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

154 Cristina Suárez-Gómez
The results shown in Table 4 confirm the tendency for relative clauses to be
non-intraposed (or non-embedded) in Late Old English, either by resorting to extraposition
or left-dislocation, but especially to the former, which is the preferred
position adopted by relative clauses with respect to the main clause. However, the
total count reveals intraposition as the preferred option in early Middle English,
over both extraposition and left-dislocation.
In terms of dialects, the distribution of the position of the relative clause has
rendered the results included in Table 5:
Table 5. Distribution of position according to dialect in Middle English
The results in Table 5 reveal that extraposition – the favourite position in late
Old English – is retained as the favourite alternative in the dialectal variety of
Kent and the South. By contrast, intraposition becomes the favourite option in
the East- and West-Midlands dialects, especially, in the former. The increase in
intraposition in both these linguistically innovative areas is of utmost importance
since it helps confirm the results obtained regarding the distribution of relativizers.
6. Conclusions
East-Midlands West-Midlands South Kent Total
Extraposition 30 (19.6) 35 (11) 21 (16.4) 11 (18.7) 97
Left-Dislocation 20 (13.1) 21 (6.6) 15 (11.7) – 56
Intraposition 43 (28.1) 49 (15.4) 11 (8.6) 3 (5.1) 106
TOTAL 93 105 47 14 259
In this chapter I have analyzed the distribution of relativizers and the position
that the relative clause occupies with respect to the main clause in order to ascertain
whether the North-South divide attested in Middle English for some levels of
analysis such as morphology, phonology and lexis, also holds true at the syntactic
level. My analysis of an early Middle English corpus shows that, regarding the
paradigm of relativizers, the innovative invariable þat gains in prominence and
preference over the traditional and archaic þe in both the West- and East-Midland
in comparison with its distribution in late Old English. As regards the paradigm
of the pronominal relativizers, wh- words start to be used first in the most innovative
areas, which happen to be the same areas that had earlier ceased to use the
Old English pronominal relativizers se and seþe. The South manifests itself as the
most conservative area, showing a very similar distribution to late Old English:
pronominal se and seþe relativizers are still used with some frequency and the only
available invariable relativizer with some productivity is þe.