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

212 Claudia Lange & Ursula Schaefer
There are, however, some objections that might be raised against our analysis
and which should be followed up in further research on this curiously under-
researched topic. The first concerns the lack of positional variability: unlike focus
markers which precede or follow their focus regardless of its position in the sentence,
’tis is restricted to sentence-initial position (cf. König 1991). *She hates ’tis
me rather than ’tis me she hates is ungrammatical, the focus marker ’tis can only
occur when the focus is topicalized to sentence-initial position. The source items
of ’tis (dummy subject it and a form of the copula be) then constrain its positional
variability. This leads to another objection: focus particles, as the name suggests,
are typically uninflected, but the copula be gives rise to forms such as ’tis, ’twas,
’twere etc. There is, however, a precedent for inflected focus markers in English:
the intensifiers myself, herself, yourselves etc., which came into being when the
original OE intensifier sylf fused with a stressed form of the personal pronoun
in early ME (cf. Lange 2007), whereas reflexivity continued to be expressed by
the bare personal pronoun. The new compound forms only became obligatory as
reflexive pronouns in EModE (cf. Peitsara 1997).
Despite these objections, which are based on the cross-linguistically attested
behaviour of focus particles in general, we would like to stick to our hypothesis as
indicated above. We think that the form of the ClC is changing in the period and
the text type we are discussing, especially it-ClCs with the first person pronoun
as focus: it is or ’tis, which is non-referential and semantically empty anyway, is
reinterpreted as a focus marker. The ‘monoclausal’ ClC without relative pronoun
lingers on in colloquial PDE, but has otherwise been erased from the language by
the efforts of 18th-century prescriptive grammarians. The object me-ClCs are fully
‘grammatical’ from the prescriptive point of view, and subject ClCs with me, as in
it was me who/that did it, have (as our corpus shows) yet to emerge on the scene. It
may be that it is me in IdCCs (found in 47 cases in our corpus, compared with 415
with I) was already quite common in the spoken language, and that it took some
time before this usage spread to subject ClCs. Indirect evidence for this comes
again from the grammarian Joseph Priestley:
When the word if begins a sentence, it seems pretty clear, that no person, whose
attention to artificial rules did not put a sensible [i.e., noticeable] restraint upon
his language, would ever use the nominative case after the verb to be. Who would
not say, If it be me, rather than If it be I? (Priestley 1786: 104)
3. The relation between IdCCs and ClCs
In the first section of our chapter we discussed the EModE occurrence of it is I/me
both in IdCCs and in it-ClCs in order to see whether we could find any traces that