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

The balance between syntax and discourse in Old English 1
Even though of low frequency, the existence of such examples points to the fact
that specificity and anaphoricity do not entirely cover the domain to the left of
the adverbs þa/þonne. The link with the previous discourse, however, is again
highly relevant. Comparing instances of high and low definite, specific, anaphoric
subjects in subordinate clauses involving a demonstrative object þæt, Milićev (in
preparation) shows that the antecedent of the high definite expression needs to
be sufficiently prominent/accessible in the preceding discourse. This is especially
the case when another anaphoric expression is found to the left of the adverb, i.e.,
pronominal and demonstrative objects. This may make it necessary to refine the
account so far, since different levels of discourse givenness clearly play a role in
the positioning of a discourse old entity (recall that a similar situation holds for
pronominal objects). We leave it for further research to provide an explanation of
the interrelations of these more intricate discourse-internal conditions.
On the basis of the discussion so far, the following generalization seems warranted:
those cases in which the definite NP is high (on the left of þa/þonne), the
demonstrative is definite + anaphoric. But we have also seen that there are some less
clear cases. In the following section, we will develop a statistical approach which
shows that the generalizations so far established do achieve a very significant level
of statistical probability. This shows that, counterexamples notwithstanding, the
analysis presented here appears to be on the right track.
On the basis of the discussion so far, we come to the following conclusions:
morpho-syntactically, Old English is tailored to allow a certain amount of discourse
flexibility. The morpho-syntax allows this by virtue of the extra position created by
the discourse particle, and the availability of an extra class of referential expression
extending the range of discourse-anaphoric strategies. In terms of discourse, the
strongest trigger for an NP to occur in the high position seems to be the presence of
a discourse antecedent. To further strengthen the conclusions reached so far, we will
develop a quantitative approach to the relation between the key syntactic properties
and discourse relations. This is the topic for the next section.
3. A quantitative approach
In this section, we develop a methodology which serves to provide statistical
evidence for the approach presented in this article. The focus of the quantitative
evidence is on subject-initial subclauses, as it is here that we find the full range
of subject types (personal pronoun, definite NP, indefinite NP, impersonal man,
and so on, and thus we need to show that the generalizations we have established
bear further scrutiny. The methodology developed here is much inspired
by Bresnan et al. (2007). A database was created with all the relevant subclauses