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

150 Cristina Suárez-Gómez
For the purposes of this study, more revealing information is provided in
Table 3, which contains the distribution of relativizers in early Middle English
according to the dialectal area in which they appear. This table includes raw numbers
and normalized frequencies per ten thousand words. The four dialectal areas
represent the classification displayed in The Helsinki Corpus.
Invariable þe, the most commonly used relativizer in late Old English and in
early Middle English, gained preference in the linguistically conservative areas of
the South and Kent. More surprisingly, it also became the relativizer of choice in
the East-Midlands, showing an even higher frequency than in late Old English.
This contradicts Kivimaa (1966), who observed that this relativizer first levelled
out in this dialectal area (and the North). Taking into account the fact that the
southern dialect is the direct inheritor of the West-Saxon dialect of Old English,
the predominance of þe in the South and Kent is only to be expected, given that it
is a representative of a conservative dialect. What is much harder to account for is
its continued high frequency in the East-Midlands, a linguistically advanced area,
where one would accordingly expect integration and innovations rather than the
retention of earlier traditions.
A very different siuation prevailed in the West-Midlands where the invariable
þat, which although present, was very rarely used in late Old English (see Table 2),
became the preferred invariable relativizer. This situation deserves special attention
because here the frequency of invariable þat is even greater than that of invariable
þe (94.8 vs 63.7 respectively), and thus constitutes an innovative trace with respect
to late Old English. This distribution confirms Kivimaa’s observation that þat is
more frequent where þe disappears first, but contradicts her conclusions in that
þat is not favoured in the East-Midlands.
Regarding Old English pronominal relativizers (se and seþe), the numbers lend
support to Kivimaa’s conclusions. My results show that Old English pronominal
relativizers are in decline and almost in ‘danger of extinction’, especially in the East-
and West-Midlands (3.1 and 1.3 occurrences per ten thousand words respectively).
Surprisingly, they appear more frequently in the generally most conservative area
linguistically speaking, namely Kent (18.7), in which they are even more frequent
than the innovative þat.
Finally, the dialectal distribution shows that the new pronominal relativizers
represented by wh-words which were introduced into the English language in this
period (cf. Table 2), are only present in the Midlands, both East and West, which
are precisely those dialects in which the frequency of pronominal relativizers inherited
from Old English (se and seþe) decreased earlier. This substitution effect
seems to have acted as a compensation strategy, so as not to leave a functional
gap vacant, a phenomemon which would agree with one of Maxwell’s diachronic