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

5.2 Distribution
Syntactic dialectal variation in Middle English 153
Before dealing with the results of my analysis, I would like to point out that, in order
to analyze position, many examples were filtered out, leaving only those which
can potentially show variation in position. In fact most of the selected tokens are
examples in which the relativized item is the subject, as in example (4) above, or a
topicalized complement, as wið wifa earfoðnyssum in example (15).
(15) Wið wifa i earfoðnyssum [ RC þe (i) on heora
against women pain Rel in their
inwerdlicum stowum earfeþu þrowiað], foxes
internal places trouble suffer of-foxes
leoþu & his smeoru mid ealdon ele &
joint & his grease with old oil &
mid tyrwan wyrc him to sealfe do on
with tar work him to unguent do on
wifa stowe.
of-women places
“Against the pain of women who had trouble on their internal parts, mix tar
with old oil and foxes’ joints until it becomes an unguent and put it on those
female parts’.” [Q O2/3 IS HANDM QUADR 234]
By contrast, examples such as (8) and (9) had to be excluded from the count of relative
clause position. Although the antecedent of example (8) functions as subject,
it resorts to Subject-Verb inversion, so as not to separate the antecedent from the
relativized item (sum mon and se) thus avoiding embedding. In instances similar
to (9), also left out of the count, the antecedent functioning as prepositional object
of the main verb appears in final position of the main clause, leaving no alternative
position for the relative clause. The exclusion of such examples explains the reduced
number of examples in the following tables in comparison with previous ones.
The results from the position in late Old English and early Middle English are
included in Table 4:
Table 4. Distribution of position in late Old English (Suárez-Gómez 2006: 80) and early
Middle English
Late Old English Extraposition 105 (30.3)
Left-Dislocation 81 (23.3)
Intraposition 57 (16.4)
Total 243
Early Middle English Extraposition 97 (14.7)
Left-Dislocation 56 (8.5)
Intraposition 106 (16.1)
Total 259