THE INFORMATION-STATUSES OF OLD ENGLISH OBJECT LEFT-DISLOCATIONS

Elizabeth Traugott


Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center/Mellon Foundation
Graduate Research Program



Old English (OE) is well-known to allow a number of word orders. The focus of recent research has been on verb-second syntax, its correlation with preposed objects and adverbs, and the position of pronominal vs. full NP subjects in main and subordinate clauses. Almost no work has been done on the discourse correlates of OE syntax (but see Traugott/Pintzuk 2005 for a preliminary study of the information status of preposed objects, Kemenade Forthcoming on tha, thonne ‘then’ (temporal and narrative) in subordinate clauses). The present paper investigates object left-dislocations (LDs) in OE, building on studies of Present Day English (PDE) and cross-linguistic information-structure, especially left-dislocation vs. topicalization. Givón (1983: 32) says LDs are “[u]sed to return topics back to the register after a long gap”. Geluykens (1992) associates them with introduction of new information and contrast. Prince (1997) identifies three types of LD in PDE, only one of which occurs in writing: “Poset LD”. Like topicalization it requires a partially ordered set relationship to prior text, but unlike topicalization, it does not require an open proposition (Prince 1997:127-132). Using the Switchboard Corpus (Godfrey/Holliman/McDaniel 1992), Gregory/Michaelis (2004) confirm Prince’s three types but argue that all LDs share the property of topic-promotion. While the majority of denotata of topicalizations in their data are previously mentioned (“anaphoric”), they fail to persist as topic; however, most denotata of the preposed NPs in LD’s are not previously mentioned and continue as topics (Gregory/Michaelis 2004: 28). Snider (2005) shows that there is a “small tendency” for LDs to be animate, compared to a much larger one for objects in topicalization.

Using Taylor/Warner/Pintzuk/Beth’s (2003) parsed corpus of OE as the database, we investigate several OE texts, ranging from histories to homilies between c. 800 and 1100, to assess to what extent object LD-dislocation structures in OE were used in ways similar to those in PDE. The preposed object may be accusative, dative, genitive, or even nominative (with case mismatch between the LD and the resumptive element), and the resumptive may itself be preposed, see (1):

(1) ealle tha Romaniscan men the Hannibal on Crece geseald hæfde, him bebead se consul thæt hie eal hiera heafod bescearen (Orosius 108.9) ‘all the Roman men whom Hannibal into Greece sold had, them commanded the consul that they all their heads shaved’ (= the consul commanded all the Roman men whom Hannibal had sold as slaves in Greece to shave their heads)

Object LDs in OE do not correlate strongly with discourse-new information (22% non-anaphoric), contrast (5%), or topic persistence (9%). The highest correlations are with a poset relationship (51%), animacy (51%) or “heaviness” of the preposed object (48% are ten words or more long; 96% include a relative clause). Together these factors suggest that LDs in OE partition the sentence into a secondary topic (Lambrecht 1994: 147) and an adjoined clause serving as comment/focus (cf. Gundel/Fretheim 2004:187 on PDE).

References

Geluykens, Ronald. 1992. From Discourse Process to Grammatical Construction: On Left-Dislocation in English. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Givón, T., ed. 1983. Topic Continuity in Discourse: A Quantitative Cross-Language Study, 5-41. (Typological Studies in Language, 3.) Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Godfrey, J., E. Holliman and J. McDaniel. 1992. SWITCHBOARD: Telephone speech corpus for research and development. International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing 92. 517-520. And see http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~treebank/home.html
Gregory, Michelle L. and Laura A. Michaelis. 2004. Topicalization and left-dislocation: A functional opposition revisited. Journal of Pragmatics 33: 1665-1706.
Gundel, Jeanette K. and Thorstein Fretheim. 2004. Topic and focus. In Laurence R. horn and Gregory Ward, eds., The Handbook of Pragmatics, 175-196. (Blackwell Handbook in Linguistics.) Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Kemenade, Ans van. Forthcoming. Discourse relations and word order change. In Ans van Kemenade and Bettelou Los, eds., Handbook of the History of English. Oxford: Blackwell.
Lambrecht, Knud. 1994. Information Structure and Sentence Form: Topic, Focus and the Mental Representations of Discourse Referents. (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics, 71.) Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Prince, Ellen F. 1997. On the functions of Left-Dislocation in English discourse. In Akio Kamio, ed., Directions in Functional Linguistics, 117-143. (Studies in Language Companion Series, 36.). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Snider, Neal. 2005. A corpus study of left-dislocation and topicalization. Stanford University: Linguistics Department.
Taylor, Ann, Anthony Warner, Susan Pintzuk, and Frank Beths. 2003. The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose. Department of Language and Linguistic Science, University of York, UK. Available from the Oxford Text Archive.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs and Susan Pintzuk. 2005. The discourse function of object topicalization in English. 4th Holland-York Symposium on the History of English Syntax, Leiden May 28-29.