Abstract / Description of output
The Edinburgh Royal College of Physicians manuscript of Cursor Mundi and the Northern Homilies, a northern Middle English text from the early 14th century, contains unprecedentedly high frequencies of matrix verb-third and embedded verb-second word orders with subject–verb inversion. I give a theoretical account of these word orders in terms of a grammar, the ‘CM grammar’, which differs minimally in its formal description from regular verb-second grammars, but captures these unusual word orders through addition of a second preverbal A-projection. Despite its flexibility, the CM grammar did not spread through the English-speaking population. I discuss the theoretical consequences of this failure to spread for models of grammar competition where fitness is tied to parsing success, and discuss prospects for refining such models.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Article number | 59 |
Number of pages | 29 |
Journal | Languages |
Volume | 6 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 24 Mar 2021 |
Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)
- Middle English
- diachronic syntax
- word order
- verb‐second
- grammar competition