THE LOSS OF THE CORRELATIVE SYSTEM OF EARLY ENGLISH AND ITS POTENTIAL IMPLICATIONS FOR THE OV - VO SYNTACTIC CHANGE

Old English made use of demonstratives for referent tracking and clause linking; the neuter demonstrative pæs in the main clause in (1), for instance, links to the following subclause, which starts with another neuter demonstrative, pæt: (1) & heo pa sona pæs gefægnode, pæt heo hæafde and she then at-once that-GEN rejoiced that she had ealles pæs gæres bigleofan all the year's livelihood
'and then she immediately rejoiced because she had an entire year's worth of supplies' (lit. 'and she immediatey rejoiced because of that, that she had an entire year's worth of supplies')
Pæs precedes the verb and hence provides a crucial clue about OV-word order, as pronominal objects, unlike full NP-objects, rarely undergo extraposition in Old English. This system of clause linking piggy-backs on a referent tracking system that uses gendered demonstratives, as in (2):
(2) & pa sealde he heom mid his agenre handa ane trywene flascan

and then gave he them with his own hand a wooden bottle

wines fulle [...]. Of pære hi druncon, oo pæt hi to rauennam

of-wine full Of that they drank until-that they to Ravenna

becomon.

came
'and then he gave them with his own hand a wooden bottle full of wine [...]. They drank from it (meaning: this bottle lasted them) until they came to Ravenna.'
Gender, unlike case, remains stable from one clause to the next, as gender is an inherent property of nouns. The feminine demonstrative pære in (2) refers back to the new information of the first clause, the feminine noun flascan 'bottle'. Given information is typically referred back to by personal pronouns ("Topic Continuity"), and new information by demonstratives ("Topic Shift"), as in (3), where the demonstrative pam successfully indicates Topic-Shift from the old topic hei to the newly-introduced topic sum manj.
(3) hei sæde, pæt sum manj wære in pære ylcan mægoe, pamj/*i wæs

he said that a man was in that same family DEM was

nama Martirius



'He said that there was a man in that same family, whose name was Martirius'.
This division of labour persists in the other West Germanic languages but is lost in Present-Day English. Such "stand-alone" demonstratives decline in Early Middle English (Allen 2016; Los & van Kemenade 2018), leading to the Present-Day English situation in which singular "stand-alone" this and that can no longer refer to human referents (Huddleston & Pullum 2002: 1405-6), and hence are no longer available as Topic Shifters. That the plurals these and those were not affected suggests a connection with the loss of gender: unlike the singular demonstratives, plural demonstratives were not gendered in Old English.

The hypothesised chain of events is as follows:
1) The loss of morphological gender undermined a clause linking system that depended on demonstratives.



2) This clause linking system, no longer supported by the morphology, abruptly disappeared from the language (Lenker 2010) and hence removed clues in acquisition of the OV character of the language, accelerating the rise of VO.



3) Topic Shift was no longer supported, which had far-ranging consequences for the discourse, obscuring "who does what to whom" because now only personal pronouns are available for both shifted and continued topics.



Word-order investigations in Early Middle English have always been hampered by a lack of data in the crucial period. A new resource, A Parsed Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (PLAEME; Truswell et al. 2019), has now become available to fill this data gap.