Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: 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.
Source: Languages
Author: Robert Truswell
Institution: University of Edinburgh
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $1,296
OpenAlex ID: W3151569697