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

Syntactic dialectal variation in Middle English 145
South, being more conservative, keeping the linguistic features of Old English and
only displaying the innovative traces later. West-Saxon, the better known variety
of Old English, is taken as the historical dialect of comparison and all innovative
and conservative traces are determined with respect to this model.
Unfortunately, fewer regional indicators have been gathered in the field
of syntax. Although little is known about its contribution to Middle English
dialectology, one may assume that, in a situation of language contact, grammatical
differences would also be observed at the level of syntax, 4 and that this
neglected field of study probably had an important part to play. In other words, we
should expect a state-of-affairs of differentiation (with respect to West-Saxon) in
those dialects which may have been influenced by language contact situations, and
a state-of-affairs of similarity (also with respect to West-Saxon) in those dialects
outside such language contact situations.
To the best of my knowledge, the only corpus study conducted so far on historical
dialectology at the level of syntax is about word-order patterns in Middle English and,
more precisely, the way in which the different dialects of Middle English implement
the verb-second constraint. In the South, the Middle English verb-second constraint
behaves as it had in OE, that is, as a variant of the IP-V2 5 type (like modern Yiddish
and Icelandic), since movement of the finite verb to the second position of the clause
is observed both in main and subordinate clauses (Kroch and Taylor 1997, 2000;
Kroch, Taylor & Ringe 2000). In the North, however, the verb-second constraint is
of the CP-V2 6 type, as in modern mainland Scandinavian, German or Dutch, in the
sense that movement of the finite verb to the second position of the clause is only
allowed in main clauses. Kroch, Taylor and Ringe hypothesize that such a difference
in the implementation of the verb-second constraint is a consequence of contactinduced
simplification in the verbal agreement paradigm of the northern dialect.
Regarding relativization, some sparse notes are found in Kivimaa (1966:
129–134), but these have not been supported by numbers. She observed that
there are in fact traces of variation in the use of relativizers in Early Middle
4. A similar process is observed in pidgin languages, whose grammatical specifications are
in many cases determined after a process of language contact (Holmes 2001: 81, 83). See for
instance the development of relativizers in Tok Pisin, from the deictic marker ia to a function
word (Romaine 1984).
5. IP-V2 = inflectional phrase, verb second language. In Government and Binding theory IP
refers to a maximal projection and represents the position to which the verb moves in IP-V2
languages.
6. CP-V2 = complementizer phrase, verb second language. In Government and Binding CP
refers to the largest unit of grammatical analysis and represents the position to which the verb
moves in CP-V2 languages.