Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang

On the position of the OE quantifier eall
and PDE all*
Tomohiro Yanagi
Chubu University
This paper, through a study of the corpus of Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, shows
that the quantifier eall in Old English exhibited the same distributional properties
as the quantifier all in present-day English: (i) eall can float from a nominative
noun phrase (NP) it modifies; (ii) eall can float from an accusative NP when it is
followed by a predicative complement; and (iii) the ‘pronoun-quantifier’ order is
more frequent than the ‘quantifier-pronoun’ order. The paper also argues that the
quantifier eall is base-generated as the head of the Quantifier Phrase (QP) and
selects an NP as its complement. The ‘full-NP-quantifier’ order can be derived by
adjoining the NP to the QP. However, this operation is not applied to an NP in
the argument position, due to the ban on adjunction to arguments. Unlike NPs,
pronouns are adjoined to the head of a QP, yielding the ‘pronoun-quantifier’
order more freely.
1. Introduction
It is well-known that in present-day English (PDE) the quantifier all can occur in
various positions as in (1), as well as in the pre-nominal position as in (2).
(1) a. The children all would have been doing that.
b. The children would all have been doing that.
c. The children would have all been doing that.
d. The children would have been all doing that. (Baltin 1995: 211)
(2) All the children would have been doing that.
* An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 14th International Conference on
English Historical Linguistics, held at the University of Bergamo, Italy on 21–25 August 2006.
I am grateful to Masayuki Ohkado and anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and
suggestions. I am also indebted to Patrick Miller for correcting stylistic errors. Of course, all
remaining inadequacies are my own.