings contribute to work on Old English clause structure.

It is shown that pronominal subjects can invert with negated and/or subjunctive verb forms in main clauses with topicalisation.

This settles the debate on the structural position of the topic in main clauses in favour of the higher of the two porposed positions (i.e. the specifier of CP). It also underlines the importance of keeping such verb forms separate from non-negated indicative verb forms in data work on verb placement.

Furthermore, the data indicate that topicalisation is possible in Old English subclauses, in spite of claims to the contrary.