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

Syntactic dialectal variation in Middle English 155
Regarding the position occupied by the relative clause, it has been observed
that the less-preferred structural technique of Old English, namely intraposition,
becomes the preferred form in the East- and the West-Midlands in early Middle
English, the most advanced areas. By contrast, the dialects from the South, both
Southwestern and Kent, avoid the use of embedded structures and instead favour
extraposition and also, in the Southwest, left-dislocation.
The analysis of the distribution of relativizers and the position adopted by the
relative clause with respect to the main clause provides relevant evidence of geographical
variation in early Middle English, agreeing with the evidence provided
at other linguistic levels, as is the case of orthography and pronunciation, lexis and
morphology. The evidence seems to suggest that more advanced dialects (such
as those in the East- and West-Midlands) innovate earlier than less advanced or
more conservative dialects (Southwestern and Kentish), and thus confirm the
North-South divide.
References
Carkeet, David. 1976. Old English correlatives: an exercise of internal syntactic reconstruction.
Glossa 10:1. 44–63.
Fernández Cuesta, Julia & María Nieves Rodríguez Ledesma. 2004. Northern Features in 15th
and 16th-Century Legal Documents From Yorkshire. Methods and Data in English Historical
Dialectology ed. by Marina Dossena & Roger Lass, 287–308. Bern: Peter Lang.
Fischer, Olga. 1992. Syntax. The Cambridge History of the English Language, vol. II, 1066–1476
ed. by Norman Blake, 207–408. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fischer, Olga, Ans van Kemenade, Willem Koopman & Win van der Wurff. 2000. The Syntax of
Early English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Givón, Talmy. 1993. A Function-Based Introduction. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Holmes, Janet. 2001. An Introduction to Socio-Linguistics. 2nd edition. London: Longman.
Hopper, Paul & Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2003. Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Keenan, Edward. 1985. Relative clauses. Language typology and syntactic description, vol. II:
complex constructions ed. by Timothy Shopen, 141–170. Cambrige: Cambridge University Press.
Kivimaa, Kirsti. 1966. þe and þat as clause connectives in early Middle Enlgish with special consideration
of the emergence of the pleonastic þat. (Commentations Humanarum Litterarum 39, 1).
Helsinki: Societas Scientarum Fennica.
Kroch, Anthony & Ann Taylor. 1997. Verb movement in Old and Middle English: dialect
variation and language contact. Parameters of Morphosyntactic Change ed. by Ans van
Kemenade & Nigel Vincent, 297–325. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kroch, Anthony & Ann Taylor. 2000. Verb-Object order in early Middle English. Diachronic
Syntax. Models and Mechanims ed. by Susan Pintzuk, George Tsoulas & Antony Warner,
132–163. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kroch, Anthony, Ann Taylor & Donald Ringe. 2000. The Middle English Verb-Second Constraint:
A Case Study in Language Contact and Language Change. Textual Parameters in