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

The balance between syntax and discourse in Old English 1
standard deviation for the text source random effect was 0.80. The estimated scale
was 0.93, indicating that the choice of the link function is reasonable.
probability of specific NP
0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0
high
mid absent present
position of NP
presence of antecedent
Figure 2. Relation between NP specificity, NP position and the presence of an antecedent.
. Discussion and conclusion
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probability of specific NP
0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0
The methodology developed in Section 3 provides substantial corroboration for
the analysis presented in Section 2. In Section 2, we hypothesized that Old English
syntax allows a higher degree of discourse flexibility by virtue of an extra syntactic
position on the left of a discourse particle, and a larger range of referring expressions
provided by the presence of an articulate paradigm of weak demonstrative
pronouns serving as definiteness and potentially also specificity markers. We hypothesized
that the most important trigger for an NP to occur in the position
left of the discourse particle is the presence of an antecedent in the discourse,
correlating strongly but not absolutely with specific reference to that antecedent.
In the statistical model developed in Section 3, these hypotheses were fully confirmed,
with a very convincing degree of statistical likelihood. Significant correlations
were established between high position for the NP, definiteness of NP and
specificity of NP. Furthermore, there is a highly significant correlation between the
specificity of NP and the presence of a discourse antecedent. All in all, this shows
that in Old English, syntax and discourse interact in interesting ways, in a fashion
that was lost in the subsequent history of English, as discussed in van Kemenade &
Los (2006) and van Kemenade & Milićev (to appear).
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